Can I Take Oxycontin When Pregnant?

When Purdue Pharma launched its new painkilling drug Oxycontin in 1996, company officials were sure they had a winner. At a launch party for the opioid-based drug, Dr. Richard Sackler, a Purdue executive from the family that founded the firm and still mostly owns it, declared that the introduction of Oxycontin “will be followed by a blizzard of prescriptions that will bury the competition.”

Sackler was right. Over the next two decades, Purdue’s Oxycontin dominated the rapidly growing market for prescription painkillers. The firm, aided by its aggressive marketing tactics, eventually captured 16 percent of the national market for such drugs, trailing only the generic manufacturers of similar opioids – and the drug’s popularity with both doctors and patients stayed strong even after news stories and lawsuits linked Oxycontin to addiction.

Not surprisingly, with so much Oxycontin on the market, a lot of doses were ultimately prescribed to women who were pregnant. The most extensive study found that between 2008-2012, or near the height of the surge in painkiller use, an astonishing one-in-three American women of childbearing age (defined as age 15-44) were prescribed some opioid painkiller. Meanwhile opioid use disorder – the medical term for addiction – also took off during this period for women who showed up at hospitals in labor, with such cases quadrupling from 1999-2014.

It seems remarkable now, but there was little discussion within the medical community during those years about whether it was safe for these women, or, even more importantly, for their babies to prescribe Oxycontin during pregnancy. In fact, many doctors continued to prescribe Purdue’s profitable painkiller even after studies emerged in the early 2010s linking opioids like Oxycontin to birth defects and a disorder called Neonatal Abstinence Syndrome, or NAS.

Oxycontin, NAS and your baby

Indeed, it’s long past time to put procedures into place to ensure that women who are actually pregnant aren’t prescribed opioid painkillers. Our legal team, which has pushed to include the families of children who were exposed to these medications in the womb in settlement talks with Big Pharma over the industry’s gross negligence and its deceptive marketing practices, is also pushing for a medical monitoring fund that would gather new evidence while providing for the long-term care of kids harmed by these drugs.

The most common health hazard for babies exposed to Oxycontin in the womb is NAS, which is a form of opioid withdrawal that can keep newborns in the hospital for weeks while they’re treated for shaking, vomiting, frequent crying, and an array of other symptoms.
Our team of experts carefully analyzed all available data and concluded that government methods have undercounted the number of kids exposed to opioids. (Indeed, even the diagnosis code for NAS or Opioid Use Disorder (OUD) was only developed recently.) We estimated that approximately 42,000 NAS babies are born in the United States every year, meaning the total number of kids dealing with the after-effects of opioid exposure number in the hundreds of thousands. This is a national epidemic that rarely gets mentioned in the news media.

In addition to the symptoms described earlier, the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has asserted that babies born with NAS can experience a range of problems that include trembling, Irritability, including excessive or high-pitched crying, sleep problems, hyperactive reflexes, seizures, yawning, stuffy nose, or sneezing, poor feeding and sucking, loose stools and dehydration, and increased sweating.

Other potential health hazards

Most babies born with NAS are kept in intensive care for several weeks and then sent home from the hospital. However, medical experts are just beginning to learn – first through anecdotal evidence but increasingly through research – that many of the children exposed to opioids during pregnancy develop other problems as they grow. These include behavioral problems, cognitive delays, mental or motor deficits, or attention-deficit disorder (ADD). That’s why our goal in seeking damages from Purdue Pharma and other drug companies is a fund that will track these children — to better understand the medical consequences.

But it’s important to note that while NAS and developmental difficulties may be the most common consequences of taking Oxycontin while pregnant, there are other serious concerns, especially birth defects. In fact, some specialists say that birth defects can happen when an expectant mother takes opioid painkillers in the 4th to 10th week of a pregnancy, which is often before a woman knows she is pregnant or given good guidance on pre-natal care.

As far back as 2011, a CDC study found links between opioid use during pregnancy and common birth defects such as heart defects or cleft palate. The greatest increase in risk involved spina bifida, the condition in which the spinal column doesn’t close properly in the womb. The CDC paper found that women whose babies had been born with spina bifida where twice as likely to have taken opioids during their pregnancy than mothers whose children had no birth defects.
Another increased risk from taking Oxycontin or similar painkillers during pregnancy is gastroschisis, in which a baby is born with its intestines hanging outside the stomach, due to a hole in the abdominal wall. There are about 1,800 American cases of this rare illness every year. The CDC research found that rates of gastroschisis are about 60 percent higher in the counties that had the highest rates of prescription opioid use.

In addition to spina bifida, another neural tube defects — which often take place during the first month of pregnancy — that showed increased risk in the 2011 CDC study was anencephaly, where most of the brain and skull don’t fully develop. Heart defects posted the highest gain in the CDC’s study, including hypoplastic left heart syndrome, in which the left side of the heart doesn’t develop properly. It’s fatal if not treated with surgery.

A need for testing – and justice

None of these heartbreaking conditions need to occur. In our legal challenge to Big Pharma, our attorneys have demanded a medical protocol similar to the one that has been widely used since researchers established a link between the drug Accutane — which is taken for skin conditions such as acne — and birth defects. Doctors now require pregnancy tests for women of child-bearing age before Accutane is prescribed, and there’s no reason this can’t be done for Oxycontin or other popular brands of painkillers as well.

But our chief focus is justice for the literally hundreds of thousands of families that weren’t warned about Oxycontin, weren’t tested, and now are raising children with the consequences of a powerful industry’s gross negligence.

Our lawyers have gone into federal court to get children born to prescription opioid-dependent-and-using mothers recognized as their own legal class within the national opioid litigation, which is currently before U.S. District Court Judge Daniel A. Polster in Cleveland. We’ve already filed lawsuits in a number of states seeking recognition for the legal rights of these kids and their families.

Our team of highly experienced lawyers is heavily focused on ensuring that any settlement dollars in these cases go directly to the aid of those in the greatest need: The children. Too many of us were around in the late 1990s when the settlement with Big Tobacco over that industry’s decades of deceit was directed by states and other localities that then typically spent this vast windfall on plugging holes in their budgets rather than directing dollars to the health needs of the people who’d been harmed – or who could be – by smoking cigarettes.

If you took Oxycontin while pregnant and now have concerns about your child’s health and long-term needs, we hope you’ll join us in the fight for justice involving Purdue Pharma and the other big pharmaceutical companies. Time may be limited; potential claimants in the current Purdue Pharma bankruptcy proceedings have until the end of June to file. By signing up, you can help us ensure that any national financial settlement over the opioid crisis goes to the families and the communities that need the money the most.

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