Oxycontin Birth Defects Lawsuit

Oxycontin birth defects lawsuit offers hope to mothers of NAS babies

An Oxycontin birth defects lawsuit has offered mothers like Colorado’s Shelly Whittaker something that’s been hard to find over a dozen years of struggling with the ups and downs of raising three sons born with the condition caused by opioid exposure in the womb known as NAS: Hope.

Her doctors never told Whittaker – who began taking OxyContin, the Purdue Pharma-manufactured opioid painkiller, for lupus and rheumatoid arthritis in 2007, after her daughter was born and before she became pregnant with her first son – about the increased risk of birth defects.

And no one mentioned Neonatal Abstinence Syndrome, or NAS, when the boy was born with symptoms such as high-pitched crying, tremors and convulsions, diarrhea, vomiting, and difficulty swallowing. “We took him to the doctor, and I said, ‘I don’t know what’s wrong,’” Whittaker recalled. “They said, ‘He’s fine – we don’t know what it is.’”

But things weren’t fine. Her second son experienced many of the same difficulties at birth, and so did a third son – even though by then there was growing awareness of the addictive nature of Oxycontin and Whittaker had been placed on a different medication, Subutex. As Whittaker, now 38, watches her three sons grow, the boys continue to experience developmental and behavioral problems, and have trouble keeping up in school.

Last year, Whittaker read on social media about an Oxycontin birth defects lawsuit, and she decided to sign on as a plaintiff. She sees legal action against the maker of OxyContin, Purdue Pharma, and other leading drugmakers and distributors as a way to get help for struggling families — as well as some manner of justice.

Like other mothers of children with NAS, Whittaker said there’s a whole array of unmet needs for these kids. “I would love for them to have some help with their schooling,” she said. “There’s no school in my community that helps children who’ve been falling behind.”

NAS babies are a hidden crisis in America

Shelly Whittaker is hardly alone. Our team of lawyers is representing hundreds of mothers like her in the OxyContin birth defects lawsuit that is currently pending. In researching the case, we’ve come to discover that there are literally hundreds of thousands of NAS babies growing up in America – far more than the government has acknowledged. These children and their families need medical help, other assistance, and better information.

Here’s the background: OxyContin and other opioid painkillers were introduced into the U.S. market in the 1990s by big pharmaceutical companies and aggressively marketed to doctors as a cure-all for the pain caused by numerous ailments. Unbeknownst to the American public, these large drugmakers learned fairly quickly that their new medications were highly addictive – warnings that were ignored in the face of billions of dollars in profits.

The result has been the largest drug-addiction crisis in the history of this country. Much of the opioid-abuse epidemic began with medications that were legally prescribed such as OxyContin, Percocet, and Vicodin, although over time many users moved into illegal street drugs such as heroin and fentanyl (which is also sometimes prescribed). Although opioid use peaked around 2012, the latest government statistics still find 58 opioid prescriptions for every 100 citizens. The toll has been enormous. According to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, there were 47,600 overdose deaths related to opioids in America during 2017, the last year for which records were available. That’s nearly as many Americans who died in the entirety of the Vietnam War.

The opioid crisis has become front-page news in many American cities, but information about mothers who used opioids during their pregnancies and their babies has lagged. Unfortunately, America’s doctors were slow to make what today seems like a strong connection between opioid exposure in the womb and birth defects such as club foot, spina bifida, heart defects, cleft palate, hydrocephalus, esophageal atresia, gastroschisis, anorectal atresia, or diaphragmatic hernia.

That’s in addition to the most common adverse outcome: NAS, which causes symptoms such as body shakes, excessive crying or yawns, feeding problems, diarrhea, sleeping problems, fever, or runny noses. As these children grow, many experience behavioral problems, cognitive delays, mental or motor deficits, or attention-deficit disorder (ADD).

The number of American children – and families – affected had been grossly undercounted. The current working government number of about 29,500 NAS births in 2018 falls far short of the real total. Based on information that about one-in-three pregnant women in America — or roughly 1.3 million out of the 3.8 million women who gave birth — were given a prescription for opioid painkillers, our team has estimated that a baby with serious problems related to opioid exposure is born somewhere in the United States every 19 minutes.

A conservative estimate is that this results in roughly 250,000 births every year of children with some level of NAS that will require the type of specialized treatment that we are seeking. That’s more than eight times the government’s figure.

‘None of this is my fault’

One of the hundreds of thousands of American parents who knows the trauma of raising a child exposed to opioids in the womb is Jennifer Scully, a 42-year-old career nurse who lives in upstate New York.

Scully says she’s gotten used to the phone calls from the school attended by her 5-year-old daughter from teachers and staff who don’t understand the seizures occasionally experienced by her child, in which she would stare blankly into space for a minute or two, unresponsive to adults. To Scully, the seizures are one more problem – on top of her small size, limited vocabulary, and delayed potty training – that she connects with opioid exposure.

“Because I’m a nurse, I pay a lot more attention to things,” she says. But the career health-care professional trusted her doctors in 2014 when she unexpectedly became pregnant while under treatment for both the aftermath of a broken back and breast cancer, which is why she was on a drug regimen that included OxyContin.

“They said, ‘We’re not taking you off and besides, it won’t affect the baby,” Scully recalls. Instead, her newborn daughter spent five days in the hospital coping with the symptoms of NAS, including tremors and high-pitched crying. When they finally left the hospital, doctors insisted the worst that Scully would have to deal with would be an occasionally cranky baby – a gross underestimation of the developmental problems her daughter has faced.

Like Whittaker, Scully joined the OxyContin birth defects lawsuit shortly after she read about it on social media. She said she agree with the ambitious goals of the legal action: Long-term health care and a medical monitoring fund for children exposed to opioids in the womb. She says the big pharmaceutical firms “need to be held responsible for what they’ve done. I expected a healthy child. None of this is my fault.”

The legal fight for opioid justice

Over the course of 2019, a series of class-action lawsuits were filed on behalf of opioid-exposed children in a number of states. Our legal team has been working hard 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.

Our efforts are linked closely to the ongoing complex negotiations – involving big pharmaceutical companies and a number of states and localities hoping to recover their costs for dealing with the opioid crisis – aimed at a comprehensive settlement. Late in 2019, the OxyContin manufacturer at the center of the crisis, Purdue Pharma, filed for bankruptcy and floated a tentative settlement of its liability in the range of $10-12 billion.

Our lawyers have argued that the proposed Purdue Pharma deal doesn’t go far enough, and that it allows the founders and largest owners of the firm, the Sackler family, to keep too much of their wealth. But our biggest concern about both the Purdue Pharma deal and the related, more universal settlement talks is that those most in need – hundreds of thousands of kids whose childhood has been disrupted – will get shut out.

Most of our attorneys are very familiar with the landmark settlement in the late 1990s with Big Tobacco, in which the major cigarette makers coughed up millions of dollars that were largely paid out to a coalition of states and other localities — similar to today’s opioid talks. Most of these cash-strapped government entities merely absorbed the money into their general budgets. Very few dollars went toward smoking-cessation programs, or toward the massive health problems that have been caused by smoking.

On behalf of Shelly Whittaker, Jennifer Scully and the thousands of other families stung by the opioid crisis, we desperately want things to be different this time around. The money we are seeking on behalf of the kids, as part of any comprehensive settlement with Big Pharma, would go toward meeting their extensive long-term needs. That includes the medical monitoring fund and collecting data helping doctors understand the scope of the problem and best practices.

The good news is that there is still time for new plaintiffs to join our OxyContin birth defects lawsuit, but that time is also growing short. If your child was exposed to opioid painkillers during pregnancy, join us and our fight for a settlement that will actually benefit families and the communities where they live. Too many parents have suffered in silence for too long. We are fighting for justice and a better future, and we would like you to be part of it.

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