PRENATAL CARE: TV Ads Discourage Drug Use During Pregnancy
An aggressive new television ad campaign designed to discourage drug and alcohol use during pregnancy was announced yesterday by California First Lady Gayle Wilson at a drug rehabilitation center. The campaign, titled "Your Kids Are What You Are," will begin airing in two weeks. "Our goal," Wilson said, "is to reach out to these pregnant women and their families, [t]o try and get them into treatment that can save not only their lives, but the lives of their babies." In one ad, "a baby plays with drug paraphernalia while wishing aloud that its mother would stop using drugs," the Los Angeles Times reports. The second ad shows tears rolling down a mother's face at her son's funeral, while a voiceover says, "Weeping won't bring baby John back." Recovering mothers at the rehab center reportedly were receptive to the ads' hard-hitting messages. The Times notes that the current number of pregnant California women with substance abuse problems is unknown, but a 1993 University of California-Berkeley study found that 69,000 out of 607,000 California infants were born to substance abusing mothers. (Leonard, 9/17).
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