Recreational Drugs and Fertility

If you are currently engaging in illegal drugs, you know it’s not good for you. Imagine what it is doing to your child. If you are trying to get pregnant, using illegal drugs can be incredibly destructive to your kid. If you take illegal drugs, even ones as “safe” as marijuana, you can harm both yourself and the child you are trying to conceive.

What can recreational drugs do to your future pregnancy? Illegal drugs can cause miscarriages, low birth weight, premature labor, future addictions, fetal death and even the death of the mother.

Marijuana, otherwise known as pot or weed, can cause some problems to your future attempts at conception. Marijuana can put toxins near the baby, which will prevent the baby from getting its full share of oxygen. If you have smoked before you conceived, you can see birth defects occur. However, you need to quit smoking as soon as you realize either that you are pregnant or are trying to conceive.

Cocaine is another popular recreational drug that can affect and disrupt your pregnancy. Whatever you take into your system also enters your child’s system, which is the case with cocaine. As the cocaine enters your blood stream, it will go into your child’s blood stream, but whereas it might leave you at a normal pace, it stays with your child much longer. Each hit of cocaine, therefore, increases and disturbs your child’s system more and more. Increased use of cocaine can cause miscarriages and placental abruptions that will lead to either severe bleeding, preterm birth or the death of the fetus. There has not been any proof that doing cocaine once or twice prior to cocaine will hurt your child, but repeated use can significantly impair him or her.

Heroin is another popular and unfortunate source of many birth defects and problems from women who engage in this illegal drug prior to conception. Heroin is a very addictive drug so if you do the drugs before conceiving you are likely to have a child that is addicted to heroin and will suffer from withdrawal symptoms, including irritability, fever, convulsions, diarrhea. Also, if you inject heroin, you are highly susceptible to HIV, which will be passed onto your child as well. If you take heroin, you will need to get off the drug for a number of reasons, including if you want to have a child. You will want to look into methadone and other treatments like counseling to ensure the future healthy success of you and your child.

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