A new report, aired by a television network, discusses how young and pregnant women are inclined towards marijuana use. The report identifies that the use is observed to be more than ever to help with the anxiety and the ‘morning sickness’. In addition, even after the doctor’s strict warnings about marijuana seriously affecting the baby’s development, there is no decrease in the marijuana consumption by pregnant women.
A study, published in the Journal of American Medical Association on Tuesday, went on to show that the marijuana use has increased in the pregnant women who fall in the age bracket of 18 to 24 years of age. The study had focused on the expecting mothers of California.
Statistically, the report shows that among these pregnant women, Marijuana use in California went on to rise from 4.2 percent to 7.1 percent, between the years 2009 and 2016.
The Marijuana use climbed up from 12.5 percent to 21.8 percent among all the pregnant teens who were younger than the age of 18, and rose from 9.8 to 19 percent among the women between the ages 18 – 24.
The study also shared that the marijuana use across the U.S. in the pregnant women between the ages 18 and 44, hiked from 2.37 percent to 3.85 percent between 2002 and 2014.
Medical Marijuana was legalized in the California state in 1996, and the women growing up in the state are of the view that marijuana is a legitimate medicinal therapy and is not an illegal drug.
The pregnancy in the young women, especially the adolescents are also linked to the increasing marijuana and alcohol consumptions, as Dr. Haywood Brown from the Duke University School of Medicine said, “The paper is not surprising, and the findings of a rise in marijuana use during the pregnancy is consistent with recent attention to marijuana and legalization in various states.”
The survey took 279,457 young pregnant women from the Kaiser Permanente Northern California Health Care System and used self-reporting and the toxicology screenings as the tools for gathering all the statistics.
The easy and increased accessibility to the medical marijuana in the country, especially the Californian state is not to slow down any time soon in the coming years. Also, the medical risks of marijuana on the baby and the pregnant women, both are not very widely known and hence unaware mothers who use marijuana and are otherwise healthy face difficulties and are negatively impacted.
But there still is a huge segment of young pregnant women who are well aware of the impact of marijuana on their pregnancies but are still willing to risk both, their and their child’s life.
“Then there’s the other group who take a more pragmatic view of pregnancy,” said Dr. Robyn Horsager-Boehrer, the chief of OB-GYN at the University of Texas Southwestern’s hospital. “They know there are potential risks involved with many decisions they make involving medication exposure, alcohol use and smoking, but they decide those risks are acceptable, especially if the risks are not well-defined or conclusive.”
