Re: “I can’t do this again,” and “The faces of fentanyl,” (The Leader, Nov. 25 and 20).
I understand the trauma a person might feel after watching someone overdose from this powerful and insidious drug and stopping breathing in front of them.
And I understand how they would have trouble re-living these events over and over again in their minds.
However, there is another matter on my mind ever since I read you newspaper’s story, The faces of fentanyl.
What is more horrifying to me is the number of children born to both using drug addicts and alcoholics.
Why do we not have articles on these innocent children who are doomed from the start because of the addictions of people who cannot even make good decisions for themselves?
Many young people on the streets or in our jails are victims of Fetal Alcohol Syndrome and I believe the damage to the children of drug-addicted, overdosing addicts is probably a lot worse.
The young women on the front page of the newspaper has died from fentanyl overdoses five times, is pregnant and has had five children. Were those other pregnancies, like this one, while she was using drugs?
And every time she stopped breathing, causing brain damage to herself, how much brain damage would the poor unborn child suffer?
These unborn children will have their lives ruined by the drugs/alcohol that their parent consumes. They have no choice in the matter and they will regret the circumstances their whole lives, if they are able to regret anything with the damage that may be caused to their tiny developing brains.
They have no choice but to suffer a lifetime of grief, brain damage and possible physical damage as well caused by the people who created them but did not have the ability to put their unborn child’s lives over their need to destroy themselves.
It is my opinion, and I know many people will agree with me, that women who are drug or alcohol addicted give up their personal rights once they become pregnant. They should either volunteer to go into locked, secure treatment facilities or have an abortion. And if they continue to practise unprotected sex, they should also be sterilized.
Unborn children’s rights must have priority over drug- or alcohol-addicted women. How can we live with ourselves if we do not try to save them from misery?
How can society afford to both try to protect their mother from her own destruction and the lifelong care for these poor children?
I am broken-hearted.
Liz Irwin, Surrey
