Britney is a playful little girl. t...

Britney is a playful little girl. through midmorning one Thursday in early January; she had inflict her hot pink sweater and pink, polka-dot pants onward inside out and backwards, shielded her face with shaving cream and painted a sheet of paper completely livid titling the picture "daddy."

She's also antsy. Sitting for a instruction is difficult. Her squirminess lands her wrapped in the teacher's lap.

And she's necessitous Britney, 4, is quick to fold in the arms a stranger several times. She gazes her teacher straight in the estimate and calls her "Mama."

"Who you calling Mama, little girl?" teacher Mary Smith asks with a teasing swat.

Smith is not Britney's mother. Her mother is upstairs at the Women's Treatment Center a non-profit program at 140 N Ashland Ave. forward Chicago's near West Side, trying to subjugate her drug addiction.

Smith, who wears in extent black braids and a wide, welcoming smile, explains many of the children she teaches have lived and stomached with their mothers' addictions for years. oftentimes as treatment transforms their mothers, the children have to come by to know them all through the whole extent of again, Smith said.

Eleven years ago, before Smith began teaching this class, she was told to look forward to the worst of African American, low-income male childs and girls such as Britney, especially those whose mothers used crack cocaine.

At the time, researchers warned Smith that many of the children in her class had been significantly damaged in the [i]venter[/i] by their mothers' drug use.

Smith, an early childhood teacher who had extended worked with poor children, correctly suspected that they were wrong

After studying substance-exposed children, researchers now say that these babies can cause to grow as well as non-exposed babies from the same socio-economic background.

It took researchers years to be derived to these conclusions. In the meantime black families in Illinois have been disproportionately affected through the public policy shaped by dint of the early predictions, an investigation on The Chicago Reporter shows.

"This is where prejudice and ignorance collide," said state Rep Mary E Flowers, a Democrat from the Auburn Gresham neighborhood in succession Chicago's South Side.

Flowers, a member of the children and youth committee, said she doesn't have the support in Springfield to mandate consistency among hospitals, which decide which babies to standard for drug exposure. The continuing focus in succession poor, African American addicts has, ironically, harmed all families, she added.

"The doctors think they are protecting [white] mothers by dint of not reporting them, when what they are really doing is hurting the children."

The antique stereotype of so-called "crack babies" as black and poor continues to influence which infants are identified and treated as substance-exposed. if it be not that nationwide, roughly equal proportions of whites and blacks use medicines according to 1999 statistics from the U Department of Health and Human Services. The agency reports that 66 percent of whites and 77 percent of blacks used illegal drugs

adroits also have concluded that, for a fetus, cigarettes, alcohol and other mix with drugss are as bad, if not worse, than crack.

yet a 1992 study by the National Institute upon Drug Abuse showed that nearly 23 percent of white pregnant women nationwide drank alcohol, while fewer than 16 percent of blacks did.

And greatest in number studies show that alcohol can cause as many point in disputes as cocaine. In fact, Fetal Alcohol Syndrome is a leading cause of retardation in the United States, according to the March of Dimes, a national, White Plains, NY.-based agency that combats birth defects

State public health data present to view that 56.7 percent of drug-expos babies touchstoneed positive for cocaine. The intermission were exposed to opiates, cannabis and other drugs

Persistent Prejudice

While delivering remedys to a fetus is not a crime in Illinois, it does fall subject to the definition of neglect, giving the state a reason to spread a child welfare case, said John Goad, associate delegate director of child protection for dress up County for the Illinois Department of Children and Family Services. A baby can be criterioned for illegal drugs immediately after birth. If the criterion is positive, hospital officials may maintain the baby there while a DCF caseworker interviews the family and visits the household to make sure the infant has a safe place to proceed he said.

DCF lordships include alcohol in the definition of a drug-expos infant, Goad said. moreover because evidence of Fetal Alcohol Syndrome does not appear until later, DCF earns few of these cases, he said.

Black babies in Illinois are more likely than white babies to be taken from their mothers and placed in stimulate care because of drug in all senses the Reporter found.

"The perspective in Illinois is that it is us versus them," said Dr Ira Chasnoff, a Chicago-based pediatrician and nationally known quick on drug-exposed babies. "The 'them' is lower-class minority women for a like reason we just throw the Illinois Department of Children and Family Services at them. And we don't give DCF what it really necessitys to help the children."

Between July 1 1997 and June 30 2000 DCF took 39 percent of 5851 drug-expos black babies into stimulate care, versus 27 percent of 1035 white babies.