Comprehensive Opioid Abuse Reduction Act of 2016

Floor Speech

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Mr. TURNER. Mr. Chairman, I would like to thank my colleague from New York (Mr. Donovan) for yielding and for his work on this amendment, which I am proud to cosponsor.

Mr. Chairman, the purpose of this amendment is simple: increase access to substance abuse treatment for pregnant women. We accomplish this by making clear that States receiving grants from an existing Department of Justice program may use them to provide family-based treatment.

Currently, nonviolent mothers and fathers have access to family- and community-based substance abuse treatment options that help keep their families together, and that should be true for expectant mothers as well. Our amendment would help provide this access to the 60 pregnant women in Ohio State prisons last month and countless others across the country, all of whom are ineligible for it today.

I have met with doctors, nurses, hospitals, law enforcement, and treatment professionals, and have seen firsthand the devastating effects that heroin and opioid abuse have inflicted on pregnant women and newborns in my own southwest Ohio community. In December of 2013, I toured Soin Medical Center in Beavercreek, Ohio, and discussed the concerning trend the hospital was observing: increasing numbers of infants born addicted to opiates.

At the Dayton Children's Hospital neonatal intensive care unit, I witnessed the hardship that heroin and opioid addiction inflicts on both women and their babies. I met with mothers struggling with substance abuse who had given birth to infants who had become addicted in the womb. I watched newborns just starting their lives suffering through the painful symptoms of neonatal abstinence syndrome.

At the Women's Recovery Center in Xenia, Ohio, I spoke to young women participating in opiate abuse intervention and treatment programs. One former heroin user I spoke to shared with me her story about how the intervention and treatment she received at the center allowed her to overcome her addiction before giving birth to her son.

It is vital that we provide women access to this treatment--for their own health and for the health of the children that they will bring into the world.

Mr. Chairman, I urge adoption of this amendment.

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