“I was 13 weeks pregnant, taking bong rips for breakfast.”
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When it comes to cannabis, the risk-reward stakes can feel outlandishly high. The rewards, for some, can be the difference between months of extreme nausea, pain, or crippling anxiety, and a relatively smooth pregnancy. The risks, however, are no less than losing one’s baby to the child-welfare system.
A robust community of “cannamoms” discusses their use in Facebook groups, sub-Reddits, Instagram comments, and private chats. A Clubhouse roundtable about breastfeeding and cannabis had no fewer than 500 attendees at 11 a.m. on a Sunday morning last November. When I posed the question of weed in a doula-led private Telegram group of about 120 mostly Los Angeles moms, a handful piped up immediately saying they used it while breastfeeding; others said they were dying to, but afraid.
“I would sit in an armchair and just be gripping the arms of the chair and try to put something on TV to just try to escape how I was feeling,” she said. “Every couple hours, I would try to get up and force myself to eat something. And that’s what the first half of my pregnancy looked like.” Tara’s experience was similar. The doctor told her that it was a good thing she was feeling sick, because it meant the baby was healthy. “It was like a vagina mill. It was not whole-person care,” she says. So she changed lanes and opted to have her baby with a midwife — a decision that cost her several thousand dollars out of pocket. “But it was the way that I wanted to go, and we can afford it.”
And so, we consult resources like Oster, who says her readers send her several weed-related queries each week. “People’s questions are incredibly specific,” she says. “Like: ‘I use this in the following way with the following kind of gummies following this and that, and what do we know about that?’ And it’s like: nothing. We know nothing.”
Hurd and her colleagues’ latest research comes from a decade-long monitoring of 322 mother-child pairs in New York City for an ongoing National Institute of Mental Health–funded study about stress in pregnancy. Hurd was surprised to see how reliably those placental changes predicted future behavior. But she says we shouldn’t be terribly shocked to find that weed impacts our immune function, given what we know about how it works in our bodies — specifically in an internal network called the endocannabinoid system.
While it’s true that confounding factors like cigarette smoking or stress could also have impacted results, Hurd says her team has already shown that THC exposure similarly impacts animals’ placentas. But the good news, she says, is that these effects can likely be mitigated or even reversed by influences in a child’s home or school environment.
“As advances are being made in the area of legalization and destigmatization of marijuana,” says Lynn Paltrow, executive director of the National Advocates for Pregnant Women, “the place that remains highly stigmatized, and the place where I think that the war on drugs is being perpetuated, is through pregnant patients.”
“This is not applicable if you’re a person of color,” Diggs says. “If you’re a white couple, you’re walking into the hospital, you own a cannabis company, no one’s gonna bat an eye at all. You could probably leave some products for the nurses. If you are a person of color, and you even have a whiff, or you have a little tincture of CBD on the counter to rub onto your feet, you’re going to get a full blood panel and a social worker will come by your room.
The day we spoke, Anthony estimated she had 100 DMs on Instagram, the vast majority of which were questions about using weed during pregnancy and breastfeeding . Her followers want to know about everything from the risk of Child Protective Services to how long THC remains in breast milk after smoking.
“Most moms that I encounter, who are asking if they should consume cannabis during pregnancy, have done research,” Anthony says. “They are talking to people, they’re asking questions. Those are markers of a good mom. A good mom cares. A good mom wants research. A good mom wants answers. They’re asking questions. And I think that those women shouldn’t be vilified.”
Judy Chang, an OB/GYN at the University of Pittsburgh School of Medicine whose research focuses on patient communication, has an idea of how those conversations could go. She says that doctors should offer up information about cannabis use during pregnancy as a universal counseling point rather than waiting for women to ask and risk stigmatization.
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