A baby boy was recently born in a local hospital to a mother who took cocaine, benzodiazepine, THC, methadone and other drugs throughout her pregnancy. He arrived prematurely, and throwing up. He's got what the doctors call prolonged QT interval. Simply put, he has a defect interfering with his heart's ability to pump blood to the rest of his body.

He also has developed neonatal abstinence syndrome. NAS is associated with a painful withdrawal caused by his mother's drugs. According to Wikipedia, there are two types. Prenatal NAS is caused by substance abuse by the mother, while postnatal NAS is caused by discontinuation of drugs directly to the infant. His nurse said he cries constantly, jerks, has watery stools and is having difficulty sleeping between feedings. He is in pain but his nurse believes the morphine is helping him manage his pain.

He will likely be in the hospital for up to two more months then released into the care of a foster family. An immediate relative was asked if she could care for him, and she can't. This decision, she says, "broke my heart."

My heart is feeling a bit chipped these days as well. I agonized each day as I thought of this baby, still in his mother's womb. I asked everybody, "What can we do?" Most of them shrugged their shoulders. There is nothing we can do, they say. We just wait, until the mother gives birth.

I can't ignore this issue, even if pro-mother critics cite a list of reasons why we cannot condemn pregnant women for taking drugs. Or why we cannot consider prenatal drug abuse as child abuse.

Seems to me the the mother, father and the child all have rights. No doubt about it, but I'm not advocating for any of those beliefs. I am advocating for doing away with drugs, for protecting this baby from the cocaine, from the other drugs that could disconnect the systems that make him whole, disconnect the nerves that make up his brain or disconnect his heart's ability to pump blood to the rest of his body.

I am advocating for giving babies in the womb a fighting chance to survive and arrive intact. I'm advocating for placing mothers involuntarily in residential treatment maternity homes for up to nine months until they give birth. Then they can decide if they are going to be mothers or drug addicts.

This baby's mother was well aware of the problems the drugs might cause her child. About halfway through her pregnancy, she was kicked out of a family drug treatment court program when she relapsed. She wouldn't pick up from there. She declined to go into a residential treatment program, believing she could recover on her own. She wouldn't accept our help. And we couldn't help her baby.

It's a no brainer, folks. This isn't working. The direct and indirect costs are enormous at the hospital with a price tag of several thousands of dollars per day per child and in the court room where we taxpayers pay the judge, the attorneys for the parents and the guardians for the children to hear story after story about the neglect and abuse they experience. Then there is the direct cost of providing long-term therapeutic services to the children.

With this baby still in agony, we need to figure out what to do. For those of you thinking about the money, seems to me this great recession is not a reason to abandon these children. There are opportunities for being fiscally creative here. Joseph Neff and David Raynor of the News & Observer had an idea: Get legislators to mandate generic drugs for Medicaid. They estimate we could save about $28 million. We could use some of the savings to protect our unborn children from illegal drug use, put their mothers in maternity homes, involuntarily, and save over the long run in social and medical costs.

Seems to me we are talking about something greater here than money. We're talking about a child who needed us to advocate and protect him long before he arrived.