I was standing next to the water fountain at the Mississippi Agricultural Museum when the person I was chatting with mentioned an article they just read. In the article, babies who were born dependent on opioids because of their mother’s opioid use were being treated in an entirely new way. Instead of being separated from their mothers and put in a bright, loud NICU before being whisked into foster care, they were kept with their moms in private, low-stimulation hospital rooms. Moms were taught how to swaddle and soothe their babies and encouraged to practice skin-to-skin contact and breastfeeding. Giving the baby opioids to help them through withdrawal was a last resort. Mom was the primary medicine. The results were striking. Babies were getting through opioid withdrawals faster, using less opioids post-birth, and leaving the hospital days earlier.

This conversation was in 2015, but I remember it so clearly because my heart started pumping faster, my blood pressure shot through the roof, and I was overcome with anger. Intense emotional experiences tend to imprint themselves in our memory. My response in the conversation was swift and strong. That article couldn’t possibly be true, I retorted. Right then my family was fostering a baby who’d been removed from his mom’s custody because she was using drugs while she was pregnant. Even though I had no data to support my anger, the results in the article called into question whether our involvement was truly in the best interest of that precious baby’s life and health. That was too hard to consider when our family was deeply invested. I wasn’t getting up at all hours of the night to feed a newborn for nothing! I guess it’s human nature that when we hear an idea that conflicts with something we’re invested in, our knee-jerk reaction is to shut it down.

But I continued to hear about this bonding approach to opioid-dependent newborns, and last week the National Institutes of Health released a report on a study of 1305 infants across 26 US hospitals. The “Eat, Sleep, Console” (ESC) method, very similar to what I heard about in 2015, was studied alongside the Finnegan Neonatal Abstinence Scoring Tool (FNAST) that has been used for 50 years. The results echo what I heard 8 years ago. Newborns in this study who received the ESC approach to their opioid dependance were ready to be discharged from the hospital 6 days earlier than babies whose care was determined using FNAST. The ESC babies were also 63% less likely to receive opioids as part of their post-birth care. For a lot of these babies, what they needed most was mom.

On the one hand, we have a promising new approach to opioid-dependent newborns. On the other, some jurisdictions across the country arrest women who use drugs while pregnant. I’ll give the benefit of the doubt to people who advocate a punitive approach and assume they truly believe scaring mothers will help babies. But is prosecution or prenatal care the best way to protect the life and health of unborn children whose mothers are struggling with addiction? Responses that feel good and responses that do good aren’t the same thing.

If a woman is afraid that a doctor’s visit will land her in prison, that momma won’t go anywhere near a doctor for as long as possible. Even worse, it seems that the impact these prosecutions are most likely to have on unborn children is incentivizing women struggling with addiction to have an abortion. If they give birth, they could end up in prison. If they have an abortion, they won’t. What a tragedy.

It’s hard to rethink something we’re deeply invested in. It took time for me to get over my initial anger at what felt like a threat to my role and instead embrace curiosity for the best path to healing for vulnerable babies. Change is hard, but if we want addicted moms to make healthier choices early in their pregnancies, we have to broaden the path to help not handcuffs. And if we want to give babies born dependent on opioids the best chance to recover quickly and suffer less, mom might be the best medicine out there.