Ordeal of SA’S tik babies laid bare
EACH year about a thousand young women addicted to crystal methamphetamine, or tik, give birth to so-called tik babies in Cape Town.
“I started smoking [heroin, dagga and tik] while I was 16,” said Meggan Adams from the Cape Flats while filling her glass pipe with more white tik crystals. She is six-and-a-halfmonths pregnant with her second child.
“With my first child I was smoking five packets [of tik] a day – one packet just wasn’t enough for me,” Meggan said.
“There were times, after I smoked, that I could feel the child being like hyperactive in my tummy.”
Meggan has been living on the streets of Cape Town since she was a child and, despite her pregnancy, prefers to sleep out on the street.
She doesn’t like spending time at home and would rather roam around, begging for money to buy food.
“I’m very worried about her on the streets,” said Meggan’s mother, Amiena, who often comes to town to get money from her to help support Meggan’s five-year-old son.
A Health-e News documentary investigating the use of tik among pregnant women will be featured tonight on Special Assignment on SABC3.
Alecia (not her real name), another heavily pregnant young woman from Bishop Lavis, also on the Cape Flats, said she had started smoking tik when she was 18 after seeing her friends do it.
“I smoked with them, and ever since then I’m smoking,” she said while lighting up a tik pipe. Throughout her pregnancy she was smoking up to three bags of tik a day. Two days after the interview in mid-June she gave birth to a baby boy. At only six weeks Baby Clintino died of unknown causes.
“I don’t know what happened,” said Alecia. “The Friday he was still okay, but Saturday when I woke up he was blue in the face… I miss him a lot… every day, every hour.”
Professor Johan Smith, head of the Neonatal Unit at Tygerberg Hospital in Cape Town, said it was estimated that about 200 000 people in the Western Cape use tik – many of them pregnant women. Babies born to heavy tik-using mothers may suffer acute symptoms of withdrawal.
“These babies are very agitated and irritable, they cry a lot, and may have seizures,” said Smith. Between 500 and 1 000 babies are born to tikusing mothers in the Western Cape each year.
Smith said tik reduced the size of the region of the brain essential for learning and memory.
“It’s a threat to the brain development and the physical health of pregnant mothers, and their children.”
Dr Kirsty Donald of the Red Cross Children’s Hospital in Cape Town conducted a study on the effects on children whose mothers had reported tik abuse during pregnancy. “What was very clear from the results is that children exposed to tik have behavioural and developmental problems.”
Nirosha Moolla, a school psychologist who deals with pupils exposed to tik before birth, said they were slower than their classmates. “They struggle to remember.”
“These pupils present with a lot of unprovoked anger,” said Faizel Cottle, a learning support adviser.
Get the full story at 9pm tonight on SABC3’s Special Assignment.