Our babies were ADDICTED TO HEROIN

We speak to a couple who adopted three children, all born to mothers who were on drugs

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They took turns to pace the length of their living room with the baby girl in their arms as she screamed and writhed in agony. Clare and Jeremy Wilson felt so many emotions - pity for this helpless newborn, and anger at the heroin-addicted birth mother who had inflicted such torture on an innocent baby.

‘It’s hard to put into words how the desperation gnaws at your heart when you watch a tiny baby going through the pain and trauma of withdrawal,’ says Clare.

‘Round and round in our heads it would go. But our focus had to be on supporting her through it. She barely slept, jerking herself awake when she tried, so the only way we could handle it was taking shifts, passing her between us. We couldn’t bring ourselves to leave her alone, screaming.’

The year was 2017 and, by this point in time, the couple from Somerset were well-versed in this very particular parenting challenge.

Unable to have children of their own, this was not the first but the third time they had fostered, in the hope of adopting, a baby who'd been born addicted to heroin. In fact, they were the first couple in the UK to foster-to-adopt three newborns - each with neonatal abstinence syndrome (NAS) having been exposed to drugs in the womb - with the full knowledge that the babies’ biological parents may win the right to claim them back.

Fortunately, they went on to adopt all three, now aged 11, eight and seven. Yet their story doesn’t stop there - far from it. ‘The early months with each of them were the hardest but, of course, the aftereffects don’t end following withdrawal,’ explains Clare. ‘Each of our three children has additional needs, which make their lives harder.’