Note: Cross posted from [wp angelfury] I will not SHUT UP , GIVE UP and I WONT go away!!.

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Once again the MOTHERS ACT has been reintroduced in both the U.S. House of Representatives (H.R. 20 introduced Jan 6th 2009) and the U.S. Senate (S. 324 introduced Jan 26 2009)

This bill quite simply is a feeder line for the psycho-pharmaceutical industry and will result in more mothers and infants being put at risk for being prescribed antidepressant and other dangerous psychiatric drugs documented by the U.S. FDA to cause birth defects, psychosis, mania, worsening depression, suicidal and homicidal ideation.

The Melanie Blocker Stokes MOTHERS Act is a federal bill named after Melanie Stokes, a woman who suffered emotional difficulties after giving birth and was subsequently prescribed a cocktail of intensely controversial psychiatric drugs including anti-psychotic, anti-anxiety, and anti-depressant drugs before being subjected to electroshock treatment.

Melanie Stokes was in the mental health system, was prescribed drugs, was hospitalized, was subjected to the still barbaric practice of electroshock and only after receiving mental health “treatment” did she commit suicide. That is what the mental health industry did for a new mother named Melanie Stokes. It is incredible that a story such as this does not raise alarm bells within Congress on the negligence of prescribing cocktails of psychiatric drugs to new mothers, drugs documented by the US FDA and international drug regulatory agencies to cause not only a host of documented adverse events for adults, but also for the unborn children of pregnant women who incredibly, are being prescribed these drugs even during pregnancy.

(click to enlarge) Adverse Drug Reactions Reported to FDA's MedWatch

(click to enlarge) Estimated SSRI Side Effects

Despite psycho pharmaceutical rhetoric about the need for more mental health treatment of pregnant women and new mothers, the fact remains that the most common treatment for women diagnosed with postpartum depression is drugs. There is absolutely no language in the Mothers Act that will ensure mothers being “screened” for postpartum depression are granted the most fundamental right of “informed consent,” meaning, per the legal definition, they are warned about all the risks of the proposed treatments and all the alternatives. So much for the rights of mothers.

Proponents of the bill, including Pharma front groups and other vested interests, claim this won’t happen. So the public is supposed to believe that the same vested interests which have been exposed for downplaying or denying the dangerous effects of antidepressant and antipsychotic drugs for more than a decade should be trusted. The public is supposed to believe that because new mothers are screened for a specific condition called “postpartum depression” (which has as its main treatment, drugs), does not mean that they will A) be prescribed them, or B) won’t be warned that the drugs prescribed to help them could in fact result in worsening depression, psychosis, mania, suicidal and homicidal ideation, stillbirths or birth defects if prescribed the drugs while pregnant.

The opposition to the Mothers Act is simple. It violates informed consent. It is a psycho/pharmaceutical friendly bill, not a consumer friendly bill. And those who support it either don’t understand the fundamental right of informed consent, or have made their allegiance clear.