Article by Blair Campbell

About four weeks into my first and so far only pregnancy, I was prescribed Promethazine, a drug often given to cancer patients struggling with extreme nausea from chemotherapy. For me, morning sickness fluctuated between mildly miserable and totally incapacitating, and I was grateful for something — anything — that might make it better. Promethazine definitely did the trick, but it also felt like a knock-out drug, so I limited my intake to bedtime the night before days when I absolutely had to be productive.

I never questioned the safety of the drug because it was prescribed, seemingly without hesitation, by a doctor I trusted. More than a year later, I looked it up online and saw that it was classified by the FDA as a Pregnancy Category C medication, meaning that its risks to the fetus are unknown. What is known, according to the FDA, is that Promethazine can cause fatal respiratory depression in children under age two, and that several cases of gangrene requiring amputation have been linked to its injectible form. Read more…..