Mothers Are Losing Custody of Their Babies After Hospitals Report Inaccurate Drug Test Results

A Georgia mother claims that she lost custody of her newborn daughter due to faulty drug tests from a lab with a documented history of inaccurate results. When a drug court and her OB-GYN ran tests on Kristen Clark-Hassell, her results were clean. But the tests from Georgia’s Division of Family and Children Services (DFCS) came back positive, and so the government took her youngest child.

“They literally took her off my breast in the hallway with her screaming after the court hearing,” Clark-Hassell told the Savannah-based outlet The Current. “For her to just be ripped like that just cut a hole in our hearts.”

In a 2021 whistleblower complaint, a former lab director for Avertest—the company that processed Clark-Hassell’s drug tests—claimed that as many as 30 percent of the lab’s test results were inaccurate. She further alleged that “meeting deadlines for test results is more important to Avertest than accuracy” and that the company manipulated data and set arbitrary detection cutoffs, increasing false positives. Avertest settled the Justice Department lawsuit relating to these claims in 2024, paying a $1.3 million settlement.

Clark-Hassell’s legal battle began with a DFCS-ordered Avertest drug screening in 2020. According to documents obtained by The Current, that test was taken on August 5, and it came back positive. Then a test from her OB-GYN taken on August 11 was negative. In September, a court-ordered drug test came back negative, but the DFCS ordered another round of testing in October. That time, her urine sample came back clean, but her hair follicle test was positive—raising serious concerns about the reliability of the results. While it’s still possible that the sporadic positives Clark-Hassell experienced were the result of drug use, this exact circumstance is why accurate testing matters when deciding whether or not to take the drastic step of removing children from their parents’ care.

Clark-Hassell’s case is not unique. Last year, The Marshall Project published two investigations revealing that CPS removed children based on unreliable drug tests. Some mothers tested positive after consuming over-the-counter drugs or poppy seeds. In other cases, hospitals reported women for testing positive for drugs that were given to them during labor.

Separating kids from their parents can be devastating. To do it on the basis of a dubious test result is even worse.

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