‘People like me don’t have babies’: Inside the clinic helping addicted expectant mums

Elvira Tsecoutanis was in the grip of a heroin addiction when she found out she was pregnant with her first child.

“I thought, ‘People like me don’t have babies,’” Tsecoutanis says. “I shouldn’t be a mum.”

Tsecoutanis is not a religious person, but she likens a heroin addiction to being possessed by the devil: an unstoppable, violent force that drags a person into hell against their will. She remembers crying on the way to her dealer’s house, desperate to stop using.

“No one will ever carry as much shame and judgment about ourselves as mothers in addiction,” Tsecoutanis says.

“No one will ever judge or shame us as much as we do ourselves. We don’t want to be doing it.”

The 50-year-old mother of two, who has bipolar II and attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD), has been clean for more than eight years.

Now she works with expectant mums as a peer support leader at Western Health’s Sapphire Clinic.

The pioneering antenatal and multidisciplinary health clinic at the Joan Kirner Women and Children’s Hospital in St Albans has been running for more than a year.

So far, it has helped more than 130 women during their pregnancies with trauma-informed, non-judgmental healthcare spanning from addiction medicine to obstetrics, midwifery, perinatal psychological support, maternal-fetal monitoring, infectious diseases, dietetics and social work.

Many of the women who come into the clinic are just like Tsecoutanis once was: in the throes of addiction, homeless, sleeping in their cars, or battling complex mental health conditions. Others are desperate to get into rehab so they can kick the drugs or alcohol to get sober for their babies.

“I see the same shame and wariness in them that I felt inside myself,” Tsecoutanis says. “Drugs are illegal, right? They are so judged on a moral level, so there’s this barrier immediately.”

Tsecoutanis tells the women her own story about drug and alcohol use, fleeing violent relationships, of raising her two young children, of falling in and out of addiction for years until she finally stopped.

“So many of them have so much trauma,” she says. “I can see them relax a little bit and then slowly they start to open up because they know I understand.”

It is a Friday morning inside the brightly lit hospital clinic. The phone at the front desk barely stops ringing, and associate midwife unit manager Kylie Charles is working with military precision.