For decades, the Motherisk Drug Testing Laboratory at Toronto’s Hospital for Sick Children ran hair-strand drug tests to assess whether pregnant people and parents—mostly mothers—were fit to care for their children. These tests were later found to be unreliable and far below forensics standards, lacking basic safeguards like proper validation, quality control and independent oversight.

Motherisk was no marginal operation. Between 2005 and 2015 alone, the lab tested more than 16,000 people for “child protection” purposes. More than 100 child welfare agencies across five provinces relied on its results. Millions of public dollars were spent on inadequate testing that shaped decisions with lifelong consequences. 

My youngest child was apprehended from the hospital at just two days old, based on compromised and unreliable drug tests.

I became involved with the Children’s Aid Society, Toronto’s primary child welfare organization, due to allegations related to marijuana use while breastfeeding, resulting in years of drug testing and restricted access to my children. In 2008, my youngest child was apprehended from the hospital at just two days old, based on compromised and unreliable drug tests from the Motherisk program.

These faulty results were used to justify decisions that led to me losing custody of my children for more than a decade. Even after the testing failures were acknowledged and apologies were offered, the stigmatizing narratives in court records and case notes were never corrected. I continued to be portrayed as an unfit parent.

A 2018 review largely focused on “fixing” flawed testing methods and oversight. But by framing the problem as a technical failure, we avoided a harder conversation about the deep-seated biases—the moral judgments about drug use and parenting—that made this junk science so easy to believe in the first place.

Motherisk thrived because it replaced human uncertainty with apparent objectivity. It allowed drug use to become a shortcut to judge parental fitness, equating abstinence with good parenting and any drug use with so-called abuse. This was despite decades of medical experts saying that drug testing cannot assess parenting capacity, and Ontario law not even listing drug use on its own as a reason for children’s aid involvement. 

This impulse to “catch” parents rather than support families remains institutionalized today.

Nevertheless, biases and racism of social workers and other professionals continue to drive the reporting of families for drug use, scaring parents and their children away from seeking the very care and support they need. 

This impulse to “catch” parents rather than support families remains institutionalized today through “duty to report” rules. In shelters and other social and health services, staff often feel pressured to call children’s aid even when there is no imminent risk, simply because they are not trained in alternatives and fear legal penalties. 

In Ontario, there were roughly 125,000 calls to children’s aid in 2024-2025, leading to over 63,000 investigations. This surveillance disproportionately targets Indigenous and racialized families.

Framing drug use as a proxy for parenting capacity shields decision-makers from many of the real issues harming families: poverty, inadequate housing, and structural inequality. 

The lesson is not that we need “better” tests. It is that we must end our over-reliance on the child welfare system.

I have experienced the trauma that comes from this firsthand, which caused lasting psychological harm and permanently damaged my sense of safety within health care and child protection systems. Even now that my children are young adults, this painful chapter remains central to my family history.

The lesson of Motherisk is not that we need “better” tests. It is that we must end our over-reliance on the child welfare system as a primary response for ensuring family safety. Families are safer when they are supported with housing, health care, and trusted community-based support—not torn apart by systems that surveil, punish and separate. Skilling up social service and health care workers to learn about alternative responses to mandated reporting should be a first-line prevention strategy.

The science is settled. The unresolved question is why our institutions continue to cling to the same moral judgments that allowed junk science to shatter so many families in the first place.

Anne-Rachelle Boulanger, a lawyer and policy analyst at the HIV Legal Network, and Kathleen Kenny, a postdoctoral research fellow at the College of Global and Community Health at the University of Manitoba, contributed to this article.

Photograph (cropped) via PickPik

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