Jillian Broomstein starts to cry when she talks about the day her newborn son Jeremy was taken from her by New Hampshire’s child welfare agency. He was 2 weeks old.

“They came into the house and said they would have to place him in foster care and I would get a call and we would set up visits,” she said. “It was scary.”

Broomstein, who was 26 at the time, had not used heroin for months and was on methadone treatment, trying to do what was safest for her child. The clinic social worker told her that since Jeremy would test positive for methadone when he was born, she would need to find safe housing or risk losing custody.

Broomstein moved in with a friend and her kids — but it turned out that friend had her own legal battles with the state’s Division of Children, Youth and Families, known as DCYF. The friend’s home would not pass muster as “safe housing” because of that.

Since Broomstein grew up in foster care and had no family to take her in, Jeremy was taken from her. She had 12 months to try to get her son back or lose her parental rights permanently.

To get their children back from the foster care system in New Hampshire, parents struggling with addiction are required to be compliant in drug treatment and have a safe place to live. If they can’t find housing or if they relapse, the clock does not stop ticking.

“I cannot stress enough that 12 months is a really short window for somebody who’s in early recovery,” said Courtney Tanner, who runs Hope On Haven Hill, one of the few places in New Hampshire where pregnant women and new mothers can live with their children and get treated for addiction. But with just eight beds here, the waitlists can be long.

There are more than 430,000 children in foster care in the U.S., according to the latest government figures. The opioid crisis is definitely a factor in an increasing trend of more children being removed from the home, but the scope of the problem is hard to measure due to poor tracking.

NPR and Kaiser Health News.

NPR. This story can be republished for free (details).