It is 1978. Deb Ford is 22 years old, recently divorced and learning how to party.
She and her friends in Kalispell drink all night, six days a week beer, wine, mixed drinks, shots right out of the bottle. They take Sundays off to recover.
When alcohol begins making her sick, Ford takes a pregnancy test. She is 2 1/2 months along.
Her daughter, Michelle Elizabeth Ford, is born March 3, 1979. Five years later, Ford sobers up for good and moves with her daughter to Canada, where they live in a community of Christian missionaries.
Fast forward.
It is 2001. Michelle Ford is 22 years old, socially awkward and working at a taco joint in Kalispell.
She begins dating a man who tells her she is smart and beautiful, words no one else has ever used to describe her.
When he wants to move into the Glacier National Forest and live off the land, she goes along. When he shoots a hiker to death, burns and buries the man's body and drives away in his pickup truck, she goes along.
When he is arrested and charged with murder, Michelle Ford is, too. She is smiling in her mug shot.
After eight years in prison, Michelle Ford believes she is rightly being held responsible for crimes she knowingly committed. But she also believes there is a mitigating factor that helps explain why she did what she did.
Alcohol that her mother drank during the first 10 weeks of pregnancy - those weeks when Deb Ford didn't realize she was pregnant - irreparably damaged Michelle Ford's brain.
She has been diagnosed with alcohol-related neuro-developmental disorder, a condition related to fetal alcohol syndrome.
"If I had been not brain damaged, I don't think I would have committed that crime," Michelle Ford said. "I still did it, and I'm still responsible for it. … I don't want to hide behind my brain damage and say, 'It's all the brain damage's fault.'
"But I had the freedom of a 22-year-old with the brain power of a 5-year-old."
A spectrum of problems
Experts don't know how many Americans have fetal alcohol syndrome or one if its related disorders, but the impact of the conditions on society is enormous.
The United States spends more than $5 billion a year on fetal alcohol syndrome, or FAS, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. That figure does not include the cost of caring for people with related disorders.
Prenatal exposure to alcohol can lead to a spectrum of diagnoses. At one end is FAS, with its easily identifiable facial characteristics and developmental disabilities.
But infants diagnosed with what is often called "full-blown FAS" make up only a small portion of the babies born with alcohol-related birth defects.
Most of the time, the defects are invisible and, if they are recognized at all, are mistaken for other problems, such as attention deficit disorder, rebelliousness or bad parenting.
"No one understands these kids," said Deb Watson, whose brain-damaged son served time in prison for helping kidnap and assault a Billings pizza delivery driver. "They fly under the radar because they look so normal."
"It's not quite like a lobotomy," Watson said. "It takes their conscience away. They can't help it. That's the way they were born."
High estimates put the number of American babies born with FAS at about 10,000 a year, with another 30,000 infants less obviously affected by prenatal exposure to alcohol.
In Montana, that amounts to 100 babies born every year with alcohol-related brain damage.
"Of all the substances people abuse, alcohol produces by far the most neurobiological effects on a fetus," said Deborah Henderson, manager of the Infant, Child and Maternal Health section of the state Department of Public Health and Human Services. "And alcohol is Montana's drug of choice."
Those 100 Montana babies represent fewer than 10 percent of the state's annual births, but the rate is still far too high for a condition that is 100 percent preventable, Henderson said.
"It is a lifetime problem that can't be cured," she said. "Many people with fetal alcohol spectrum disorders can learn coping skills and lead happy, productive lives. Others may never be able to live independently."
'I looked normal'
Children born with FAS have a slight advantage over those born with alcohol-related disorders that fall elsewhere on the spectrum.
Because kids with FAS are visibly disabled, they tend to be routed through special-education classes and supported by other resources as children and as adults.
That was the case for Mark McManus' brother, who has FAS but was diagnosed as slightly mentally retarded when the boys were young. McManus, 49, was also exposed to alcohol in the womb, but nobody realized it.
"I looked normal," he said.
McManus, a Billings chaplain, was in his early 40s when he was diagnosed with fetal alcohol spectrum disorder, or FASD. The diagnosis explained a lifetime of struggling to understand the world around him and secretly feeling inadequate.
"Most adults who have FASD are in a mental institution, are alcoholics or are in prisons not getting help," McManus said. "They're undiagnosed or misdiagnosed."
Despite looking physically normal, a child with alcohol-related brain damage will act differently than his or her peers beginning in infancy, said Dr. John Johnson, director of medical genetics at Shodair Children's Hospital in Helena.
FASD babies are sensitive to excessive stimuli, don't sleep or eat well and, as they grow into toddlers, dissolve inexplicably into hysterical meltdowns. Still, their disability often goes unrecognized until they reach school age. Even then, it can be overlooked for years.
"They've got some basic knowledge, but they can't apply it," Johnson said. "They have no abstract abilities."
A child who was exposed prenatally to alcohol might be able to memorize the names of colors but won't know which color is which. She probably won't be able to count money or tell time, and she almost certainly will not be able to grasp the idea of consequences.
Deb Watson remembers trying to teach her son, James, what "hot" meant when he was about 2 years old.
No matter how many times she explained that touching a teapot hurt his hand because the teapot was hot, he would reach for it again, she said. His damaged brain couldn't make the cause-and-effect connection.
It is not uncommon for children with alcohol-related brain damage to get into trouble with the law, as James Watson later did.
"They can be easily led by the group you don't want your kids hanging out with," Johnson said. "They're going to start hanging out with the wrong crowd because they fit in there."
"They're always left behind and in trouble, and half the time they don't understand why they're in trouble because they don't understand the law," he said. "They have a hard time understanding right from wrong. They just don't get it."
Advocates disagree about how many people in the criminal justice system were exposed to alcohol in the womb, but the number is undoubtedly high.
FASD was apparently at the root of an arson fire that destroyed Huntley Project's high school last year. Gregory Three Fingers, sentenced recently for his role in the fire, has been diagnosed with FASD.
'Beautiful and brain-damaged'
People with FAS or FASD live in a different world, said Lissie Clark, a 33-year-old Great Falls woman who was one of the first Montanans to be diagnosed with fetal alcohol syndrome.
"I am very susceptible," said Clark, who owns a gourmet dog biscuit business. "I do have that constant struggle of who's right and who's not? Who do I follow?"
"If someone says, 'Let's get a knife and take this person out,' you don't think of the consequences," she said.
"When she's with me, she acts like me," said Lissie's adoptive mother, Johnelle Howanach. "When she's with somebody else, she does what they do. … People with this challenge can be talked into anything."
Their mental limitations and trusting nature mean people whose brains were damaged by prenatal exposure to alcohol need structure, routine, repetition and constant guidance.
For Clark, that guidance has come from Howanach for more than 20 years. Neither woman knows what will happen when Howanach is no longer able to care for Clark.
"My mom is my external brain," Clark said.
Deb Ford has taken on the same role for her daughter, who hopes to be released from the Montana Women's Prison sometime in the next year. Michelle Ford plans to rely on her mother to help her navigate the outside world.
"I can't guarantee I'll never end up around bad people again," Michelle Ford said. "But now that I know about my brain damage, I'm a lot less likely to be conned by somebody who says I'm beautiful and smart."
"Now I know my damage doesn't make me dumb or ugly. I can be beautiful and brain-damaged, too."
source: billingsgazette
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