By Cara Murez
HealthDay Reporter
WEDNESDAY, April 5, 2023 (HealthDay News) — New mothers who gave birth early in the pandemic filled far more opioid prescriptions than American women did previously, raising concerns about the potential for narcotic misuse.
About 38% of more than 460,000 women who gave birth from July 2018 through December 2020 were prescribed opioids for postpartum pain management, according to the University of Georgia study.
But there was a nearly 3 percentage point increase in the number of opioid prescriptions filled after March 2020 — when a national emergency was declared in the United States — than before the health…
