Addicted Pregnancy and Time

This chapter describes the economic structure and living conditions of the daily-rent hotels in contrast to publicly funded housing designed to respond to chronic homelessness in adults without children. The moral economies of debt that surrounded the drug-sex economy and the actual financial debts owed on daily-rent hotels rooms created social and physical relations that were unstable. Everyone was seeking something to consume (drugs, food, money for the rent), and constant insecurity bred specific forms of vulnerability. For the women in the daily-rent hotels these forms of vulnerability included housing instability, mental and physical health complications, predatory violence, and food insecurity—all of which impacted both drug use and pregnancies. Experiences of consumption and insecurity defined life in the daily-rent hotels, structured risk, and replicated larger debates about the dual, and often competing, demands of pregnancy and addiction.