Pregnancy: will E damage my baby?

My Girlfriend has just discovered that she is 3 weeks pregnant. Three days before we found this out we had been clubbing on ecstasy.

What harm may we have done the baby? We are very concerned and look forward to any help you can give.

Advice from a doctor at a London teaching hospital:

There is no reason to believe that ecstasy will cause deformed babies. However, although not based on pharmacology, I suspect that ecstasy use may increase the chance of miscarriage. My wife miscarried post e and I am convinced that the two events were linked.

There are receptors on placental blood vessels that may well get tickled up by e and messing with placental circulation early in pregnancy (at any time, actually) is likely to be bad news.

I however see no reason why e (as opposed to, say, anti TB drugs which will induce the liver to chew up oral contraceptives and make them ineffective) should have that effect on a drug interactions score.

It should however be remembered that prolactin inhibitory factor is dopamine - and that therefore there is the potential for messing with your hypothalamico-pituitary axis.