EP 8: The Problem with Punishing Pregnancy
Pregnancy is a place of both power and vulnerability. For much of human experience, power and decisionmaking when it came to pregnancy was in the hands of women. It was an issue of health and healing. But no more. These days, we're substituting legal intrusions for health care. Between the racist War on Drugs and the Dobbs decision, there are a lot of things pregnant people can be punished for.
In this episode, we speak with Karen Thompson of Pregnancy Justice and jasmine Sankofa of Movement for Family Power about their work. You might remember jasmine from episode 4, the Problem with Punishing Parents. And let's hear from a doctor! We hear a clinical perspective from Dr. Mishka Terplan, an OB-GYN. And Nadia Ben-Youssef, a member of the Justice Beyond Punishment Collaborative, shares part of her pregnancy story.
Useful Links
Our guests today include Karen Thompson, the Director of Litigation at Pregnancy Justice, and jasmine Sankofa, the Executive Director of Movement for Family Power (MFP). Learn more about the Informed Consent Campaign, which MFP participates in. Karen Thompson shares the definition of reproductive justice as defined by SisterSong, and their website also has a lot of useful information on what support for pregnancy looks like.
Learn more about post- (and pre-) Dobbs criminalization in this report from Pregnancy Justice - and check out their other reports. Listen to this panel featuring Dr. Mishka Terplan on Criminalizing Birthing Outcomes in a Post-Dobbs World from the American Bar Association.
You can learn more about “eat, sleep, console” from this study. And here’s an article about the early 20th century legal case Buck v. Bell to show the long history of punishing pregnant people we’re talking about.
Transcript:
Kathleen Pequeño (Host): This is the Problem with Punishment Podcast. Spoiler alert: The problem with punishment is it doesn't work. But the bigger problem is that we turn to punishment in every aspect of our lives, from our families to our neighborhoods, our boroughs, our city. We keep expecting punishment to make things better, when, for the most part, it makes whatever problem we're addressing worse. Every time punishment fails, it hurts. Some people have taken the pain of that failure and turned it into purpose. I'm your host, Kathleen Pequeño, and I'll be talking with a range of New Yorkers who've experienced firsthand the failure of punishment and who found or created something better to do instead. From gun violence to child abuse to drug addiction, New York can lead the way and actually solving some of our most pressing problems. But first, we have to talk about the problem with punishment.
Welcome to our episode The Problem with Punishing Pregnancy. This episode has a different origin story than all the other episodes in Season One, in that it was not on the original list of episodes. So the original list of what we were going to talk about in Season One began as a conversation with the Justice Beyond Punishment Collaborative. If you haven't been to the collaborative website yet, I would really recommend it. It's beyondpunishment.org.
The collaborative met and worked for years on how do we tell stories, and shine a light on all the ways in which we get farther away from justice—farther away from safety—because of our preoccupation or obsession with punishment (like our cultural obsession, right? Not us personally. Whether it's in our city, government, in our social justice movements, in our families, you know, the places where we turn first, second and third is to punishment. The collaborative has done a number of different creative projects. There is a beautiful play, there's a beautiful zine, there's another great publication. There's just a number of things. Again, go to the website beyondpunishment.org to see those.
When the collaborative was meeting to talk about this podcast years ago, we said, well, what would we talk about? You know, give us some episode ideas, boom, boom, boom. Suddenly, the flip charts were full. We gelled that list down to about 20 topics, and pregnancy was not on there. The closest we came was the family policing system, which had come up in a couple of different ways in that initial brainstorm conversation, and people agreed. We wanted to talk about the family policing system. When we were doing the work on that episode, I found myself in conversation with jasmine Sankofa from Movement for Family Power. And as we were talking, she said, “well, and you're going to include talking about removal and how often that happens, you know, at birth, aren't you?” And I said, “well, I don't know. Am I?” And after 30 seconds of conversation with jasmine, I was like, oh my gosh, we have to find a way to fit this into Season One. And we started talking with other collaborative members and other guests, and it was Ashley C Sawyer who was a guest on a different episode and is at Pregnancy Justice, who connected us with the legal director. And so that's, you know, started out the roots of this episode.
I want to say a word about language in this episode as well, because Pregnancy Justice used to be called National Advocates for Pregnant Women and changed their name. I think it was a great move. A—that was a horrible acronym when it was NAPW. But also, this is a piece of language I think is really important to come back to, which is that the importance of talking about “pregnant people” and not just “pregnant women.” A lot of the problems and challenges of how we've wound up with punishment entwined with pregnancy have to do with sexism. They are rooted in sexism. But not only women become pregnant. So I think it's useful to say “pregnant people,” but the other thing is, there is a place where because of the sexism, when we say “women,” there is a way that we start already minimizing people's agency and kind of turning women into ‘the vessel’ instead of people. Someone does not become less of a person when they become pregnant. And I think their conversation about fetal personhood, which we'll talk a little bit out of this, and the person carrying the pregnancy has not surrendered any of their personhood. And I do think we need to talk about that and be realistic about that.
So many of these systems where we talk about punishment in this series, they rely on dehumanization. They rely on forgetting that everyone in this scenario is still a person. And so for me, I try and work people-first language into all these episodes. And that is why I actually do prefer talking about “pregnant people” versus “pregnant women.”
But to start us off, let's just hear a little bit from Karen Thompson at Pregnancy Justice, and also to kind of remind us baseline of what we're talking about when we're talking about pregnancy.
Karen Thompson: My name is Karen Thompson. I'm the legal director at Pregnancy Justice. Let me start with pregnancy criminalization itself, because I think that a lot of people don't really know who we are or what it is, and think that pregnancy criminalization is just about abortion. Because when we talk about reproductive justice, that's where people's heads go.
But first, reproductive justice as a term is one that was created by an organization called Sister Song, which was a group of Black women who, in the 90s, when there was an international conference about reproductive rights, really felt like people of color, working folks were being left out of the conversation about what that meant. So they literally sat down at a table and wrote on a napkin their idea of what reproductive justice was and what that is, is the right to have a child, the right to not have a child, and the right to raise any child that you do have in safety and health. And so that is kind of the largest frame for the work we do. But what pregnancy criminalization is about and what pregnancy justice is fighting is the idea that somebody, because of their pregnancy or their pregnancy outcome, that is birth, abortions, miscarriage, stillbirth, should in any way be punished just because of the fact that they are pregnant. Pregnancy loss is too often met with a cast response. The fact that somebody is using while they're pregnant is met with a carceral response. And so our work is to advocate for those people, both through direct litigation and strategic litigation, through our communications wing, as well as through policy. The problem is that the law is being substituted in for health care, and the law is becoming the answer for things that we're not being asked.
Kathleen Pequeño (Host): And here's another way that this episode is not like the other episodes. I go and talk to the gynecologist. For this episode, we ask people, well, what works better instead when it comes to pregnancy? Right. That's always the point, too. It's not enough to say that there's problems with punishment. We have to say what works better. And people said like, “Well, you know, have you talked to a doctor? Have you talked to Dr. Mishka Terplan?” And I was like, “No, I never willingly go to the gynecologist to talk.” Is that - can it happen in this episode? And I did go willingly to speak to the gynecologist over the internet, and I'm really glad that I did. So here's the good doctor.
Dr. Mishka Terplan: I have never met and or taken care of a pregnant person who was not concerned for their health or, you know, that of their baby to be. I've never met a pregnant person who thought that smoking cigarettes in pregnancy is a healthy behavior. Everyone knows to some extent there's misinformation, but generally speaking, people know that there are risks associated with all sorts of different kinds of things, and people engage in behavioural change in pregnancy to really maximise their health and the health of their baby to be.
Kathleen Pequeño (Host): Right, when people find out they're pregnant, they often are willing to engage in some changes. So how do we get them access to the specific changes and or care that they need? Because there's assessing so that you can help people out. But then for some people, that turns into surveillance.
Dr. Mishka Terplan: We still do a poor job of adequately screening people, even more importantly, making care environment welcoming and safe for people to disclose behaviours that are criminalized and surveilled. It's important to recognize that birth isn't safe in the United States. And in particular, it's not safe for people who use drugs. It's not safe for them. It's not safe for their families. It's not safe for their communities. And I think it's important to think about discrimination as a patient safety issue, and to think about how discrimination in healthcare settings contributes to poor outcomes in the people we serve.
Kathleen Pequeño (Host): You know, it's so different to meet a doctor who's humble about that and kind of acknowledges that, you know. Because I have, I think, like many people have been in any number of settings where I was like, "wait, am I—Is everyone treated like this when they're in this health care setting?" And that can range from maybe a little bit of quiet disrespect or quiet, you know, being dismissed to very life-altering levels of discrimination. And we know that we see that in particular when it comes to women of color and pregnancy.
Dr. Mishka Terplan: The primary reason for removing newborns, or actually infants, anyone under the age of one, is parental substance use. And almost all of those reports originate from health professionals. And there's been no change in the past two decades of reports to child welfare from police, anonymous sources, child care parents, but there's been a 400-plus percent increase from health professionals. An increase that is inequitable, more Black infants, more indigenous infants are reported than other infants, and that rate of difference is increasing.
Kathleen Pequeño (Host): So when we talk about this large, large increase in removal, it's not a coincidence. It's not an accident. It has to do with policy choices tied back to the racist War on Drugs. And I do want to mention we have a whole episode about the Problem with Punishing Addiction. I encourage you to listen to that if you haven't, but to talk about how our inability to deal with substance use and addiction is affecting families in the arena of pregnancy, I'm going to start to turn to jasmine Sankofa from the Movement for Family Power.
jasmine Sankofa: My name is jasmine Sankofa, and I am the executive director of Movement for Family Power. We are a national hub and incubator organizing to abolish the so-called child welfare system, or what we call the family policing system.
When we say the family policing system, we are referring to the so-called child welfare system, which includes the foster system. Directly impacted people and scholars have renamed the system in recognition of its racist history and the harm and trauma caused by forced family separation. One of the most common ways that pregnancy criminalization interacts with family policing is through a practice called Test and Report. So Test and Report is when healthcare providers drug test or screen patients. And then they report those results to family policing agencies. And often this happens without the patient's consent. It's a very widespread practice where folks are tested across the board. But Black, Indigenous, Latine, and low-income families are disproportionately targeted by non-consensual drug testing despite similar rates of substance use across races, right? And so folks are also more likely to be reported to the family policing system or CPS for prenatal drug use. And once the family policing system barges into a pregnant or birthing person's life, they are vulnerable to being separated from their newborns, sometimes immediately after birth and during ongoing surveillance through investigations and other forms of punishment by the family police. We also see the punishment of pregnancy through this relationship between abortion bans and family policing, where the same governments that ban the right to abortion care are also deliberately choosing to separate and not support families.
Kathleen Pequeño (Host): You know, one of the amazing things about pregnancy is that it is a combination of both such intense personal power and such vulnerability, and I think that's part of why we're so bad at figuring out how to deal with it culturally at this point. We're very confused by the sort of power that it contains, when that power also so clearly contains the potential for things to go wrong. So much of it that's outside of our control. And then you layer that in with sexism, with the way where there's kind of a built-in distrust of a system that was largely controlled by women for so long. And you bring us to this time where we're basically kind of just freaking out and turning to regulation, whether it makes sense or not. And let’s go back to Karen at Pregnancy Justice for a moment.
Karen Thompson: We live in a world right now where that fragility, that tenuous moment of life, is just completely being railroaded over by the idea of someone being a criminal if they didn't do it right, if they got an infection, if they got sick, if they contemplated abortion, if they didn't necessarily want to be pregnant, right? Like all of the feelings that you might have about a pregnancy are now being folded into the idea that you are somehow responsible for any negative outcome. And so I think that people need to understand that isn't a red-state thing, that isn't a working class thing, that is a nationwide thing that we are now facing. That who gets to decide whether your pregnancy is being done well is not you, and it's not even necessarily your doctor. If we're getting to a place where someone's body is always already a crime scene, there is never going to not be a moment where you are not subject to state control. Pregnancy criminalization is a question about democracies. It's a question about misogyny and sexism being operationalized in the government. It's a lot of like ugliness that is completely distilled to this one particular experience of being alive.
Kathleen Pequeño (Host): One of the recurring themes in the podcast is systems of punishment that rely on the fact that people are worried about being punished if they don't punish other people. So we see that in the mandatory reporting schemes, right that mandatory reporters are concerned that if they don't report concerns about abuse or neglect or drug use that they will in fact, be punished.
jasmine Sankofa: The stigma that we see around parents using drugs has roots in the racist drug war. As the civil rights movement progressed and governments began creating and expanding carceral systems like the family policing and criminal legal systems, we're seeing that at the same time, the government was enacting the Child Abuse Prevention and Treatment Act, which is the federal legislation that created the modern family policing system. There's these manufacturing of demonizing myths about Black mothers. Myths that have since been disproven, but the stigma they created still exists at the core of our policies.
Kathleen Pequeño (Host): These stigmas had a societal basis, not necessarily a medical basis, but even with decades of indication that it's not true, we have still held on to these kinds of racist beliefs about who is going to be the ideal pregnant person.
Karen Thompson: The idea that people have is anyone who is pregnant who's using is the worst, right? And there's some like very general social stigma about mothering and mothers, which makes this very 50s Betty Crocker, whatever the idea is that it's trad wife stuff, right? It's like there's one idea of what a good mother is, and anyone who does not meet that in their behavior, in their class status, in their, their racial group, their religious practice, if they are not in particular, taking particular boxes, they're a bad mom.
Dr. Mishka Terplan: We classify substances legally, which reflect some social classification. There's prescribed substances, illicit substances and legal substances. And we assume that that classification means something biologically or in terms of public health. So we assume that things that are illegal are more harmful, and we translate that then to pregnancy. The illegal exposures must be worse than the legal ones. Then the prescribed medication ones must be safe. That is false. So, from the perspective of teratogens, those are substances that cause birth defects, of the 100 some thousand known chemicals in the universe, only a handful are truly teratogenic. Most of those are actually prescribed medications.
Kathleen Pequeño (Host): That is a big word, teratogen. It might be the only word any of the episodes that I was like, wait, I have to look up how to spell that. It's a big word, and it's a big idea about what are the things that actually bring risk to a pregnancy. And then the doctor blew my mind again by even putting teratogens in their place.
Dr. Mishka Terplan: I think in this space that we grossly overstate the risks of in utero chemical exposure and greatly minimize the role of the caregiving environment. And the way I summarize the transformation I would like to see is I would really like if we could flip the script and stop talking about drugs and drug exposure in pregnancy and focus instead on how do we support, how do we best support early childhood development?
Kathleen Pequeño (Host): And to do that, we would actually need to stop routinely and overusing drug testing of pregnant people.
Dr. Mishka Terplan: What we see today in not all, but many birthing hospitals in the United States is like an overuse and misuse of drug testing, with reflex reporting for any positive result to child welfare, and alcohol is not something that is easily and much less routinely tested for. I'm not advocating we routinely test for alcohol, but it's not part of the standard drug panel.
Kathleen Pequeño (Host): This is where I got very confused in the conversation about, okay, so we test a lot for some drugs, but we don't test at all for alcohol. I found it so confusing. I was like, how does this make sense?
Dr. Mishka Terplan: It doesn't make sense. Like from a medical perspective, from a child development perspective, from a health perspective, from a dyadic perspective, from a community health perspective, the overuse of drug testing doesn't make sense. The reflex report to child welfare authorities does not make sense. And the amount of family separations, not only does it not make sense, but it is harmful, period.
What we've seen in the last couple of decades is an increase in overuse and misuse of drug testing, and there's a lot of different reasons for that. One of them is that, change in legislation, both federally and then at the state, that expanded what mandatory reporting includes to include substance exposure. But it's really a misunderstanding of those statutes. Most states don't have laws that say you must drug test, much less you must report a drug test alone. So we overuse drug testing. We misinterpret the results, and we over report the results to child welfare by over report to child welfare. I mean a report that's in excess of what the actual legal mandate is. And so if we restrict drug testing to how we should use any test, which is for clinical purposes, then we would actually, in hospitals that have done this like do a lot less testing. What we're doing today is it's a parenting test. It's a moral test. It's a us acting as agent of the state test, not us acting as health professionals in the care of a person and their family test.
Kathleen Pequeño (Host): I mean, I had to ask the doctor as a health provider, "Do you think this leads to mistrust?"
Dr. Mishka Terplan: Overuse of drug testing, reflex reporting to child welfare? Even the whole presence of child welfare within health care has made care more carceral. So we act as police, not as physicians, and that generates legitimate mistrust in patients.
Kathleen Pequeño (Host): We all agree that we want healthy babies. And jasmine Sankofa, in the episode about the problem with punishing parents, I think really boiled it down well to it's not a zero-sum game. It's not that it's either the parents do well or the babies. So I want to come back to her here to talk about what is one of the best things we can do for babies that have had drug exposure?
jasmine Sankofa: The best medicine for babies exposed to substances is their birthing parent, and the family policing system does not make children safer, nor does it support the health and well-being of their parents. And so I think there's still this concept in what's so important about harm reduction. Right. And meeting folks where they are is to ensure that folks have tools to keep themselves safe, that they have a network of community to help keep themselves safe.
Kathleen Pequeño (Host): One of the most common recurring themes in all of these episodes is how often community and connection make a big difference. So that can be true on the neighborhood or the city level. And it can also be true on the level of producing a great outcome for a tiny baby.
Dr. Mishka Terplan: The CDC even summarizes or abbreviates early intervention to just mean growing up in a stable household where there's love, devoid of violence.
jasmine Sankofa: Family separation goes directly against what we know babies with neonatal abstinence syndrome actually need to thrive, their mamas. Eat Sleep Console is a care approach, a model developed by doctors at the Yale New Haven Children's Hospital, and it emphasizes well-being by keeping the baby close to their mama through skin-to-skin contact and breast or chest feeding. Previous approaches have always taken a medicalized approach, so an intervention with either medicine or removal, right? And so with the sleep console approach, it emphasizes the importance of that skin-to-skin contact, that instead of needing to diagnose and utilize medication, that mamas can instead be that medication for their babies and not needing to lean on the family policing system as this punishing force that is separating families and is actually doing the exact opposite of what babies need in that moment.
Kathleen Pequeño (Host): We're going to talk more about abortion bans, of course, because that is one of the topics when it comes to punishment and pregnancy. But in all the episodes we try and talk about, you know, what should people be doing instead of the current situation? And for that, in New York State, it's helpful to talk about the Informed Consent Coalition.
jasmine Sankofa: The Informed Consent Coalition in New York is really supporting not only on the legislative front and changing policies that might exist in hospitals, but doing that organizing, doing that narrative shift work that is so important to get folks out of this mindset. A lot of what happens with this system is that it's been able to operate under this guise of benevolence. ‘It's a force for good.’ and ‘We have to have this system in place. This is how we keep children safe.’ And there's a lot of narrative shift work that's happening on the ground in New York that challenges this carceral mindset that in this cloud that we're all indoctrinated into, in thinking that we need more punishment, and if that doesn't work, then we must double down and have more punishment. Instead, we're talking about what is really evidence-based practice, right? Like, what is actually true and what is fear-mongering? You know what is real and what is sensationalized through the media and other outlets.
Let us really think about how we keep children and families safe. And we don't do that by punishing them. We don't do that by taking people's bodily fluids and testing them without their consent. We don't do that by forcing and stripping children away from their families in any connection to their family of origin. We do that by investing in communities. We do that by ensuring that people can trust their healthcare providers, that people can reach out and get support on their own terms, without the threat of having their babies ripped from their arms. We do that by ensuring that folks have access to housing and access to mental health services, and access to any other kind of support that they may need, without the threat of punishment.
Kathleen Pequeño (Host): You know, these systems of punishment block people from getting care. And so, for many of the well-intentioned people who are in these systems, they are actually there to help and to provide care. So, for a provider like Doctor Terplan, it comes back to getting people in so that they can do some of the things that work.
Dr. Mishka Terplan: Infants and even children young children with alcohol exposure benefit greatly from early intervention services. So we do a bad job identifying and linking them to that. And so in react in response to that, they added language about FASD, Fetal Alcohol Spectrum Disorder and Fetal Alcohol Spectrum into the language of capita. Thinking that that language would help identify kids who would benefit from early intervention better. That's not what happened. Our ability to properly identify and refer those children to early intervention services is as poor as it was before that language was implemented. And in practice, what is our societal response to drugs? It's separation. It's destabilizing. Our policy system response is one that actually contributes to negative outcomes and development. The separation is a form of state violence. So we are actually exercising violence and through separation, which is known to be detrimental to early childhood development.
Kathleen Pequeño (Host): Doing this episode in 2025 means we have to acknowledge that now we live in the post-Dobbs landscape, and that there are now an increasing number of penalties and punishments for people who don't bring their pregnancy to completion with the baby. So, for this, we wanted to start off with like the actual real effects of threatening punishment in these scenarios. And we're joined for this section by Nadia Ben-Youssef, who is actually one of the participants in the Justice Beyond Punishment Collaborative. She works at the Center for Constitutional Rights, and she'll be featured in a different episode. This is our crossover episode on so many levels, but in here, she was willing to sit and talk with me about how this issue of punishments for pregnancy intersected with her life. So we're going to start with that before we go back out into the big picture.
Nadia Ben-Youssef: The problem with pregnancy is that this society does not support pregnant people, nor does it support families, and nor does it support, you know, people living balanced lives in such a way that they could imagine taking time off of work to be pregnant, to have a baby, to raise that baby. And that's the biggest problem with pregnancy, is that it requires a huge amount of resources and personal resources to be able to do it in a healthy way.
I'm going to take you to the first time that I was pregnant, which is in the spring of 2022. So it's the leaked decision of the Dobbs decision. So the Supreme Court decision that overturned Roe v Wade, that leaked this decision, was covered in the media in early May. My partner and I went to our 12-week check-in in and there was something really wrong with the fetus. And so, you know, the doctor comes in with this sort of, we are watching this. You have no idea what's going on. Obviously, the sort of tech understands what it is that they're seeing, but can't say anything. And we're just like watching this screen. It's the first time I've been pregnant. We were so overwhelmed by what was in front of us. This like creature that looked actually more, you know, at 12 weeks, you kind of have like a sense of beyond the gummy bear look. And the doctor comes in and says, I have bad news. And, you know, your heart sinks, and said, “You know, this really doesn't look viable. So there's something really wrong.” And we were shocked. And we go in to the genetic counselor who says to us, because of the timing, that you can still, at least now get an abortion in New York. And it's because that Dobbs decision had come out ten days earlier, and it was sort of throwing into stark like question whether or not people would have access to abortion and to making these decisions. And they were telling us there, listen, this is not a viable pregnancy. The baby looks really sick, and we would recommend termination. But in the end, you know, we terminated the pregnancy in June, early June of 2022. And the Dobbs decision came down formally just a couple of weeks later.
We were so aware of the cruelty of criminalizing pregnancy and criminalizing abortion in that context of just sort of taking away our choice in a time where we really didn't want to make that choice. This is a pregnancy that was desired and wanted, and we were excited about it, and we were dreaming about it, and we had to make a decision ultimately to determine to end the pregnancy and to get an abortion. And all the while, there's this background noise in the public discourse of not allowing pregnant people to make that choice.
Kathleen Pequeño (Host): And here's where I encourage you to take a breath, because we go from these really personal stories, really deeply personal stories to suddenly conversations about the law, because that's the nature of how this works now. And so we're going to turn back to Karen Thompson to talk to us about this legal landscape and what it is starting to mean for people who are pregnant.
Karen Thompson: Fetal Personhood is a really wonky term, but it basically means that a fertilized egg is considered to be a human being, just like you and I who are talking here today, sharing all of those rights. And if you think that if you believe that if you live in a state where that is the law, then there is no parent. There is no person. There is only the egg. Eggs are people. The fetus is a person and their right is supreme. And so when you think like that, then there is not a moment when someone's body is not going to be a crime scene or a potential crime scene. And so it's about surveillance. It's about social control. And it's not about health care or healing. What pregnancy criminalization is about and what pregnancy justice is fighting is the idea that somebody, because of their pregnancy or their pregnancy outcome, that is birth, abortions, miscarriage, stillbirth, should in any way be punished just because of the fact that they are pregnant. And while that might seem like okay, yes, the fact is we live in a country where everything has a carceral response. So the fact of a pregnancy loss is too often met with a carceral response. The fact that somebody is using while they're pregnant is met with a carceral response.
jasmine Sankofa: If we want to keep babies safe, we have to take care of their parents. I think there's this false dichotomy that exists that it's children versus parents, parents versus children, and that is not the case. In order to move forward, in order to truly keep families safe, in order to have thriving communities, we must invest in them. And we can't punish our way into family safety. We can't punish our way into family well-being. The only way that we do that is by loving up on people, supporting them, and giving them everything that they need in order to thrive.
Kathleen Pequeño (Host): This podcast was produced in Brooklyn, New York, the unceded ancestral lands of the Lenape and Canarsie people. We thank all the ancestors for caring for this land over the generations, and we're committed to the work of creating a shared future that includes the native communities that are still here, and all the people who call this land home.
Thanks so much to jasmine Sankofa and Sara Duggan of Movement for Family Power for explaining a lot of this to us until we got it right. You can learn more about their work at movementforfamilypower.org. Thanks also to Karen Thompson and Zenovia Earl of Pregnancy Justice. You can learn more about their work at pregnancyjusticeus.org. Thank you also to Dr. Mishka Terplan, who blends the art of healing with the science of medicine and was great at explaining to me what all the acronyms really mean. And thank you to Nadia Ben-Youssef. She has supported this podcast in so many ways as a member of the Justice Beyond Punishment Collaborative, and she was so gracious about sharing her personal experience with our listeners for this episode.
Our podcast team is Doctor Candace King, Reverend Doctor Sharon White-Harrigan, and Tess Weiner. Thank you to our production partner, JuleCave Studios, led by our consistent yet creative producer, Julius Shepard-Morgan. We're winding down on the ten episodes we planned for season one. Will there be a season two? I don't know. Send us your comments and questions while we're still in production. If you find this podcast useful, rate us and tell your friends and family about it. I'm your host, Kathleen Pequeño. This podcast is a project of the Justice Beyond Punishment Collaborative at the Center for Justice at Columbia University, with support from Trinity Wall Street. You can learn more about the collaborative and our other creative projects at beyondpunishment.org. Thanks so much for listening.
