How the Informed Consent Coalition is Fighting the Family Policing System in Hospitals and Beyond

[upbeat music] Today's conversation is about informed consent, pregnancy, drug testing, hospitals, and the family policing system, and I wanna get right into it, 'cause this is one of those issues where the more you learn, it's, you're just like, "Man, I did not know this was going on like this." And so you're gonna hear about a form of surveillance and punishment that's been happening to parents and newborns in medical settings, but you're also gonna hear about a coalition that's been organizing against it.

We wanna take you into areas of struggle that don't get talked about enough, but we don't wanna just leave you with another tragic story about how bad everything is.

We wanna show you where people are fighting, where people are organizing and making big moves, scoring victories, and building enough power that institutions have to respond.

You know what I mean? [air horn blaring] [crowd cheering] We, we, we, they, we don't want them to ignore us.

They can't ignore us.

All right, so a while back, we had April Lee on the show to talk about the child welfare system, or, as we call it, the family policing system, and one of the things we talked about in that episode is how so many of the things that are supposedly done in the name of protecting children actually end up harming children and harming parents and destabilizing families, and that's the contradiction at the center of this whole system, right? They say they're keeping people safe, but then the intervention is separation, surveillance, threats, you know, involving the courts in our lives, all that stuff, right? So if we're serious about safety, we really have to ask, safe for who? And safe from what? And so today's conversation is gonna move in that same direction.

So in the interview, they're gonna break down this practice called test and report, and the work of the Informed Consent Coalition is fighting against that, and they're gonna talk about why this struggle isn't just about one hospital policy, but it's really about reproductive justice broadly and racial justice and, you know, all these other fights.

And they get into how people have organized, how the movement has grown, and what you can actually do to plug in.

I learned a ton from listening to these two powerful advocates, and I can't wait for y'all to hear it, so here it is.

[upbeat music] All right, all right, Unruly Subjects.