NCCPR news and commentary round-up, week ending July 29, 2025

● Can a total stranger really show up in your hospital room days after you’ve given birth and hand you a contract in a foreign language letting them take your child? Well, not if you’re affluent. But if you're poor …  And that’s not even the worst of the abuses uncovered in this story by Sandy West in the Texas Observer. I discuss some of the other horrors in this NCCPR Blog post. 

● The Texas Observer story focuses on alleged abuses by private agencies, but it also illustrates what happens when public agencies that are supposed to regulate them are willfully blind. For another example of willful blindness, check out the story from The Beacon in Kansas that is the subject of this NCCPR Blog post. 

● Some of the best research in child welfare is coming from scholars who are able to embed with the key actors and those who are acted upon – Kelley Fong’s book, Investigating Families is  one of the finest examples.  

Now there’s another. The Imprint interviews Katie Gibson, a post-doctoral fellow who embedded with the people who decide if foster youth will be given psychiatric meds, and those who review the decisions. From the story: 

In her dissertation research, she came away impressed by the professionals she observed, and grateful for their transparency. But she also began to question the medication “audit” oversight model. Gibson argues that while audit programs like the one she observed can contribute to improving some prescribing practices, they also deepen the foster care system’s reliance on stigmatizing mental health diagnoses that center children as the problem — instead of the troubled institutions that house them. 

● One mother ate a poppy seed bagel, another was given morphine for pain relief by the hospital where she gave birth. But in both cases, based on a single positive drug tests, the hospitals turned them in to the family police. Watch the joint investigation by The Marshall Project and CBS News Sunday Morning: 

● It’s not just the wrong bagel that can get you reported to the family police.  From Abortion, Every Day: 

And B’s arrest? It happened after she went to the hospital for medical care—and someone there called child protective services. 

That’s right, apparently in South Carolina, a miscarriage is cause for a child abuse investigation. As If/When/How attorney Farah Diaz-Tello told AED, “Once law enforcement decides they want to punish somebody, they're going to try to find a way to do it.” 

● It’s not all bad news. Law 360 reports on a big victory in New York City for survivors of domestic violence and their children. 

● Sadly, the reporting staff at the Minnesota Star-Tribune often has been clueless, or worse, about these issues for a little over a decade.  But at least one of the interns got it right, in this story about the appalling treatment of Native American families by county family police agencies. 

● There’s a new study out about foster parents feeling, as the headline puts it, “Undervalued, misled, & isolated.”  That’s probably true. But wouldn’t it be great if some of them stopped and thought: They really need me, If this is how they treat me, how are they treating the birth parents? And is all that bad stuff they told me about the birth parents really true? 

In this week’s edition of The Horror Stories Go in All Directions: 

● From Law and Crime, a story with the headline: “'Careful not to leave a mark': Florida family of 4 abused 'illiterate' foster and adopted children who don't even know their own birthdays, police say” 

A Florida family of four is behind bars after subjecting their adopted and foster children to myriad forms of abuse, law enforcement in the Sunshine State allege.

● From Capitol News Illinois:

A caseworker assigned to monitor Illinois foster child Mackenzi Felmlee — who later died in May 2024 — had a troubling past, including an arrest for a violent crime and orders of protection filed against her by eight women for alleged threats, harassment and abuse, court documents show.