On November 29, 1975, Republican President Gerald Ford signed the Education for All Handicapped Children Act into law, which later became the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act (IDEA). IDEA requires that disabled students have access to public education, discourages segregating disabled kids from their peers, and that qualifying students have access to individualized education plans, more commonly known as IEPs. IDEA does not apply to education in private schools. “Before our disabled elders secured our rights under the law, disabled kids were locked out of systems and out of their potential,” Rep. Lateefah Simon (D-Ca.), who is blind, told me in a statement. Many disability advocates are concerned about the state of education for disabled kids. Continued attempts to dismantle the Department of Education by President Donald Trump and Education Secretary Linda McMahon, as well as attempts to fire their staff, put the oversight that disabled kids’ needs are met at risk. Such oversight includes putting districts on notice for funding if they overpenalize Black disabled students, for instance. Then, there is the longstanding issue that IDEA has never been fully funded, meaning that the federal government is not funding IEPs to 40 percent. “Congress must protect and fully fund the IDEA to ensure future generations of disabled children have the supports and services they need to thrive in school,” Simon continued. “Our civil rights are not up for negotiations.” This is not to say that all students’ needs are adequately met under the IDEA. Jordyn Zimmerman, a nonspeaking autistic person, told me that she did not have access to effective communication via iPad until she was 18. “When I finally gained access to effective communication,  required under IDEA  and also the ADA,  there was a realization that I could learn, and I was slowly included in the school community, until I graduated at the age of 21,” Zimmerman said, who is the board chair of CommunicationFIRST. “So that really highlights,  both the flaws, but also the power in when the spirit is fulfilled with intentionality.” Zimmerman is also very concerned about attacks on the Department of Education. “Without a strong Department of Education, states can redirect money away from students with disabilities, so that high-quality education will only exist for some,” Zimmerman said. “Students also won’t get the funding for the therapies, assistive technology, and specially-designed instruction that students need, and families depend on.” > “I will fight that with everything that I have, because IEPs are protection > for these kids.” Samantha Phillis, an advocate with Little Lobbyists, told me that her two daughters, who are in public school, are on IEPs, one of whom is autistic and one has spinal muscular atrophy. Phillis is currently experiencing her school trying to walk back her IEP, which she suspects is common for kids with disabilities who appear to have lower support needs. “I will fight that with everything that I have, because IEPs are protection for these kids,” Phillis said. Phillis’ daughter with spinal muscular atrophy also has a nurse with her at all times in school due to her complex health needs. The nurse receives some funding through Medicaid, so Phillis is also terrified about how Medicaid cuts will impact her daughter’s ability to attend school. “It’s one of the biggest heartbreaks I think I’ve ever experienced in my entire life is seeing how people like my daughters are affected by this administration,” Phillis told me. There have not been recent attempts to repeal IDEA yet, but this is a concern for Nadia Hasan, a woman with cerebral palsy who credits IDEA with helping her succeed in school. “There’s just a lot more like isolation and lack of opportunity,” Hasan told me. Marleen Salazar, a Texan with learning disabilities who is now an undergraduate student at the University of Texas Rio Grande Valley, credits her special education teachers for helping her learn to advocate for herself. “They were very much a very key part of building me that confidence and advocacy to make sure that I expressed what I needed and what I didn’t need,” Salazar told me. This advocacy included being able to take standardized tests in a room by herself, as well as getting extended time. Salazar’s younger sister, who is dyslexic, now has accommodations as well. Salazar has concerns about what will happen if funding is rolled back. “The fear is if funding is cut, or the state doesn’t want to provide these resources anymore, what does that mean for her in the future?”

In 2017, David Leavitt drove to the Northern Cheyenne reservation in Montana to adopt a baby girl. A few years later, during an interview with a documentary filmmaker, Leavitt, a wealthy Utah politician, told a startling story about how he went about getting physical custody of that child.  Subscribe to Mother Jones podcasts on Apple Podcasts or your favorite podcast app. He describes going to the tribe’s president and offering to use his connections to broker an international sale of the tribe’s buffalo. At the same time, he was asking the president for his blessing to adopt the child. That video eventually leaked to a local TV station, and the adoption became the subject of a federal investigation into bribery. To others, the adoption story seemed to run afoul of a federal law meant to protect Native children from being removed from their tribes’ care in favor of non-Native families.   This week on Reveal, reporters Andrew Becker and Bernice Yeung dig into the story of this complicated and controversial adoption, how it circumvented the mission of the Indian Child Welfare Act, and why some of the baby’s Native family and tribe were left feeling that a child was taken from them.  This episode was produced in collaboration with the Investigative Reporting Program at UC Berkeley’s Graduate School of Journalism. This is an update of an episode that originally aired in August 2024.

In the fall of 2018, Tia Goins was a new mother in crisis, facing eviction, unable to find room in a shelter, and confronting the prospect of homelessness in a Detroit winter—with her three-month-old baby. “It was like, what do I do?” Goins said earlier this year. “I just—I just didn’t want her to be homeless with me.” In a moment of panic, she Googled adoption options and clicked on the first link that came up: a website for Brighter Adoptions, an agency in Layton, Utah. Goins was hesitant—adoption wasn’t something she had ever seriously considered—but the agency representative was persistent. “The lady just kept calling, kept calling,” Goins said. Within 24 hours of Goins’ first phone call, Brighter Adoptions had flown her from Detroit to Utah to place her child for adoption. Though Goins texted the owner of the agency saying she was having second thoughts, the process moved quickly: Within two days, agency representatives were at Goins’ hotel room door with the final adoption paperwork. Goins’ story is the subject of an investigation by the Center for Investigative Reporting (which publishes Mother Jones) that aired Thursday on PBS News Hour. As I wrote in the January/February issue of Mother Jones, Utah has become a hub for domestic adoption, with agencies flying in new or expecting mothers from across the country to place their children. The agencies often offer cash stipends and free lodging to mothers—many of whom, like Goins, are in desperate financial and housing situations. This cottage industry is enabled by so-called “adoption-friendly” laws in Utah that expedite the process. Many states build in protections for birth parents, allowing birth mothers to change their minds days or even weeks after signing adoption paperwork, and requiring that birth fathers have a chance to contest the adoption. In Utah, such safeguards don’t exist. Once the papers are signed, the decision is irreversible. In addition, the children of unwed birth fathers can be placed for adoption in Utah without their notification or consent. And finally, Utah is the only state where finalized adoptions can’t be dismissed even if the adoption was fraudulent. > “In confusion,” says Texas A&M professor Malinda Seymore, “there is profit.” Agencies like Brighter Adoptions say they’re providing needed services, centering the needs of birth mothers and finding loving homes for their children. In an email, Brighter Adoptions owner Sandi Quick said that the agency ensures that mothers “fully understand the implications of adoption.” But critics argue that moving mothers away from their support systems to a state that expedites adoptions makes mothers more vulnerable. Plus, they say, the adoption industry is fueled by agencies, lawyers, and facilitators that often profit off of the process. “I think domestic, private, infant action in America toes that line of legalized trafficking,” says Ashley Mitchell, director of Knee to Knee, which runs support groups for birth parents. Over the past decade, several states, particularly those with restrictive abortion laws, have passed “adoption-friendly” legislation. Georgia, Kentucky, and Indiana have shortened the period during which a birth mother can change her mind; Virginia and South Dakota put limits on the rights of birth fathers; Louisiana, Arkansas, and Texas require schools to provide adoption education. Texas also has launched a multimillion-dollar campaign promoting adoption. Malinda Seymore, a law professor at Texas A&M University, says that the dramatic state-by-state differences in protections for birth parents benefits the adoption industry. “In confusion, there is profit,” she says. “If you can move a birth mother to a different state and take advantage of more favorable laws for your client, why wouldn’t you?”

In late March, the US Department of Education put state education officials on notice: No longer would the federal government tolerate what the agency described in a Dear Colleague Letter as the widespread infringement on parents’ rights to direct the schooling of their kids. “By natural right and moral authority, parents are the primary protectors of their children,” Education Secretary Linda McMahon declared in a cover letter attached to the guidance. “Yet many states and school districts have enacted policies that presume children need protection from their parents.” Like many of the executive orders and other directives coming out of the Trump administration since January, the guidance focused largely on trans and queer students—in this case, their right to privacy (or lack thereof). But McMahon’s sweeping rhetoric framed the issue as something much bigger. “Attempts by school officials to separate children from their parents, convince children to feel unsafe at home, or burden children with the weight of keeping secrets from their loved ones is a direct affront to the family unit,” she wrote. The US Supreme Court has long held that the parental right to direct the upbringing of one’s children is fundamental. But McMahon’s letter highlights how the Trump administration is weaponizing that idea to a degree that scholars and advocates say is unprecedented at the national level. The ideology of parental rights has emerged as a cornerstone of President Donald Trump’s authoritarian agenda, repeatedly invoked by him and others to justify the rollback of a wide range of policies—involving civil rights, education, public health, and reproductive health—that conservatives have vociferously opposed.  Some of the biggest supporters of the Trump administration’s actions are Christian nationalists intent on imposing a near-limitless idea of parental rights on American society, legal scholars and children’s rights advocates say. In the view of religious ultraconservatives, any government infringement on the right of parents to control every aspect of their children’s upbringing violates both the laws of the land and the laws of God.  > “Christian nationalists feel like, with Trump in control, they have the > political and cultural momentum, and they’re pushing to make this happen right > now.” “Christian nationalists feel like, with Trump in control, they have the political and cultural momentum behind them, and they’re pushing to make this happen right now,” says Samuel Perry, a sociology professor at the University of Oklahoma and a leading scholar of the religious right. “They feel like, OK, this is our chance, and we are not going to apologize about pushing our agenda.” The parental rights agenda has found eager supporters on Capitol Hill, in state legislatures, and with state and federal courts. Here are some examples: * In January, Republicans in both houses of Congress introduced the “Families’ Rights and Responsibilities Act,” which would empower parents to use parental rights as a defense for any behavior that falls short of “serious physical injury” to or death of their child. * At least 22 states have enshrined “parental bills of rights” into their laws, reports the ultra-conservative think tank the Heritage Foundation, which was responsible for Project 2025, the policy blueprint for the Trump 2.0 era. One of those states, Texas, just passed another bill that prohibits the government from infringing on “the fundamental rights granted to parents by their Creator.” Among other things, it bans DEI hiring programs in K-12 schools and school-authorized LGBTQ clubs. * Lawmakers and courts have been using parental rights to roll back reproductive protections for minors. In May, a Florida appeals court ruled that the state’s “judicial bypass” law allowing teenagers to seek a judge’s sign-off for an abortion violated the rights of parents. Last year, the ultraconservative Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals partially sided with a Texas father who sued to block Title X clinics in the state from offering birth control to minors without parental consent.  * Even child labor protections have been getting the “parental rights” treatment, with more than a dozen states weakening labor laws for children since 2021. An expansive idea of parental rights is also before the US Supreme Court this term. The case of Mahmoud v. Taylor was brought by a group of religious parents who opposed the required reading of LGBTQ-inclusive storybooks in public schools. A decision is expected by the end of June.  Legal scholars note that increasingly, conservatives are deploying “parental rights” as a way to advance regressive and unpopular social policies. Their strategy has been successful because “almost everybody can agree on the importance of parental rights,” says Naomi Cahn, a professor at the University of Virginia School of Law. “It’s a good Trojan horse.” But for Christian nationalists, “parental rights” is much more than a buzz phrase—it is part of a deeply held belief system, rooted in religion and patriarchy. They’re not egalitarians, Perry says. “They live in a world of authorities and hierarchies. One of those includes parents [having authority] over their children.” He points out that allowing “for the possibility that a child could kick against that [authority] to carve out their own space…is out of the question.” > “They live in a world of authorities and hierarchies. One of those includes > parents [having authority] over their children.” Whatever adherents are motivated by—a sincerely held belief in the rights of parents, or something more cynical—the expansion of parental rights comes at a cost to the very children that conservatives vow to “protect,” child advocates warn. “They may want to cloak this in the words ‘parents’ rights,’ but it’s about authoritarianism,” says Rebecca Gudeman, who leads health policy initiatives at the National Center for Youth Law. “It’s not about one parent’s ability to create a safe space for their child, it’s about controlling society.” Parental rights are far from being a new rallying cry. They have been invoked to support or oppose a slew of policies for over a century—titans of industry in the 1920s, for example, warned that restricting child labor would threaten the “fundamental institution” of the family. Around the same time, the Supreme Court issued two seminal opinions establishing parental rights in education: Meyer v. Nebraska and Pierce v. Society of Sisters, which respectively struck down an English-only instruction law and a compulsory public education law. But the modern parental rights movement was born when the Supreme Court ordered public schools to desegregate in Brown v. Board of Education in 1954. Fearmongering by white parents about the federal government’s infringement on their right to direct their children’s schooling led to the widespread establishment of segregation academies: whites-only private schools, some receiving government funding, many of them religiously based. “You had largely evangelical Christian conservative populations in the American South say, ‘This was about family values, this is about traditional families. It’s not about racism. It’s just about us wanting to control our own families and their education,’” Perry says. “But of course, it looks a lot like segregation, and it looks a lot like just retreating from mainstream culture and values.”   Over the years, many of the hardest-fought parental-rights battles have been waged over education and reproductive health. In the 1980s and ’90s, its rhetoric was used to challenge sex education in public schools and school curriculums more broadly and to push for the right of parents to withdraw their children from school and teach them at home. Parental rights arguments also led to the passage of dozens of state laws requiring parental consent or notification for minors seeking abortion after Roe v. Wade in 1973.  > In the past, parental rights laws were aimed at “giving parents an individual > decision about whether to opt in or opt out of something, or to make an > individualized decision for their child.” Now, many of these laws “create > mandates coming top down from the state.” Importantly, most parental-rights laws of this era were aimed at “giving parents an individual decision about whether to opt in or opt out of something or to make an individualized decision for their child,” says abortion historian Mary Ziegler, a law professor at the University of California, Davis. But since 2020, that’s changed: Now many of these laws “create mandates coming top down from the state, imposing [ideas or actions] on all parents in the name of parents’ rights.” The pandemic was a turning point for the parental rights movement. With school closures in early 2020, parents became much more involved in their children’s education—and many were clamoring for school re-openings or appalled by what they saw. Add to this, the “racial reckoning” that followed the murder of George Floyd in May 2020, and conservatives became mobilized in opposing curriculum changes around the teaching of American history. “Covid-19 opened parents’ eyes to the pervasive indoctrination taking place in many classrooms,” McMahon wrote in her March letter to educators. “Families across the country saw gender ideology and critical race theory taught on-screen at their own kitchen tables.”  Beginning in earnest in 2021, issues like vaccine requirements and mask mandates were weaponized in the name of parental rights by fledgling rightwing groups like Moms for Liberty as well as conservative behemoths such as the Alliance Defending Freedom. But the parental rights movement’s biggest obsession was diversity and school curricula focused on America’s racial, and racist, history. The CRT Forward Tracking Project at the UCLA law school found that local, state, and federal government bodies introduced nearly 900 policy proposals targeting critical race theory and diversity initiatives from September 2020 through the end of 2024. “Parents’ rights cannot help but be racialized,” UCLA law professor LaToya Baldwin Clark wrote in the Yale Law Journal in 2023, calling the parental rights movement and the anti-CRT movement “twins.” “The movements work in tandem because they are born from the same parent: White supremacy.” The next wave of bills focused on queer and trans kids. Queer acceptance—particularly the notion that children can be trans—was a direct threat not only to the order of men and women in society but to the authority of parents over children, Perry says. Hundreds of anti-trans bills, pushed by religious right groups, flooded state legislatures in the latter half of Joe Biden’s presidency. When Florida passed its then-groundbreaking Parental Rights in Education bill in 2022—banning, among other things, teaching about gender and sexuality from kindergarten through third grade—then-Republican House Speaker Chris Sprowls called the year “the session of Florida parents.” Meanwhile, the overturning of Roe v. Wade has led to a new flurry of actions targeting minors seeking abortion and other forms of reproductive care—notably, “abortion trafficking bans” in Idaho and Tennessee that make it a crime to help teenagers cross state lines to get an abortion. Cases like these prompted Ziegler and her colleagues to take a broader look at how parental rights are being used by conservatives: not to protect individual parents’ rights but to bring about a sweeping policy realignment that rolls back progressive policies. They call this strategy “retrenchment by diversion.”  “The idea is that you have to invoke some other goal—[in this case,] parental rights—to advance your agenda when you know that voters would be much more likely to reject it if you named what it was you were prioritizing,” Ziegler says. “There are bona fide movements for parental rights, and then there are movements with very different agendas that have hitched their star to parental rights arguments when they think doing so will help.”  > “There are bona fide movements for parental rights, and then there are > movements with very different agendas that have hitched their star to parental > rights arguments when they think doing so will help.”  Conservatives stop short of promoting parental rights when to do so would conflict with their other beliefs—like banning gender-affirming medical care for trans youth, regardless of whether parents support such care for their own children. Maxine Eichner, a family law scholar at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, sees this as evidence that the real goal of many parental rights bills is to turn back the clock on broad policies that conservatives abhor. “Recent uses of parental consent statutes seem like a subtle, or not so subtle, attempt by legislatures just to force minors to forgo some activity that the legislature simply doesn’t like,” Eichner says. Perry has seen what he describes as “a form of local resistance among red states to push parental rights” transformed, after Trump’s election, to become “mainstreamed at the national level.” It doesn’t matter to the religious right that Trump isn’t exactly a model Christian, Perry adds. The president is “Christian enough” since he represents a political vision that Christian nationalists want: A strong patriarch willing to break things in pursuit of what they see as righteous goals. “Whether they think Donald Trump should teach their Sunday school, I think they wouldn’t have that,” Perry says. But “he fights for their team. He is powerful. He doesn’t apologize, he’s not democratic, he’s not egalitarian. He’s an authority, and he issues executive orders, which they love. … So they do see him as a Christian leader in as much as he is leading our country back to ultimate authority: authority of the Bible, patriarchal authority, authority of God.”  This aggressive push for a no-guardrails version of parental rights has made children’s rights advocates deeply alarmed, because, put simply, parents don’t always act in the best interest of their children. Certainly, many well-meaning parents make decisions with good intentions that nonetheless end up having long-term negative consequences for their children. But as it expands its power, the parental rights movement is resisting efforts to impose minimal constraints in order to protect children from harm.  For example, this year’s battle over homeschooling regulation in Illinois. The state has among the loosest regulations on homeschooling in the United States, with no record-keeping mandates or requirements that a parent or other teacher has a high school diploma or a GED. When the legislature tried to pass a law addressing the lack of regulations—prompted by an investigation by ProPublica and Capitol News Illinois, which found that fatal child abuse went unaddressed due to the state’s homeschooling laws—homeschool advocates, supported by the Home School Legal Defense Association, launched a nationally-reaching opposition campaign. The bill’s sponsor, Democrat Rep. Terra Costa Howard, told multiple news outlets that she received a death threat in the mail. “God said ‘Do Not Kill,’ but also said ‘Smite thine enemy.’ We’re watching,” the anonymous letter read. > View this post on Instagram > > > > > A post shared by HSLDA (@hslda) The anti-regulation campaign was effective: Despite passing out of committee, the bill never received a floor vote in the Democrat-controlled House and died when the legislative session ended on May 31. That disappointed a homeschool reform advocate I’ll call Elizabeth, who calls the legislation’s attempts at oversight “bare minimum.” Elizabeth was homeschooled in Illinois from third through eighth grade and says her later education and transition to the workforce suffered from a lack of structure, oversight, and accountability. “The sheer spectrum of what can go wrong is so wide,” she says, “from something this simple like, I just was not educated, to situations of deep and horrific abuse that can happen when there’s [no regulation] in place.” The parental rights movement thinks about issues in terms of what parents want, rather than what children need, says Anna, another woman whose childhood experiences being homeschooled in Illinois have made her an advocate for more regulation. “My parents are the consumers of homeschooling, they’re the consumers of the curriculum,” Anna says. “But once I turn 18, they are done.” And then it’s left to the now-adult homeschooled children to pick up the pieces.  > “We have this legal historical construct, both in the world of policy and the > world of litigation, we have been trying to shed, which is that children are > chattel.” Homeschooling is far from the only issue that worries children’s rights advocates contemplating the Trump 2.0 era. In opposing the proposed “Families’ Rights and Responsibilities Act” introduced by Republicans in Congress, the bipartisan advocacy organization First Focus Campaign for Children underscores the threats to children’s well-being. Child abuse that falls short of “serious injury or death” would be harder to prosecute, particularly with the built-in parental rights defense afforded by the bill. State-level vaccine mandates for education could be nullified (alongside Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s push for greater vaccine scrutiny at the federal level). Requirements that parents “make and consent to” all healthcare for children would prevent adolescents from accessing STI treatment, mental health care, and reproductive health services, while likely denying them the right to refuse medical treatment that has proven to be harmful, including anti-queer “conversion” therapy.  “Parents are the guardians and not the owners of children,” First Focus Campaign for Children President Bruce Lesley wrote in a February letter to lawmakers. “Policymakers should reject philosophies that treat children as the property of parents or that assume children lack independent reason, agency, or understanding of their own ‘best interests.’” It’s a battle that’s as old as this country. For much of our history, white women were considered the property of their husbands and children the property of their fathers (marriages between enslaved people weren’t legally recognized, and neither were their parental rights). The family patriarch could force his children to work, enlist his sons in the military, marry off his daughters, and otherwise harm his children under the guise of corrective punishment. “We have this legal historical construct, both in the world of policy and the world of litigation, we have been trying to shed, which is that children are chattel,” says Kristen Weber, the National Center for Youth Law’s senior director of child welfare. The rise of the parental rights movement makes one thing clear, she adds: “We haven’t really fully gotten there.”

A growing number of states are considering legislation to set up protections for patients who might be drug tested when they give birth. Three of the bills were introduced following an investigative series by The Marshall Project and Reveal that exposed the harms of drug testing at childbirth — including how many patients are often reported to child welfare authorities over false positive or misinterpreted test results, and how women have faced child welfare investigations and removals over medications the hospitals themselves gave them. In New York, a bill that would require hospitals to obtain consent from patients before drug testing has been advancing. Two proposed bills, in Arizona and Tennessee, failed to make it out of their legislative sessions.  “We know when there’s secret drug testing, families are often torn apart,” said New York state Rep. Linda Rosenthal, a Democrat from Manhattan, who noted cases of women who were reported to child welfare over positive tests caused by poppy seeds and prescribed medications. “This is not some theoretical discussion we’re having here. This is really something that occurs.” > “Can you imagine if someone took the baby from you out of your arms or never > even let you hold your child?” The New York bill, versions of which were first introduced by Rosenthal beginning in 2019, has faced years of resistance from state lawmakers. Similar efforts in Minnesota, Maryland and California also failed in prior legislative sessions. But in New York, The Marshall Project’s reporting on hospital drug testing helped convince more lawmakers to get on board, according to activists who lobbied for the legislation. If passed, the law would permit hospitals to drug test birthing patients and their newborns only if medically necessary. It would also require them to obtain informed consent from patients before drug testing them, which would include disclosing the potential legal consequences of a positive test result. Similar bills were introduced this year in Tennessee by both a Democrat and Republican. Sen. Janice Bowling, a Republican from Tullahoma who frequently advocates for parental rights, was first approached about the issue by a progressive advocacy group and quickly saw the bipartisan appeal. She said she was shocked to learn that women had been tested and reported over false positive tests caused by poppy seeds, the heartburn drug Zantac and other legal substances. “Can you imagine if someone took the baby from you out of your arms or never even let you hold your child?” she said. “Taking children from families because a state entity says they have the authority to determine whether or not you’re a fit parent, that’s a slippery slope.” After a particularly contentious legislative session, the bill failed to make it out of committee. Bowling said she plans to take up the bill again in 2026. In Arizona, lobbyists and activists said they plan to pursue a similar informed consent bill next legislative session, in addition to continuing to pursue a more far-reaching bill that was introduced but failed to advance this year. > “If the trust between a doctor and patient is broken, that will lead to much > more severe consequences for the child and the mother.” The Pro-Choice Arizona Action Fund and the reproductive advocacy group Patient Forward began pursuing the legislation following a Reveal and New York Times Magazine investigation in 2023 that detailed the story of an Arizona woman whose baby was placed in foster care after she was reported to child welfare authorities for taking prescribed Suboxone during her pregnancy. Current Arizona law requires healthcare providers to contact child welfare anytime a baby is born exposed to controlled substances, including legal medications such as Suboxone and methadone. “We were like, how does this happen? What are the mechanisms in place that allow this to happen?” said Garin Marschall, co-founder of Patient Forward. “We wanted to understand what we could do to make sure that it didn’t happen again.” The proposed legislation would have revised Arizona law to bar positive drug tests alone as a reason for a child welfare report or investigation. If healthcare providers have no concerns about abuse or neglect, the law would require hospitals to notify the health department instead of child welfare authorities. Other states, such as Massachusetts and New Mexico, have passed similar laws, while hospitals around the country have also made changes to their drug testing policies. In New York, advocates said their bill has historically faced resistance from lawmakers who worry that asking patients for consent to test them for drugs will lead more women to decline such tests. But healthcare providers interviewed by The Marshall Project have said it’s rare for patients to decline a drug test, and even so, drug tests rarely provide useful medical information. Doctors don’t typically need drug tests to identify or treat babies exposed to substances in the womb, and a positive test does not actually prove that a parent has an addiction, the experts said. Instead, studies have found that screening questionnaires, which collect certain information from patients, such as their partner’s history of drug use, are effective at identifying someone with an addiction without putting them at risk of needless child welfare intervention. Doctors have found that maintaining open communication with patients is also the best way to help them, whereas studies show more punitive policies lead women to avoid prenatal care altogether. “If the trust between a doctor and patient is broken, that will lead to much more severe consequences for the child and the mother,” Rosenthal said. “Everyone does better if that doesn’t happen.” This article was published in partnership with The Marshall Project,  a nonprofit news organization covering the U.S. criminal justice system. Sign up for their newsletters, and follow them on  Instagram, TikTok, Reddit and Facebook. 

Last Thursday night, I attended a cocktail party in the penthouse apartment of an Austin, Texas, highrise. Through floor-to-ceiling glass windows, we watched dusk settle over the rainy sweep of the city, from the bars below us to the university campus, to the downtown skyline, studded with construction sites. As the first guests began to trickle in, the conversation turned to the ethics of gene-editing embryos to create custom babies. “I would actually argue that the ethical questions probably aren’t as big, because kids already don’t choose their genes,” said Malcolm Collins, a slight, bespectacled man in his late thirties who had helped organize the gathering. “I think that we’re really close to a subculture where this is normalized—a right-wing subculture.” His wife, Simone, busily filling bowls with chips, nodded in agreement. Simone was dressed for the evening in a white, wide-brimmed bonnet, a peasant blouse, and an austere, calf-length black jumper; her daughter, one-year-old Industry Americus, lounged in a carrier on her back. She and her husband, she said, were comfortable with the idea of designer babies; after all, Industry and her three older siblings, all under the age of 7, had been created with the help of a company that said it could analyze their embryos’ genetic makeup to screen for genetic illnesses, depression, and schizophrenia, as well as predict their intelligence. Yet Simone wasn’t convinced that the world needed bespoke babies—the process would be too expensive, and with all the hormone shots, monitoring, and precise timing, too cumbersome. “IVF isn’t going to move the needle on birth rates,” she said. The Collinses and some 200 others were in Austin that weekend for NatalCon, a conference held at the University of Texas-Austin for pronatalists, people who believe that falling birthrates the world over imperils humanity. The Collinses weren’t the official organizers, but ever since they spoke at the first NatalCon in 2023—before Industry Americus was born—they have emerged as the de facto spokespeople of the movement, enthusiastically appearing for a gauntlet of media interviews. In their late thirties with chunky glasses and a sort of grad-student intensity, the Collinses are catnip for journalists because of their extreme eagerness to regale us with the sci-fi-esque details of their lives. They’re starting their own religion! They believe in something called the “future police!” Simone told me that the purpose of her unsubtle Handmaid’s Tale getup was at least in part for journalists’ benefit. (“Multiple things can be true at one time,” she explained. “You can both be trolling, but also be like, ‘Man, this is actually pretty comfortable.’”). Because of their media savvy, extreme self-confidence, and eagerness to open up, they have been the subjects of dozens of articles about the pronatalism movement, from the New York Magazine to the Washington Post to the Guardian. I could go on and on about the Collinses—their backstory as erstwhile leftists who met on Reddit; the time Malcolm slapped his kid in front of a reporter; the fact that 80 percent of the viewers on their YouTube channel are men. But all the media focus on their charismatic quirkiness detracts from the darker corners of the movement. Many of the pronatalists make no secret of the fact that when they talk about saving civilization from birth rate collapse, they have a very specific civilization in mind. At the opening night of the conference, the day after the cocktail party, the keynote speaker, far-right influencer, and Pizzagate conspiracy theorist Jack Posobiec, told the crowd exactly that. “Western civilization isn’t just worth preserving. It’s worth fighting for,” he said. “This is a war, and natalism is our sword and shield, and we will not abandon the front line.” The enemies on the left “want us dead, so take them seriously,” he warned. “Think about it, the Luigis, the Tesla terrorists, they would have no problem at all with getting rid of us.” > “If Vice President JD Vance has his way, our whole electoral process may be > recalibrating around this new pronatal biopolitics.” In this war for the West, many of the natalists have long believed that God is on their side. But a major change has taken place since the first NatalCon because the political winds seem to be at their backs. “JD Vance and the entire Trump administration seem to be bringing their children everywhere with them, including the Oval Office,” enthused Terry Schilling, another opening night speaker who heads the right-wing lobbying group American Principles Project. Right-wing political commentator Steve Turley offered the attendees more specifics. “If Vice President JD Vance has his way,” he said, “our whole electoral process may be recalibrating around this new pronatal biopolitics.” There are signs that this is not just wishful thinking. Vance and other members of the new administration have begun warning about falling birthrates and using some of the same rhetoric as the pronatalists. Around the same time NatalCon was beginning on Friday evening, Elon Musk appeared on Fox News. The host asked what he worried most about. “The birth rate is very low in almost every country, and unless that changes, civilization will disappear,” Musk responded. “Humanity is dying.” Meanwhile, at the conference, Posobiec was wrapping up his speech with the same theme. “This is the war for civilization, and we are going to win it one life at a time,” he said. “God bless the West.” Posobiec’s rhetorical flourishes are distinctly lacking from the NatalCon website, which describes the problem of declining fertility rates in much more neutral terms. “By the end of this century,” it says, “nearly every country on earth will have a shrinking population, and economic systems dependent on reliable growth will collapse,” and “thousands of unique cultures and populations will be snuffed out.” First, let’s get a few things straight. There is no consensus among demographers that the world is running out of humans; on the contrary, the world is on track to reach a population of 9 billion by 2037. Yet it’s true that dwindling fertility in developed nations will soon result in overall older populations, with significant portions aging out of the workforce. Today, about 21 percent of EU citizens are over 65; by 2050, according to World Economic Forum projections, more than a third of the populations of Italy, Spain, and Greece will be over the age of 65; in Hong Kong, the percentage of people over-65 will be greater than 40 percent, also compared to about 21 percent today. The trend is slightly less pronounced in the United States, where people over 65 are expected to increase in proportion from just shy of 17 percent in 2021 to 23 percent in 2050. When so many people approach retirement at the same time, however, governments tend to get nervous about the collapse of the workforce—and in some places, they’re pulling out all the stops to prevent that from happening. Singapore, France, and Canada offer couples tantalizing combinations of long parental leaves, and thousands of dollars in “baby bonuses” and education savings accounts. Hungary implemented a policy that exempts mothers of four or more children from ever paying taxes again. Jennifer Sciubba, a political demographer with the nonpartisan think tank Population Research Group, notes that birth is not the only aspect of life governments could incentivize in order to address the problems presented by an aging population. The hiring of older workers, for instance, promoting policies to support caregivers of the elderly, and devoting resources to improving the health and quality of life of senior citizens could all be government initiatives. “I think we’re wasting a lot of time that we could be using to have innovative solutions and experiments at municipal levels to see what works,” she said. “And we just aren’t doing it.” I was looking forward to asking the NatalCon organizers about their thoughts on non-baby-related solutions to the aging population problem, but I never had the opportunity. A few months ago, when I requested a press pass from the conference organizer, Kevin Dolan, who posts on Twitter under the name Bennet’s Phylactery, he tweeted out my email to his 91,000 followers. “The balls on these people lmao,” he wrote. “You want me to buy you dinner & pay for your booze because you can’t afford to come harsh the vibes & slander my friends on your own dime?” When I tried to pay to register, my application was rejected. A father of six, Dolan runs a men’s society called Exit Group that describes itself as “a fraternity of like-minded men who take a short position in the present system and build for what comes next.” On X, Dolan overdoses on the words “retarded” and “gay,” complains about anti-white bias, and thunders against feminism, which he believes “will not reduce or curtail fertility, it will eliminate it—it is incompatible with human life.” I hoped once I showed up to the conference, they might just let me in. Surely I, a middle-aged woman fading into irrelevance with my nearing-expiration-date womb, would be easy to ignore in this baby-crazy crowd. On the first evening of the conference, the day after the cocktail party, 200 attendees gathered for the opening dinner in the UT-Austin art museum. As soon as I introduced myself to the keeper of the wristbands, I was banished. “You are not welcome here!” he said and promptly summoned a cadre of security guards to escort me out of the building. To really understand the pronatalist movement, you first need to be aware of its two main factions. The “trads,” most of whom are religiously motivated, believe that large families are God’s will. Some of the more militant among them also believe in the “Great Replacement” conspiracy theory, which posits the existence of a global conspiracy to replace white Americans with immigrants of color. Then there are the techies, many of whom see pronatalism as an imperative for maximizing the potential of the human race—they are interested in things like gene-editing people, figuring out how to increase the human lifespan, and replacing elementary school teachers with AI tutors. The penthouse cocktail party was a tech-heavy crowd. In addition to the Collinses, the guest list included the co-founder of Heritage Molecular, which says it “makes customized human embryos using genetic engineering,” and the founder and CEO of Minicircle, a company that focuses on “reversible gene editing.” Another guest I met was Patri Friedman, the head of a Peter Thiel-backed venture firm that funds deregulated economic zones. He told me about his recent trip to one such zone in Honduras, where medical procedures are deregulated. While he was there, he said, he had all the bacteria in his mouth replaced so he would never get another cavity and underwent a gene editing procedure that he felt had substantially increased his cardio performance. He proudly pointed to the spot between the thumb and pointer finger on his right hand. There, he told me, a chip resided “that unlocks my Tesla and has my business card on it.” > “I think everybody just needs to eat more meat, less hormonal birth control, > and wear less polyester, and like anything else that’s disrupting your > hormones.” For all their blue-sky thinking, when it comes to actual humans now walking the earth, the tech faction can be pessimistic. About halfway through the cocktail party, I dropped in on a conversation between Malcolm Collins and another guest, a woman who didn’t want to be named. Malcolm was holding forth about his observation that young people didn’t seem especially interested in having sex. The other guest agreed. “Everything about the young generation is less sexual,” she said. “People wear clothes that are much more androgynous; they don’t do as much to emphasize their sexuality,” she added. “I think everybody just needs to eat more meat, less hormonal birth control, and wear less polyester, and like anything else that’s disrupting your hormones.” Malcolm nodded. He had recently been back to his alma mater, St. Andrews University in Scotland, where he had seen a group of students partaking in the annual tradition of running naked into the freezing ocean. Compared to his memories of the event from two decades ago, the current crop of students came up short. “There was no flirting—there wasn’t as much fun,” he said. “Everybody looked like an amorphous blob, but it wasn’t just that—young people were ugly.” “Right,” said the other guest. “It’s the way that they, like, groom themselves.” A few hours before the opening evening of the conference the following day, I had my first meeting with someone who was not a techie but a trad. We met at the George Washington statue at the center of the UT-Austin campus, and the students were out in force: sorority girls, kids hawking the campus humor magazine, a big group of kids clutching enormous, multi-hued boba teas. While the students streamed by, I caught up with Scott Yenor, who is a professor of political science at Idaho’s Boise State University, a fellow at the right-wing think tank the Claremont Institute, and a father of five. In a 2023 piece for the Claremont Institute website, he wrote about the dangers of what he called “anti-natalism.” Progressive values, he argued, had brought about the crash of South Korea’s birth rates, and America was headed in the same direction. “Honoring same-sex attraction above opposite-sex attraction and creating environments in which homosexuals receive special protection and encouragement will cause more people to identify as gay, as current polling indicates,” he wrote. “In these and many other ways, a legal and cultural regime can diminish the desire for children.” > “When the ideal for womanly achievement is the independent woman, it is > necessarily undermining family life.” I asked Yenor to tell me about his objections to feminism, and he explained that he saw it as a pernicious enemy of procreation. “When the ideal for womanly achievement is the independent woman, it is necessarily undermining family life,” he said. This problem was hard to fix because the 1964 Civil Rights Act had “made it impossible and in fact, suspect to treat men and women differently.”   Yenor told me that he is a member of a secretive fraternal order, a Christian nationalist group called the Society for American Civic Renewal. The unofficial head of the group is Charles Haywood, a shampoo magnate who has said that he aspires to be a “warlord;” he wants to lead armed factions who would wage “more-or-less open warfare with the federal government or some subset or remnant of it.” At the 2023 NatalCon, Haywood recounted the story of his growing feeling of contempt while watching a neighbor fetch his mail. The guy “was all well-kept and put together, but he was totally beta,” he said. (“Beta” is internet slang for submissive.) “We don’t get any kids unless men are masculine.” For this problem, he blamed schools that “feminize boys” and co-ed social spaces, including workplaces. “You should be able to have a group of men in the workplace who interact with each other, favor each other over women for advancement in the workplace, and just generally, advance the interests of men,” he said in his speech. During the Q&A, an audience member asked Haywood for clarification: Had he really meant that men should be promoted over women because they are men? “Women should not have careers,” he said emphatically. “They should be socially stigmatized if they have careers.” Yenor echoed those sentiments. Most women want to stay home with the kids anyway, he told me. I looked back at the students, many of whom were college girls carrying backpacks, hustling to class or lab or clubs. “It’s much better in society if we have a situation where men are providers, and women prioritize motherhood and being wives and homemakers,” Yenor said. “That should be the life script of about 70 percent of Americans.” If I expected a kind of battle royale between the trads and the techies, I would have been disappointed. What I discovered instead was that despite what appeared to be their differences, the techies and the trads were much more fundamentally aligned. One arena for this cooperation is in politics, specifically with the Republican party, where the tech bros have begun to overlap with the trads. As Steve Turley, the political commentator, said during his NatalCon speech, there are “kinds of pronatal possibilities that open up” in the “tech-trad alignment.”  In the GOP, the trads are the conservative Christians, many of whom believe that Trump is God’s chosen leader. Leaders in this group are associated with the New Apostolic Reformation, a loose network of charismatic Christians that was influential in the “Stop the Steal” campaign to overturn the 2020 election. Representatives from this camp include House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-LA), Sen. Mike Lee (R-UT), and Paula White, a longtime Trump spiritual adviser who is now leader of his new White House Faith Office. The Republican techies are the extremely online leaders who believe that a no-holds-barred approach to technological innovation can usher in a new era of prosperity for the United States. The de-facto leader of this group, of course, is Department of Government Efficiency head and tech multibillionaire Elon Musk. A father of 14, Musk is the staunchest and most highly visible pronatalist in the Trump administration. “Instead of teaching fear of pregnancy, we should teach fear of childlessness,” he posted on X in November. Last April, he posted Kevin Dolan’s speech from the 2023 NatalCon, commenting, “If birth rates continue to plummet, human civilization will end,” the phrase he would later repeat during his Fox News interview last week. A 2023 Bloomberg News investigation revealed that in 2021, Musk donated $10 million to the Population Wellbeing Initiative, a research group at the University of Texas-Austin that says it conducts “foundational research in economics, demography, and social welfare evaluation.” (Dean Spears, who heads the group, wrote in an email to Mother Jones that Musk’s donation did not influence the center’s work. He said his own work focuses on global health and that he thinks “what Trump has done to USAID is awful.”) Straddling the trad-tech divide is Vice President JD Vance. A traditional Catholic who is staunchly pro-life, Vance is connected to the TheoBros, a group of mostly millennial Protestant men who proudly call themselves Christian nationalists. Vance also has deep connections to Silicon Valley, where he worked briefly for Peter Thiel, as well as for Circuit Therapeutics, a biotech firm that focused on gene editing. In addition to his tech sector work experience, Vance is also famously well-connected on social media, plugged into perpetually online right-wing intellectual movements. The pronatalists recognize Vance for the lynchpin that he is. “Vance is often cited as a symbol of this tech-trad realignment,” Turley said in his speech. “He’s a traditionalist Catholic. Grew up in the hillbilly mountains of Appalachia, and he’s also part of a very successful Silicon Valley Tech company with Peter Thiel.” In January, addressing the annual March for Life an anti-abortion rally crowd in Washington, DC, shortly after he was sworn in as vice president, Vance said, “I want more babies in the United States of America.” He has also fanboyed over Hungarian President Viktor Orbán’s tax break for big families. Last year, when Vance took heat for a resurfaced video in which he derided “childless cat ladies,” he clarified in an interview with Fox News Megyn Kelly that he hadn’t meant to offend these ladies, only to suggest that their misery over their own choice to remain childless would “make the rest of the country miserable, too.” Vance has proposed the idea of a weighted voting system, in which the votes cast by parents would be valued more highly than those by the childless. Yenor, the Idaho State professor, told me he liked the sound of that idea; he worried that as nonparents begin to make up a greater share of voters, “there will be less interest in sustaining an environment for children to be raised in.”   It’s not just Vance and Musk who are bringing pronatalism to the national stage. In February, US Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy (a father of nine) signed a memo recommending that his department prioritize “communities with marriage and birth rates higher than the national average.” Last year, the Heritage Foundation, the think tank responsible for the Project 2025 roadmap for Trump’s second term, recommended that the government defund higher education, claiming that more educated women tend to have fewer babies. In the same article, the authors suggested that “education policy also suppresses fertility by discouraging parents from choosing religious education in K-12 schools.” The far-right Claremont Institute suggested in 2023 that states could juice birth rates “by building relatively wholesome environments for raising children,” adding that “protecting kids from publicly-sponsored gender wokeness is a great first step.” Part of that wholesome environment, the authors write, could be “pro-family programming” on state public television and a campaign to draw churches with a “family-friendly mission.” If the “lefties” didn’t like these new policies, fine! “Plenty of U-Haul trucks are available! Family-friendly citizens in; other citizens out.” Trump himself appears ready to listen. At a Maryland campaign event in 2023, he thundered, “I want a baby boom!” In December, Trump named Michael Anton, a conservative writer who spoke at the 2023 NatalCon, to be his director of policy planning for the State Department. (Anton’s speech at the 2023 NatalCon advised viewers to look to Socrates’ Xenophon for examples of how to woo women by making them feel insecure.) Trump said in a February executive order that the reason he believed more Americans should be able to undergo IVF was “because we want more babies, to put it very nicely.” Last week, during a Women’s History Month event at the White House, Trump said, “We’re gonna have tremendous goodies in the bag for women too. The women, between the fertilization and all the other things we’re talking about, it’s gonna be great. Fertilization. I’m still very proud of it, I don’t care. I’ll be known as the fertilization president and that’s okay.” > “I’ll be known as the fertilization president and that’s okay.” Trump also has shown openness to some of the darker sides of pronatalism, repeatedly bragging about his “good genes.” At a 2020 rally in Minnesota, he told the majority-white crowd, “You have good genes. A lot of it’s about the genes, isn’t it, don’t you believe the racehorse theory? You think we’re so different? You have good genes in Minnesota.” Last October, on the campaign trail, he said, of immigrants who committed crimes, “It’s in their genes. And we got a lot of bad genes in our country right now.” I didn’t hear anyone utter the phrase “bad genes” in the speeches at NatalCon. Though I was barred from attending the conference itself, I was able to obtain recordings of the speeches, which were, with the notable exception of Posobiec, milquetoast. Jonathan Keeperman, whose far-right company Passage Publishing was a sponsor of the conference, made a speech in which he argued that one barrier to having children was the culture of frenetically carting kids around to a zillion activities. Peachy Keenan, a Los Angeles mother of five and the pseudonymous author of the 2023 book Domestic Extremist: a Practical Guide to Winning the Culture War, said “the natalism movement must be about more than numbers and technology. It has to be about in the simplest terms, maternal love.” Raw Egg Nationalist, the pseudonym for a British writer who opines online about masculinity, opined that the result of our comfortable and coddled modern condition is a decline in sexual desire. The eminently reasonable people who made those speeches bore little resemblance to their online alter egos. Keeperman, who often uses the pseudonym Lomez, has created a niche in republishing works by fascist thinkers—for example, a Spanish soldier who fought on Francisco Franco’s side, a WWI-era German nationalist, and a Russian czar loyalist who “chronicles the chaos, courage, and tragedy of his struggle against the Bolsheviks.” On X, where Keeperman posts to 106,000 followers under the pseudonym Lomez, he decries immigration (“no, actually we don’t want your huddled masses”), makes liberal use of slurs, and theorizes about “bioleninism,” the idea that the political left exists because “the dregs of society cannot accrue status of their own, and so depend instead on the state and its unofficial organs to give them status in exchange for loyalty.” Raw Egg Nationalist writes regularly about his belief that immigrants threaten Western civilization; he has referred to immigration as “a hostile act.” And then things can drift towards unapologetic fascism. He has been known to drop the occasional “HH”—short for “Heil Hitler—to his 280,000 followers on X. Keenan, meanwhile, often warns about proselytizing pronatalism to the enemy. “We don’t really want to market natalism to the progressive feminists—the people maxing out their fertility should be people, ideally, who won’t raise their children to be gender-neutral furries who want to join Antifa one day,” she said at the 2023 NatalCon. “The good news is that the fear of climate change will keep liberal women’s birth rates low forever.” It wasn’t hard to imagine how the common-sense speeches of the online firebrands could appeal to ordinary conference-goers, many of whom were hoping to find community. At a happy hour event before the conference, I spoke to a greying guy who said he had come because he found himself single, without kids, and was the sole caretaker of his elderly parents who were suffering from dementia. With the aging of the population, he worried more people would soon end up in his situation. A woman I talked to was there because she had endured many rounds of IVF and wondered if anyone was trying to make the technology more individualized. On the second day of the conference, I met a Texas couple, accompanied by a few of their nine children, who had come because they were hoping to meet other large families. What had they thought of the conference so far, I asked. The man, who didn’t want me to use his name, likened what he had heard about the coming fertility crash to the Y2K bug. “People in 1995 didn’t somehow consider that the year 2000 was only a couple years away, right?” he said. “People don’t really think about the future anymore—we knew when the year 2000 was coming, and yet people were not prepared for it.” The conference, the woman said, had helped her see the weight of their responsibility to their children. “You’re leaving a legacy, right? That’s something very important.”

Pop culture is full of lovable orphans. There’s Annie, of course, and Harry Potter, and the Boxcar Children, and James (with the Giant Peach), and Cinderella—the list goes on and on. They have familiar stories: The protagonist loses parents and finds themselves in dire straits, typically under the supervision of evil caretakers. But through grit, wit, and, often, the help of a wealthy, generous benefactor—think Daddy Warbucks—they’re able to succeed. When author Kristen Martin lost her own parents to cancer as a child, her experience as an orphan was nothing like that. There were no evil stepparents to outsmart before going on epic adventures. Relatives stepped in; the grief was consuming. The “utter disconnect,” she says, between her experience and those of pop culture protagonists was part of the inspiration for her book, The Sun Won’t Come Out Tomorrow: The Dark History of American Orphanhood.  Martin explores the history of orphanhood in America since the 1800s and its harsh reality today, coming to a striking conclusion: It is poverty—rather than the death of both parents—that has often led children to be deemed orphans. “The fact is,” Martin writes, “most of the children we’re talking about when we’re talking about orphans had one or two living parents but were separated from them, either voluntarily or involuntarily,” she writes.  > Despite the narrative that “we are a nation that values the nuclear family, > rallies around children in need, and believes all young people have promising > future,” in reality, “only some are deserving of strong familial ties.” The book takes readers from the proliferation of religious orphanages in the 1800s; to orphan trains, when a quarter million poor children from East Coast cities were sent on trains to homes in the Midwest, where they often labored as farm hands; to the Foundling Asylum of the Sisters of Charity (now New York Foundling), where mothers anonymously left their infants in a cradle on the stoop, relinquishing them for adoption; to Indian boarding schools, part of a 150-year effort to dispossess Native children of their identities and reform them in Christian ideals; to the modern foster care system, in which poverty and addiction often drive home investigations and family separation. At each step, Martin reminds readers that, despite the narrative that “we are a nation that values the nuclear family, rallies around children in need, and believes all young people have promising future,” in reality, “only some are deserving of strong familial ties.” In the 1930s, when the number of orphanages in America peaked—and when Annie takes place—only a tenth of institutionalized children had lost both parents. Letters from parents of children sent on orphan trains reveal their desperation: “I wish to ascertain what part of the United States he is residing in and if he is well cared for,” wrote one father in 1860 to the Children’s Aid Society, which spearheaded the orphan train movement. “I was promised when he was sent away that I would know what place he was to be sent to. He left my house last January and it is as you are aware a long time to wait to hear from him…I feel worried about him, as he was sent away without me seeing him.” The parallels to today are unmistakable: The Foundling cradle has an eerie resemblance to modern day Safe Haven Baby Boxes, which are installed outside places like fire departments, and which anti-abortion policymakers often tout as a safe, anonymous option way for desperate mothers to surrender their children. The distress in the father’s letter sounds like that of parents today asking about their children in foster care. The letters of children on orphan trains asking the Children’s Aid Society for basic information about where they were born and how old they are echoes the efforts of present-day adoptees requesting their birth certificates and birth parents’ identities. I spoke to Martin about her research and the stories we tell ourselves about orphanhood. Answers have been edited for brevity and clarity. Why do you think we tell the stories we tell about orphans in pop culture? There’s the narrative plot answer to that question, and then there’s the deeper, critical answer to that question. If you have an orphan as a protagonist, they come with a built-in conflict. Especially for children’s stories, they are expedient protagonists, because you don’t have to worry about the issue of them having adults who are going to stop them from doing the things that they are going to do in the story, like go off on an adventure. The child has more agency in these stories. > “It’s like this whole fetish of individualism, essentially, that we’re > promoting. It’s very, very American.” But the fact that we have so many of these stories, and they they often have very similar beats and morals and takeaways—to me, it promotes this idea that America is a country where all children have the ability to make something of themselves, and that these children are able to, through their own resilience, grit, and spunk, to overcome horrible situations, both from losing their parents and then, usually in these stories, there’s some kind of evil caretaker at the beginning that the child has to get away from. And then usually, there’s an adult figure who comes along who’s super benevolent and saves the child. It’s like this whole fetish of individualism, essentially, that we’re promoting. It’s very, very American. And the reality that we’re not looking at is that, throughout American history, the children who have been most vulnerable, who we’ve considered to be “orphans”— mostly what they’re suffering from is being in a society where their parents are poor, and they’re separated from their parents. That is something that we just don’t want to look at. How do you define “orphan”? Before I started the book, I would say it was either a full orphan, someone whose parents both died before they were majority age, or a half orphan, someone who had lost one of their parents before age 18. And now I would say that this is a largely symbolic category—that it means what we want it to mean, and that historically, a lot of orphans have just been poor children or children who were separated from their families. That would also include Black children during slavery, who were sold away from their parents. It would include Native children who were forced to attend boarding schools and were taken away from their families and their tribes. And now in foster care, it would also include children who are, by court order, separated from their families. If we think of all of these children as full orphans like me, whose parents are dead, it renders their parents and families as non-entities, and it’s very convenient. It’s convenient to not have to think about the family connections with these children. It’s easier for us as a culture to just ignore that they exist.  I was shocked to learn that, back in the 1800s and early 1900s, so few kids in orphanages had actually lost both parents. > “The children who were spending time in orphanages mostly had at least one > parent who was living.” The first thing that really blew my mind when I was doing my research was, wow, orphans are not orphans. The children who were spending time in orphanages mostly had at least one parent who was living. You did archival research, looking at letters that parents and kids involved in orphan trains wrote to the Children’s Aid Society in the 1800s. What was it like reading those letters? It was parents who were asking for information about their children: where they had been placed and what had become of them. Those letters devastated me.  And then the letters the kids wrote were also very upsetting to read, because often they were asking for very basic information about themselves, like “How old am I?” Another thing in the records were letters sent from former orphan train riders as adults, seeking information about themselves. People were in their 60s and 70s and 80s, asking, “Where was I born? When was I born? Who are my parents?” These were things that were still hounding them, weighing on them so many years later.  It’s reminiscent of modern-day adoptees who don’t have access to their original birth certificates because they were sealed. When I was in the archives, I was thinking, wow, we have really learned nothing. Because we ignore this history, we’ve learned nothing from it. And the thing that we should learn is that it is devastating to not have access to this information about yourself. It is extremely harmful. It’s harmful for the children. It’s harmful for the birth parents to have this severance.  Baby boxes are popular today, particularly among anti-abortion policymakers. What do you make of that? This is something that has existed since the Middle Ages in Europe. This was happening all over in Catholic countries, where we had this huge taboo against extramarital conception. And that’s what was happening in the United States, too. In the 1800s, Catholic organizations created these mechanisms for people to anonymously relinquish their children. We were doing this 200 years ago, and it had very bad outcomes, and we have not learned from that. When [baby boxes] come up in the news now, you don’t hear about the fact that these organizations existed in the past. Instead, it’s this happy story of, “Oh look, a firefighter has rescued this baby, and the mom must have been really evil, and it’s so nice that this baby’s gonna have a better life, and maybe the firefighter himself is going to adopt them. Oh, wow, great local news story.” Often, after natural disasters or wars, we hear about orphans who need help. What should we keep in mind as we hear about such situations going forward? Every time we have some kind of crisis—an example of this would be the earthquake in Haiti—there’s immediately this apparatus that pops up. It’s usually religious organizations, charities that want to scoop up children and make them adoptable. In general, these children are not orphans—they have either parents who can take care of them, who are still living, or larger family networks. 

On Wednesday, the nonprofit organization Disability Rights Florida sued the Florida Department of Children and Families, claiming that the state agency failed to collect data and compile comprehensive annual reports on the people it’s involuntarily committing. Florida’s Baker Act, which first passed in 1971, has required specific data—including the length of commitments and the diagnoses of those committed—to be collected since 2007. But it hasn’t been doing that, according to Disability Rights Florida. What available data does show, however, is that children with alleged mental health issues in Florida are involuntarily committed at higher rates than children in other states under similar laws. From 2020 to 2021, around one in five people involuntarily committed under Florida’s Baker Act was 18 or younger. In 2020, Florida involuntarily committed a 6-year-old with ADHD, a case that made national news. > Children in Florida are involuntarily committed at higher rates than children > in other states under similar laws. To be committed under the Florida’s Baker Act, which is officially known as the Florida Mental Health Act, three criteria need to be met: a person must refuse a voluntary exam, be believed to have a mental illness, and be deemed a threat to themselves or others. After an initial hold of up to 72 hours, the person can be forced to continue to have involuntary inpatient or outpatient treatment by a judge for up to six months, and this can be extended again at the judge’s discretion. “The Baker Act requires that DCF track important facts about how involuntary psychiatric care is used, like how long the average patient stays in a receiving facility,” said Sam Boyd, Southern Poverty Law Center senior attorney in a press release. SPLC and the Florida Health Justice Project are representing Disability Rights Florida in its lawsuit. “Its failure to do so interferes with Disability Rights Florida’s responsibility to protect and advocate for individuals subject to involuntary psychiatric examination.”  While the issues that Disability Rights Florida is alleging with data collection did not start under Governor Ron DeSantis, changes to the Baker Act have happened under him. DeSantis approved legislation this past June that would make it easier for police officers to put people on an involuntary psychiatric hold. DeSantis has previously claimed that involuntary commitments would stop mass shootings. However, research largely suggests that some mass shooters’ having a mental health diagnosis is more often coincidental than a contributing factor to such violence. A 2021 SPLC report found that the use of the Baker Act has outpaced the increase of mental health diagnoses in the state, especially for children. “This explosion in Baker Act use has coincided with a drastic increase in police presence in schools,” the report notes, “suggesting that the Baker Act is being used punitively in some cases, like juvenile arrests and incarceration, to target and remove children that teachers, administrators, and school police perceive as uncontrollable or undesirable.” SPLC highlighted that at Palm Beach schools during the 2019-2020 school year, 40 percent of students involuntarily committed were Black, despite making up 28 percent of the student population. Involuntary commitments may also play a role in how forthcoming people may be about their mental health. One small 2019 study, for instance, found that people were less likely to want to disclose concerning psychiatric symptoms, such as suicidal ideations, to a mental health provider after an involuntary commitment. The Florida Department of Children and Families did not reply to a request for comment on the lawsuit. The lawsuit, which the state has not responded to yet, requests that the court require the state agency to start collecting better data and compile annual reports.

When children in rural Hayward, Wisconsin, suffered abuse, the small community of 2,500 people was ready with an important resource: a child advocacy center with a team of experts prepared to guide them through the trauma. For nearly eight years, the Marshfield Child Advocacy Center satellite clinic was the only place in a more than 100-mile radius where law enforcement officers, prosecutors, medical professionals, and child protective service workers joined forces to support the child’s wellbeing and pursue a criminal case against the abuser. An average of 50 children a year have spoken here to a trauma-informed, specially trained forensic interviewer, with law enforcement listening from another room. The interviews were recorded, and often played later in court, to minimize the amount of times the children had to repeat details of abuse.  These were critical services for kids who may have otherwise ended up answering questions in a police interrogation room, or not reporting at all. But in October, the Hayward satellite office was forced to close its doors.  It was one of more than 960 child advocacy centers nationwide that have become essential for communities and law enforcement, and they rely heavily on public support to serve kids and families free of charge: Federal funds accounted for an average of 35 percent of centers’ budgets nationwide last year, according to the National Children’s Alliance.  Much of that money comes from a fund created by the 1984 Victims of Crime Act (VOCA), which redirects financial penalties levied in corporate criminal cases to domestic violence shelters, rape crisis centers, and child advocacy centers nationwide. But as prosecutions have declined, the government’s payout from that fund has been plummeting for years, throwing the already underresourced organizations that rely on them into disarray.  > “To have a law enforcement officer, for instance, or a social worker drive a > patient three hours for a forensic interview—chances are, that’s not going to > happen.” The final straw for the Hayward facility came this year, when it saw an 80 percent cut to its federal funding. Rural areas like Hayward “have limited resources all around, but when it comes to be child abuse and neglect, there’s obviously a paucity of those,” said Kristen Iniguez, director of the Marshfield Child Advocacy Center, which oversaw the Hayward satellite clinic from its headquarters about 150 miles southeast. “To have a law enforcement officer, for instance, or a social worker drive a patient three hours for a forensic interview—chances are, that’s not going to happen.” Now, this is the reality facing abused children near Hayward. As I recently reported in a months-long investigation, domestic violence shelters and rape crisis centers have seen devastating cuts to their hotlines and legal advocacy services, among others, as a result of the declining VOCA funds.  Leaders of centers in five states told me the VOCA cuts are also forcing them to cut personnel or left them unable to fill vacant positions, leading to longer wait times for children in need of services and burnout for existing staff. And even for organizations that have managed to avoid the worst-case scenario—closing their doors—they are bracing for more funding cuts to come.  The funds mostly come from financial penalties levied in corporate criminal cases. But as federal prosecutors have pursued more deferred and non-prosecution agreements—which allow defendants more time to pay up or avoid charges entirely if they cooperate with the government—deposits into the Crime Victims Fund have shrunk from about $6.6 billion in 2017 to $2.5 billion this year. (Because of caps set by Congress since 2000 to manage fluctuations in the fund, the amount of money disbursed has been even lower.) The funds are distributed to states based on their population size, and then to eligible programs.  Kids room with toys at the National Children’s Advocacy CenterCourtesy of the National Children’s Advocacy Center There have been efforts to shore up VOCA funds, but they’ve so far been inadequate. President Biden signed the VOCA Fix Act into law in 2021, diverting revenue from deferred and non-prosecution agreements to the Crime Victims Fund, but it has yet to fill the gap. The Crime Victims Fund Stabilization Act, a bipartisan bill introduced in both chambers of Congress this year, would divert additional funds collected through the False Claims Act, which penalizes defrauding of the government. Since fiscal year 2017, $1.7 billion from the False Claims Act has gone into the General Fund of the Treasury—money that could otherwise go into the Crime Victims Fund under the new bill. But the prospect of the bill becoming law before the end of this session looks increasingly unlikely. More cuts without a solution enacted at the federal level means that future child abuse victims like those in rural northern Wisconsin will be less likely to see their cases prosecuted and to have a sense of closure, according to Iniguez.  “It’s kind of just unfair for the victim—and a child victim, at that,” she said. While the House version of the bill introduced by Missouri Republican Rep. Ann Wagner now has nearly 200 bipartisan co-sponsors, it hasn’t yet gotten a needed committee hearing. Spokespeople for House Judiciary Committee Chair Jim Jordan (R-Ohio) and House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-La.) didn’t respond to questions.  Wisconsin’s GOP Rep. Tom Tiffany, whose district includes both Hayward and Marshfield, has not signed on to support the bill. His office did not respond to requests for comment. Sen. Tammy Baldwin (D-Wisc.) supports the Senate bill and is waiting to be added as a co-sponsor, according to a spokesperson. Wisconsin’s Republican senator, Ron Johnson, has not signed on and did not respond to a request for comment. That bill, too, is still waiting for a committee hearing. > “My fear is that with the lack of funding, more and more CACs are going to be > forced into making really difficult decisions about their ability to continue > providing services, and to what degree in their communities—it’s a crisis.” While politicians in DC dawdle, advocates fear the worst. Last year, VOCA funds supported more than 1,000 child abuse service organizations, according to DOJ data; support for victims of child sexual and physical abuse and neglect were among the most common services the funds supported, that data also shows. “Millions of victims, including abused children and battered women, will be left without access to safety, justice and healing,” more than 700 prosecutors wrote in a letter to Congress earlier this year, urging them to act. As Chris Newlin, the CEO of the National Children’s Advocacy Center, the first-ever child advocacy center, told me, “My fear is that with the lack of funding, more and more CACs are going to be forced into making really difficult decisions about their ability to continue providing services, and to what degree in their communities—it’s a crisis.” The National Children’s Advocacy Center campusCourtesy of the National Children’s Advocacy Center The hallmark of child advocacy centers, experts say, is the multidisciplinary team—the collaboration among the group of officials who determine how to best support the child going forward.  The National Children’s Advocacy Center was established in Huntsville in 1985 with the help of former Democratic Rep. Bud Cramer, who saw firsthand how the system failed child abuse victims during his time as district attorney of Madison County. In a 2013 column for Roll Call, Cramer wrote that he realized the system needed an overhaul when the grandmother of a child abuse victim told him the girl had to recount her allegations of abuse 11 different times during the course of his prosecution. “I had to ask myself, why aren’t we talking to each other—social workers, law enforcement, prosecutors and victims advocates? We all touched the case at some point, but had yet to coordinate any part of the investigation,” Cramer wrote. “So, I decided to change that.”  This approach has proven effective: Research has shown that child advocacy centers lead to higher rates of felony prosecutions of child sexual abuse, faster processing of cases, and greater satisfaction among both children and their caregivers. The goal is always to ensure “that that child is always the first priority in that room, and that their needs for comfort and safety guide that process,” says Emily Perry, a forensic interviewer in Indiana. Susie’s Place—the child advocacy center she founded in 2009, which now has three locations throughout Indiana—is designed to feel like a cozy living room, outfitted with couches, toys, televisions, and books. In the interview room, kids sit in overstuffed armchairs with weighted blankets and an easel in between them and the forensic interviewer. (Drawing is among the techniques used to elicit information from kids.)  This sense of comfort is the point, and a personal priority for Perry, who has seen firsthand how victims struggle without the support offered by the centers. As a child protective service worker in the 1990s, Perry recalls walking a 5-year-old child sexual abuse survivor through the halls of a sheriff’s department—housed in the same building as the local jail—to a sterile detective’s interrogation room to be interviewed by someone without specialized training about their experience of abuse. “I knew that the trauma of the investigation,” she says, “was sometimes more harmful than the abuse itself.” Now, at centers like Susie’s Place, “we can gather reliable information to guide an investigation, but also springboard [children] into healing and recovery while that’s happening,” she adds.  Emily Perry founded the child advocacy center Susie’s Place in 2009, and it now has three locations throughout Indiana. Courtesy of Emily Perry Rooms at Susie’s Place are designed to make children feel comfortable when they speak to a forensic interviewer.Courtesy of Emily Perry The work of these professionals doesn’t end with the forensic interviews. They often also offer medical exams conducted by child abuse pediatricians, mental health counseling, and advocates, who explain the criminal justice process and help connect kids and families with other resources.  Perry said she hasn’t had to slash her facility’s services yet, as the state has done a good job minimizing the impact of the declining funds. But at some child advocacy centers, even additional state support hasn’t prevented casualties. In West Virginia, federal VOCA funds have dropped 58 percent since 2017, even as the need is rising. Last year, more than 4,800 children in West Virginia received services from a child advocacy center for the first time—a 10 percent increase compared to the previous five years, according to the statewide child advocacy network. Maureen Runyon, coordinator of the child advocacy center at Charleston Area Medical Center Women and Children’s Hospital, lost one of her three VOCA-funded advocates last month and she is not planning to rehire due to the uncertain funding picture. Even though the West Virginia legislature allocated funds to offset the VOCA cuts over the last several years, there’s no guarantee they’ll do it again next year, when the state’s 21 child advocacy centers are expected to face a $2.5 million cut. Runyon expects the impacts of losing an advocate will be felt by other staff who have to pick up the slack—and by the 450 children they serve on average each year, whose families will have to wait longer for the help an advocate offers. “At the end of the day, helping this child get what they need so they can grow up and be an emotionally healthy adult is the most important thing we do,” she said, “and our advocates are the ones who are primarily responsible for trying to make sure that happens.”  Maureen Runyon, coordinator of the child advocacy center at Charleston Area Medical Center Women and Children’s Hospital.Courtesy of Maureen Runyon The medical exam room at the Charleston Area Medical Center Women and Children’s Hospital’s child advocacy centerCourtesy of Maureen Runyon Only one of West Virginia’s federal lawmakers, Republican Rep. Carol Miller, has supported the bill. Neither of West Virginia’s senators—Republican Shelley Capito and outgoing Independent Joe Manchin—have signed on to the Crime Victims Fund Stabilization Act; nor has Republican Rep. Alexander Mooney. Their offices did not respond to requests for comment.   Cuts to federal funding for child advocacy centers in Alabama have “created a mass exodus” of specially trained staff from the state’s three dozen centers, said Lynn Scott, executive director of the Alabama Network of Children’s Advocacy Centers. And while the state has provided some funding to support the centers, it has not kept pace with the 57 percent drop in VOCA funds the state received since 2017, Scott says.  Since Scott joined the statewide group in 2019, half of Alabama’s executive directors have left their positions, mostly “due to the burnout and stress of having to do multiple roles because the funding for direct services has been cut.” Two centers have not rehired leaders, she said, and all centers have seen increases in wait times for forensic interviews and counseling sessions and even higher caseloads. Further cuts, Scott added, “would really close some doors”—likely at a half dozen or so centers in rural areas of the state, she believes.  Yet support for new funding from the state’s federal lawmakers has been mixed. Four of the state’s seven House representatives and GOP Sen. Tommy Tuberville are supporting the bills. Alabama’s other Republican senator, Katie Britt, frequently advocates for “protecting kids,” including, famously, through misrepresenting an anecdote about a child sex-trafficking victim during the State of the Union rebuttal. But she has yet to sign on, and a spokesperson did not respond to repeated inquiries about why.  To advocates like Scott, the inaction is confounding. Fighting “child abuse is bipartisan,” she said. Increasing funding, she added, “should be an easy ‘yes.’” The National Children’s Advocacy Center was established in Huntsville, Alabama in 1985, and it became the model for child advocacy centers nationwide.Courtesy of the National Children’s Advocacy Center When I asked advocates to share their message for lawmakers about the need to support these services, several emphasized that early intervention can reduce the likelihood that child abuse victims will face challenges later in life, including substance abuse, post-traumatic stress disorder, and becoming perpetrators of violence themselves. “We can’t keep children from being abused at a child advocacy center,” said Runyon from West Virginia, “but once they are, we’re their best chance for having good quality intervention, and having a healthier, happier adulthood.” Even if the Crime Victims Fund Stabilization Act were to pass Congress this session, advocates say it would not solve the entirety of the funding crisis facing the centers: The funding mechanisms still rely on unpredictable criminal penalties. It would take some time before centers saw the increased funds. And the bill is only written to be valid through 2029. “This stabilization bill is just a band aid,” Perry, from Indiana, says. “If there isn’t more of a steady, consistent flow of funds into the Crime Victims Fund, then we’re just going to be revisiting this time and time again.” Some state and local governments have tried to offset the federal funding cuts for their local centers, but many of those appropriations are temporary, and the facilities can’t plan for them to continue. There are a couple notable exceptions: One is Maryland, where officials passed a law last year compelling the state to supplement federal VOCA funds to ensure $60 million is available annually. Wendy Myers, executive director of the Maryland Children’s Alliance, which represents two dozen centers, said the new law helps “stabilize services for the most vulnerable Marylanders, including child victims of abuse,” and that the funds support training for forensic interviewers, trauma therapists, and language translation for direct services at all child advocacy centers across the state. Another exception is Colorado: The state passed a ballot measure last month that will provide tens of millions of dollars annually to 19 child advocacy centers and other VOCA-funded organizations through a 6.5 percent excise tax on firearms and ammunition.  Forensic interview room at the National Children’s Advocacy CenterCourtesy of the National Children’s Advocacy Center Advocates say these kinds of long-term solutions are necessary to stabilize needed funding—but federal and state lawmakers largely continue to punt the issue. Biden’s budget recommended a $7.3 billion infusion into the Crime Victims Fund, but Congress has so far left it out of the relevant appropriations bill. As the National Children’s Alliance pointed out in its brief on VOCA cuts, private donors are unreliable, and relying on fundraising events leads to more overhead costs for nonprofits. “No other source offers the stability and scale that federal funding can provide for critical services for child crime victims,” the brief says of VOCA.  In the meantime, children are suffering without services, and centers in need are losing qualified staff. Iniguez, from the Marshfield CAC in Wisconsin, will leave the state to run a center in Ohio in the new year, she said. Ohio’s last federal award was almost double Wisconsin’s—and Iniguez hopes that means she won’t have to fight as hard to provide the services children need. “The community I’m going to,” Iniguez said, “is very responsive to the needs of children who have been victimized.” 

This story was originally published by Inside Climate News and is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration. A new study delving the emotional and psychological impact of climate change on 16,000 young Americans provides crucial empirical evidence for what until now “we’ve been relying on our intuition to tell us,” the study’s first author says. A clear majority of young Americans between the ages of 16 and 25 are either very, or extremely, worried.  Eric Lewandowski, a psychologist at New York University, focuses on the mental and emotional effects of climate change and co-authored a 2021 paper on the subject but still felt there was more to be studied in the United States.  His new paper, “Climate emotions, thoughts, and plans among US adolescents and young adults: a cross-sectional descriptive survey and analysis by political party identification and self-reported exposure to severe weather events,” was published October 17 in The Lancet Planetary Health. The bottom line nationally: Young people are overwhelmingly concerned about climate change. The study found that nearly 60 percent of respondents said they were either very or extremely worried when asked, “How worried, if at all, are you about climate change and its impacts on people and the planet?” and more than 85 percent said they experience some level of climate anxiety. > “It was very striking” that endorsement of climate issues was above 50 percent > no matter political affiliation.  “This was a chance, in such a big country, to try to get a better feel across the country, where the impacts of climate change are so heterogeneous, to try to get a feel for the emotional and psychological impacts of climate change,” said Lewandowski.  To get a sense of how both geography and politics impact the perceived mental toll of climate change, the study compiled survey data on approximately 400 youths from each state or state cluster (states with smaller populations and similar geography and political landscapes were grouped together during data analysis, with the exception of Hawaii which had a sample size of around 100, but was considered too dissimilar from other states to be clustered). Though this study still only provides an “emerging picture” of the mental impact of climate change on American youth, it provides crucial empirical evidence for what until now “we’ve been relying on our intuition to tell us about the emotional and psychological impact of climate change,” said Lewandowski.  There was similarity in responses across dramatically different geo-political regions of the country. The responses never differed by more than 25 percent across all surveyed populations.  The survey also tracked the emotional and psychological impact of climate change across the political spectrum. “Endorsement was high regardless of political identification, and yes, it was lower in the Republican group…One of the widely recognized features of thinking about climate change in this country is the political divide, and that’s also documented in the research,” said Lewandowski.  “It was very striking,” he said, that endorsement of climate issues was above 50 percent no matter political affiliation.  “We also asked people to report which of a range of seven severe weather events they had experienced in the area where they lived,” said Lewandowski. “As people endorsed or reported that their area had experienced more and more of these things, there was correlated increased distress and increased desire for action.” > “Everyone’s worried about this, and so it’s like, what does that mean for > policy outcomes in places like Texas or Missouri or Florida.” On both a hopeful and tragic note, the slope of that increase in distress and calls for action, stayed static between people of different party identification. “It really seems that this increase is happening, and we suggest the increase will happen across the political spectrum as there are more and more impacts,” said Lewandowski. To Olivia Ferraro, a 25-year-old climate activist and member of the Climate Mental Health Network Gen Z advisory board who lives and works in New York City, this is just more evidence of right wing politicians being out of touch with their Gen Z constituents.  This is exciting news to Ferraro. “Many of those respondents might not have ever participated in the democratic process before. So it’s very encouraging to see to me that it’s not really a partisan issue for young people,” said Ferraro. “Everyone’s worried about this, and so it’s like, what does that mean for policy outcomes in places like Texas or Missouri or Florida over the next five to 10 years, as these young people age into voting age groups?” Overall Ferraro found the study results validating. For her, climate change is not just terrifying, but also personal. In 2022, Ferraro found herself unhealthily obsessed with climate change while feeling like she could do nothing after taking a deep dive into the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) report on the comprehensive state of the climate and the outlook of climate change. Then she got heat stroke one summer afternoon while on vacation in Florida.  “I just passed out,” said Ferraro, who had to be taken to the hospital by ambulance and received stitches for a head wound. “It was very stressful, and I was just existing in the hot weather. I wasn’t even doing anything particularly exerting,” she said. Given her own experience, she understands how going through an extreme weather event can be a catalyzing moment. “All of these factors together over months were a cocktail of distress,” she said.  She expects concern over climate will only grow as more people feel the impact of extreme weather first hand. Ferraro just hopes that the effects of climate exposure on increased calls for action carries across generations. “I feel like data won’t be what changes the minds of older generations,” said Ferraro. “I honestly think that a lot of the empathy and understanding about how distressing climate experiences are will most likely come from a close personal connection, who is thoughtful enough to share a first hand experience, or someone living through a serious weather event.”  Caroline Hickman, a researcher and senior lecturer at the University of Bath, welcomes the latest research on climate change and young people in the US.  Much of the current data on regional variation in youth response to climate change comes from the 2021 paper she, Lewandowski, and numerous other authors published in The Lancet. One thing Hickman wishes would get more attention is the way climate distress waxes and wanes at various stages of life. When the results of the 2020 British Association of Counseling and Psychotherapy survey on the mental health impact of climate change first came out, she was struck by how much concern over climate change decreased during midlife. While approximately 60 percent of people aged 16 to 34 and around 55 percent of people over the age of 55 experience some level of climate distress, only 44 percent of people aged 45 to 54 experienced any form of climate distress. While we can speculate, said Hickman, “You could say, midlife, you’re busy trying to pay the mortgage…maybe getting divorced, separated, maybe trying to keep your head above water financially, right? You’ve got a lot of pressure all around from every direction, at midlife, particularly generationally, you’re taking care of aging parents and children, so you’re sandwiched.” But, she said, “the trouble is that is also the age of most industry CEOs and politicians, right? These are the people with the power to do something about this.” Saahitya Uppalapati, a PhD student and climate communications researcher at George Mason University in Virginia, thinks the climate crisis has a PR problem. “People think, ‘Oh, it’s a luxury to be concerned about [the climate], but that’s not true,” she said.  Her research has shown that it’s “people from Gen Z, with fewer economic resources and people of color who are experiencing the highest levels of climate distress,” especially when compared to the level of climate distress among “white Boomers.” Uppalapati’s research has shown that 3 percent of Americans are already experiencing clinically significant climate anxiety, and 3 percent are so distraught over climate change, they meet the diagnostic criteria for depression.  While this 3 percent is already a significant number of Americans, the percentage of Latino Americans experiencing climate anxiety and depression is much higher, with 10 percent reporting clinically significant anxiety and 10 percent reporting climate triggered depression.  This holds true across other vulnerable communities. “There’s also some research to say that they’re also more likely to report that they’re involved in climate change activism, and more environmentally engaged than white people, and they also feel more confident about taking action,” said Uppalapati. “I think the historical and the systemic challenges that people of color have experienced, be it wider situations that have been exacerbated by climate change, like living close to highways because of zoning and the heat that comes with it, I think that has really fostered a sense of concern among people of color. You tend to see that they’re more concerned and anxious and depressed about it, but they’re also more engaged.” Uppalapati’s work is the first of its kind. By modifying some of the existing diagnostic screening questions, she was able to use well established screening criteria for anxiety and depression, but specifically geared toward climate change. The true number of people experiencing climate-triggered anxiety and depression may be much higher, said Uppalapati. “I think there’s hesitation to use that word [climate], but people might be experiencing it and not realize it, especially if they’re hesitant or reluctant to acknowledge climate change.” “It’s okay to have some level of anxiety and depression. It’s a very normal response, but we don’t want it to get to a stage where it truly impedes your life. And we saw that over 3 percent are likely experiencing distress that is limiting their everyday life. That’s concerning, and it’s important that they provide mental health resources,” said Uppalapati. That said, some climate distress is beneficial for climate action. Uppalapati co-authored another paper that showed the people who are experiencing the most climate distress are the ones most likely to take action. Another forthcoming paper looks at the connection between race, climate distress, and climate action.  “You can’t shake off the fact that exposure to higher climate harms and social inequities stem from some level of systemic racism, And I just think it’s interesting that despite having the highest exposure, they’re also the people who are doing the most,” said Uppalapati. “They’re able to channel that distress into action.” An education reporter turned climate organizer, Anya Kamenetz, of the Climate Mental Health Network, knows the importance of a good communication tool in helping gauge the emotional toll climate change is taking on the young—and old. That was the idea behind the so-called climate emotions wheel, which Kamenetz created with the Network to help find new ways for people to voice their feelings around the climate crisis.  A riff on the traditional emotions wheel common to therapists the world over, the climate emotions wheel features the 27 emotions most commonly associated with climate change. Laid out in a tiered rainbow pattern, there are four core emotions— anger, positivity, fear, and sadness—with secondary feelings radiating off of the central emotions. The 23 secondary emotions range from inspiration to indignation with everything from loneliness to panic to the old standby, hope in between.  The wheel is available under a Creative Commons license, so anyone can use it. Since its creation a year ago, “it’s traveled all over the world. It’s been translated by volunteers into 15 languages. It’s been presented in classrooms and libraries. It was presented at the last UN conference at the cultural pavilion, and at a talk there,” said Kamenetz.  There is even an emoji climate emotions wheel. Designed to be used with small children experiencing climate distress, the emoji wheel has since become a hit with people of all ages.  The climate emotions wheel features the 27 emotions most commonly associated with climate change. Climate Mental Health Network Panu Pihkala, the Finnish interdisciplinary environmental studies researcher whose work the wheel is based on, was actually hoping to create something like the climate emotions wheel when he set out to work on his 2022 paper Toward a Taxonomy of Climate Emotions. But it was “so complicated and I was so busy that I never did it. So I was very glad that somebody was doing it, and I enjoyed the cooperation!” said Pihkala, who was a member of the working group that translated his paper into the climate emotions wheel.  In addition to trying to identify what feelings are most commonly associated with climate change, in his 2022 study, Pihkala also asked about people’s self recognition of stronger, more psychosomatic symptoms. But, he said, “a major issue in this kind of research is that it may be difficult for people, first of all, to recognize what they are feeling at all. And second, to recognize what they are feeling exactly in relation to climate change.” This emotional disconnect can cause people to shy away from acknowledging their feelings and taking any subsequent action on climate change, especially when they stem from political alignment or potential for social alienation.  “Fundamentally, the whole range of emotions can be constructive if the energy in these emotions becomes channeled in constructive ways,” said Pihkala. “For example, guilt can lead people to just distance themselves problematically from these issues, or it can lead people to change their ways.”