Urban Matters: When Child Welfare Intrusion Makes Reproductive Freedom and Illusion

Our Fallon Speaker, Family Defense attorney, and Erin Cloud co-wrote an op-ed advocating for rethinking prevention and childcare advocacy.

“Change must happen now. We can start by rejecting the notion that maternal “risk” can be predicted by poverty or Child Protective Services data. In both the child protective and criminal legal systems, there is a push to define risk through assessment tools to predict safety; in child welfare, the tool is named predictive analytics. Stories like Mary’s remind us that child protective “histories” cannot be reduced to algorithms, and that flagging people like Mary can have disastrous effects.”

Read the full op-ed here