BJP NYC 10: How the Child Welfare System Undermines Pregnant People and Families with Erin Miles Cloud

Season 1 Episode 10 features an interview with Erin Miles Cloud: a lawyer and a mother, as well as the Co-Director and Co-Founder of Movement for Family Power. In this week’s episode we do a deep dive into the womb to foster care pipeline and the ways in which hospitals and social workers are complicit in criminalizing poor parents and people who use drugs. We get into the relationship between the police department and child welfare services, and how the child welfare system incentivizes the separation of families.

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Erin Miles Cloud’s Bio:
Erin Miles Cloud is the co-director/co-founder of Movement for Family Power, and a former family defense public defender. She is  Baltimore born, and Bronx living.  She is Black mother of two beautiful children. 

References During the Episode:

• Movement for Family Power’s Ground Zero Report
• Follow Movement for Family Power on Facebook, Twitter and Instagram
• BBC documentary “Guinea Pig Kids: ARV Babies in New York City”

Questions to Consider After the Episode:

• How can we better support pregnant people and parents who are poor? Who use drugs and substances? 
• When we consider abolition of police, we need to also consider all of the ways that police are embedded in social welfare programs. And how social welfare programs mimic the values and behaviors of police. 

Created and Hosted by Taja Lindley
Produced by Colored Girls Hustle
Music, Soundscape and Audio Engineering by Emma Alabaster

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For more information visit BirthJustice.nyc

This podcast is made possible, in part, by the Narrative Power Stipend - a grant funded by Forward Together for members of Echoing Ida.