Join us for a Black Mothers March Teach-In on March 30th, Lifting the Veil: The Fight for Community Access to Family Policing Courts.
RSVP: bit.ly/BMM-courtaccess ✊🏾 Tap in to explore the power & necessity of community access to family policing courts to build community defense ecosystems.
2026 marks 5 years of the #BlackMothersMarch to end family policing! Join us on Mother’s Day (May 10) in Washington, DC to fight for a future where Black mamas & families can thrive.
Learn more, RSVP, get organizing tools, & support the march: BlackMothersMarch.com ✊🏾
8/ To protect against copaganda-style reporting and produce more accurate, nuanced coverage of the family policing system, check out our new guide: justjournalism.org/page/child-welfare
7/ Even fewer highlight the support-based approaches–like increased access to public benefits, housing, and childcare–proven to be more effective at keeping families safe and together.
6/ Too few news articles examine how poverty is mislabeled as child abuse and neglect, or the immense harm inflicted on children and parents by the family policing system itself.
5/ This coverage shifts attention away from structural harms–like poverty, racism, and state violence–and trains the public to see surveillance and family separation, especially of BIPOC and marginalized families, as child safety.
4/ Family policing copaganda relies on disproportionate, sensationalized news coverage of rare child abuse tragedies and so-called foster or adoption “success stories.”
3/ Family policing copaganda works the same way.
It frames the family policing system (or the “child welfare” system) as benevolent and necessary, while framing parents who are investigated and separated from their children as inherently abusive, neglectful, or unfit.
2/ Copaganda (cop propaganda) frames police as good and heroic, while framing the people they target as inherently dangerous and deserving of punishment.
So you’ve heard of copaganda? Let’s talk about family policing copaganda. 🧵
Are you a journalist covering the family policing system (aka "child welfare")? 🗞️
Our new guide w/ Center for Just Journalism, @civrightscorps.bsky.social, & partners helps journalists produce nuanced coverage & protect against copaganda-style reporting.
➡️ justjournalism.org/page/child-welfare ⬅️
If we are serious about protecting children, we have to get serious about investing in families–and lead with facts, not fiction. Read the full study by Dr. Frank Edwards, Dr. Robert Apel, and Dr. Kelley Fong: bit.ly/jama-mortality-rates
5/5
In reality, the system sensationalizes tragic child deaths to prop up a failed system despite that the vast majority of family policing cases are NOT for allegations of abuse. & in fact when tragedies happen, the system often rushes to judgement, misidentifying the cause of child fatalities.
4/5
These findings challenge fear-based assumptions that shrinking the foster system puts children at greater risk–as well as false claims that child fatality rates could be reduced if only the family police separated *more* families.
3/5
Researchers examined 10 years of data from all 50 states and here’s what they found: child deaths from maltreatment do not decrease when states remove more children into the foster system, nor do they increase when states remove fewer children.
2/5
Don’t be fooled by fearmongers who weaponize child fatalities to fuel family separation. A major new study challenges their false narratives. ⬇️
1/5
Happy Black Futures Month from Movement for Family Power!
To tap in with us through this month & beyond, join Movement Syncs, MFP’s monthly mass movement calls for family policing abolitionists: bit.ly/movement-syncs 💫
How the Foster System Has Become Ground Zero for the Drug War: bit.ly/MFP-groundzero
Drug Tests Are Not Parenting Tests: bit.ly/MFP-drugtest
The Intersecting Politics of Abortion, Pregnancy, & Family Policing w/ Dorothy Roberts: bit.ly/roberts-FPS
Hands Off Mamas: Disrupting the Criminalization of Birthing People Who Use Drugs: bit.ly/MFP-handsoff
Interested in learning more about where abortion criminalization meets the war on drugs meets family policing? Check out our resources ⬇️
It’s never been about the drugs. It’s never been about the kids. It’s ALWAYS been about restricting bodily autonomy.
This is why we must unapologetically center pregnant people who use drugs in our fight for reproductive justice.
Since the fall of Roe, 13 states have enacted a complete abortion ban.
More than 9 in 10 cases of pregnancy criminalization and over 50% of newborn family separations by the family police include allegations of substance use.
Charging people with ‘child abuse’ for using drugs while pregnant normalized the concept of fetal personhood & the subordination of pregnant people–helping lay the groundwork for the eventual fall of Roe v. Wade in 2022.
By then, the debunked “crack baby” myth had already ignited the rise of pregnancy criminalization.
Now, pregnant people suspected of using drugs were being arrested, jailed, and charged with civil and criminal child abuse. Moments after birth, their babies were snatched into the foster system.
Years later, the “crack baby” myth was thoroughly debunked.
Researchers found no evidence that exposure to crack cocaine in the womb led to the long-term harms sensationalized by the government and media.
And behind every baby was a mother portrayed as selfish, morally corrupt, & evil.
In the 1980s and 90s, the government and media flooded the airwaves with images of Black pregnant people using crack cocaine and giving birth to so-called “crack babies,”
portrayed as irreparably damaged, future “super predators,” and drains on public resources.
At first, fetal personhood was a fringe theory that did not pose a meaningful threat.
...until the drug war’s racist myth of a “crack baby epidemic” pushed fetal personhood to the mainstream.
By defining a fetus as a person, fetal personhood seeks to equate abortion with murder & behaviors during pregnancy as child abuse.
53 years ago today, Roe v. Wade recognized a constitutional right to abortion.
That right did not ensure access to abortion care, but what followed were immediate efforts to codify the theory of fetal personhood.
