QAO: And outside of the pregnant women or women who had had children, who are directly affected by this law, you interviewed some people who just live in Tennessee or who are drug users in Tennessee and aren’t directly affected by this law perhaps. Why did you feel it was important to talk to all of those other people?
RG: Well, because this isn’t a complete vacuum. Sometimes these laws happen, and it’s as if nothing like this has ever happened before, but for the people who live lives who are impacted by them, it’s just another part of a much longer term thing. So if you talk to someone who had a baby four years ago in Tennessee, and who was a heroin user, about her decisionmaking, I think that’s important context, and I wanted to really have the opinions of people who use drugs that are impacted and have their expertise matter and not just the expertise of the service providers and then the lived experience, individual experience of the people. I feel like that’s a kind of journalistic dichotomy that people do where some people have the knowledge and other people have the story and I wanted to get the knowledge from people who had lived it.
QAO: This story has gotten a lot of attention, and there’s been a lot of people talking about it and talking to you two about reporting the story. How do you feel about the reception of the story and how do you think you’ll be doing any follow up work?
RL: I don’t know; we have gotten a lot of attention for it especially in our journalism circles, and we spoke on the radio a little bit about it here in New York. I think this story is worth following up on. Just this week Jamillah Falls — one of the women we wrote about — went to prison — I think Rosie can speak to this a little bit more.
RG: She said she would rather go to prison than finish out this drug court program that we wrote about in the article which is really important to know. She’s going to be in prison now for four years because she had a probation violation as well. Her son — her lawyer tells me her son is likely to be — you know, her parental rights will be terminated so it’s very profound.
RL: And I think that’s another angle of it too, is that what happens after the — you know the women are arrested, then what happens, are they going to end up in jail, how many go to jail, how many go through treatment? Doing that breakdown is a lot more work for sure.
RG: And what do they think of everything — I mean I think that’s what gets lost so much, often. Here’s a mug shot, and here’s what happened, but what is actually that person who is the subject of the story actually make of it all? So I’m really curious what Jamillah is thinking right now.
RL: There’s that and there’s also what happens to their children. Children are taken away from their mothers, and they’re only a few weeks old. And the mom’s parental rights get terminated because she can’t get through an essentially impossible drug treatment program, so I think there’s definitely follow-ups to be done.
RG: There’s also the bigger sort of story — if you crunch the numbers after a year or two you’ll find, I’m sure or I would expect — I shouldn’t speculate but even if you crunch the numbers now there are many many NAS [neonatal abstinence syndrome] births, and there are only a few women prosecuted, but they’re all poor, they’re disproportionately women of color, and we know that there are many more women, white women and women with money who are giving birth in the exact same way — NAS births, the exact same crime — but they’re not being prosecuted and their kids are probably fine and they’re all probably fine. So, if you compare down the line the women who have been arrested and their fate and the women who have been driven underground and their fate, versus the women who will get a pass and their fate, in five years, I think you’ll see very very different lives. But again, no surprise there.
QAO: Do you want to add anything that you felt was important to know about the process of this story?
RL: The I-Fund was great for this — seriously — we had a lot of support from [Investigative Fund editor] Sarah Blustain throughout. But she was especially instrumental in the first few weeks, when we were starting our research and planning our trip in Tennessee and checking in with us and helping us kind of visualize, what kind of information exactly do we need to get in this short amount of time and how are we going to get it?
RG: Absolutely, she made it possible for us to do this story because she believed in the story, she helped us organize our plan so we could actually get something — because it would have been really easy to go there and get nothing. And she accepted what we got and trusted us to keep getting more and getting more, building more. I think this kind of journalism, first of all, costs a lot of money, takes a lot of time, and it requires support, editorial support, and that kind of moral support. And I think not a lot of places understand that; they’re happy to aggregate it in 15 minutes but it cost thousands of dollars to report out, and many, many, many, many hours. We’re very grateful that there’s a place that understands that that’s what it takes.
RL: And to add to that, CUNY J-School also: we had a lot of support from professors, our professors there. That said, I think this story would have been — I’m not going to say impossible but it would have been — very, very difficult to compile everything and report everything and just figure out, structurally, everything that we had to figure out alone. It took a lot of people. It definitely wasn’t just me and Rosie, it definitely took a lot of people to get this story done.
This interview has been edited and condensed.