Hospitals across the United States routinely drug test people coming in to give birth, using pee-in-a-cup tests that are notoriously imprecise. As a result, many parents face child welfare services investigations, and thousands of them are also referred to police and prosecutors every year — even in many cases where there’s no finding of abuse or neglect.
The Marshall Project’s reporters Shoshana Walter and Jill Castellano, in collaboration with CBS Sunday Morning correspondent Erin Moriarty and producer Sari Aviv, investigated how states across the country are funneling thousands of new parents to law enforcement. They also found that these referrals disproportionately affect mothers of Black newborns.
Watch the CBS Sunday Morning investigation here and read our investigative series.
