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Medications like Suboxone help pregnant women safely treat addiction. But in many states, taking them can trigger investigations by child welfare agencies that separate mothers from their newborns. This week, we tell the story of one young mother who thought she was doing the right thing by taking her prescription, only to be reported to the state of Arizona and investigated for child abuse and neglect. 

Reveal’s Shoshana Walter starts off by introducing us to Jade Dass, who was taking Suboxone to treat her addiction to opioids before she became pregnant. Scientific studies and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention say that taking addiction treatment medications, such as Suboxone and methadone, during pregnancy leads to the best outcomes for both mothers and babies. But after Dass delivered a healthy daughter, the hospital reported her to the Arizona Department of Child Safety. 

Next, Walter explores why women like Dass are being investigated for using addiction-treatment medications during pregnancy. In response to the crack and opioid epidemics, state and federal legislators enacted laws that inadvertently created a dragnet for women like Dass who are following a doctor’s orders to treat addiction. To understand the scope of the dragnet, Walter, data reporter Melissa Lewis and a team of Reveal researchers and lawyers filed 100 public records requests, putting together the first-ever tally of how often women are reported to child welfare agencies for taking prescription drugs during pregnancy. 

We close the hour by rejoining Dass as she grapples with a judge’s decision to put her baby in foster care. Dass and her boyfriend make a desperate move to try and keep their family together. 

For more about Jade Dass and other mothers facing investigation for taking medication assisted treatment, read Shoshana Walter’s investigation in collaboration with the New York Times Magazine.


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From book bans to uproar over critical race theory, American classrooms have been on the front lines of the culture war. And there’s one state that’s leading the charge.

In Florida, Gov. Ron DeSantis has championed several laws affecting education, from prohibitions on classroom instruction about sexual orientation or gender identity to blocks on funding for diversity, equity and inclusion initiatives at state colleges. He’s also targeted one the state’s most liberal and academically rigorous institutions: New College of Florida.

In January, DeSantis’ chief of staff told National Review, “It is our hope that New College of Florida will become Florida’s classical college, more along the lines of a Hillsdale of the South.” The comment sparked widespread controversy because Hillsdale College is a private Christian school in Michigan, and New College is the state’s public honors college.

That same month, DeSantis appointed multiple new trustees to the board, who began seizing control of New College almost immediately. In their first meeting, trustees ousted the college’s president and legal counsel and selected a new board chair, a DeSantis appointee. And they set in motion a plan to terminate the school’s diversity officer.

Since then, a pitched battle has been playing out, with DeSantis and his appointees on one side and students and faculty on the other. In this episode of Reveal, we partner with freelance reporter and filmmaker Sam Greenspan, who is a graduate of New College, to examine the changes taking place there. Greenspan follows journalists at the Catalyst, the student newspaper, as they cover the rapid-fire changes that are throwing the future of the college into uncertainty. 

To close the show, host Al Letson interviews Democratic Florida Rep. Angie Nixon about her opposition to many of the governor’s recent policies and the effects she thinks they’ll have on students and educators in the state.


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“Get a job!” That sums up our current cash welfare system in a nutshell. Ever since so-called welfare reform in the 1990s, the system has been based on the idea that welfare recipients must be doing some kind of work or job-readiness activity to receive government assistance. It’s a system that plays on what Americans have long wanted to believe – that all it takes to move out of poverty is a can-do attitude and hard work. 

Now, there is a growing chorus of politicians who argue that even more programs that help people in need should have more and tougher work requirements attached. Recently, Republicans successfully fought to create new work requirements for food assistance under the debt ceiling deal.  

In this episode, Reveal partners with The Uncertain Hour podcast from Marketplace to explore the lucrative industry built on welfare-to-work policies. Critics say these for-profit welfare companies have cultivated their own cycle of dependency on the federal government. Krissy Clark from The Uncertain Hour takes listeners into America’s welfare-to-work system.

We meet a struggling mother of two in Milwaukee who hits hard times and turns to a local welfare office for help – a welfare office outsourced to a private for-profit company. Inside, staff preach the power of work, place people into unpaid “work experience” and enforce work requirements for welfare recipients, all in the name of teaching self-sufficiency. But who’s set to benefit most, that struggling mother or the for-profit company she turned to?

Then, Clark has a frank conversation with the founder of America Works, one of the first for-profit welfare-to-work companies in the country.

It’s been nearly one year since the U.S. Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade, the landmark ruling that protected abortion rights for half a century. Many states have passed laws severely restricting or banning abortion. And in states like Texas, pregnant patients are being put in peril. 

Freelance journalist Sophie Novack reports on the hard decisions Texas doctors and nurses are making in the aftermath of the state’s ban. Providers are facing impossible choices when it comes to caring for pregnant patients with medical complications. Some fear that performing an abortion, even to save the life of a mother, could lead to criminal prosecution. 

Reveal reporter Laura C. Morel has spent the last year investigating anti-abortion crisis pregnancy centers. Now that abortions are severely restricted or banned in much of the country, these centers are trying to fill some of the health care gap that’s emerged in conservative areas. In states that continue to allow abortions, crisis pregnancy centers have doubled down on their mission to discourage patients from terminating their pregnancies – often using deceptive practices to lure them into their facilities. Morel talks to a Florida woman who describes her experience at a Jacksonville crisis pregnancy center, where a volunteer deceived her into thinking it was an abortion clinic. As Morel and episode host Nadia Hamdan discover, deceiving pregnant women is part of these centers’ long history. 

Finally, we explore how a 2018 U.S. Supreme Court decision has made it harder to regulate anti-abortion centers – and how the lack of regulation harms clients. Morel tells the story of an anti-abortion nurse in Kentucky who reported infection control problems at the crisis pregnancy center where she volunteered, only to find that the facility is allowed to operate in a regulatory gray zone.


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Montana has a long history of making money by extracting and exporting its natural resources, namely coal. State politicians and Montana’s largest electricity utility company seem set on keeping it that way. 

Reveal’s Jonathan Jones travels to the southeastern part of the state, to a town called Colstrip. It is home to one of the largest coal seams in the country – and one of the largest coal-fired power plants in the West. He finds the state’s single largest power company, NorthWestern Energy, recently expanded its share in the Colstrip power plant and is planning to build a new methane gas plant on the banks of the Yellowstone River. Meanwhile, in the state capital of Helena, lawmakers have passed a flurry of bills to ensure the state’s continued reliance on fossil fuels. NorthWestern supports many of these bills, including one of the most extreme laws to keep the state from addressing climate change. Jones follows the money behind the coal expansion in Montana and the local and statewide resistance efforts to push the state toward clean energy. 


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The future of warfare is being shaped by computer algorithms that are assuming ever-greater control over battlefield technology. The war in Ukraine has become a testing ground for some of these weapons, and experts warn that we are on the brink of fully autonomous drones that decide for themselves whom to kill.     

This week, we revisit a story from reporter Zachary Fryer-Biggs about U.S. efforts to harness gargantuan leaps in artificial intelligence to develop weapons systems for a new kind of warfare. The push to integrate AI into battlefield technology raises a big question: How far should we go in handing control of lethal weapons to machines? 

In our first story, Fryer-Biggs and Reveal’s Michael Montgomery head to the U.S. Military Academy at West Point. Sophomore cadets are exploring the ethics of autonomous weapons through a lab simulation that uses miniature tanks programmed to destroy their targets.

Next, Fryer-Biggs and Montgomery talk to a top general leading the Pentagon’s AI initiative. They also explore the legendary hackers conference known as DEF CON and hear from technologists campaigning for a global ban on autonomous weapons.

We close with a conversation between host Al Letson and Fryer-Biggs about the implications of algorithmic warfare and how the U.S. and other leaders in machine learning are resistant to signing treaties that would put limits on machines capable of making battlefield decisions. 

This episode originally aired in June 2021.


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