MS Now guest discusses reports that CPS targeted a mother after she helped her daughter plan an abortion and removed the teen from her home
Professor Dorothy Roberts: “It has nothing to do with protecting the autonomy of the child or the safety of the child. It has everything to do with trying to control children, teens, women, and their reproductive lives.”
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From the May 31, 2026, edition of MS NOW's Velshi
ALI VELSHI (HOST): We've done this story with you before, but now we've got this abortion restrictions and the child welfare system where these systems police women specifically, and the post-Roe abortion bans and the child welfare system, which you've documented so well in your book is weaponized against women.
So talk to me about this reporting by Jessica Valenti, that we're now seeing mothers, a mother who was trying to help her young daughter get an abortion, being targeted in the way that we've described.
DOROTHY ROBERTS (GUEST): Yes, I think the story reveals the harms and the violence of these two regimes, which are often seen as separate, but they're connected. So the regime of compelled births, which is what abortion bans and restrictions on abortions do, and the regime of what I call family policing, otherwise known as the child welfare system, which is a system that operates in this very brutal way that we see in this case, where the government can weaponize it in order to target the most marginalized groups or to affect a kind of government intervention that ordinarily we would think is unconstitutional.
You know, here we have an anonymous report. We don't know who reported this mother, and that happens all the time in this system. We have the removal of a child without any court order, but that happens all the time as well. CPS workers threaten a family as was done here with the threat of you might be charged with murder and then take children away without even going to get a court order based on an anonymous allegation and based on this made up allegation that the mother was coercing her daughter, no evidence of that.
So it shows how we can take these two, or the government can take these two forms of state intervention and violence, forcing children and women to have children against their will, and then using this weapon, this powerful tool of the state that gets too little attention, the family policing system to threaten, and in the end, to block the 14-year-old teenager from getting an abortion that had been planned so meticulously to get transportation out of state, to provide financial assistance. All of that gets tossed aside, and she's forced to have a child that she did not want to have. And as you mentioned, to add to the cruelty, after she has the baby, she's now investigated because she's a teen mom. That happens all the time as well in this family policing system.
VELSHI: So these intersecting, oppressive regimes cause us to have to underline specific things about it. The phenomenon of mothers being targeted by CPS for helping their teen daughters terminate a pregnancy. Important for people to understand, and you have written about this, this is not a phenomenon that only occurs in anti-abortion states. Valenti mentions another mother who lives in a state where abortion is still legal and was still investigated by both CPS and police for helping her daughter and the pregnancy.
ROBERTS: That's right. So again, it's a very effective and powerful tool that the state can use even against legal activity. You know, generally, the family policing system targets impoverished families and low-income families and charges them with child neglect for what is actually conditions of poverty. So here we see even in a state where abortion is legal — and If/When/How was reporting that this is happening in New York, Pennsylvania, you know, where abortion is legal — that assisting an abortion can be framed as if it's child abuse or neglect, because it's medical neglect if the mother brings the child into the hospital — the teen who's pregnant — and has a medical medication abortion for help, now gets charged with child abuse or child neglect or medical neglect because everything didn't go perfectly well. And again, that is a typical strategy or tactic of the family policing system to charge marginalized mothers with medical neglect when they bring their child to the hospital for help.
VELSHI: That's a little hard to get your head around. So now you've got this idea of authorities going after women for medical neglect if their children are in need of abortion, the idea that it might be abuse. And then there's this third idea that was in Jessica Valenti's story that that Child Protective Services was accusing the mother of coercion, alleging that the mother was pressuring and forcing her daughter to get the abortion. And yet another piece of this anti-abortion law-making is parental consent, requiring a parent's permission. It's long been used as a way to make it harder for teens to access abortion. So now I don't understand how to make sense of this. On one hand, you're supposed to get the parent's permission. On the other hand, the mother is now being held responsible because she's helping her daughter get an abortion.
ROBERTS: Yes. It just shows you how this has nothing to do with protecting children. It has nothing to do with protecting the autonomy of the child or the safety of the child. It has everything to do with trying to control children, teens, women, and their reproductive lives. And so the state that wants to do that can use CPS in — or the laws for abortion, I should say, restricting abortion or even in states where abortion is legal to require these conflicting aspects, both that parents have to give consent. But also when you have a mother who is helping her child to have an abortion, that then it's coercion. So, you know, the coercion argument is made up, as can always happen in cases of allegations against parents in this system. Again, it can be anonymous, it can be completely made up, but it can be used as a threat to coerce — here's where the coercion comes in. It's not the coercion of the child —
VELSHI: The mother —
ROBERTS: Yeah, yeah, right on the part of the mother. It's coercion on the part of the state using the threat of child separation or actually removing a child from the home in order to effectuate a repressive policy.