#311 | Listen to Me: Black Maternal Health, Tragedy, and the Fight for Change

In honor of Black Maternal Health Week, we’re joined by Stephanie Etienne and Kanika Harris, creators of the documentary Listen to Me. The film follows the pregnancy and birth journeys of several black women. It reveals a devastating reality: Black mothers in the U.S. and U.K. are dying in childbirth at far higher rates than white women regardless of education, income, or resources.

Kanika shares the heartbreaking story of losing her twin babies after a sudden onset of preeclampsia and HELLP syndrome. Though she arrived at the hospital by ambulance, bleeding and in critical condition, she was still stopped at the front desk and asked for insurance information before being evaluated. The tragedy was compounded when her husband, Jua, was advised not to tell Kanika the whole story about the fate of her babies, out of concern that Kanika might not survive if she received the devastating news while her own health was so tenuous.

We talk with Stephanie and Kanika about why they made the film, what they want every pregnant woman to know, and how Black families are often treated with suspicion or disregard in medical spaces. They also speak of the grief carried by partners, families, and entire communities when a mother is lost.

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Transcript

I'm Cynthia Overgard, owner of HypnoBirthing of Connecticut, childbirth advocate and postpartum support specialist. And I'm Trisha Ludwig, certified nurse midwife and international board certified lactation consultant. And this is the Down To Birth Podcast. Childbirth is something we're made to do. But how do we have our safest and most satisfying experience in today's medical culture? Let's dispel the myths and get down to birth.

Welcome Stephanie and Kanika to Down to Birth. We're so honored and happy to have both of you here together on this podcast episode today, which will be releasing. We think it's going to be releasing, like, just a day or two before Black maternal health week, and we just got to see, I guess, the raw footage of your upcoming documentary called Listen to me, which is estimated to come out this summer, focusing on specifically a very small handful of black women through their pregnancies and births. We were really struck by some of the points that the documentary made. I think one of the really big ones is that black women are dying at higher rates in childbirth, irrespective of their background and education, we saw very educated, well spoken women with great communities, wonderful best friends, like they look like they had absolutely everything going for them, and they were still facing pretty tragic outcomes. And Kanika for you, I know you yourself experienced a very tragic outcome. You and your husband, when you were so happy to be pregnant with twins. You lost one and then lost the other. So can we just please begin? Stephanie, you're in the UK and Kanika, you're in the US. Can you just please give a little introduction of each of yourselves and your role in this plight?

Okay, I'll start. My name is Stephanie. I am a midwife and herbalist. I'm based in Baltimore, Maryland, but currently living in London temporarily. My my work as the midwife started in the clinical setting. I worked in the Bronx for many years, and then transitioned to the DC area, and work there, and then, you know, life happened, and I and I stepped away from clinical practice to focus on raising my kids and being a mother, but I have since, kind of transitioned my work to be more focused On Black maternal health advocacy and also focused on herbalism and making sure that we include alternative medicine options and healing modalities in our practice, in taking care of those who are looking to become pregnant or are pregnant. 

And Kanika?

I thank you. I'm so excited to be on this podcast today. I am Kanika Harris. I am a mother of three and a mother of two that are unseen. I am a doula, maternal health advocate, and I am the Executive Director of the National Association to Advance black birth. You know, my journey to black maternal health really came, you know, it started getting my PhD at Michigan, I learned about health equity and health disparities and how racism plays out in America through the lens of maternal health, and now I carry my lived experience, my work in policy and advocacy and just the care work that is a through line. I think both Stephanie and I into playing my part and trying to end this epidemic in the United States, and I would say globally as well, that's one of my top questions. Is there a difference from what you're seeing with the outcomes of black versus are women of color? I think is, is probably proper, right there. It includes women of color, not just black women. Is that correct? These higher rates versus white women in the UK as well. Are you seeing that too? Stephanie, yeah, I actually just attended a black maternal health conference hosted by the motherhood group last Friday, and yes, was definitely surprised to learn that here, specifically black women, are they the statistics here are four to five times more likely to die of maternal health related complications. And so it is similar here, very similar, and for what we're finding to be very similar reasons that we're not talking about issues of having poor health before pregnancy or tending to have, you know, medical issues that that cause these higher rates. It's really about the overall experience of access to quality care, access to care that is not lessened by the experience of racism in America and in the UK, that those social experiences really do complicate our health experiences.

Do we want to begin by Kanika, you maybe sharing your story, sharing what you talked about in the documentary?

Um. Yeah, sure, I never were. How did you start? So in 2010 I was pregnant with twins, and just starting, my family found out I was pregnant with twins while I was engaged, so I was originally with midwives and the DC area that had actually, you know, delivered my peers, not me, per se, but delivered my peers. So this one midwife was now delivering her friend's children's children. So I was a, I was a part of that midwifery group, and she was just like, you know, I think for some reason, you know, I think you just need to get a sonogram. Because I was like, I'm going all natural. I don't want any sonograms. I don't want anything. I just want to do this with you. And she was like, No, you got to get a sonogram. She was like, You're just measuring way too big. And so that's how I found out I was pregnant with twins. Far into my pregnancy. I was five months pregnant by then, but there were no health concerns, there were no issues, there were no warning signs, really, that things were off. And then one day, I just got really I just had a really bad day. I was really sick. It was actually my little sister's baby shower. I was, you know, bad headache, backache. I even had my first child birth class then. And so I just thought, I'm just having a bad day. I'm just going to plow through this. And then things cascaded really fast overnight, I was rushed to the hospital. I think the most hard part about that story is that there was some time that I spent in the waiting room. Even though I was rushed through the ER by ambulance, they still stopped me at the reception desk to ask me for my insurance card that I did not have on me, and that took away a lot of time that I think, that, you know, could have saved one, or maybe both babies. I had a son that was born still, and then I had a daughter that passed away three days later, and how pregnant were you at at this point? And what was going on?

I was about 31 weeks. Um, when you say what was going on, what do you mean? Just, just as far as, like, the symptoms and the diagnosis and, okay, yeah, so I had something, yes, I had a placenta, abruption. So basically my placenta, which nourishes, gives your baby oxygen, all those things, was separating from my uterus, which is very, very painful, and that was happening because my blood pressure was severely high, and I had pre eclampsia, which and help syndrome. So help syndrome is really a severe version of preeclampsia, where you are basically have an organ failure, especially with your liver. So things were looking not good for me, not good for the babies, and because I just wasn't aware of those symptoms, I lost a lot of time at home trying to plow through The pain, yeah, thinking that it would go away. You had lower back pain, right? I had, yeah, severe headache, like a bad migraine, that wouldn't go away. Nausea, vomited a few times, and then, you know, when I couldn't take the pain anymore, I was already bleeding at home a lot. Yeah, and was that the first when you got to the emergency room? Was that the first time that you had known about any type of underlying preeclampsia? Yes, that was the first time I had just went to the doctors, not even a week earlier, and my blood pressure was fine. So it was like a true sudden spike. They wanted your insurance information. So that took time while I'm bleeding out, while you were bleeding, that was really hard to so like you can see, you can see the blood on the gurney. Like I was, I was trying to take a shower, and passed out from the blood loss, because I was, I knew we need to go to hospital. In my mind, let me just take a shower, because I'm sure I'm going to stay and so I'm just trying to work through all these things. And then, you know, the the bleeding got severely worse. And, yeah, so I'm. In, you know, my husband's clothes, because he was trying to get me dressed and he could, he was nervous, couldn't find anything but his basketball shorts and a T shirt on me. So, you know, I'm coming in in really bad shape.

Yeah, and what specifically caused the loss of your babies, loss of oxygen from the My placenta separating from my uterus. It was basically loss of oxygen, especially for my daughter. There was no brain functioning because of the loss of oxygen. So we decided to take her from life support, one part from that portion of the documentary where they were recounting your story, your husband was recounting it tearfully. Can you tell me, by the way, how to pronounce his name? J, U, A, how do you say that? Jua, Jua, okay. And Jua was saying that he was advised by the medical staff not to tell you that you had lost your son, and I had to really stop and think about that, like, Was that the right or wrong thing to do? Of course, you ended up learning in the most unfortunate way. There was just medical staff going by who callously casually mentioned you were the woman who lost his son, and that's how you found out, which was just horrible, but I'm just curious, because medical people listen to this podcast too. What's your opinion on whether they should have withheld that critical information from you at that time?

I think, from a systems level, thinking about it, the medical system, at least in the US, is so disjointed, the number of questions that you have to recount and tell over and over again, so the number of people that walk in and out of your room, the physician who delivered Me, I never saw her again until much later, and there are Many other physicians and nurses that were in and out asking me the same question. Some of them didn't even know what had happened. Or, like, you know, the baby, one of the babies were was in another hospital. Like, you know, they're just coming in, you know, chipper. Oh, I heard you had twins. Where are they? Weren't they in here. Oh, where's the baby? If, if that was the right thing to do, it's hard to say, because I'm so emotionally attached to what the outcome felt like. I they had given me pictures of the babies, and I was showing the pictures to, you know, people that would come and see me in the hospital saying, hey, look, see, I'm, I'm going to take, I'm going to take them home. They're just in, you know, they showed you photos of your babies without telling Yeah, your son had died, and you're supposed to endure all that, or because, for a while, he had to endure the knowledge without you knowing anything.

So my first son, my son was in the room with me, so at some point when I was conscious, I was allowed to see him, impart with him, and have that conversation. It was my daughter that was immediately put on life support that I was under the impression that she was going to make it. So it was like, I lost one, but that's okay, because she's going to make it. So they had given me pictures of her in the NICU, and so those, those were the pictures I had. My son was next to me for at least a day, even though he had passed away, but I was holding on to this hope with this picture that they gave me from the NICU, because she looked like a baby, you know, I'm saying she was almost four pounds, so she wasn't like she looked like a baby, that would make it. And so I was holding on to that hope, and they wanted to use that so that I wouldn't slip away. So I don't know, I really don't. It's hard for me to answer that was that the thing that kept me here, possibly, but it was also extremely heartbreaking, yeah, and hard for your husband, yeah, yeah, it was, yeah, you're going to blame the husband, poor thing. So, you know, I, I was very upset at him. I was very upset at my close friends that were holding this information, because I felt like a fool. Yeah, I'm asking for a breast pump. I'm telling people the baby's going to come home. You know, trying to become a doting mom, and everyone knows that this is not the case.

So do we want to transition now into talking about your work and what the two of you are working on? And this is such. An embedded problem. It's so hard to get to the bottom of this problem. Your husband shared something that we've heard so many men share, which is, we had a father on the podcast, I think, in early 2021 who wrote a book called table for five. They had triplets. One of them died, and then the whole process of one baby dying, and then after the baby was gone, his whole observation was everyone just said to him, How's your wife? Like, it was like the whole experience happened to her, and he felt he didn't victimize himself in any way, but he just really observed that he was totally marginalized. He was almost viewed as this gatekeeper to the person who suffered. And your husband picked up on the same thing. He just said, like people, he didn't know if it was because he because he was a well built, strong black man. He didn't know if he was intimidating anyone. He didn't know if it was because he wasn't the actual mother he but he also had that experience of being marginalized in losing his child, ultimately, both of his children, he --

He also said he wasn't even acknowledged as your husband.

Yeah, he wasn't. That is a layer of racism and stereotypes that we deal with in, you know, in the US that has a long history. So there's usually not an assumption that a young couple. When I say young, I was, I think I was 29 and he was maybe 3132 that, you know, there's an assumption that, yeah, he, he may not be husband, or I don't know of this relationship. So I'm just talking to mom. I'm not going to talk to you, because you have no rights. And then another part of that is when we are in the hospital and we take on a sick role, it comes with other layers of stereotypes, of poverty, of these layers of labels that you will put on a black couple in a hospital. We we're not coming in the hospital. You know, you will hear in America, us talk a lot about how we have to present ourselves in hospital settings, or in medical settings or in establishments to be respected. But when you're sick, all of that presentation goes out the window, and all of those labels start to play themselves out. And so that's a part of what was happening. You know, it's the middle of the night, he's ungroomed. I'm looking crazy. And now this sick couple in the hospital are now probably poor, probably on welfare, and the list goes on and on and on. Not that any of that should matter, but we're used to getting labeled in that way.

Did that happen? Did you have an example of someone saying something like that to you or making an assumption like that directly? Um, or what did it feel implied?

Or did it did it feel like when you got to the emergency room and that's gonna take you back, and they waited for your insurance. That's a clear example. They were not sure you had it, right? Yeah, and they pointed to the sign that was like, Hey, lady, you need your insurance. So you automatically think, would, would this have happened to a white woman coming into a space like this, yeah.

And in some cases, it probably would, you know, there are certainly cases where it would and then there are lots of cases where it wouldn't. It probably depends on who it was, how she presented herself coming in.

Some of our local hospitals have a like a gate. You can't enter the ER without first talking to the person. No matter what you're going through. You're not even in triage yet. You can't go through without giving your insurance card. But they must set it up differently in all sorts of places, and you were already there lying down, bleeding before their eyes, right? I mean, it's one thing, if somebody comes in looking stable and, you know, you just want to verify that they have insurance. It's a whole nother thing. When somebody comes in and they're visibly bleeding, passing out, their life is at risk.

Let's transition into the work that you're doing, and then what you're doing to, I don't know what, what's the what is the primary focus of your work? Is it to educate? Is it policy? Where do you put your energy in this field? Both of you, my primary focus. You know, we talk about it all the time. Kanika and I that as much as we talk about black maternal health, we're always, you know, surprised that there are people who have no idea, people in our own communities who have no idea, and so the primary focus at least of the film is education and also validation, for those of us who have had these experiences and thought so many people go. Through things like this and think that they're the only one think that it was something that they did. It was something about their particular case, when in reality, there are a lot of systemic issues at play that make them more susceptible to having these kinds of experiences. So validation for sure, of women and families that we know feel alienated and yeah, to show to show also that there is a lot of power within our community. To show that there, despite all of the things that we may be experiencing, we have a lot of tools and resources within ourselves, within our culture, within our ancestral history, that can help us kind of navigate these really, really difficult situations that we face in the health system.

Yeah, I agree wholeheartedly with Stephanie. I think stories are also what change policy. Stories are what changed the narrative around the conversation. We really wanted in this documentary to show the full spectrum of how we show up as mothers and into birth. And a lot of times, you most likely will see documentaries that start at the at the moment of the tragedy. And we wanted to tell a full spectrum story where it's like here are three women who have similar through lines. You know, their parents wanted them to be better educated them. They took paths of service, and their birth outcomes were still no different than all the stereotypes and issues that they presume are the reasons are behind the high maternal deaths. What are those stereotypes?

Oh, the stereotypes are that we are under resourced, we are poor, we are not educated, we're not as healthy, we don't we're not as healthy, we don't eat well, yeah, we are overweight, we are on drugs, and those women, those are the ones that are driving up the maternal rates in this country. And you know, we have over 20 years of studies that show the almost the exact opposite. You know, teenagers have better birth outcomes in the United States than well resourced black women, and also poor under resourced white women with less than a high school education come out with better birth outcomes than well educated, well resourced black women. So it's the counterfactual of what we would expect or think given this problem? What advice would you give your own daughter if she were pregnant and going into the hospital? I mean, what to do about it from her perspective, what is the best advice to give these women facing these these terrible, higher odds when they go into the hospital like what we've had. A just reminded me Trisha. A few years ago, we had that lovely Jessica, Jessica, a black woman, think she had her doctorate, she had a home birth because she was from New York, and in New York, I forgot her statistics. It was like 11 out of every 12 women who die, or like a women of color or something in New York City, whereas statistics are already terrible in the US, she had a home birth. I mean, what, from your perspective, what is the best course of action until things improve? Well, I mean, I think that there isn't one singular thing that we can do. Because, you know, as we know, this is this is bigger than our sort of agency. There are things that are outside of our ability to control, but we definitely talk a lot about how pregnancy does not begin at the moment of seeing a positive pregnancy test, that pregnancy is something that we need to prepare for in different ways. We need to prepare our bodies, our psyche, our spirit, for because the way we relate to the medical system in the United States is it's still doctor knows best. It's still the white coat kind of experience of this person knows more about me than I do, and I think we have to start much earlier to help people understand where their power lies, how to ask questions, how to advocate for themselves, how to prepare themselves for pregnancy. Community and for the experience of walking into the medical system. So it's something that starts long before the moment of realizing you're pregnant. And you know, we can say those things and still feel very adamant about holding the system accountable and trying to change the system, we need to have both things happen.

I would wholeheartedly agree. I would tell her, let's try not to be in the hospital if possible.

So that's, that's number one, let's, let's look at a birth center or home birth. You have to be healthy enough to do that, as Stephanie is saying, like we definitely in this country to help the idea that midwives and doula and birth centers are the solution. However, as Stephanie is saying, you have to be healthy enough to be in those places and not risk out. Even if you're in the hospital, you have to be with the midwife. You still have to be healthy enough to deliver with her and not have any complications that will pitch you out, although of Yeah, say that again. Sorry.

I would argue a little bit there that we risk women out of out of hospital births a little too easily. You know, the buy getting lower, 1,000% years old? Yeah, no, yeah, little bit pressure. And I see I do, it's both end. So I do see, like midwives and birth centers that I know that are really inching those numbers as far as they can possibly go and still, like, oh man, like, I'm sorry you're just not well. And so to Stephanie's point, we just have to look at a continuum of care. Like maternal health is the list litmus test for the barometer that we use worldwide for how well we're doing as a nation, how healthy we are as a nation. So in the United States, what is it's just showing that we're very sick nation, which we are. Yeah, absolutely, and in many, many, many ways, right? So starting at the point of telling my daughter, you know, I start with her way earlier. She's seven now. She's, she's, she's gone to Stephanie's childbirth classes with me, sat under the table where her little pad her iPad, but she comes out learning stuff, and so she's starting to be embedded in this world, knowing that, you know, birth is a natural process. This is her birth weight. She talks about, you know, when I'm fundraising, she was like, help my mommy, so babies can come out of vaginas, you know. So she and my son, you know we have to so we have to start this, this education, this counter cultural, community care way earlier, so that they are ready and prepared for whatever is coming their way. That's just what we hope will happen if we do that, until all people in the United States and worldwide have the power to care for themselves and their communities. This will always be a problem.

The title of the documentary is, listen to me, tell us why you chose that title.

You asked, how did we land on that title? Yeah, tell us. Tell us what I mean. It's a great name. It's a great title. And I have my thoughts on why you chose it, but I want to hear it from you guys. Yeah, I think we, I feel like we always had that title. It was, it came very early. I think the way we've told this story has been very intentional. It has taken us over eight years to finish making this film, partly because we are doing many, many other things. We wear many other hats. We're raising children. You know, we had to fundraise to make the film, but we've always said that this is about storytelling, and it's about telling our perspective of things that we were not going to kind of flood the film with talking heads or quote, unquote, experts, like we positioned ourselves as the experts. So the women in the film, yes, they are professionals, and yes, they are working in this world, but they're also the experts in their own lived experience. So even if kamika was not a birth justice ad. Advocate, even if she didn't have a PhD, she would still be the expert in her own story. And so that's been something that we've really held onto for the whole time that we've been making this film, is that our stories should be told by us, and we need people to listen. We need people to really hear what black women are saying about their experience in the hospitals, their experience in the medical system, that it's not, it's not rocket science, like it's not something that is impossible to solve. There just has to be the will and the intention to do so. If you hear what women are saying, it's very clear. It's very clear, this is not a it's not debatable anymore. Maybe at an earlier stage, it was debatable as to why these things happen. We understand why they're happening. You just need to listen and take action from there. Yeah, and to add to what Stephanie is saying in our interview transcripts, it came over over and over again, if they would have just listened if someone would have listened to me. I'm going to make people listen to me. So at the end, you hear Shalon daughter saying, you know, I'm going to be a doctor. So then they'll listen to me. They didn't listen to my mommy, but they're going to listen to me. So this, this Listen to me just came up over and over in our transcripts and our interviews, and we were like, That's it. Listen to me. This has been long said about black women in birthing and I remember around at least 15 years ago, there was, it was such an incredibly sad story. There was a little video to accompany it. There was some handsome black, well spoken man. I don't remember his name. He just made a really good presentation in front of Congress. Impossible not to respect him, and he showed some footage of his wife, who was beautiful. She spoke like three or four languages fluently. She had a PhD. She was in beautiful shape, and she died like a slow 12 hour horrible death in the hospital after giving birth, while the whole time saying to the medical staff around her, something is wrong. I know something is wrong with me. And at one point he said, when he spoke in front of Congress, he said, My wife kept telling people she knew something was wrong. And he recalled one particular person from the hospital saying to her, you're just going to have to wait in that first of all, the tone of voice really disturbs me. It's very upsetting and but that was sort of what came out of stories like theirs. She knew something was wrong. She was telling them something was wrong and they weren't taking action, and you had that little mini experience when they were talking about your insurance card. You know they are going to blame that on policy, that they had to get your insurance card first and all that. But it's still the same story. It's like, is it not enough evidence for them to see me bleeding while this was happening? So it seemed a very fitting title to me when I was recalling that that gentleman's story in Congress.

Yeah, you're speaking of Charles Johnson and Kira, and he's, you know, he's a well known advocate in the Maternal and Child space right now, with his cure for moms is the name of his nonprofit, and yeah, and they were very privileged his his mother is a celebrity judge on TV, so you're talking about very privileged family walking into the hospital thinking that they're going to pop some bottles and go home with another baby boy. And that didn't, that didn't happen. So yeah, very tragic. And yes. So again, when you when you can't walk in with all the bells and whistles and you are taking on that sick role. What comes with that is no power. And when you are a country, a capitalist country, capitalism and care just don't go together. Yeah? 

Yeah. The fact that the hospitals are for profit corporations creates a lot of conflicts of interest, and it's gotten a lot worse over the decades because of that model. So um, what's the final message you'd like to leave everyone with?

Um, the final message, please go to our website and help us get this film out in the world. If this resonates with you and you're deeply moved, please, please contribute to our efforts to get this out in the world. I think this film shows that we have to come up with our own. Uh, sovereign forms of care to get out of this. And I think you will see how that works and how that happens in the film. But then also just the education that is missing in terms of how we would naturally tell a story around why maternal deaths. Maternal deaths are so high in the United States, and this is about reframing that to anyone on this call that this has happened to it's just it's not your fault, and to where we hope the film helps to relieve a lot of that guilt and a lot of those feelings that we have around this, that there are bigger factors at play that were generations in the making of this country that are putting us in this situation. Okay, I would, I would just add that black women tend to be, we can be vegans in the coal mine. You know, like we, what we're experiencing is not will not continue to be isolated to us, like Kanika was saying, we live in a very sick country. These issues are happening to sort of a less fatal degree to a lot of other women in this country. So it benefits all of us to watch this film, to think about these issues, to be concerned about what's happening to black women, because this will happen to all women, and we won't have an answer for it if we don't really start to address it now, this can continue happening on a much larger scale. It's not okay to just sort of ignore issues, because it doesn't happen directly to you, so we should be all be paying attention. Yeah.

Thank you for joining us at the Down To Birth Show. You can reach us @downtobirthshow on Instagram or email us at Contact@DownToBirthShow.com. All of Cynthia’s classes and Trisha’s breastfeeding services are offered live online, serving women and couples everywhere. Please remember this information is made available to you for educational and informational purposes only. It is in no way a substitute for medical advice. For our full disclaimer visit downtobirthshow.com/disclaimer. Thanks for tuning in, and as always, hear everyone and listen to yourself.

How is Shalon's daughter and who's raising her?

Shalon's daughter is, she's older than your Okay, yeah, she's, she lives. She's being raised by her grandmother, Wanda Irving. And you know, Wanda talks about that experience of, you know, being in your 70s and raising a small child and how challenging it is. Yep, she she's never known her mother except for the first three weeks of her life and but she's a you know, we've met, we've met Soleil several times over the last couple of years, and she's an amazing child. She's got this energy that, you just know, this energy comes from just the higher power. Her mother is with her. She's got such a beautiful spirit. And she's, you know, she's a happy kid. She's doing lots of, you know, fun activities. Her grandmother has her in piano lessons and theater classes. And, you know, she just does a lot of a lot with her granddaughter and make sure that her granddaughter is seeing the world. We shot a little footage of them in Italy, like she took her on a on an international trip. And, yeah, her grandmother is really trying to give her the life that she she knows her daughter would have wanted for her. Yeah, i My heart breaks for her mother. It breaks for her to have such a responsibility to fill her daughter's big shoes and and to be grieving her own daughter every step of the way, just like that just is so painful. And that photo, just like that photo in the film is just like, so, so painful to see. And it was her friends are really beautiful women. They're really loving, wonderful friends. That was very touching. I'm really happy that you included them in it. Yeah, yeah. It is that was important for us, because we talk about it a lot that it's there's a community impact when a woman, when a woman, is stripped away from us, yeah, it affects not just her family, but her whole community. Exactly that. This photo of the two girls when they were seven and saying they were going to always be together like that was really powerful. We do forget. We really do forget all the other people it affects. And it's really good. We put that in there. So congratulations on your hard work, finally paying off, raising the money that you needed to and doing your best to fight an incredibly big uphill battle.

This is, this is the way to do it, though, just what you said, sharing stories, evoking that emotion, like Cynthia was just describing, you know, if you didn't see those photos, if you didn't know that purse, if you didn't feel her pain. It's just like, oh, another problem out there. But when you get personal, when you get personal about it, you get angry about it. You want to make change. That's right, do.