Andrea Dunlop

And I say, yeah, like there are some really emotionally challenging moments.

aspects to doing this work and looking exclusively at child abuse cases.

And I always said, I was like, but I'm never bored.

Like it is, it's fascinating work.

That doesn't mean that like, I'm glad it's happening.

And like, hurrah, I get to be a true crime podcaster because you know what I mean?

It's like, it's just such a, it's such a disingenuous, it's such a purposefully disingenuous.

There's something especially troubling about vilifying child abuse pediatricians, because to my mind, it's kind of a miracle that you can find doctors to do this work at all.

It's emotionally grueling, it's not especially well-paid, and now they have to deal with being excoriated in the press and tied up in court with lawsuits.

And we need them.

According to the National Institute of Health, 18% of children will experience physical abuse.

And abusive head trauma is the leading cause of death from physical abuse in children under two.

And the job of a child abuse pediatrician isn't to, quote, find abuse, as it's often portrayed, but to determine abuse.

And on average, they have positive findings of abuse in only about half of the cases they evaluate.

And there's no reason to believe that we're actually catching every case.

It's so striking, again, in having these conversation with people who are abolitionists.

And that's why I'm so kind of hammering that at the moment to sort of draw these arguments out from each other, because I think this conversation that this is involved in is about parents' rights and whether parents have the right to do anything they want to their children or not.

And I think that's what's essentially undergirding this argument, not, you know, this abolitionist argument where it's about what if we had, you know, what if every child had enough food and their parents had enough support?

And like, how could we, you know, these things that there's a lot of robust data that would help prevent so many situations from getting to this point.

And like, to me, child abuse pediatricians, to your point, are engaged in that conversation about prevention.