Andrea Dunlop

They're seeing the child as an object to get what they want, which is control over other people, control over their spouse, over their family members, over the doctors to sort of be able to pull one over on people.

And I think part of the reason I've thought a lot about the gender dynamics of this abuse because it is such a high percentage, something like 96.7 percent offenders are female.

And I think the reason it shows up there is not because there's something specific about the female brain that makes people do this.

I think it's because abusers abuse power where they're given power.

And one of the only places we really give women unchecked power is over their children.

And so that's where abusers who are female identifying are going to leverage that power.

There's often an escalation as they have multiple kids.

So in our season six case, for example, this is a pretty typical dynamic I've seen, especially when people have three children.

The first child, Michelle, who was the survivor that we really explored the case with, she was not subjected to any medical abuse that we know of.

Her second child, who was born in the late 90s, went on this sort of typical pattern that we see in these cases where she was born very premature.

Again, that's something we believe Lisa caused from the feedback of her sister, who we spoke to.

Oh, lots of ways, right?

So you see people throwing themselves down the stairs.

Oh, my God.

Lisa was reported to have tripped a whole bunch of times and kept falling on her stomach and then went into premature labor.

Obviously, these things, to some extent, are going to be speculative.

It just doesn't seem likely that it's unrelated in cases where people have access to medication.

A lot of perpetrators are nurses or work as medical assistants or somewhere in the medical field.

It's not difficult to get one's hands on a drug that could make you go into labor prematurely.

Most people wouldn't try and do that, obviously, but it's not actually so very complicated.