Dr. Kristen Kirkland

speaker

373 appearances 1 recordings 1 series first heard Aug 2026 last heard 5 Aug

Dr. Kristen Kirkland’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.

Trend

recordings per month · last 12 months

Recordings per month over the last 12 months — 1 in all, peaking in Aug 2026 with 1.

Appearances

newest first · ▶ plays the moment

Cate & Ty Break It Down · Dr. Kristin Kirkland: When Adoption and Human Trafficking Intersect · 5 Aug 2026 podcast

What we do know is on a neurobiological level, mom and baby are so much more connected than I think most people realize.

There's this really cool thing

called maternal fetal microchimerism, where our cells cross the placenta on either side.

And they have found in maternal tissue up to 30 years, perhaps more, but the furthest was 30 years in the studies of those baby cells still in mom's body and all throughout the body in different tissues.

So there's different phenomena like that.

Even if you want to get real nerdy,

Go look up like how the placenta works and like the biology of that organ, which purely exists to connect mom and baby throughout the pregnancy.

Like it's just so intertwined, right?

And so if we're that entwined on a cellular level with the womb that nurtures us, the person whose womb nurtures us, then how could we not be on a psychological level?

And so there's more being studied about the psychological part.

Again, really hard to do because we've got babies involved.

But we know on a DNA level, things, certain things will change the expression of our DNA throughout a pregnancy.

And so the way I see it in medicine, and part of what eventually brought me out of the fog was studying just how connected moms and babies are.

And then considering like, how then can we go and separate on a legal level on a social basis for life, like it just didn't click for me anymore.

So since I started using the language about trafficking, my biggest pushback has been a little bit what we've already talked about of just how shocking it is to consider that something –

that is so sensationalized on either end could actually have something to do with each other.

So like I, when I was educating about trafficking and the thick of it, the biggest barrier to understanding trafficking for what it really was, was how sensationalized it is in the media, like movies like taken, things were told about, about babies being shipped in wayfair containers.

Like there's a lot of misinformation that's, that's very sensationalized about trafficking and what it is.

So misinformation on that end, misinformation on the adoption end, because adoption propaganda is,

historically has been just so ingrained.

Showing 121–140 of 373 · page 7 of 19