Summer Internship Program

Organization's Mission:

National Advocates for Pregnant Women (NAPW) is dedicated to protecting the human and civil rights, health and welfare of pregnant and parenting women while protecting their children from punitive and misguided state policies. NAPW seeks to ensure that women are not punished for pregnancy and addiction and that families are not needlessly separated based on medical and public health misinformation. Pregnancy and addiction should be treated as public health issues, not criminal justice issues.

NAPW was formed to address the intersection of the war on drugs and the war on abortion by creating a comprehensive campaign that combines expertise in reproductive law, drug policy and the myths about and attacks on African-American motherhood. Without a comprehensive strategy to undo decades of misinformation and political posturing about pregnancy and drug use, an ever-widening circle of women will be caught in increasingly punitive, intrusive, and coercive government controls that hurt rather than help women and their families. Similarly, drug policy reform efforts to de-stigmatize drug users and to shift policies from punishment to treatment will fail if the myth of crack babies and crack mothers destroying a generation of children is left unchallenged.