Family

The birth rate fell for nearly every group of women of reproductive age in the U.S. in 2017, reflecting a sharp drop that saw the fewest newborns since 1978, according to a new report by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

There were 3,853,472 births in the U.S. in 2017 – “down 2 percent from 2016 and the lowest number in 30 years,” the CDC said.

The general fertility rate sank to a record low of 60.2 births per 1,000 women between the ages of 15 and 44 – a 3 percent drop from 2016, the CDC said in its tally of provisional data for the year.

The results put the U.S. further away from a viable replacement rate – the standard for a generation being able to replicate its numbers.

“The rate has generally been below replacement since 1971,” according to the report from CDC’s National Center for Health Statistics.

The CDC calculates a “total fertility rate” by estimating how many babies a hypothetical group of 1,000 women would likely have over their lifetime. That measure now stands at 1,764.5 births per 1,000 women – a 3 percent drop from 2016. By contrast, the replacement rate is 2,100 births per 1,000 women.

“The decline in the rate from 2016 to 2017 was the largest single-year decline since 2010,” the CDC said.

The 2017 numbers also represent a 10-year fall from 2007, when the U.S. finally broke its post-World War Baby Boom record, with more than 4.3 million births.

Historically, the number of babies born in the U.S. has gradually risen since a sharp decline in the early 1970s. But that growth has been inconsistent, and over the same time frame, the birth rate has shown a general decline. The numbers are often subject to spikes and sudden dips, driven in large part by the country’s economic scene, generational size, and other factors.

The numbers seem to correspond with what the Census Bureau and others have been predicting for years: that America’s population growth will increasingly depend on immigrants, after decades in which the U.S. enjoyed a relatively high fertility rate when compared to other developed countries.

As The Associated Press reports, the U.S. birth rate is “still above countries such as Spain, Greece, Japan and Italy, but the gap appears to be closing.”

Broken out by age, the 2017 birth rate fell for teenagers by 7 percent, to 18.8 births per 1,000 – a record low. That figure is for women from 15–19 years old. For that same group, the birth rate has fallen by 55 percent since 2007 and by 70 percent since the most recent peak in 1991, the CDC said.

Women in their 40s were the only group to see a higher birth rate last year. Between the ages of 40 and 44, there were 11.6 births per 1,000 women, up 2 percent from 2016, according to the CDC’s provisional data.

Birth rates fell by 4 percent both for women from 20-24 years old and for women of ages 25-29.

For women in their 30s – an age group that had recently seen years of rising birth rates – the rate fell slightly in 2017. The drop included a 2 percent fall among women in their early ’30s, a group that still maintained the highest birth rate of any age group, at 100.3 births per 1,000 women.

For the third year in a row, both the preterm birth rate and the low birth weight rate rose. The CDC said the 9.93 percent rise in preterm births was due to late preterm births, and that the early preterm rate had not changed from 2016’s 2.75 percent.

Low birth weight – defined as newborns that weigh less than 5 lb. 8 oz. – rose slightly above the highest level previously recorded, with 2017’s 8.27 percent topping 2006’s 8.26 percent.

The overall cesarean delivery rate nudged upward in 2017, rising to 32 percent from 31.9 percent – still below the all-time high of 2009’s 32.9 percent.

The CDC also tallied births by race and cultural data (but it doesn’t yet have the data to compare those figures to the overall populations).

Here’s how the 2017 numbers were reported:

• All Races and Origins: 3,853,472
• White: 1,991,348
• Hispanic: 897,518
• Black: 560,560
• Asian: 249,214
• American Indian or Alaska Native: 29,878
• Native Hawaiian or Other Pacific Islander: 9,418

Proposed regulations may make it harder for child care facilities statewide to do business.

In Juneau, some daycare directors say the new rules would reduce capacity and worsen the shortage of affordable child care.

Gold Creek Child Development Center’s infant room caters to children ranging from 6 weeks to 18 months. They nap, play and gurgle under the watchful eye of their teachers.

On a recent afternoon, Director Gretchen Boone explained what the impact of one of the proposed regulation changes from the Department of Health & Social Services would be.

“This room, we currently have up to 10 children, and we have three teachers,” Boone said. “This room would be directly affected by the regulations … and if the age ranges and group sizes change, we would have to remove, or not fill, two spaces.”

There are 51 pages of changes being proposed to child care center licensing regulations in Alaska. Some are related to compliance with federal child care standards. Others address the types of foods child care workers can consume on the job.

Gold Creek has 60 children and about 16 staff members. It’s one of Juneau’s largest child care providers. But the demand is way higher, according to Assistant Director Colleen Brody.

“We have, currently, 97 families on our waitlist,” Brody said. “So we have 51 infants and 46 toddlers on our waitlist and that’s a lot of infants and toddlers that don’t have care.”

The proposed change that most concerns Brody and Boone would lower the maximum group size and child-to-teacher ratio allowed for toddlers and infants. Gold Creek would lose two spots in both its infant and young toddler rooms.

Boone and Brody said losing the tuition from those spots would result in a loss of more than $4,000 in revenue per month, which could force them to cut teacher positions.

“Ideally we would try and balance it without cutting anybody but $4,000 is a lot of money,” Brody said.

Samantha Adams recently closed her child care business in Juneau after 12 years due to increasing overhead costs. She said she was losing an average of $30,000 per year.

“I’m of the opinion that regulation and oversight is really crucial to ensuring that those programs are keeping kids safe,” Adams said. “At the end of the day, I think it’s very important to have regulations.”

But Adams feels many of the proposed changes overstep. She knows firsthand the financial challenges of running a daycare.

“If you’re going to implement regulations that limit our ability to make money, absolutely there should be some financial backing for those mandates,” she said.

Adams, Boone and Brody recently signed a statement with a group of eight local child care providers concerned by the proposed changes. They worry many of them could result in the closure of more programs.

Adams wants providers to have a seat at the table for these decisions.

“We as stakeholders in the state of Alaska for the child care workforce, we should be at the table when these are being proposed–before they’re ever proposed, before they ever go out to public comment,” she said. “I think a lot of us were feeling overlooked because they don’t do that.”

Besides the ratio issues, some providers are concerned about a requirement that center administrators have a certain number of college credits in early childhood education.

Providers must have one designated administrator on site for every 30 children. They already need to meet a number of qualifications to be an administrator, and some providers feel mandating more classes adds to the financial strain workers feel in a field that doesn’t pay much.

The state’s Child Care Program Office did not respond to requests for comment on the proposed changes.

The public comment period for the proposed changes ends May 31. After that, department officials will decide what, if anything, to change.

The Department of Health and Social Services is holding a public hearing on the proposed changes in Anchorage at 1 p.m. Monday. Teleconferencing is available at 1-800-754-1346.

A new study says that 42 percent of children in Southwestern Alaska live below the federal poverty line.

Child poverty in Western Alaska is higher than the statewide average, according to the study by Alaska Children’s Trust, a non-profit organization focused on preventing child abuse and neglect.

The study found that overall, about a third of Alaska’s children live below the federal poverty line. A fifth live in households that don’t have enough food.

The report attributes Alaska’s levels of child poverty to a series of economic issues, including a lack of affordable housing. About a third of Alaska’s children live in households where more than 30 percent of their family’s monthly income is spent on rent, mortgages, or other housing costs.

Alaska Children’s Trust used data from the U.S. Census, the Alaska Department of Labor, and other agencies to conduct the study.

It’s worth noting that the federal poverty line does not take certain traditional practices, like subsistence, into account when evaluating a family’s economic well-being.

Just now, the women here are heading to lunch, jobs and classes or socializing in the yard.

Ohio Reformatory for Women was built in 1916 but has expanded beyond the original stone structure.

Plus, nowadays, they’re doing more to enable women to succeed outside the prison and hopefully stay out.

Golding Kent acts as my tour guide.

“This used to be the old warden’s house,” she shouts over the hum of the golf cart, referring to a vacant lot we are passing by. It’s being redeveloped: “We’re making it into a new nursery.”

You read that right. Officials are building a nursery at a prison.

Pregnant women serving three years or less at the reformatory are allowed to keep their babies with them until their sentence is up.

The reformatory is one of only four prisons in the U.S. that allow children and infants to stay with their mothers while they’re incarcerated.

The number of women serving time in Ohio prisons is rising.

Nearly 3,000 women were imprisoned statewide in 2017, according to the Ohio Department of Rehabilitation and Corrections.

The figure has remained high over the last several years.

One of the main reasons: Crimes related to drug addiction are going up, and more women are getting swept up in it.

Some of those crimes are explicitly addiction-related, like drug trafficking. Others, like burglary, may have been committed in support of a drug habit.

Additionally, Ohio is at the epicenter of the national opioid abuse epidemic that’s ripped apart families and communities, caused a huge spike in addiction-related crimes and led to a record number of overdoses.

In response, health officials, community organizations and law enforcement agencies across the state are looking for effective ways to treat women struggling with opioid addiction. They want to keep them out of prison and away from the pressures that keep them reoffending.

It’s a big challenge but one program seems to be working, and it’s here at ORW.

The golf cart crawls toward one of the low-slung, concrete buildings, and Golding Kent tells me about Tapestry, an inpatient treatment program for women here.

The women must be clean and sober to take part, and they can be at any stage in their sentence.

Unlike more typical inpatient programs that last 30 or 90 days, Tapestry is an 18-month commitment.

It focuses not only on keeping the women clean and sober but delving into the root causes of their addiction and, ultimately, changing their lives.

Annette Dominguez, who’s led the program for the last five years, said it’s about healing mind, body and spirit.

The program works on changing how women think about themselves and getting them to open up about some of the trauma that led them to use drugs in the first place.

“It’s not just about not using drugs anymore, but it’s about changing how you think. How you think about the world. How you think about your place in it. How you think about yourself,” she said, adding, “Most of the women come with serious self-esteem issues in addition to domestic violence, sexual abuse issues that they have. So, they come here with other women who have similar issues and (can) be part of the community, which in itself is an agent of change.”

Women learn how to relate to one another and to others beyond their immediate surroundings.

They chat via Skype once a week with a school for children with disabilities in South Africa, to learn empathy.

If someone about to be released is looking for a job, a Tapestry graduate on the outside can help them network. And the program’s graduates stay in touch through a Facebook group.

Lisa Duncan and Ashley Porter are both in the middle of their sentences at the reformatory.

Duncan has been here a few times. She’s a graduate of the Tapestry program but comes back to volunteer with women like Porter who are in thick of it. Duncan lives in the same house with the women.

They refer to themselves as “sisters.”

“We are here to basically guide them,” Duncan said of her role with the program. “I’m a repeat offender, and that’s why I think it’s very important for me to be here because the sisters will understand that if you don’t stay connected, then there is definitely another number (prison sentence) under your belt. If you don’t stay connected, you’re definitely not strong enough to stand on your own. It’s too hard. We need each other to survive.”

Porter said that Tapestry is different from other programs she’s done in the past.

“This is different than a 30-day program. I know that after I finish here, I’ll be able to survive with the help of my Tapestry sisters. And support my kids.”

According to a study by the CDC titled Adverse Childhood Experiences (ACES), women who experience trauma such as sexual, physical or emotional abuse are five times likelier to end up behind bars than those who don’t.

Many of those same women will use drugs to deal with that trauma. They rely on a high to numb the pain.

That’s certainly what happened to Heather Ruble.

She graduated from Tapestry before she left ORW in 2015. She was charged with two felony counts of drug trafficking and served a mandatory four-year sentence.

Her daughter, Vanessa, was 4 and went to live with Ruble’s parents.

When I meet Ruble at her tidy, clapboard home in Lima, Ohio, she tells me how her drug abuse got out of control after her daughter was born.

She was raped twice. The first time, in 2008, she was helping an intoxicated friend get home.

There, a neighbor pulled her into an abandoned home and attacked her.

Ruble had been clean and sober for a few years but did cocaine after the attack.

She went to a nearby Walmart to wash up before heading home to her daughter. She never reported it.

The second time, a couple of years later, a former boyfriend broke into her house while she was gone. When she got back home, he brutally beat her and raped her.

This time, she reported it but she ended up with a pending domestic violence charge; he was let go.

She finally ended up telling her father what happened right before she went to prison.

“I was ashamed. I felt like it was my fault. It would never have happened if I were to just stay at home with my child. I turned that on myself and that was probably the day that changed me for a very long time.”

She started using again.

When Ruble went to the reformatory, she kept in contact with her daughter through letters and phone calls.

Her mother brought her daughter for visits, and they remained very close. Her daughter is now in middle school, and Ruble says they are closer than ever.

She said the Tapestry program made her take a look at herself — she realized she wasn’t a bad person. She had made some mistakes but wanted to change.

“I don’t have to like or love anyone that treats me as if I’m worth nothing. Or will never be anything. It’s just, and I don’t know, it was just the best thing that ever happened to me,” Ruble said of Tapestry.

Ruble now works for a community nonprofit on a rapid response team that intervenes when people overdose.

She gives people Narcan to prevent future overdoses and offers counseling.

She said before the rapid response team in Lima was set up, there would be as many as eight deaths a week. Ruble says that number has lowered a little, but not by much.

There have been more drug busts and more education but she still sees a lot of people who are using.

Montgomery County Jail, about an hour southwest of the reformatory, has a social worker on staff who helps find housing for those in need and can work with women who want to enter into a treatment program.

That’s a change from a few years ago — when the jail had no social worker and fewer programs.

Maj. Matt Haines has been with the Montgomery County Sheriff’s Office for 13 years and was on the police force before that and says he hasn’t seen anything like this recent spike in women in his jail.

He said they’ve had to reorganize the different “pods” or rooms where the women live because they’ve run out of beds.

One thing is clear with the women here: They didn’t wake up one day and decide to be addicted to drugs. It just spiraled.

A woman we’ll call Janet (we can’t use her real name because the jail did not give us permission) testifies to that: “I was taking pain medication for my foot and that’s where opiates escalated. And then they become too expensive on the streets. You start using heroin. It’s cheaper. It’s easier to get,” she said.

She is one of 174 women awaiting a court hearing in Montgomery County and seeing what treatment options will be offered to her before she gets released.

She said she’s “done” with using, like a lot of other women I meet here.

The problem is, many of the women will go back to the same neighborhoods where they were using and be around the same people they were using with.

The Montgomery County Sheriff’s Office and the drug court gives them treatment options, of which there are a few that treat just women.

Haines wants to find ways to keep people out of jail. That seems to be the opposite of President Donald Trump’s recent get-tough statements about drugs — he recognizes opioid addiction as a major epidemic but has called for harsher penalties for those dealing and trafficking, including capital punishment.

But Haines says, “We cannot arrest our way out of this problem. These women need help, and we are not equipped here at the Montgomery County jail to treat this disease. We keep seeing the same person and the behavior that causes the addiction is still there.”

“When you’re talking with a with a person that’s experiencing addiction, you see it’s not an ‘addict.’ And I really cannot stand that term because it takes the human being out of this whole disease and this illness. It’s the same thing as having a chronic health care illness,” said Emily Surico, who works at East End Community Services, an organization that’s been in the Twin Towers neighborhood of Dayton since 1998.

Twin Towers has been hit hard in the opioid epidemic.

Her organization works closely with the Dayton Police Department to offer treatment and support to women before and after they are incarcerated.

Surico said Dayton Police led the way in curbing overdose deaths.

In 2016, Montgomery County had more than 800 deaths due to overdoses. In 2017, it was just over 500. A small step, she said, but a good one.

It’s not the be-all and end-all. Surico and others in the community working to address these problems recognize that addiction isn’t something you can solve overnight. Another thing they agree on: You can’t just arrest your way out of this problem. For a lot of these women, they just need another chance.

After Tammy Hunt’s boxer died in January, she hired a local pet cremation service to pick up the remains.

In mid-February, when her stepson’s cat died, he called the same company.

But neither of them heard back from the business, Bridge Pet Services, for weeks about their bills.

On a recent weekend, they stopped by the shop and noticed a blue Toyota full of black and white plastic bags.

They took a closer look, and realized the bags were labeled with people’s names, pet names and dates going back weeks. They showed me video of what they saw.

Hunt said they were both horrified to think their own pets might be decomposing in the back the truck.

“You know, if we didn’t care, we’d just take our pets out to the landfill,” she said.

She said seeing those bags brought back the stress of losing her dog all over again.

She decided to post about it on a Juneau Community Collective Facebook thread.

The reaction from other clients of Bridge Pet Services was immediate.

Some said they’d tried calling, emailing, texting and even knocking on the door to talk to someone. Other customers noted bills and pet’s ashes that were overdue by a month or more.

“If the service is offered, then the service should be rendered,” Hunt said. “If the service cannot be rendered, then it should not be offered. I think that ordinances might need to be either enforced or altered to accommodate pet owners a little bit better.”

“It’s just embarrassing and I’m just trying to get this sorted out and get back on track,” said Mike Dziuba, who founded Bridge Pet Services with his now ex-wife in 2007. “My own dog was getting older at the time, and I just didn’t want to ship him to Anchorage and I wasn’t in a place where I was putting roots down where I was going to be at a house where I felt comfortable burying him there.”

When a pet passes away, Juneau residents are required by city ordinance to dispose of the remains immediately.

Before Bridge opened, they could bury the pet on their own property or use the landfill’s disposal service.

“I felt like I was providing an option for town instead of the landfill, of course, although I know there are still people that choose that option,” Dziuba said. “But it wasn’t for me and it’s not for most of my owners.”

Dziuba’s clients can choose an individual cremation to receive their pet’s ashes in an urn afterward, or communal cremation, where multiple pets are cremated together and Bridge disposes of the ashes.

Prices vary based on weight. Home pick-up costs $35.

Dziuba said business tends to pick up in the winter months. He thinks it’s because the ground is too hard to bury pets.

Animals awaiting cremation are usually stored inside in freezers.

It typically takes him up to two weeks to cremate and get ashes back to clients, but acknowledged he’d fallen behind because of some personal issues.

He said he didn’t want to make excuses.

“I don’t necessarily blame anybody for griping. But I’ll talk to anybody individually and try to square it up that way. I think that’s kind of the best route.”

He runs the business alone now and works full-time at Bartlett Regional Hospital during the day, so animals in body bags sometimes sit in his truck until he can return to his shop.

Dziuba said he has time off from work coming up and plans to devote it to getting caught up and making things right with his clients.

In addition to individual owners, he works with the Gastineau Humane Society and local veterinarians, picking up animals that have been put down or found dead on the side of the road and cremating them.

The humane society had a crematorium years ago, but no one working there now remembers when it went away.

City Manager Rorie Watt said the city had received calls from concerned Bridge clients. He said they asked the Gastineau Humane Society to reach out to Dziuba and is hopeful the business will get back on track.

“I do think it’s a service that the public appreciates and the prior method of burying dead pets in the landfill really was not very popular with a lot of people.”

Hunt and her stepson both eventually heard back from Dziuba. She’s still upset about what happened, but said Dziuba waived her bill.

A Sitka woman is in prison, pending extradition to the United Kingdom to face charges that she abducted her children to the United States.

Since her arrest in downtown Sitka last April, Indea Ford has been treated as a criminal.

U.S. Secretary of State Rex Tillerson will ultimately decide if Ford has to return to face abduction charges in the U.K. — and to face a former partner who assaulted her and abused their children.

Family advocates say this case is not unique, and points to a huge gulf between the rule of law and the actions of women desperate to protect themselves and their families.

Grace Harbor Church is probably one of Sitka’s largest. It’s a bright space, with windows overlooking the wide expanse of Sitka Sound.

A contemporary Evangelical congregation is led by a rock band, with lyrics projected on the gleaming white walls.

On a recent day in Sitka, they are praying for one of their own.

“We’re praying for Indea while she is in custody,” pastor Paul McArthur said from the pulpit. “And we look forward to the day when this family can be reunited.”

“Anyone who meets Indea Ford and the Ford family realizes that Indea is not a criminal,” McArthur said in the church conference room. Ford is there with him. “The person who caused the harm isn’t going to jail, but she is.”

Ford is a 34-year-old British expat, now a legal permanent resident in the U.S. She bakes cakes for a living.

There is a solemn feel in the room.

After eight months in supervised house arrest, Ford flew to Anchorage to surrender to U.S. Marshals and to enter prison.

She has no idea how long she’ll be there. This church is her emotional sanctuary.

“I just know that there has to be a reason for all of this,” Ford said. “I don’t know what that reason is — nobody knows what the reasons are, and He has plans for everybody. But I do know that I am not alone.”

A turbulent relationship leads to flight from home

Ford has lived in Sitka for two-and-a-half years with her husband, Kenny Ford, a Coast Guardsman, and three children, Grace, Ava and Noah — this last is her child with Kenny.

Before moving to Sitka she lived in Kent, England, where Grace and Ava were born.

Her relationship with the girls’ father, however, was short-lived and turbulent.

In frequent drug-fueled rages over several years, he physically assaulted her, prompting one British policeman to warn her that she was in danger of her life.

Although Ford encouraged her partner to seek help, nothing worked.

She made up her mind to leave him.

“It got to a point one day, when he was being particularly abusive — and both Grace and Ava were there — and I sat there and looked at my girls and realized that the only thing I’m doing is letting them think it’s OK to be treated like this by someone,” Ford said. “That was the point I realized that, you know what? I’m done. And I ended the relationship.”

But ending the relationship did not end the abuse.

The British courts awarded Ford custody of Grace and Ava and granted her former partner visitation — or “contact.”

The arrangement proved unsuccessful.

“Throughout 2012 to 2015, contact started and stopped. He was arrested for battery against Ava in 2014,” Ford said. “That was investigated for quite some time, but dropped because there was not enough evidence despite my taking pictures and documenting with social services through the right channels. It just went backwards and forwards like that, and the children would come home terrified and begging me not to send them to him anymore.”

Spread out on the conference room table in Grace Harbor Church are Ford’s legal files.

A large binder is filled with records of all the social service and therapeutic interventions that Ford obtained for her daughters during the three years they lived under the British court’s Child Arrangements.

Despite her efforts, she could not get traction in the British system to wrest herself and her children from her ex-partner, as he grew even more violent and unstable.

Ford booked tickets for herself and Grace and Ava — then ages 5 and 4 respectively — to travel to Virginia in fall 2015, to visit her own father — a trip she had made often in the past.

She was fully intending to return, but the plans changed.

The girls’ last contact with their biological father was two weeks before their departure for the U.S.

“He was particularly upset and aggressive that day,” Ford said. “I asked him not to speak to me like that in front of the children. He said a few choice words to me, and then told me that he was going to kill me and take the children to another country. And at that point I was like ‘no one’s helping me.’”

Ford traveled legally with Grace and Ava to Virginia on October 2, 2015.

Ten days later when she did not return home, Ford became an international fugitive.

The law can punish victims who don’t act ‘reasonably’

“There is a misfit between the contours of the law, which is based on acting reasonably, and what can happen neurologically and emotionally if someone’s experienced trauma,” David Voluck said.

Voluck has practiced family law for 21 years. He’s been a tribal judge for 10 of them.

While Voluck is not involved in this case, he has ample experience with situations where the law seems to disadvantage the people it’s designed to protect.

“Particularly in domestic violence relationships or batterer relationships, it could end up with results upside down: Where the victim of the battering and the power and the control ends up being on the end of punishment,” Voluck said.

There’s also this: A pattern-abuser may not stop just because his victims have escaped his reach.

The father of the girls never submitted a petition to recover them with the Hague Convention on International Child Abduction; he’s only filed kidnapping charges.

Ford feels he’s just trying to punish her — and facing an indefinite future behind bars, it’s working.

Author Lisbeth Meredith is a women’s advocate in Anchorage.

In her book “Pieces of Me,” she tells a similar story.

Although she ultimately recovered her daughters, Meredith was always a step behind her ex-husband, as he manipulated the legal systems of two countries.

“We have a lot more research that tells us the incredible, damning impacts domestic violence and abuse has on children — even infants,” Meredith said. “It’s debilitating to children’s futures. Their health — physically, mentally, all of that — is compromised. Knowing all that, we still are not able to make quite the adjustments I think we need to, to prevent victims from being exploited.”

In extradition proceedings, courts consider only the crime — not the ‘criminal’

And then there are those “victims” who lie, or experience a sudden religious conversion, to tease out an advantage in a domestic dispute.

Paul McArthur has been pastor of Grace Harbor for three decades, a job that often involves him intimately in family crises — including domestic violence.

He parses the truth every day in his role as a counselor, and he doesn’t believe Indea Ford is posing.

He and church secretary Betty Jo Moore (a former city paralegal who’s been helping assemble Ford’s defense and tracking her voluminous paperwork) have been writing letters and communicating with Alaska’s congressional delegation since last summer.

(Editor’s note: McArthur and Moore report that Alaska’s congressional offices are sympathetic, but unhelpful. As a rule, Congress does not interfere with the functions of the Judiciary. KCAW confirmed this position with Sen. Dan Sullivan’s office. An aide directed reporters to the senator’s website, which states that due to the separation of powers “I cannot assist or intervene in any way with legal actions, including both civil and criminal matters.”)

Their faith in Ford is absolute — it’s the legal systems of the United States and the United Kingdom they find troubling.

“The more details that you learn of this story,” McArthur said. “Every one of them makes it even more of an amazing thing that such a thing should be happening in two countries sophisticated enough to understand basic justice.”

Ford never has been able to present the evidence of her or her children’s abuse to a judge in the United States.

As far as federal courts are concerned, she must return to face the charges in the U.K.

A humanitarian appeal before the U.S. Secretary of State

The only way to escape extradition now is to appeal to U.S. Secretary of State Rex Tillerson, the first person with power over Ford’s future who can fully weigh her story.

Ford will be extradited to stand trial if Tillerson denies the appeal. Her girls will remain in the U.S. with her husband — whom she met at a Toby Keith concert in 2014, and around whom she has rebuilt her family.

Grace and Ava are thriving in their new life in Sitka — a life Ford wants for them, even if she can’t have it for herself.

“I have had more support in Sitka in this very short time than I’ve had my whole life, where I’ve been anywhere else. And this place feels like home, and my children’s home,” Ford said. “My children are so happy here, and the difference in them is amazing. They’ve gone from timid, scared children that were just terrified of everything, to happy, outgoing, confident girls. The difference is just astounding. It’s truly astounding.”

Ford’s residency status in the event that she’s extradited is uncertain.

Consulted attorneys say that under the Trump administration, immigration is a wild card.

The only certainty is that Ford will do anything in her power to keep her daughters away from the man who abused them.

“Because as a parent, that’s your main goal is to keep your children safe and happy at all times,” Ford said, holding back tears. “That should be the goal of any parent.”

Indea Ford surrendered to federal marshals Jan. 8, and remains in custody at the Hiland Mountain Correctional Center in Eagle River.