CBS Sunday Morning

Our CBS Sunday morning podcast is sponsored by Edward Jones. College tours with your oldest daughter. Updating the kitchen to the appropriate decade.

Retiring on the coast. Life is full of moments that matter, and Edward Jones helps you make the most of them. That's why every Edward Jones financial advisor works with you to build personalized strategies for now and down the road. So when your next moment arrives, big or small, you're ready for it. Life is for living.

Let's partner for all of it. Learn more at edwardjones.com. Good morning. I'm Jane Pauley and this is Sunday morning. Not to totally ruin your summer, but piece by piece an environmental threat is piling up and all of us share a part of the blame. Worse yet, even those of us who are trying to stop it may not be doing as much good as we think.

David Pogue will report our cover story. No doubt about it, plastic is the miracle material. Plastic is incredibly useful.

It has outstanding properties. Trouble is, what happens once we're done with it? The global average recycling rate we think is about so far has been nine percent. And these days even the plastic we put in the recycling bin may not be recycled. And then you have to decide how long you're going to hold on to it before you end up throwing it away.

Coming up on Sunday morning, what will we do with all our plastic? Guess who's talking to us this morning? It's late night TV talker Jimmy Kimmel in conversation with our Tracy Smith. Jimmy Kimmel's made a life out of laughter, but now he's getting attention for playing it straight.

No American citizen needs an M-16. It's a bit of a risk that you're taking. It takes a lot out of the audience.

It's hard to get them back after you have a monologue like that. So this is Hollywood. Night and day with Jimmy Kimmel ahead this Sunday morning.

Hi how are you? Be careful. Be careful. A surprising number of American women are at risk of serious health problems or even death on what should be one of the happiest days of their lives. Erin Moriarty will have their harrowing stories. It's a trend that will likely stun every mom to be. The United States is ranked 46 when it comes to maternal mortality.

That's behind countries like Saudi Arabia and Kazakhstan. Why deaths and near deaths of new mothers in the U.S. are on the rise ahead on Sunday morning. We'll have those stories and more just ahead. A common and convenient household substance is piling up on both land and sea and nobody seems to know how to stop it. Our cover story is reported by David Pogue. In the 1950s a new material burst onto the scene that would change the world forever. The ingenious alchemy of coal and oil provides the material ingenious machinery presses and stamps and molds the material into a wide variety of products. Yes it was plastic. Cheap durable sanitary strong and light. So how many raw categories of plastics are there?

Literally thousands. Fred Betke is the founder of Delta Pacific Products which makes plastic parts for medical instruments. Okay so welcome to the factory. Thank you we're all ready to serve cafeteria lunches now. That's right. Almost everything plastic starts out as pellets.

They come in every color under the sun which is why Betke keeps them carefully in separate boxes. So what are you paving not to dump some of this? Please don't do that. Delta Pacific's clients specify the exact design of the parts they want. Here hot plastic gets injected into this heavy steel mold. Later it comes out as something like this. After 65 years of making plastic we've pretty much mastered the art. What we haven't yet figured out is what to do with plastic once we're done with it.

It lasts a really long time. It doesn't biodegrade so it just sits there. Roland Geyer professor of environmental science at UC Santa Barbara has studied how much plastic we throw away. We have statistics reaching all the way back to the dawn of plastic mass production 1950 and if we add it all together it's 8.3 billion metric tons.

So if we take that and spread it out evenly over California entire state of California would be covered and that would be an ugly sight. About 70 percent of our discarded plastic winds up in open dumps or landfills like this one. So plastic bag probably used once between the cash register and the car and then how long will it be here in the landfill?

It will be with us for hundreds of years. But some plastic winds up in an even worse place the ocean. Every single year somewhere between five and twelve million metric tons of plastic waste enters the ocean. Plastic in the ocean has a tendency to break down into ever smaller pieces and these tiny pieces then get taken up even lower down in the food chain.

So we know that it ends up on our dinner plates. There's plastic in my food? There is plastic in your food, plastic in your sea salt and there is plastic coming out of your tub. In fact at this rate the World Economic Forum predicts that by 2050 our oceans will contain more plastic than fish. But wait a minute. Don't most people recycle plastic?

Not exactly. Geyer says that as of 2017 the world recycles only about nine percent of all our plastic. Even if you're good about using your recycling bin your plastic may never actually get recycled. Its first stop is a material recovery facility where metal, glass, paper and plastic get sorted. We sort everything so we will sort hanger, we'll sort plastic film, we will sort soda bottles, pill bottles and make individual bales of each plastic.

Ah okay. Sunil Bhagaria is the co-founder of GDB International, a corporate recycling facility in New Jersey. Then it is going to another factory which is then washing it, grinding it, palletizing it. Then from there it will go to another company which will make another product or maybe blowing another bottle. It's easy and economical to recycle clean pure plastic but well over half the plastic we throw in our bins is contaminated by food or paper labels or other materials. For 30 years we've had an easy solution for disposing of that dirty plastic. And what is the role of China in all of this?

That is the million dollar question. China was buying 50 percent of all plastic scrap in the world. That continued for say 20, 30 years.

And then there was a I think a movie made by somebody. Plastic China. Plastic China. The 2017 documentary Plastic China illustrated the brutal truth about the contaminated plastic that developed nations were selling to China. It showed a desperately poor Chinese family eking out a living by hand sorting these mountains of plastic trash. So the Chinese government, the communist party is waking up and saying what why why are we doing this? There's some some national pride. We really want to be the world's dumping ground.

Yes. So the Chinese government announced a new policy. Starting on January 1st this year China stopped accepting other countries plastic unless it's impossibly pure. If you are sending any scrap it should not have 0.5 more than 0.5 percent of foreign matter. Gotta be at least 99.5 percent pure. Pure plastic. Yeah.

And then that was obviously unattainable. In his plant, Bagheria showed me why. So right here you have like four or five different types of plastic. A lot of plastic comes to recyclers like Bagheria all mixed together impossible to separate cost effectively. So what happens now to the plastic we used to ship to China?

Not much. A lot of it's just piling up here in the states. We still have large volumes of the types of plastic that nobody will buy. Sitting, waiting for somebody to buy them. Clay Warner is the recycling manager at Garden Services in Salem, Oregon. And then you have to decide how long you're going to hold on to it before you end up throwing it away. The town had to ask the public to stop putting certain plastic types into their recycling bins.

First initial reaction from the public was outrage. What do you mean we can't recycle these plastics? Meanwhile, smaller recycling centers are simply going out of business. If you were selling it to China there was some revenue coming. Now if you're sending it to landfill, sending it to landfill costs money.

So not only now you're not earning, now you're paying to get rid of it. Still, Roland Guyer points out that we have overcome environmental nightmares before. We banned leaded gasoline. We managed to tackle ozone depletion.

So I think humankind has a long history of creating big environmental problems, but I think we're also starting to have a track record of solving environmental problems. Some larger facilities, like Sunil Bagaria's, have decided to process the contaminated plastic themselves. Earlier we were making money by selling it to China. Now we are making more money by keeping this here, sorting it and making plastic pellets out of it.

This China problem is a blessing in disguise. In the big picture, though, it will take effort from every stakeholder to fix the plastics problem. Recycler Clay Warner says that government should play a part. I do think, in my own opinion, that we do need to ban certain plastics and packaging. Sunil Bagaria says that corporations play a part.

Like McDonald's. They've announced that by 2025 all our packaging will be made from recycled plastic. And plastic parts maker Fred Becky says that plastic manufacturers themselves play a part. Yes, the industry's trying to address it. Polymers are being developed at, you know, the knives and spoons and forks that we see in some of the fast foods.

They've gone to those polymers, which are biodegradable. It has to happen. I mean, this is all we've got, right? Yeah, that's right. We cannot imagine life without plastics, but we cannot continue to lead our life the way we are.

It's not like, oh, let's use this planet Earth, then we will move to another planet. This is what we have. We need to take care of this. Take care of this. Before there were podcasts, there was television. Remember? See what's new under the sun every Sunday morning. Oh my God! Good night, everybody. TV host Jimmy Kimmel talks for a living every weekday night, but this morning he's talking with Tracy Smith. Do you love it here?

I do. You know, it's dirty and kind of gross, but I do love it here. For Jimmy Kimmel, Hollywood is home.

The weather is beautiful. There's great restaurants here. There's a lot to do. I mean, what's not to like? I'm with you.

I say, as somebody goes to the garbage can. Fans of his nightly show have been lining up here for the past 13 years, and lately he's become more than just another face in the late night crowd. And now, here on out, here's Jimmy Kimmel!

Kimmel, who turns 51 in November, was always the lovable frat boy at 1130. But like other late night hosts, he put comedy on hold after last fall's Las Vegas massacre. Maybe I'm nuts, but I would like to think we can put politics aside and agree that no American citizen needs an M-16 or 10 of them.

And maybe that way we don't do this again. Kimmel's call for gun control after the shooting was both praised and criticized. You've heard there's one conservative commentator in particular who says, who made Jimmy Kimmel the moral arbiter? I'm not. I mean, yeah, I agree with him. I'm nobody's moral arbiter. I mean, you don't have to watch the show.

You don't have to listen to what I say. His monologues, written just before every show, have drawn fire from critics who bash him for everything from being wrong on gun control to being soft on Harvey Weinstein. It's a bit of a risk that you're taking to our audience. You might lose the audience.

Yeah. I mean, I saw, I don't know if it was a study or a poll or some combination of those two things that like three years ago, I was equally liked by Republicans and Democrats and then Republican numbers went way down like 30% or whatever. And as a talk show host, that's not ideal, but I did.

I would do it again in a heartbeat. So you don't mind if Republicans turn off your show they're not watching anymore? I wouldn't say I don't mind. I mean, I love for everyone. I want everyone with a television to watch the show, but if they're so turned off by my opinion on health care and gun violence, then I don't know.

I probably wouldn't want to have a conversation with them anyway. Truth is Kimmel still marvels at the thought of anyone watching him on TV. Nothing in Jimmy Kimmel's boyhood was ever as fascinating as late night TV. Born in Brooklyn and raised in Las Vegas, Kimmel grew up in awe of David Letterman.

His 18th birthday cake even spelled out the words late night and so did his Nevada license plates. When you discovered David Letterman, did that become kind of a dream of yours? The idea of maybe someday being a late night host?

Never, never. I never even imagined that there would be other late night hosts. It never occurred to me that Johnny Carson and David Letterman would ever go off the air. It just never occurred to me.

I'm a little slow. He spent 12 years in radio and got a foothold in TV with the Comedy Central game show Win Ben Stein's Money. What cosmetics giant is owned by financier Ron Perlman? Max Factor.

No. He also helped create a satire of crude male behavior called The Man Show. It was a fun show to do and a silly show that some people took very seriously.

Coming up we have movies men don't want to see and girls on trampolines. Some people didn't understand that we were joking. So there were kind of two audiences for that show. The audience that was in on it and the audience that wasn't. And very angry not being in on it.

Yeah, I don't know. I think that we tried to make it like there were a lot of angry people watching the show but I think something like 40 percent of our audience was female so. It made me wonder what kind of a maniac wants this job.

And in 2003 ABC offered him a talk show of his own. It seemed like a good idea at the time. I quickly realized that it wasn't.

What do you mean? Well about six months in I was praying that they would cancel the show. It was just overwhelming. Nobody wanted to be on the show.

The show was live from 9 to 10 pm every night. I was really like, I was depressed. It was a sad moment. I was like, I don't want to be on the show. A slog. Nobody seemed to be watching the show.

It was very unpleasant all the way around. He stuck it out and survived. In part on the strength of viral videos.

Like the one where then girlfriend Sarah Silverman taunts him about sleeping with Matt Damon. So this is Hollywood. Very glamorous. It's all still a bit surreal.

Be careful. Do you feel like you deserve to be here now? I mean I guess so. I don't know.

I don't who deserves anything really. I mean it's I was lucky enough to get a shot and somehow miraculously I do think back on you know how long the odds were. But you did it.

Yeah I guess we did yeah. And he hasn't done it all by himself. His two grown children from a previous marriage Kevin and Katie have both appeared on their dad's shows.

Head writer Molly McNearney became his bride in 2013 and their four-year-old daughter Jane is almost a regular. You remember all the candy we got? Yeah. Well daddy ate all of it.

No. It was pretty much all fun and games until April of last year when the Kimmel's son Billy was born with a heart defect. It was a scary story and before I go into it I want you to know it has a happy ending okay. Kimmel's on-air story about his son's fight for life became a call to action on health care. If your baby is going to die and it doesn't have to it shouldn't matter how much money you make. I think that's something that whether you're a Republican or Democrat or something else we all agree on that right. What stays with you from the feedback that you got? I think it's the other families and you know a lot of people will tell you their stories. I mean a heart operation is no joke but you know families with cancer and ongoing illnesses and you know that's what stays with me.

I know you learned a lot about health care through this. What did you learn about your own family about Molly? She was very weak through the whole thing. I was the strong one. I'm joking.

I'm joking to make myself not cry. It's when you really appreciate your family and Molly. It's funny because we weren't sure we wanted to have a second child.

You know I have two older kids and we really love our daughter obviously but we definitely learned that we wanted to have a baby. That was that became very very clear at that moment. All right not only are you our boss you're also our best friend. The pre-show chant with his writers is a running joke but the ratings are ticking up. He might be walking in the footsteps of giants but Jimmy Kimmel has found a way to stand out. You have this show. You're doing great. You're getting recognized. What next? There really is no next when you host a show like mine. This is it? Yeah this is probably it but I never feel like it. I do steal.

I feel like I snuck in and I do sometimes I'll like drive by a neighbor's house and they have a big window like if you see you know yourself on the television it's like wow there's people in their houses watching me that's it's crazy you know it's uh television is kind of a magical thing. School teachers often worry during summer vacation their students will forget much of what they learned in class. A worry that probably doesn't apply to the school kid Steve Hartman watched in action. If you had to think of a good site for an archaeological dig you probably wouldn't think of the children's workshop school in Manhattan. You almost certainly wouldn't think of Miriam Sisherman's third grade classroom and you definitely wouldn't think of her coat closet. Closet yeah it's not like it's a tomb it's not like it's a pyramid right it's a closet right I'm really lucky that this one student decided to investigate yeah. That one student is this student Bobby Scotto.

Hit pay dirt literally. A couple years ago back when Bobby was in Miriam's class he started wondering about a little crack in the closet floor and I'm like how in the world am I going to get down there. He began poking around with his finger then turned to pencils and shirt hangers and then other kids got curious and they're totally into it.

Okay so guys. Which is why for the past two years now Miriam students have been excavating nearly every closet in this 100 year old school. They're finding some really old things. Pokemon cards.

Some more recent and some what's this much more recent. There's a camera. All of it uncovered with a kind of glee. Wow. Rarely seen in a grade school classroom. A piece of metal. I found three pencils and erasers stuck to play-doh. Whoa. No I seriously did.

Under there it's just black black mystery things in black. I just don't want to stop basically. All right guys. In fact they are so into it.

Take you guys out of the closet now. It's almost hard for Miriam to keep up with the Indiana Joneses. It would have made your life a lot easier if you just said quit messing around in the closet. I know and I actually am really glad this didn't happen to me my first couple of years of teaching because that's probably what I would have said because it's a little scary as a teacher to encourage kids to do a project that you have no idea where it's going. But on the flip side she says it can lead to some wonderful lessons. In this case Miriam says the kids got really into history and archaeology and they got their own museum exhibit showing off everything from antique school supplies to animal mummies. I found a pine cone.

Of course there are still many more findings waiting to be found. I found a pine cone. But no matter what they dig up there will never be a greater treasure than the one that stands before them every day. The teacher with that special gift for unearthing a passion. My favorite teacher that's a nice thing to find. I wonder who it's for. Staying awake all day is overrated.

Here's our contributor Jim Gaffigan. I love napping okay that's right I'm not a preschooler in my 80s but I love a good nap on a daily basis. I've had many two nap days and those were glorious. A nap is one of the first things I think about when I wake up.

It goes where's coffee then when can I go back into that nice bed. A nap is what I worry about when I can't fall asleep at night. As I toss and turn all I can think is this is gonna mess up tomorrow's nap timing. I used to be embarrassed by my daily nap habit.

I try to hide it or justify it. See as a stand-up comedian it's necessary to peak late at night so I need to nap during the day. Granted most of the people in the audience at my shows don't get to nap and they seem fine. Eventually I realized I just need a nap or well I behave like a cranky toddler that has missed his nap.

My heroic wife understands this. Sometimes she'll bring up my nap like it's an anti-psychotic drug I take. Did you get your nap today or after this maybe you should go and nap. I politely asked her to not bring up my nap in front of people I respect. I guess I'm afraid people will think I'm lazy for disappearing and sleeping halfway through the day. Maybe there's an explanation. Maybe I need a nap because I'm from Spain. You see I'm just having a siesta.

I knew there was a reason why I love churros. Coming soon, Mobituaries, a podcast on matters of death and life from Mo Rocca. Could it possibly be true that American women giving birth are more at risk of life-threatening complications than women in dozens of other countries?

Erin Moriarty has the stories behind the statistics. So mommy where you at? Beautiful Palm Springs. Fearless is how Charles Johnson describes his wife Kira. I love you. We're talking about a woman that was a marathon runner that raced cars that was a skydiver.

It never occurred to him that the greatest danger Kira would face would be going to one of the best hospitals in California to have a baby. Their second son Langston. Hey mommy. Hey daddy. Hey Langston. For us we were really and truly expecting this experience the second time around to be a walk in the park. It was a c-section not because there was a problem right? They suggested that you had one before and they recommended that she have another cesarean. Hey Langston.

I've been waiting on you buddy. The first sign of a problem came in the late afternoon of April 12, 2016 shortly after Kira gave birth. I was sitting by Kira's bedside and I began to notice the catheter turned pink with blood. A doctor ordered a CT scan, a cat scan.

Johnson says he didn't worry at first. Something's not quite right and I was aware of that but we've got a plan and she's in what I thought were great hands. And how's Kira feeling during this? Lethargic. I'm continuing to advocate and ask more adamantly look when are we taking her for the CT scan?

Seven o'clock rolls around, eight o'clock goes by, nine o'clock comes, ten o'clock comes. There's still no CT. There's still no CT scan. Shortly after midnight his wife was taken into surgery. She's holding my hand and she's saying that she was scared and I'm telling her that everything is going to be okay. Everything's going to be okay and that was the last time I saw my wife alive. When they took Kira back to surgery there were three and a half liters of blood in her abdomen and she coded immediately. And when you say code she died?

Her heart stopped immediately. Kira Johnson was 39 years old and her death isn't just a personal tragedy. She's part of a disturbing national trend. The United States is the only industrialized country where the rates of maternal deaths have increased not decreased. And so young women actually have a higher risk of dying during pregnancy and childbirth than their mothers did.

Dr. Marianne Etiobet is executive director of Merck for Mothers, a program run by the pharmaceutical giant Merck to reduce the number of maternal deaths throughout the world. She never guessed that one of the countries most in need was the U.S. Sixty percent of the deaths in the United States are preventable. And where do we compare to other developed countries like Great Britain, Canada? The United States is ranked 46 when it comes to maternal mortality. That's behind countries like Saudi Arabia and Kazakhstan. In the U.S. that means at least two women are dying every day. And it's not just deaths on the rise. So are near deaths.

60,000 a year across the country. When it was happening it would go on from anywhere from like 15 minutes to an hour. It felt like my body just wanted to crumble. Amber McLaughlin was 29 years old and eight months pregnant when she began to feel an excruciating pain that would come and go. She says her doctor wasn't alarmed. They're telling you no don't come in we've seen you you're fine? They told me to go home and rest. They said you're 35 weeks you're probably uncomfortable go home and rest.

And I said not going home I'm coming in today. Even then a nurse practitioner hesitated and then relented sending McLaughlin for tests. I get hooked up to the monitors and a few minutes I mean it felt like two they came rushing in and they said where's your husband this baby has to be out in 10 minutes. She had developed a rare condition that caused her blood pressure to skyrocket putting both her life and her babies at risk. I'm thinking to myself I was right this whole time.

Why does it come to this? And so at that moment I even at five years later it's one of those things like when nobody believes you. When McLaughlin's son was delivered by emergency c-section he weighed just three pounds. Was there a time when you really wondered whether you'd ever get to see your son? That first day he was really struggling I mean they told us that he was at pretty close to the end. Was your life ever at risk?

Part of when I was saying quote unquote I think I'm dying that's because I truly believe that my kidneys and my liver were starting to shut down. So what's causing this spike in maternal deaths? There are a number of factors. More women wait until they're older to have babies and often they begin their pregnancies less healthy with chronic conditions like obesity, high blood pressure and diabetes. But some medical professionals say the real problem is how those babies are delivered. They blame much of the increase in deaths and near deaths on a dramatic rise in c-sections. If you have a c-section in 2018 you have a 90 percent chance of having a c-section second time but the second time it's a more complicated surgery and the third time it can be like operating on a melted box of crayons and in those cases women can bleed to death. Dr. Neil Shah is a professor of obstetrics at Harvard Medical School.

The pain is okay. And a practicing physician. Are you also saying that some of these c-sections are just not necessary?

Probably more than half of them. And when complications do arise, says Dr. Shah, doctors don't always listen to their pregnant patients. I think there is a dimension of gender discrimination.

If a woman after a birth goes into a hospital with concerning signs of a complication there are no rules for how quickly an obstetrician has to see her and in fact it's a routine case that it will take hours. And statistics indicate that it may not just be gender that plays a part in dangerous delays but also race. If you're a woman of color in this country especially if you're black your odds of dying in childbirth are three to four times higher on average in our country. Why? Because you're not talking about access to health care.

You're not talking about money or education. No and this is going to be hard to hear. We believe black women less when they express concerns about the symptoms they're having particularly around pain and that's the common thread in all the stories we've been hearing in the media including Serena Williams. Yes even Serena Williams the world-class athlete who developed a pulmonary embolism after giving birth to her daughter last September. We had a lot of complications but look what we got. She says that had she not insisted on receiving a CAT scan she could have died. We're leaving the hospital after seven days, six days.

It's been a long time. If women with resources are at risk imagine what happens to women without access to proper health care. I am this baby's big sister and this is my mom. My first proper prenatal visit was at 16 weeks. It was terrifying. I had been bleeding for about 11 weeks before I was able to get a understanding to why.

Mom you can't play on it. 32 year old Akilah Collier works as a full-time substitute teacher in Orlando, Florida but she couldn't afford health insurance when she became pregnant with her second child. I went to the emergency room and that's where I got my prenatal care for the first three months. I racked up over $20,000 in medical bills during those four visits and they misdiagnosed me every single time. They were saying that it looked like I was having a miscarriage.

And there's 30 year old Ashley Lacayo who also lives in Florida. I have insurance but I've never been told no so many times by by people who like have no emotion. Oh I'm sorry. Oh I'm sorry. No.

No. Lacayo says she initially was able to get prenatal care by agreeing to pay her entire deductible, $2,600, by her 28th week of pregnancy. But when that date rolled around and she couldn't afford the full amount, her doctor refused to continue to see her. I called 15 or so different clinics in the area. Everyone denied me.

It was just a never-ending, oh how far along are you? Oh no sorry. We don't accept patients past 25 weeks. There you are.

Oh I got a kick here too. Women are literally shut out, left wandering the streets, trying to find someone who will help them and running to the emergency room in lieu of prenatal care. Midwife Jenny Joseph, who moved from London to Florida nearly 30 years ago, says she is deeply concerned by the number of women who were shut out of proper prenatal care. We are standing by literally as mothers and babies are suffering and I feel like my little piece is to be able to make a difference in that. In 2006, Joseph opened a practice specifically for them called the Easy Access Clinic. For you are the big sister. It's run by nurses and midwives who include doctors when necessary.

They turn no one away. There's nothing you can come up with that will have us say no. You can be indigent.

You may not have, you may be homeless. We're still going to see you and the simple reason is because you're carrying a baby. Like what else would we do?

There isn't any I think ethical way to say no go away. How's baby moving? A lot all the time. Two months after being refused treatment by her first doctor, Ashley Lacayo heard about the clinic. Joseph saw her the next day. This place saved me.

It did. I mean I'm I'm doing a week and where would I be without her? Both Lacayo and Collier gave birth to healthy babies in May but this problem is not going away. Since 2000, hundreds of hospital maternity wards have closed across America. Low-cost clinics like Joseph's could help fill the need but she warns that may not be enough. Women are sent out of a hospital two days after they've delivered and basically told to wait for a six-week postpartum check which is useless to them given that most of the postpartum concerns the morbidity and the mortality occurs within the first couple of weeks after the baby's born. But when deaths do occur, Dr. Etiabet from Merck for Mothers says each one must be counted and investigated. Is that being done right now? It's not being done in every state so they're not paying attention to the issue.

They're not only not going to know that there is an issue, they're not going to know how to solve it. More than two years after his wife Kira died, Charles Johnson is now a single dad raising their two sons in Atlanta. Determined to keep her memory alive, he's suing the hospital and speaking out, hoping to put a face, a deeply missed face, on an American crisis. It's immeasurable how much I miss Kira and particularly as I see these amazing gifts that she's left us with and there's so many things about our journey together that are bittersweet but they're so painful because she's not here to share them with us. Do you think Kira's death probably means other mothers will get better care? I hope so. When you go into the hospital, ask them do they know about Kira Johnson's story. Ask them do they know about what happened to her and then ask them directly what are you doing to make sure the same thing doesn't happen to me. I'm Jane Pauley.

Thank you for listening and please join us again next Sunday morning. United States for an era of sustained great power competition. The United States put our mind to something we can usually figure it out. What people are saying and what we kind of know analytically and empirically is our strategic situation, our military situation is not being matched up with what we're doing. Follow Intelligence Matters wherever you get your podcasts.