Children are often described as the future. But in many rural communities across America, the path to bringing a child into the world is getting longer — sometimes literally. Across the country, families are traveling farther and farther from home to deliver babies. Since the end of 2020, 124 rural hospitals have closed or announced plans to close their labor-and-delivery units — about two closures a month. As small hospitals struggle with rising costs and staffing shortages, obstetrics departments are often among the first services to disappear. In this encore episode of Us & Them, host Trey Kay hears from families living with those changes — and explores what the loss of maternity care could mean for the future of rural towns and communities.

America’s overdose crisis keeps changing shape.

In recent years, provisional CDC data have shown a sharp national decline in overdose deaths — even as public officials warn the street drug supply remains volatile and some communities see signs of a rebound.

That uncertainty is also reshaping the recovery world — especially around opioids. Some people find abstinence-based recovery works best. Others rely on medication-assisted treatment (MAT), using prescribed medicine like methadone or buprenorphine to stabilize a person and reduce the risk of relapse. But MAT has long divided the recovery community, fueling a stigma around a deceptively simple question:

When is someone sober?

In this encore episode of Us & Them, Trey Kay visits the Clarksburg Mission in Clarksburg, West Virginia — a Christian-centered recovery facility where people pursue different paths toward sobriety — and where debates about medication, morality, and survival are never abstract.

The U.S. continues to struggle with racial discrimination and this episode of Us & Them looks back at a moment in the 1960s when music and race intersected. America’s popular music scene is a racially integrated space and there are times when it provides a place to heal the nation’s divides. Host Trey Kay shares a story about a band that took a stand against racism and the musicians who suffered the consequences. Kay heads to the West Virginia Music Hall of Fame to talk with West Virginia musicians of different generations as they talk about their experiences past and present in the local music scene and the way it reflects our divisions and unity.