In the 1980s, Barbara Drennen was a foster mother who specialized in caring for premature newborns in Kent, Washington. One day, she was assigned a baby who had been prenatally exposed to drugs. “The baby came to me on oxygen, then had to be readmitted to the hospital, then came back to me on a ventilator.”
To give this medically fragile infant the attention it needed, Drennen converted the lower part of her house into a 24...