Nicholson V Williams and the Thirteenth Amendment
March 17, 2010 yvonnemason
Shawan Thomason, Carly and Sara Wilfawn being held by legal Slavery
The Thirteenth Amendment states: “Neither Slavery nor involuntary servitude, except as a punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted, shall exist within the United States, or any place subject to their jurisdiction. Congress shall have power to enforce this article by appropriate legislation.
Mr. Kurt Mundorff , a caseworker for the New York Child Protective Services for fourteen months, discusses in his paper titled “Children as Chattel” the Thirteenth Amendment and the case of Nicholson V Williams which involved a mother’s loss of her children due to domestic abuse.
Mr. Mundorff states that Federal District Court Judge Jack B Weinstein suggested in that case that “The exact language of the Thirteenth Amendment could be construed to cover children forcibly and unnecessarily removed without due process and then consigned to the control of foster parents.”
The common sense of this statement would appear to indicate that children removed from their homes often without good reason and held in State custody while generating income for the adults around them should be protected by this amendment.
The simple statement in the amendment which says: “prohibits slavery and indentured servitude within the jurisdiction of the United States.”
The way Child Protective Services tries to circumvent that amendment is a principle of common law which was popular in England. In feudal times various obligations and powers, collectively referred to as the “royal prerogative” were reserved to the king. The king exercised these functions in his role of father of the country.
The common law is known as “parens patriae”. The word itself is Latin. The translation is “Parent of the Country.” The definition is: A doctrine that grants the inherent power and authority of the state to protect persons who are legally unable to act on their own behalf.
In the United States we don’t have a king, yet. However, different agencies Child Protective Services being one of them have taken this application to the abyss in the treatment of children. The state is the supreme guardian of all children within its jurisdiction. Therefore the State Courts have taken the inherent power to intervene to “protect the best interest of children” whose welfare is “jeopardized” by controversies between parents. The courts are given this “supreme power” by the legislative acts that define the “scope” of child protection in the state. In other words, when you have children they are not really yours. You are just borrowing them until such time the state deems you negligent and depriving your child.
This common law in effect gives the state the power to interfere with the rights of the parent to raise their children without interference but, it gives the state the right to interfere when they are “compelled” to do so. And they can feel “compelled” to do so for any reason valid or not.
That being said, the Supreme Court has established a liberty interest under the United States Constitution which supersedes the States Constitution, for a family to freely raise their children without unnecessary interference. But this balance is only effective for protection of the Middle Class of America and the affluent Americans. This protection that is afforded to the middle class and affluent is not afforded to the poor and disenfranchised communities. If the invocation of the Thirteenth Amendment were to be put in use it would require a stricter and higher level of scrutiny of state actions than is now done. There would be a stronger presumption against interference in the lives of children and their families.
The Thirteenth Amendment plainly states that “neither slavery nor involuntary servitude, except as punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted, shall exist within the United States, or any place subject to their jurisdiction.”
With that being said, the current child welfare practices in the United States must be reformed. States now take children from their parents, with little or no adjudication and then subject them to conditions which generate income for their keepers aka foster parents/adoptive parents. (Title IV-E Funding).The parents and the children are stripped of the rights which are enjoyed by other citizens including those who have been charged with capital crimes. It traumatizes children and leaves them with feelings of guilt, (as if they had done something to cause the breakup of their family), feelings of betrayal, (why didn’t their parent want them) and feelings of never being secure again. This act brings up the Eight Amendment which states “Excessive bail shall not be required, excessive fines shall not be imposed and finally cruel and unusual punishment shall not be inflicted. When children are snatched from their homes, school or a relative’s house because of an anonymous tip, or the school principal or teacher or doctor or hospital says “we think this child is being deprived or neglected, this is tantamount to cruel and unusual punishment. A child is ripped from everything they know and are comfortable with, then tossed into a stranger’s home with a new set of “parents, siblings and rules” This is cruel and unusual punishment and goes against the Eighth Amendment in a big way. This act goes hand in hand with the decision of the Supreme Court in United States V Kozminski.
The Supreme Court stated in United States V Kozminski that involuntary servitude consists of the condition in which the victim is forced to work for the defendant or by the use of threat of coercion through law or the legal process. The definition includes those cases where the defendant in servitude by placing the victim in fear of such physical restraint or injury or legal coercion. Their holding did not imply that evidence of other means of coercion, or of poor working conditions, or of the victim’s special vulnerabilities is irrelevant in a prosecution under these statutes. They indicated the vulnerabilities of the victim was relevant in determining whether the physical or legal coercion or threats thereof could plausibly have compelled the victim to serve.
When the court made this ruling it reaffirmed its prior decision declaring that the amendment went far beyond its primary purpose of abolishing the institution of African Slavery. The Court extended the amendment to mean “to cover those forms of compulsory labor akin to African Slavery which in practical operation would tend to produce like undesirable results.” The court also determined the special “vulnerabilities of the victim are relevant in determining whether the physical or legal coercion or threats thereof could plausibly have compelled the victim to serve.”
The court used this in their discussion in regards to the young Irish boys who were brought over to America and compelled to work on the streets. They were without family and other sources of support and they had no means of escaping the “padrones” service. They had no choice by to work for their “masters”.
The Supreme Court ruled this was the same thing as African Slavery and that is what triggered the Thirteenth Amendment protections. In their findings they specified that “the Vulnerabilities of the victim should be considered, especially the age.”
Some especially those who in Child Protective Services would argue that the child welfare system is not creating involuntary servitude because children are not made to work. We can debate that point all day long.
If the definition of coerced labor is : actions an individual is forced to take, which enrich another individual, then the children which are snatched from their parents arms easily hands down quality as coerced laborers.
Mr. Mundorff, however takes things one step further. He states that the children who are literally ripped from their parents amid tears, and reaching toward their parents with their clothes in a paper sack are more like slaves. Unlike Involuntary Servitude, Slavery is a status not an activity. Children like slaves may not be made to work, but was not unshackled and there for are not allowed to be free. In the child welfare system slavery is a legal status, which one cannot escape. The parent cannot escape because they are like rats in a wheel. No matter what they do they will never be allowed to have their children back. The children cannot escape because they are now belong to the “Ruler of the County/State.”
We know that the Child Welfare System better known as Child Protective Services targets those who are poor and disenfranchised. We also know that the Kozminski ruling protects those very people against the parents whose homes are searched, and the children who are taken.
At the present time three children are being held in legal slavery by Jackson County, Ga. DFCS who then placed them in a foster home which receives a monthly check for all three girs, plus several other foster children. These three girls are not free, they are a source of income for a family who lives in Jackson County with an uneployment rate of 10.4%. It is one of the most economicaly depressed areas in Georgia. Instead of paying strangers to take care of these girls they should be giving the money to their mother for housing, child care,etc. IF they have that kind of money to pay to slave owners, then why not the natural mother.
Below is the court ruling:
Nicholson v. Williams
U.S. Court of Appeals, 2nd Cir., No. 2, 171 (amicus).
This case involves the parental rights of mothers who are victims of domestic violence.
In 1999, Sharwline Nicholson was a single mother of two young children, Kendell Coles and Claude Barnett. Ms. Nicholson was still involved with the father of her infant daughter, Claude Barnett, but Mr. Barnett lived in South Carolina and made monthly visits up to Brooklyn to see them. On Jan. 27, 1999, during one of Mr. Barnett’s visits, Ms. Nicholson ended the relationship. Mr. Barnett, who had never previously threatened or assaulted Ms. Nicholson, angrily began punching her, kicking her, and throwing objects at her. With her head bleeding profusely from the attack, Ms. Nicholson called 911. She also made arrangements for a neighbor to care for her children while she was in the hospital. Upon learning she would stay at the hospital overnight, she gave officers the names of relatives who could care for the children in her absence.
The next day, an Administration of Children’s Services (ACS) worker called Ms. Nicholson at the hospital and informed her that the agency had taken custody of her children the night before. ACS claimed that the children were in “imminent risk if they remained in the care of Ms. Nicholson because she was not, at that time, able to protect herself nor her children because Mr. Barnett had viciously beaten her.” ACS also filed charges of neglect against Ms. Nicholson for “engage[ing] in acts of domestic violence” in the presence of their child. On Feb. 4, 1999, Family Court ordered that Ms. Nicholson’s children be returned to her, but Ms. Nicholson continued to be listed on the State’s records as a neglectful parent.
Ms. Nicholson and others filed a class action suit against ACS claiming, among other things, a deprivation of Fourteenth Amendment rights of procedural and substantive due process protecting familial and parental relationships. On March 1, 2001, the District Court granted the plaintiffs a preliminary injunction, from which the defendants appealed.
The Second Circuit certified to the New York State Court of Appeals the question of how to interpret the Family Court Act’s definition of neglect. On May 3, 2004, the NYCLU joined in an amicus brief, filed at the Court of Appeals, in support of the District Court’s decision. The brief highlighted the significant gender bias that continues to persist in court and agency decisions which blame battered mothers for any and all harm their children suffer. The brief further argued that the “failure to exercise a minimum degree of care” standard of the Family Court Act should be interpreted to require a detailed, particularized showing of facts that properly assesses the non-abusive parent’s individual responsibility for any harm to her children. Amici claimed that requiring a case-specific explanation regarding the accountability of the non-offending parent is essential to protect adequately a non-offending parent’s due process rights, and that to remove a child from Ms. Nicholson’s care on the mere presumption of responsibility violates those rights.
On Oct. 26, 2004, the New York Court of Appeals unanimously held that a mother’s inability to protect a child from witnessing abuse does not constitute neglect, and therefore cannot be the sole basis for removal. Furthermore, the Court held that any decision to remove a child must be weighed against the psychological harm to the child that could be created by the removal itself, and that only in the rarest of instances should this decision be made without judicial approval. On Nov. 29, 2004, the Second Circuit issued a decree in Nicholson v. Williams under the terms set forth in the New York Court of Appeals decision.
Attorneys involved in this case include Deborah Widiss, Christina Brandt-Young and Jennifer Brown (Legal Momentum); Rebekah Diller (NYCLU); Terry O’Neill (National Organization for Women Foundation).
http://protectingourchildrenfrombeingsold.wordpress.com/2010/03/17/nicholson-v-williams-and-the-thirteenth-amendment/
Isabella Brooke Knightly and Austin Gamez-Knightly
In Memory of my Loving Husband, William F. Knightly Jr. Murdered by ILLEGAL Palliative Care at a Nashua, NH Hospital
Thursday, March 18, 2010
Three More Reason's that Child Protective Services Need to be Monitored- They are Out of Control
These Stories are Three More Reason's that Child Protective Services Need to be Monitored- They are Out of Control
March 17, 2010yvonnemasonLeave a commentGo to comments
2 Votes
Child-abuse claims vs. parents’ rights
Supreme Court mulls whether to take a suit accusing Illinois of forcing families to give up rights.
By Warren Richey | Staff writer of The Christian Science Monitor
from the June 12, 2008 edition
Washington – The US Supreme Court is being asked to determine whether procedures used in Illinois to investigate allegations of child abuse or neglect violate the fundamental rights of parents.
Hard lemonade, hard price
Dad’s oversight at Tigers game lands son in foster care
A number of people have sent us this story and we wanted to share it with our readers. If the case that child protective services needs oversight hasn’t been persuasive enough so far, maybe reading this story will be convincing.
By Brian Dickerson, Detroit Free Press Columnist
April 28, 2008
If you watch much television, you’ve probably heard of a product called Mike’s Hard Lemonade.
And if you ask Christopher Ratte and his wife how they lost custody of their 7-year-old son, the short version is that nobody in the Ratte family watches much television.
The way police and child protection workers figure it, Ratte should have known that what a Comerica Park vendor handed over when Ratte ordered a lemonade for his boy three Saturdays ago contained alcohol, and Ratte’s ignorance justified placing young Leo in foster care until his dad got up to speed on the commercial beverage industry.
Even if, in hindsight, that decision seems a bit, um, idiotic.
Ratte is a tenured professor of classical archaeology at the University of Michigan, which means that, on a given day, he’s more likely to be excavating ancient burial sites in Turkey than watching “Dancing with the Stars” — or even the History Channel, for that matter.
The 47-year-old academic says he wasn’t even aware alcoholic lemonade existed when he and Leo stopped at a concession stand on the way to their seats in Section 114.
“I’d never drunk it, never purchased it, never heard of it,” Ratte of Ann Arbor told me sheepishly last week. “And it’s certainly not what I expected when I ordered a lemonade for my 7-year-old.”
But it wasn’t until the top of the ninth inning that a Comerica Park security guard noticed the bottle in young Leo’s hand.
“You know this is an alcoholic beverage?” the guard asked the professor.
“You’ve got to be kidding,” Ratte replied. He asked for the bottle, but the security guard snatched it before Ratte could examine the label.
Mistake or child neglect?
An hour later, Ratte was being interviewed by a Detroit police officer at Children’s Hospital, where a physician at the Comerica Park clinic had dispatched Leo — by ambulance! — after a cursory exam.
Leo betrayed no symptoms of inebriation. But the physician and a police officer from the Comerica substation suggested the ER visit after the boy admitted he was feeling a little nauseated.
The Comerica cop estimated that Leo had drunk about 12 ounces of the hard lemonade, which is 5% alcohol. But an ER resident who drew Leo’s blood less than 90 minutes after he and his father were escorted from their seats detected no trace of alcohol.
“Completely normal appearing,” the resident wrote in his report, “… he is cleared to go home.”
But it would be two days before the state of Michigan allowed Ratte’s wife, U-M architecture professor Claire Zimmerman, to take their son home, and nearly a week before Ratte was permitted to move back into his own house.
And if you think nothing so ludicrous could happen to your family, maybe you should pay a little less attention to who’s getting booted from “Dancing with the Stars” and a little more to how the state agency responsible for protecting Michigan’s children is going about its work.
Doing their duty
Almost everyone Chris Ratte met the night they took Leo away conceded the state was probably overreacting.
The sympathetic cop who interviewed Ratte and his son at the hospital said she was convinced what happened had been an accident, but that her supervisor was insisting the matter be referred to Child Protective Services.
And Ratte thought the two child protection workers who came to take Leo away seemed more annoyed with the police than with him. “This is so unnecessary,” one told Ratte before driving away with his son.
But there was really nothing any of them could do, they all said. They were just adhering to protocol, following orders.
And so what had begun as an outing to the ballpark ended with Leo crying himself to sleep in front of a television inside the Child Protective Services building, and Ratte and his wife standing on the sidewalk outside, wondering when they’d see their little boy again.
A vain rescue mission
Child Protective Services is the unit of the Michigan Department of Human Services responsible for intervening when someone suspects a child is being abused, neglected or endangered. Its powers include the authority to remove children from their homes and transfer them to foster parents who answer only to the state.
By law, CPS officials are forbidden to discuss the particulars of any investigation.
But Mike Patterson, Child and Family Services director for the Wayne County district that includes Comerica Park, said that in general his agency’s discretion is limited once police obtain a court order to remove a child from the parental home — usually authorized, as in Leo’s case, by a juvenile court referee responding to a police officer’s recommendation.
“Once the court has authorized a child’s removal,” Patterson told me, “we cannot return the child to the parental custody” until the court has OK’d it.
But that doesn’t explain why CPS refused to release Leo to the custody of two aunts — one a social worker and licensed foster parent — who drove all night from New England to take custody of their nephew.
Chris Ratte’s sisters, Catherine Miller and Felicity Ratte, left Massachusetts at 10:30 the night of the fateful lemonade purchase after the police officer who’d reluctantly requested a removal order told Ratte the state would likely jump at the chance to place Leo with responsible relatives. But when the two women arrived at the CPS office early Sunday, a caseworker explained they would not be allowed to see Leo until they had secured a hotel room.
The sisters quickly complied. But by the time they returned to CPS around 10:30 a.m., their nephew had been taken to an undisclosed foster home, where he would remain until a preliminary court hearing the following afternoon.
By that Monday, April 7, when Ratte and his wife returned for a meeting with Latricia Jones, the CPS caseworker assigned to their case, no one in the family had been able to talk to Leo for a day and a half.
More investigation needed
At a hearing later that day, Jones recommended that Leo remain in foster care until she had completed her investigation, a process she estimated would take several days. It was only after the assistant attorney general who represented CPS admitted that the state was not interested in pursuing the case aggressively that juvenile referee Leslie Graves agreed to release Leo to his mother — on the condition that Ratte himself relocate to a hotel.
Finally, at a second hearing three days later, Graves dismissed the complaint and permitted Ratte to move home.
Don Duquette, a U-M law professor who directs the university’s Child Advocacy Law Clinic, represented Ratte and his wife. He notes sardonically that the most remarkable thing about the couple’s case may be the relative speed with which they were reunited with Leo.
Duquette says the emergency removal powers of CPS, though “well-intentioned” are “out of control and partly responsible for the large numbers of kids in the foster care system,” which is almost universally acknowledged to be badly overburdened.
Ratte and his wife have filed a formal complaint with the CPS ombudsman’s office.
“I have apologized to Leo from the bottom of my heart for the silly mistake that got him into this mess,” Ratte wrote in the complaint. “But I have also told him that what happened afterward was an even bigger error, and I would like to be able to say to him that institutions, like people, can learn from their mistakes.”
Contact BRIAN DICKERSON at 248-351-3697 or bdickerson@freepress.com
The case arises at a legal crossroads between the government’s interest in moving quickly to safeguard children from abuse or neglect and the right of parents to raise and maintain a family without undue government interference.
The high court is scheduled to consider whether to take up the case, Dupuy v. McEwen, at its private conference Thursday. An order agreeing or refusing to hear the appeal could come as early as Monday.
State procedures to investigate allegations of child abuse have been a topic of national concern after more than 400 children from a polygamist group’s ranch in west Texas were taken from their parents and held for nearly two months in foster care. The Texas Supreme Court later ordered state officials to return the children to their parents while the investigation continues.
At issue in the Illinois case is whether state officials can use the potential threat of placing children in foster care as a means to pressure parents to forfeit their parental rights.
Agents with the Illinois Department of Children and Family Services (DCFS) routinely advise parents in the initial stage of an abuse investigation that their children may be taken into state custody unless the parents agree to a state-imposed “safety plan.” Such plans can require the accused parent or parents to leave the home immediately and cease all unsupervised contact with their children for the duration of the investigation, according to a lawsuit filed by a group of Illinois parents.
Imposition of the safety plan can be authorized by a single unconfirmed tip received via an anonymous child-abuse hot line, the suit says.
In contrast, to authorize the removal of children from their parents, authorities must be able to present enough evidence to convince a judge that there is “reasonable suspicion” that a child has been abused or is in imminent danger.
Illinois officials bypass this evidentiary standard and judicial oversight by giving parents an offer they can’t refuse, according to the lawsuit.
The offer: Agree to a safety plan or your children may be taken away. Parents are not given an opportunity to know the substance and source of an abuse allegation, nor are they given an opportunity to challenge the safety plan before a neutral decisionmaker.
Is it coercion? Judges disagree.
A federal judge ruled that such tactics by state officials were a form of coercion. But a federal appeals court disagreed. The Seventh Circuit Court of Appeals in Chicago upheld the state program, saying it raised no constitutional issues because the parents had voluntarily agreed to the safety plan.
“We can’t see how parents are made worse off by being given the option of accepting the offer of a safety plan,” wrote Circuit Judge Richard Posner. He said the safety plan offers parents more options, not fewer options.
“If you tell a guest that you will mix him either a Martini or a Manhattan, how is he worse off than if you tell him you’ll mix him a Martini?” Judge Posner wrote.
Lawyers for the families say parents have a fundamental right to raise their children without government involvement unless officials can show evidence of abuse.
“There has to be some compelling interest in overriding that basic protection [of parents' rights], and a hot-line call by itself doesn’t cut it,” says Diane Redleaf, executive director of the Family Defense Center in Chicago and a lead lawyer in the case.
“The Seventh Circuit’s suggestion that the agonizing choice at the center of this case – between leaving one’s family or having one’s children taken into state custody – is no different than choosing between a ‘Martini’ or a ‘Manhattan’ at a cocktail party, trivializes the family’s fundamental liberty interests,” writes Stanford law professor and lawyer Jeffrey Fisher in a brief to the court on behalf of the Illinois families.
“When a person is offered a ‘Martini or a Manhattan,’ he always retains the option of declining both drinks,” Mr. Fisher says. “Though it has no evidence of parental wrongdoing, DCFS does not offer parents the option of no restrictions on their family life when it ‘offers’ safety plans.”
Parents never risk losing children
The safety plan program began in 1995. Safety plans are offered to an estimated 10,000 Illinois families each year. There is no record that any parent has ever refused to participate in a safety plan and risked having the state take custody of his or her children.
Illinois officials defend the program, saying parents voluntarily agree to safety plans. They say the plans are designed to provide a middle path between taking every child into state custody or leaving children in the presence of potential abusers during an investigation.
The safety plans are severe enough to prompt the participation of other family members like grandparents or aunts but not so severe as to wrest the child from his or her home, officials say.
State child-protection officials say their mission is different from that of the criminal justice system and that they should not be held to a high legal standard. DCFS is protective and supportive, not punitive, they say. As one official put it: “We are expected to go into a home, determine what has happened, and predict what might happen in the future.”
Both sides in the case dispute various statistics. Fisher says allegations in approximately two-thirds of all Illinois hot-line reports are eventually determined to be “unfounded.” The state responds that less than 20 percent of all hot-line reports are even investigated.
Fisher and Ms. Redleaf offer several examples of parents accused of child abuse. One case involved a married couple, both professors at a major Chicago-area university. Someone made an anonymous call to the hot line suggesting that one of the professors had abused his 8-year-old adopted daughter. Prior to any investigation into the veracity of the charge, state agents offered the professor a choice: leave the home immediately pursuant to a safety plan or DCFS would take the girl into foster care. The professor moved out. During the investigation, the state found no credible evidence supporting the abuse charge.
In another case, high school science teacher James Redlin was suspected of child abuse after state authorities received an anonymous tip that he had sexually abused his mildly autistic 6-year-old son on an occupied subway train. Mr. Redlin says it was playful tickling, not sexual abuse. But someone thought his conduct was inappropriate and informed state investigators. The state’s safety plan required Mr. Redlin’s wife, who uses a wheelchair, to provide 24-hour supervision of any contact between Mr. Redlin and their son. That case was later determined to be “unfounded.”
In a third case, a preschool teacher, Patrick DeLaFont, was accused in a hot-line call of abusing a preschool child. State investigators required Mr. DeLaFont to move out of his home, pending the investigation, even though none of his own children were the subject of the accusation. After living apart from his family for 11 months, investigators concluded the allegation against DeLaFont was “unfounded.”
After a 2-year-old girl fell from a back porch while playing, her parents took her to a hospital emergency room where X-rays revealed a fractured arm. Someone at the hospital doubted the back-porch explanation. State investigators demanded that the husband – seen as the likely abuser – leave the family home for 24 hours. He did so. A week later, the day before Thanksgiving, agents ordered both parents out of the house or risk having both their children taken into foster care. Grandparents arrived to care for the children while the parents were sent away. A week later, the parents were allowed to return home to their children after another doctor examined the X-rays and found no basis to suspect child abuse.
FBI, State Investigate Drug Firm
The Chicago Tribune’s lead article today (Wednesday January 31, 2007) has the headline “FBI, state investigate drug firm.” The article concerns billing fraud by a DCFS-contract agency K.K. Bio-Science Inc. It reports that the current FBI probe follows a DCFS Office of Inspector General report. It does not state when, in the 15 year history of the contract with this company, questions about their fraudulent billing practices first arose or how those concerns came to the OIG’s attention.
An issue that is not discussed in the news article but which is of great concern to the Family Defense Center is whether families are the victims of false court reports related to the falsified billings for drug tests that were not done. If so, in some cases children may have been returned to parents who were thought to be drug free but were not and in other cases, false positives may not have been retested to show that they were false, in which case a child might have been kept in care on the basis for a false positive that should have been retested. While we have no information at this time as to the full scope of the reported fraud, the central role of drug testing in determining whether children are returned home or remain in foster care makes it vitally important that a full investigation and review of the court reports relied upon by DCFS and its agents and presented in the juvenile court occurred.
The Family Defense Center is willing and able to speak confidentially to any family member who believes they have were the victim of a fraudulent report by K.K. Bio Science Inc. as that report relates to a DCFS or juvenile court matter. (If the drug test report was used was in domestic relations court or criminal court, our limited resources would not extend to investigating the merits as to those reports and their impact).
http://protectingourchildrenfrombeingsold.wordpress.com/2010/03/17/these-stories-are-three-more-reason-that-child-protective-services-need-to-be-monitored-they-are-out-of-control/
March 17, 2010yvonnemasonLeave a commentGo to comments
2 Votes
Child-abuse claims vs. parents’ rights
Supreme Court mulls whether to take a suit accusing Illinois of forcing families to give up rights.
By Warren Richey | Staff writer of The Christian Science Monitor
from the June 12, 2008 edition
Washington – The US Supreme Court is being asked to determine whether procedures used in Illinois to investigate allegations of child abuse or neglect violate the fundamental rights of parents.
Hard lemonade, hard price
Dad’s oversight at Tigers game lands son in foster care
A number of people have sent us this story and we wanted to share it with our readers. If the case that child protective services needs oversight hasn’t been persuasive enough so far, maybe reading this story will be convincing.
By Brian Dickerson, Detroit Free Press Columnist
April 28, 2008
If you watch much television, you’ve probably heard of a product called Mike’s Hard Lemonade.
And if you ask Christopher Ratte and his wife how they lost custody of their 7-year-old son, the short version is that nobody in the Ratte family watches much television.
The way police and child protection workers figure it, Ratte should have known that what a Comerica Park vendor handed over when Ratte ordered a lemonade for his boy three Saturdays ago contained alcohol, and Ratte’s ignorance justified placing young Leo in foster care until his dad got up to speed on the commercial beverage industry.
Even if, in hindsight, that decision seems a bit, um, idiotic.
Ratte is a tenured professor of classical archaeology at the University of Michigan, which means that, on a given day, he’s more likely to be excavating ancient burial sites in Turkey than watching “Dancing with the Stars” — or even the History Channel, for that matter.
The 47-year-old academic says he wasn’t even aware alcoholic lemonade existed when he and Leo stopped at a concession stand on the way to their seats in Section 114.
“I’d never drunk it, never purchased it, never heard of it,” Ratte of Ann Arbor told me sheepishly last week. “And it’s certainly not what I expected when I ordered a lemonade for my 7-year-old.”
But it wasn’t until the top of the ninth inning that a Comerica Park security guard noticed the bottle in young Leo’s hand.
“You know this is an alcoholic beverage?” the guard asked the professor.
“You’ve got to be kidding,” Ratte replied. He asked for the bottle, but the security guard snatched it before Ratte could examine the label.
Mistake or child neglect?
An hour later, Ratte was being interviewed by a Detroit police officer at Children’s Hospital, where a physician at the Comerica Park clinic had dispatched Leo — by ambulance! — after a cursory exam.
Leo betrayed no symptoms of inebriation. But the physician and a police officer from the Comerica substation suggested the ER visit after the boy admitted he was feeling a little nauseated.
The Comerica cop estimated that Leo had drunk about 12 ounces of the hard lemonade, which is 5% alcohol. But an ER resident who drew Leo’s blood less than 90 minutes after he and his father were escorted from their seats detected no trace of alcohol.
“Completely normal appearing,” the resident wrote in his report, “… he is cleared to go home.”
But it would be two days before the state of Michigan allowed Ratte’s wife, U-M architecture professor Claire Zimmerman, to take their son home, and nearly a week before Ratte was permitted to move back into his own house.
And if you think nothing so ludicrous could happen to your family, maybe you should pay a little less attention to who’s getting booted from “Dancing with the Stars” and a little more to how the state agency responsible for protecting Michigan’s children is going about its work.
Doing their duty
Almost everyone Chris Ratte met the night they took Leo away conceded the state was probably overreacting.
The sympathetic cop who interviewed Ratte and his son at the hospital said she was convinced what happened had been an accident, but that her supervisor was insisting the matter be referred to Child Protective Services.
And Ratte thought the two child protection workers who came to take Leo away seemed more annoyed with the police than with him. “This is so unnecessary,” one told Ratte before driving away with his son.
But there was really nothing any of them could do, they all said. They were just adhering to protocol, following orders.
And so what had begun as an outing to the ballpark ended with Leo crying himself to sleep in front of a television inside the Child Protective Services building, and Ratte and his wife standing on the sidewalk outside, wondering when they’d see their little boy again.
A vain rescue mission
Child Protective Services is the unit of the Michigan Department of Human Services responsible for intervening when someone suspects a child is being abused, neglected or endangered. Its powers include the authority to remove children from their homes and transfer them to foster parents who answer only to the state.
By law, CPS officials are forbidden to discuss the particulars of any investigation.
But Mike Patterson, Child and Family Services director for the Wayne County district that includes Comerica Park, said that in general his agency’s discretion is limited once police obtain a court order to remove a child from the parental home — usually authorized, as in Leo’s case, by a juvenile court referee responding to a police officer’s recommendation.
“Once the court has authorized a child’s removal,” Patterson told me, “we cannot return the child to the parental custody” until the court has OK’d it.
But that doesn’t explain why CPS refused to release Leo to the custody of two aunts — one a social worker and licensed foster parent — who drove all night from New England to take custody of their nephew.
Chris Ratte’s sisters, Catherine Miller and Felicity Ratte, left Massachusetts at 10:30 the night of the fateful lemonade purchase after the police officer who’d reluctantly requested a removal order told Ratte the state would likely jump at the chance to place Leo with responsible relatives. But when the two women arrived at the CPS office early Sunday, a caseworker explained they would not be allowed to see Leo until they had secured a hotel room.
The sisters quickly complied. But by the time they returned to CPS around 10:30 a.m., their nephew had been taken to an undisclosed foster home, where he would remain until a preliminary court hearing the following afternoon.
By that Monday, April 7, when Ratte and his wife returned for a meeting with Latricia Jones, the CPS caseworker assigned to their case, no one in the family had been able to talk to Leo for a day and a half.
More investigation needed
At a hearing later that day, Jones recommended that Leo remain in foster care until she had completed her investigation, a process she estimated would take several days. It was only after the assistant attorney general who represented CPS admitted that the state was not interested in pursuing the case aggressively that juvenile referee Leslie Graves agreed to release Leo to his mother — on the condition that Ratte himself relocate to a hotel.
Finally, at a second hearing three days later, Graves dismissed the complaint and permitted Ratte to move home.
Don Duquette, a U-M law professor who directs the university’s Child Advocacy Law Clinic, represented Ratte and his wife. He notes sardonically that the most remarkable thing about the couple’s case may be the relative speed with which they were reunited with Leo.
Duquette says the emergency removal powers of CPS, though “well-intentioned” are “out of control and partly responsible for the large numbers of kids in the foster care system,” which is almost universally acknowledged to be badly overburdened.
Ratte and his wife have filed a formal complaint with the CPS ombudsman’s office.
“I have apologized to Leo from the bottom of my heart for the silly mistake that got him into this mess,” Ratte wrote in the complaint. “But I have also told him that what happened afterward was an even bigger error, and I would like to be able to say to him that institutions, like people, can learn from their mistakes.”
Contact BRIAN DICKERSON at 248-351-3697 or bdickerson@freepress.com
The case arises at a legal crossroads between the government’s interest in moving quickly to safeguard children from abuse or neglect and the right of parents to raise and maintain a family without undue government interference.
The high court is scheduled to consider whether to take up the case, Dupuy v. McEwen, at its private conference Thursday. An order agreeing or refusing to hear the appeal could come as early as Monday.
State procedures to investigate allegations of child abuse have been a topic of national concern after more than 400 children from a polygamist group’s ranch in west Texas were taken from their parents and held for nearly two months in foster care. The Texas Supreme Court later ordered state officials to return the children to their parents while the investigation continues.
At issue in the Illinois case is whether state officials can use the potential threat of placing children in foster care as a means to pressure parents to forfeit their parental rights.
Agents with the Illinois Department of Children and Family Services (DCFS) routinely advise parents in the initial stage of an abuse investigation that their children may be taken into state custody unless the parents agree to a state-imposed “safety plan.” Such plans can require the accused parent or parents to leave the home immediately and cease all unsupervised contact with their children for the duration of the investigation, according to a lawsuit filed by a group of Illinois parents.
Imposition of the safety plan can be authorized by a single unconfirmed tip received via an anonymous child-abuse hot line, the suit says.
In contrast, to authorize the removal of children from their parents, authorities must be able to present enough evidence to convince a judge that there is “reasonable suspicion” that a child has been abused or is in imminent danger.
Illinois officials bypass this evidentiary standard and judicial oversight by giving parents an offer they can’t refuse, according to the lawsuit.
The offer: Agree to a safety plan or your children may be taken away. Parents are not given an opportunity to know the substance and source of an abuse allegation, nor are they given an opportunity to challenge the safety plan before a neutral decisionmaker.
Is it coercion? Judges disagree.
A federal judge ruled that such tactics by state officials were a form of coercion. But a federal appeals court disagreed. The Seventh Circuit Court of Appeals in Chicago upheld the state program, saying it raised no constitutional issues because the parents had voluntarily agreed to the safety plan.
“We can’t see how parents are made worse off by being given the option of accepting the offer of a safety plan,” wrote Circuit Judge Richard Posner. He said the safety plan offers parents more options, not fewer options.
“If you tell a guest that you will mix him either a Martini or a Manhattan, how is he worse off than if you tell him you’ll mix him a Martini?” Judge Posner wrote.
Lawyers for the families say parents have a fundamental right to raise their children without government involvement unless officials can show evidence of abuse.
“There has to be some compelling interest in overriding that basic protection [of parents' rights], and a hot-line call by itself doesn’t cut it,” says Diane Redleaf, executive director of the Family Defense Center in Chicago and a lead lawyer in the case.
“The Seventh Circuit’s suggestion that the agonizing choice at the center of this case – between leaving one’s family or having one’s children taken into state custody – is no different than choosing between a ‘Martini’ or a ‘Manhattan’ at a cocktail party, trivializes the family’s fundamental liberty interests,” writes Stanford law professor and lawyer Jeffrey Fisher in a brief to the court on behalf of the Illinois families.
“When a person is offered a ‘Martini or a Manhattan,’ he always retains the option of declining both drinks,” Mr. Fisher says. “Though it has no evidence of parental wrongdoing, DCFS does not offer parents the option of no restrictions on their family life when it ‘offers’ safety plans.”
Parents never risk losing children
The safety plan program began in 1995. Safety plans are offered to an estimated 10,000 Illinois families each year. There is no record that any parent has ever refused to participate in a safety plan and risked having the state take custody of his or her children.
Illinois officials defend the program, saying parents voluntarily agree to safety plans. They say the plans are designed to provide a middle path between taking every child into state custody or leaving children in the presence of potential abusers during an investigation.
The safety plans are severe enough to prompt the participation of other family members like grandparents or aunts but not so severe as to wrest the child from his or her home, officials say.
State child-protection officials say their mission is different from that of the criminal justice system and that they should not be held to a high legal standard. DCFS is protective and supportive, not punitive, they say. As one official put it: “We are expected to go into a home, determine what has happened, and predict what might happen in the future.”
Both sides in the case dispute various statistics. Fisher says allegations in approximately two-thirds of all Illinois hot-line reports are eventually determined to be “unfounded.” The state responds that less than 20 percent of all hot-line reports are even investigated.
Fisher and Ms. Redleaf offer several examples of parents accused of child abuse. One case involved a married couple, both professors at a major Chicago-area university. Someone made an anonymous call to the hot line suggesting that one of the professors had abused his 8-year-old adopted daughter. Prior to any investigation into the veracity of the charge, state agents offered the professor a choice: leave the home immediately pursuant to a safety plan or DCFS would take the girl into foster care. The professor moved out. During the investigation, the state found no credible evidence supporting the abuse charge.
In another case, high school science teacher James Redlin was suspected of child abuse after state authorities received an anonymous tip that he had sexually abused his mildly autistic 6-year-old son on an occupied subway train. Mr. Redlin says it was playful tickling, not sexual abuse. But someone thought his conduct was inappropriate and informed state investigators. The state’s safety plan required Mr. Redlin’s wife, who uses a wheelchair, to provide 24-hour supervision of any contact between Mr. Redlin and their son. That case was later determined to be “unfounded.”
In a third case, a preschool teacher, Patrick DeLaFont, was accused in a hot-line call of abusing a preschool child. State investigators required Mr. DeLaFont to move out of his home, pending the investigation, even though none of his own children were the subject of the accusation. After living apart from his family for 11 months, investigators concluded the allegation against DeLaFont was “unfounded.”
After a 2-year-old girl fell from a back porch while playing, her parents took her to a hospital emergency room where X-rays revealed a fractured arm. Someone at the hospital doubted the back-porch explanation. State investigators demanded that the husband – seen as the likely abuser – leave the family home for 24 hours. He did so. A week later, the day before Thanksgiving, agents ordered both parents out of the house or risk having both their children taken into foster care. Grandparents arrived to care for the children while the parents were sent away. A week later, the parents were allowed to return home to their children after another doctor examined the X-rays and found no basis to suspect child abuse.
FBI, State Investigate Drug Firm
The Chicago Tribune’s lead article today (Wednesday January 31, 2007) has the headline “FBI, state investigate drug firm.” The article concerns billing fraud by a DCFS-contract agency K.K. Bio-Science Inc. It reports that the current FBI probe follows a DCFS Office of Inspector General report. It does not state when, in the 15 year history of the contract with this company, questions about their fraudulent billing practices first arose or how those concerns came to the OIG’s attention.
An issue that is not discussed in the news article but which is of great concern to the Family Defense Center is whether families are the victims of false court reports related to the falsified billings for drug tests that were not done. If so, in some cases children may have been returned to parents who were thought to be drug free but were not and in other cases, false positives may not have been retested to show that they were false, in which case a child might have been kept in care on the basis for a false positive that should have been retested. While we have no information at this time as to the full scope of the reported fraud, the central role of drug testing in determining whether children are returned home or remain in foster care makes it vitally important that a full investigation and review of the court reports relied upon by DCFS and its agents and presented in the juvenile court occurred.
The Family Defense Center is willing and able to speak confidentially to any family member who believes they have were the victim of a fraudulent report by K.K. Bio Science Inc. as that report relates to a DCFS or juvenile court matter. (If the drug test report was used was in domestic relations court or criminal court, our limited resources would not extend to investigating the merits as to those reports and their impact).
http://protectingourchildrenfrombeingsold.wordpress.com/2010/03/17/these-stories-are-three-more-reason-that-child-protective-services-need-to-be-monitored-they-are-out-of-control/
Child Welfare Agency Echoes Nazi Germany?
Child Welfare Agency Echoes Nazi Germany?
By Dale Hurd
CBN News Sr. Reporter
Thursday, March 18, 2010
BERLIN - It sounds like Nazi Germany: families afraid of a loud knock on their door in the early morning, police bursting in, and taking away their children.
But it's not Nazi Germany. It's today's Germany.
In Berlin, when authorities came for 7-year-old Dan Schulz, his family secretly videotaped the abduction. On the tape, family members are crying and the boy can be heard screaming, "Mom I don't want to go!"
A German official responds, "Your mother can't help you here."
The boy was taken by Germany's notorious child welfare agency, the Jugendamt. The official reason young Dan was taken was that he wasn't in school, even though he had been homeschooled and then began private school.
Wrecking Normal Families
The Jugendamt, which dominates Germany's controversial family court system, takes children when it wants, from perfectly normal families. The Jugendamt's well-documented treatment of families, especially homeschoolers, has now become an international issue.
In January, the Romeikes, a German homeschool family, were granted asylum in the U.S. after an immigration judge ruled that Germany and the Jugendamt had violated their human rights. Mike Donnelly, with the Home School Legal Defense Association, was one of the attorneys for the Romeikes.
"The judge said that this policy was repellent to everything that we as Americans believe," Donnelly said. "He felt that these were basic human rights. These were the kinds of rights that no country had a right to deny their people. "
The Jugendamt undoubtedly does some good, somewhere, but it also has gained an international reputation as a ruthless organization that takes children from good families and wrecks homes.
"My experience with the Jugendamt has been terrible," Dan's mother Heidi Schulz said. "They destroy families; they torture people, and make money out of it."
She is still haunted by the morning her son was taken from her.
"He was screaming so much and he held me tight, and I couldn't do anything. Nothing," she recalled.
After he was taken, Heidi was only allowed sporadic visits and phone calls.
"And when I would call him, he would scream and say, 'Mama, come and get me!' And I would say, 'I don't know where you are,'" she said.
Child-Trafficking Network?
After three years of fighting and praying for her son, a judge finally ordered Dan to be returned home. Heidi said her son had been kept at an orphanage where he was beaten up by other children, poorly fed, poorly clothed and not educated for the first year and half.
"It was terrible. At first I thought I was just going to the doctor but it was nothing like that," Dan recalled. "They told me I was sick."
Opponents and victims of the Jugendamt say the system amounts to a government child-trafficking network, in which about 80 kids per day are seized from parents and funneled to children's homes and psychiatric care, with the overflow going to foster homes. They claim the system needs to continually take in more children to keep functioning.
"There is a system of persons, of social workers, of teachers, psychotherapists, who live on children being taken out of the family," German psychologist Carola Storm-Knirsch said. "We call it industry."
Storm-Knirsch has worked for the Jugendamt on several cases. But she broke with the Jugendamt over the Schulz case, which she called "totally wrong."
"There are homes with empty beds. And they need children," she explained. "And they call the Jugendamt and say, 'Hello, do you have a child for us?'"
Documents shown to CBN News indicate little Dan brought in about $8,000 a month for the state home where he was kept. While CBN News was there, Heidi got a bill in the mail from the Jugendamt for what was done to her family.
"One thousand-six hundred euros," she said, adding sarcastically, "They take your child and then they take your money."
No Reform Needed?
The local Jugendamt office is right across the street from the Schulz's, so we asked for an interview. They said they couldn't talk about the case, but said that they "acted in a humane and correct way, and legally."
The German embassy in Washington told us flatly that the Jugendamt does not need to be reformed. And it answered "yes," when we asked, "Does Germany adhere to the European Convention on Human rights in respect to the rights of parents?"
But a German legal expert insists that the German Supreme Court ruled in 2004 that the European Convention on Human Rights is not binding on Germany.
In her fight for her son, Heidi tried to get the ear of German politicians, such as the former head of the European Parliament. But a videotape shows that when another Jugendamt victim suggested the Jugendamt should be considered a criminal organization, the former head of Germany's Green Party, Reinhard Bütikofer, exploded.
"Stop it with this stupid brazen radical cr---! It's stupid brazen radical cr--! I don't want to be insulted by such cr--," he screamed.
Heidi Schulz has already raised two exceptional daughters. Winonah has studied in Japan, and Tashina in America. But the Jugendamt suspects Heidi has psychological problems, and they have begun a new process which could lead to her son Dan being taken away again.
Dan told us there's nothing wrong with his mom.
"The children's home is sick, not my mother," he said.
Echoes of Nazi Germany
The psychologist Storm-Knirsch agrees, saying the Schulz family is healthy, but she thinks some members of Germany's Jugendamt and family court system could use therapy.
"These people are sick!" she said.
Heidi, who was raised in communist East Germany, said that in some ways, communism felt safer than the new Germany.
"They (the Jugendamt) are so mighty," she said. "They have all power and you are nobody."
The German establishment doesn't like to be reminded that the Jugendamt was started by Adolf Hitler. Storm-Knirsch adds that "Adolf Hitler really did his work well."
HSLDA Attorney Mike Donnelly told CBN News that more German families are seeking political asylum in the United States.
Meanwhile, in Berlin, Heidi admitted to us that she feels defenseless, as she waits for the Jugendamt to decide whether she will keep her son.
http://www.cbn.com/cbnnews/world/2010/March/Child-Welfare-Agency-Echoes-Nazi-Germany/
By Dale Hurd
CBN News Sr. Reporter
Thursday, March 18, 2010
BERLIN - It sounds like Nazi Germany: families afraid of a loud knock on their door in the early morning, police bursting in, and taking away their children.
But it's not Nazi Germany. It's today's Germany.
In Berlin, when authorities came for 7-year-old Dan Schulz, his family secretly videotaped the abduction. On the tape, family members are crying and the boy can be heard screaming, "Mom I don't want to go!"
A German official responds, "Your mother can't help you here."
The boy was taken by Germany's notorious child welfare agency, the Jugendamt. The official reason young Dan was taken was that he wasn't in school, even though he had been homeschooled and then began private school.
Wrecking Normal Families
The Jugendamt, which dominates Germany's controversial family court system, takes children when it wants, from perfectly normal families. The Jugendamt's well-documented treatment of families, especially homeschoolers, has now become an international issue.
In January, the Romeikes, a German homeschool family, were granted asylum in the U.S. after an immigration judge ruled that Germany and the Jugendamt had violated their human rights. Mike Donnelly, with the Home School Legal Defense Association, was one of the attorneys for the Romeikes.
"The judge said that this policy was repellent to everything that we as Americans believe," Donnelly said. "He felt that these were basic human rights. These were the kinds of rights that no country had a right to deny their people. "
The Jugendamt undoubtedly does some good, somewhere, but it also has gained an international reputation as a ruthless organization that takes children from good families and wrecks homes.
"My experience with the Jugendamt has been terrible," Dan's mother Heidi Schulz said. "They destroy families; they torture people, and make money out of it."
She is still haunted by the morning her son was taken from her.
"He was screaming so much and he held me tight, and I couldn't do anything. Nothing," she recalled.
After he was taken, Heidi was only allowed sporadic visits and phone calls.
"And when I would call him, he would scream and say, 'Mama, come and get me!' And I would say, 'I don't know where you are,'" she said.
Child-Trafficking Network?
After three years of fighting and praying for her son, a judge finally ordered Dan to be returned home. Heidi said her son had been kept at an orphanage where he was beaten up by other children, poorly fed, poorly clothed and not educated for the first year and half.
"It was terrible. At first I thought I was just going to the doctor but it was nothing like that," Dan recalled. "They told me I was sick."
Opponents and victims of the Jugendamt say the system amounts to a government child-trafficking network, in which about 80 kids per day are seized from parents and funneled to children's homes and psychiatric care, with the overflow going to foster homes. They claim the system needs to continually take in more children to keep functioning.
"There is a system of persons, of social workers, of teachers, psychotherapists, who live on children being taken out of the family," German psychologist Carola Storm-Knirsch said. "We call it industry."
Storm-Knirsch has worked for the Jugendamt on several cases. But she broke with the Jugendamt over the Schulz case, which she called "totally wrong."
"There are homes with empty beds. And they need children," she explained. "And they call the Jugendamt and say, 'Hello, do you have a child for us?'"
Documents shown to CBN News indicate little Dan brought in about $8,000 a month for the state home where he was kept. While CBN News was there, Heidi got a bill in the mail from the Jugendamt for what was done to her family.
"One thousand-six hundred euros," she said, adding sarcastically, "They take your child and then they take your money."
No Reform Needed?
The local Jugendamt office is right across the street from the Schulz's, so we asked for an interview. They said they couldn't talk about the case, but said that they "acted in a humane and correct way, and legally."
The German embassy in Washington told us flatly that the Jugendamt does not need to be reformed. And it answered "yes," when we asked, "Does Germany adhere to the European Convention on Human rights in respect to the rights of parents?"
But a German legal expert insists that the German Supreme Court ruled in 2004 that the European Convention on Human Rights is not binding on Germany.
In her fight for her son, Heidi tried to get the ear of German politicians, such as the former head of the European Parliament. But a videotape shows that when another Jugendamt victim suggested the Jugendamt should be considered a criminal organization, the former head of Germany's Green Party, Reinhard Bütikofer, exploded.
"Stop it with this stupid brazen radical cr---! It's stupid brazen radical cr--! I don't want to be insulted by such cr--," he screamed.
Heidi Schulz has already raised two exceptional daughters. Winonah has studied in Japan, and Tashina in America. But the Jugendamt suspects Heidi has psychological problems, and they have begun a new process which could lead to her son Dan being taken away again.
Dan told us there's nothing wrong with his mom.
"The children's home is sick, not my mother," he said.
Echoes of Nazi Germany
The psychologist Storm-Knirsch agrees, saying the Schulz family is healthy, but she thinks some members of Germany's Jugendamt and family court system could use therapy.
"These people are sick!" she said.
Heidi, who was raised in communist East Germany, said that in some ways, communism felt safer than the new Germany.
"They (the Jugendamt) are so mighty," she said. "They have all power and you are nobody."
The German establishment doesn't like to be reminded that the Jugendamt was started by Adolf Hitler. Storm-Knirsch adds that "Adolf Hitler really did his work well."
HSLDA Attorney Mike Donnelly told CBN News that more German families are seeking political asylum in the United States.
Meanwhile, in Berlin, Heidi admitted to us that she feels defenseless, as she waits for the Jugendamt to decide whether she will keep her son.
http://www.cbn.com/cbnnews/world/2010/March/Child-Welfare-Agency-Echoes-Nazi-Germany/
CPS Worker Trapped in Abilene Home
A Child Protective Services worker called Abilene Police just before 2 p.m. Wednesday to report she was trapped inside an apartment by a mother who had pushed a couch in front of the door.
Ashley Goodman, age 20, threatened to assault the case worker if she she attempted to leave the Pine Meadow Apartment on Nonesuch Road, according to an APD report.
Officers arrived and arrested Goodman for unlawful restraint of a public servant, a third degree felony. She was released from the Taylor County jail after 9:30 p.m. on a $5,000 bond.
Police said they recently answered another call at Goodman's home by a man who said he came by to gather his things. Goodman was inside with an infant and would not open the door for him.
http://www.reporternews.com/news/2010/mar/18/abilene-mom-traps-cps-worker/
Ashley Goodman, age 20, threatened to assault the case worker if she she attempted to leave the Pine Meadow Apartment on Nonesuch Road, according to an APD report.
Officers arrived and arrested Goodman for unlawful restraint of a public servant, a third degree felony. She was released from the Taylor County jail after 9:30 p.m. on a $5,000 bond.
Police said they recently answered another call at Goodman's home by a man who said he came by to gather his things. Goodman was inside with an infant and would not open the door for him.
http://www.reporternews.com/news/2010/mar/18/abilene-mom-traps-cps-worker/
Childhood Bipolar Disorder is not Bipolar? DSM-V and the new Temper Dysregulation Disorder with Dysphoria
Childhood Bipolar Disorder is not Bipolar? DSM-V and the new Temper Dysregulation Disorder with Dysphoria
Written by Nestor Lopez-Duran PhD on Wednesday, February 10.2010
Today the American Psychiatric Association released a draft of the major changes that are expected in the new version of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorder – 5th Edition (DSM-V). While most people in the field will be underwhelmed by the relatively minor changes, there are a few areas where the DSM-V will likely make some drastic changes. Today most of the news coverage was focused on the proposed changes to the Autism diagnosis, which has raised some heated debate in the autism community. However, there is another major change that has received little, if any, attention: the clarification that a syndrome that in recent years has been labeled childhood bipolar disorder is actually NOT bipolar disorder. Instead, a new disorder category was created: Temper Dysregulation Disorder with Dysphoria (TDD).
Let me start by explaining that the creation of TDD does NOT deny the existence of classic bipolar disorder in childhood. That is, although extremely rare, bipolar disorder can occur in children and adolescents, and it looks very much like adult bipolar. Instead, TDD was created to capture a valid syndrome with characteristics and outcomes that are different than those of bipolar disorder. The available scientific data supports the position that the TDD syndrome is NOT simply the manifestation of bipolar disorder in childhood. This means that thousands of children that have been diagnosed with childhood bipolar disorder may not have bipolar and instead have a completely different syndrome now called Temper Dysregulation Disorder with Dysphoria.
So what is TDD?
Here is the proposed criteria for TDD:
A. The disorder is characterized by severe recurrent temper outbursts in response to common stressors.
1. The temper outbursts are manifest verbally and/or behaviorally, such as in the form of verbal rages, or physical aggression towards people or property.
2. The reaction is grossly out of proportion in intensity or duration to the situation or provocation.
3. The responses are inconsistent with developmental level.
B. Frequency: The temper outbursts occur, on average, three or more times per week.
C. Mood between temper outbursts:
1. Nearly every day, the mood between temper outbursts is persistently negative (irritable, angry, and/or sad).
2. The negative mood is observable by others (e.g., parents, teachers, peers).
D. Duration: Criteria A-C have been present for at least 12 months. Throughout that time, the person has never been without the symptoms of Criteria A-C for more than 3 months at a time.
E. The temper outbursts and/or negative mood are present in at least two settings (at home, at school, or with peers) and must be severe in at least in one setting.
F. Chronological age is at least 6 years (or equivalent developmental level).
G. The onset is before age 10 years.
H. In the past year, there has never been a distinct period lasting more than one day during which abnormally elevated or expansive mood was present most of the day for most days, and the abnormally elevated or expansive mood was accompanied by the onset, or worsening, of three of the “B” criteria of mania (i.e., grandiosity or inflated self esteem, decreased need for sleep, pressured speech, flight of ideas, distractibility, increase in goal directed activity, or excessive involvement in activities with a high potential for painful consequences; see pp. XX). Abnormally elevated mood should be differentiated from developmentally appropriate mood elevation, such as occurs in the context of a highly positive event or its anticipation.
I. The behaviors do not occur exclusively during the course of a Psychotic or Mood Disorder (e.g., Major Depressive Disorder, Dysthymic Disorder, Bipolar Disorder) and are not better accounted for by another mental disorder (e.g., Pervasive Developmental Disorder, post-traumatic stress disorder, separation anxiety disorder). (Note: This diagnosis can co-exist with Oppositional Defiant Disorder, ADHD, Conduct Disorder, and Substance Use Disorders.) The symptoms are not due to the direct physiological effects of a drug of abuse, or to a general medical or neurological condition.
The syndrome captured by section A-C (frequent and intense temper outbursts, happening several times per week in the context of negative emotionality) is the core of the symptoms that has been incorrectly interpreted as indicative of childhood bipolar disorder. Section H is very interesting. It states that this diagnosis is not appropriate if the person has experienced classic mania (e.g., bnormally elevated or expansive mood), as in such a case the diagnosis of bipolar is likely more accurate.
So why did the DSM-V decide that this syndrome is not simply bipolar disorder of childhood?
1. Lack of continuity to bipolar.
If TDD is simply the expression of bipolar disorder during childhood, then children diagnosed with this condition would eventually develop symptoms of classic bipolar disorder as they reach adulthood. The data do not support this hypothesis. That is, children who display the TDD syndrome in childhood (and are often incorrectly diagnosed as bipolar) are not more likely to develop classic bipolar disorder later in life as their peers (see Brotman et al., 2006; Leibenluft et al, 2006; Stringaris et al, 2009). Instead, these children are more likely to develop depression, not bipolar!
2. Different Biological Markets.
Youth who are diagnosed with classic bipolar differ significantly from those who have a TDD-like syndrome (see Brotman et al, 2010; Guyer et al, 2007; Rich et al, 2008). If TDD is simply bipolar, then the biomarkers of TDD should be similar to those of bipolar, but this is not the case.
3. Different Demographic Factors.
If TDD is simply bipolar, then the gender distribution of TDD should be similar to that of bipolar. This does not appear to be the case. Specifically, there is no gender differences in the rate of classic bipolar; male and females are equally likely to develop the condition. However, the TDD-like syndrome is disproportionately observed in boys rather than girls.
4. A need for a new category that would impact treatment and research.
In theory, the presence of TDD will educate clinicians, researchers, and the public that this syndrome is not simply a version of bipolar disorder. This would facilitate research on the causes, features, and treatments for this condition. This has major implications for treatment. For example, the standard treatment for bipolar disorder does NOT seem to work in children that have the TDD syndrome (Dickstein et al, 2009). By explicitly stating that TDD is not bipolar, researchers would be less likely to approach the search for treatments from a “bipolar framework”, which would potentially facilitate the discovery of more effective interventions.
I am actually glad about this change as it will have a clear impact on clinical practice and research that will most likely benefit the children affected with this condition.
References:
Brotman MA, Schmajuk M, Rich BA, Dickstein DP, Guyer AE, Costello EJ, Egger HL, Angold A, Pine DS, & Leibenluft E (2006). Prevalence, clinical correlates, and longitudinal course of severe mood dysregulation in children. Biological psychiatry, 60 (9), 991-7 PMID: 17056393
Dickstein DP, Towbin KE, Van Der Veen JW, Rich BA, Brotman MA, Knopf L, Onelio L, Pine DS, Leibenluft E (2009): Randomized double-blind placebo-controlled trial of lithium in youth with severe mood dysregulation. J Child Adolesc Psychopharm 19: 61-73
Guyer AE, McClure EB, Adler AD, Brotman MA, Rich BA, Kimes AS, Pine DS, Ernst M, Leibenluft E (2007): Specificity of face emotion labeling deficits in childhood psychopathology. Journal of Child Psychiatry and Psychology, 48:863-71
Leibenluft E, Charney DS, Towbin KE, Bhangoo RK, Pine DS (2003): Defining clinical phenotypes of juvenile mania. Am J Psychiatry 160: 430-437
Rich BA, Grimley ME, Schmajuk M, Blair KS, Blair RJR, Leibenluft E (2008): Face emotion labeling deficits in children with bipolar disorder and severe mood dysregulation. Development and Psychopathology 20: 529-546
Stringaris A, Cohen P, Pine DS, Leibenluft E (2009): Adult outcomes of adolescent irritabilty: A 20-year community follow-up. Am J Psychiatry 166: 1048-54
http://www.child-psych.org/2010/02/childhood-bipolar-disorder-is-not-bipolar-dsm-v-and-the-new-temper-dysregulation-disorder-with-dysphoria.html
Written by Nestor Lopez-Duran PhD on Wednesday, February 10.2010
Today the American Psychiatric Association released a draft of the major changes that are expected in the new version of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorder – 5th Edition (DSM-V). While most people in the field will be underwhelmed by the relatively minor changes, there are a few areas where the DSM-V will likely make some drastic changes. Today most of the news coverage was focused on the proposed changes to the Autism diagnosis, which has raised some heated debate in the autism community. However, there is another major change that has received little, if any, attention: the clarification that a syndrome that in recent years has been labeled childhood bipolar disorder is actually NOT bipolar disorder. Instead, a new disorder category was created: Temper Dysregulation Disorder with Dysphoria (TDD).
Let me start by explaining that the creation of TDD does NOT deny the existence of classic bipolar disorder in childhood. That is, although extremely rare, bipolar disorder can occur in children and adolescents, and it looks very much like adult bipolar. Instead, TDD was created to capture a valid syndrome with characteristics and outcomes that are different than those of bipolar disorder. The available scientific data supports the position that the TDD syndrome is NOT simply the manifestation of bipolar disorder in childhood. This means that thousands of children that have been diagnosed with childhood bipolar disorder may not have bipolar and instead have a completely different syndrome now called Temper Dysregulation Disorder with Dysphoria.
So what is TDD?
Here is the proposed criteria for TDD:
A. The disorder is characterized by severe recurrent temper outbursts in response to common stressors.
1. The temper outbursts are manifest verbally and/or behaviorally, such as in the form of verbal rages, or physical aggression towards people or property.
2. The reaction is grossly out of proportion in intensity or duration to the situation or provocation.
3. The responses are inconsistent with developmental level.
B. Frequency: The temper outbursts occur, on average, three or more times per week.
C. Mood between temper outbursts:
1. Nearly every day, the mood between temper outbursts is persistently negative (irritable, angry, and/or sad).
2. The negative mood is observable by others (e.g., parents, teachers, peers).
D. Duration: Criteria A-C have been present for at least 12 months. Throughout that time, the person has never been without the symptoms of Criteria A-C for more than 3 months at a time.
E. The temper outbursts and/or negative mood are present in at least two settings (at home, at school, or with peers) and must be severe in at least in one setting.
F. Chronological age is at least 6 years (or equivalent developmental level).
G. The onset is before age 10 years.
H. In the past year, there has never been a distinct period lasting more than one day during which abnormally elevated or expansive mood was present most of the day for most days, and the abnormally elevated or expansive mood was accompanied by the onset, or worsening, of three of the “B” criteria of mania (i.e., grandiosity or inflated self esteem, decreased need for sleep, pressured speech, flight of ideas, distractibility, increase in goal directed activity, or excessive involvement in activities with a high potential for painful consequences; see pp. XX). Abnormally elevated mood should be differentiated from developmentally appropriate mood elevation, such as occurs in the context of a highly positive event or its anticipation.
I. The behaviors do not occur exclusively during the course of a Psychotic or Mood Disorder (e.g., Major Depressive Disorder, Dysthymic Disorder, Bipolar Disorder) and are not better accounted for by another mental disorder (e.g., Pervasive Developmental Disorder, post-traumatic stress disorder, separation anxiety disorder). (Note: This diagnosis can co-exist with Oppositional Defiant Disorder, ADHD, Conduct Disorder, and Substance Use Disorders.) The symptoms are not due to the direct physiological effects of a drug of abuse, or to a general medical or neurological condition.
The syndrome captured by section A-C (frequent and intense temper outbursts, happening several times per week in the context of negative emotionality) is the core of the symptoms that has been incorrectly interpreted as indicative of childhood bipolar disorder. Section H is very interesting. It states that this diagnosis is not appropriate if the person has experienced classic mania (e.g., bnormally elevated or expansive mood), as in such a case the diagnosis of bipolar is likely more accurate.
So why did the DSM-V decide that this syndrome is not simply bipolar disorder of childhood?
1. Lack of continuity to bipolar.
If TDD is simply the expression of bipolar disorder during childhood, then children diagnosed with this condition would eventually develop symptoms of classic bipolar disorder as they reach adulthood. The data do not support this hypothesis. That is, children who display the TDD syndrome in childhood (and are often incorrectly diagnosed as bipolar) are not more likely to develop classic bipolar disorder later in life as their peers (see Brotman et al., 2006; Leibenluft et al, 2006; Stringaris et al, 2009). Instead, these children are more likely to develop depression, not bipolar!
2. Different Biological Markets.
Youth who are diagnosed with classic bipolar differ significantly from those who have a TDD-like syndrome (see Brotman et al, 2010; Guyer et al, 2007; Rich et al, 2008). If TDD is simply bipolar, then the biomarkers of TDD should be similar to those of bipolar, but this is not the case.
3. Different Demographic Factors.
If TDD is simply bipolar, then the gender distribution of TDD should be similar to that of bipolar. This does not appear to be the case. Specifically, there is no gender differences in the rate of classic bipolar; male and females are equally likely to develop the condition. However, the TDD-like syndrome is disproportionately observed in boys rather than girls.
4. A need for a new category that would impact treatment and research.
In theory, the presence of TDD will educate clinicians, researchers, and the public that this syndrome is not simply a version of bipolar disorder. This would facilitate research on the causes, features, and treatments for this condition. This has major implications for treatment. For example, the standard treatment for bipolar disorder does NOT seem to work in children that have the TDD syndrome (Dickstein et al, 2009). By explicitly stating that TDD is not bipolar, researchers would be less likely to approach the search for treatments from a “bipolar framework”, which would potentially facilitate the discovery of more effective interventions.
I am actually glad about this change as it will have a clear impact on clinical practice and research that will most likely benefit the children affected with this condition.
References:
Brotman MA, Schmajuk M, Rich BA, Dickstein DP, Guyer AE, Costello EJ, Egger HL, Angold A, Pine DS, & Leibenluft E (2006). Prevalence, clinical correlates, and longitudinal course of severe mood dysregulation in children. Biological psychiatry, 60 (9), 991-7 PMID: 17056393
Dickstein DP, Towbin KE, Van Der Veen JW, Rich BA, Brotman MA, Knopf L, Onelio L, Pine DS, Leibenluft E (2009): Randomized double-blind placebo-controlled trial of lithium in youth with severe mood dysregulation. J Child Adolesc Psychopharm 19: 61-73
Guyer AE, McClure EB, Adler AD, Brotman MA, Rich BA, Kimes AS, Pine DS, Ernst M, Leibenluft E (2007): Specificity of face emotion labeling deficits in childhood psychopathology. Journal of Child Psychiatry and Psychology, 48:863-71
Leibenluft E, Charney DS, Towbin KE, Bhangoo RK, Pine DS (2003): Defining clinical phenotypes of juvenile mania. Am J Psychiatry 160: 430-437
Rich BA, Grimley ME, Schmajuk M, Blair KS, Blair RJR, Leibenluft E (2008): Face emotion labeling deficits in children with bipolar disorder and severe mood dysregulation. Development and Psychopathology 20: 529-546
Stringaris A, Cohen P, Pine DS, Leibenluft E (2009): Adult outcomes of adolescent irritabilty: A 20-year community follow-up. Am J Psychiatry 166: 1048-54
http://www.child-psych.org/2010/02/childhood-bipolar-disorder-is-not-bipolar-dsm-v-and-the-new-temper-dysregulation-disorder-with-dysphoria.html
ssa challenges Department of Health and Human services on Inspector General recommendations
ssa challenges Department of Health and Human services on Inspector General recommendations
By Mike Riggs - The Daily Caller 03/17/10 at 5:54 PM
In a letter to sent today to DHHS Secretary Kathleen Sebelius, Rep. Darrell Issa alleged that the Department of Health and Human Services is unprepared for the demands of Democrats’ impending health-care bill, and bases that supposition on the department’s performance during the last year.
“A list of unimplemented recommendations recently released by your department’s inspector general have raised troubling questions about your department’s lack of focus on addressing waste, fraud and abuse of taxpayer funds,” Issa wrote.
The list in reference is the annual Compendium of Unimplemented Office of Inspector General Recommendations, released by DHHS Inspector General Daniel R. Levinson. According to Issa’s letter, “The list contains 86 significant outstanding recommendations that if implemented,” could result in “12.2 billion in savings … with over $8.7 billion coming from Medicare and Medicaid ‘Priority Recommendations’ alone.”
While 33 of the recommendations are new, 53 of the recommendations are from Obama’s first year in office.
“The previous year’s Compendium of Unimplemented Office of Inspector General Recommendations (released May 2009), contained 63 such recommendations,” reads Issa’s letter. “Disturbingly, only 10 of these 63 significant IG recommendations from 2008 appear to have been either fully implemented by this administration during its first year in office or deemed no longer relevant by the IG – the other 53 appear again on this year’s report. I would remind you that under the Inspector General Act, federal agencies are supposed to complete final action on IG recommendations within one year.”
Issa’s letter then asks whether “the significant amount of time spent by senior officials” in the DHHS “lobbying for the president’s government health-care proposal raises important questions about whether these activities have distracted efforts to root out waste, fraud, and abuse.”
When contacted for comment, DHHS spokesman Nicholas Papas did not respond directly to Issa’s letter. “HHS is strongly committed to fighting waste, fraud and abuse and has launched an unprecedented effort, including $1.7 billion in our FY 2011 budget request to prevent and detect fraud in the health-care system,” Papas said. “Additionally, our administration has expanded its partnership with the HHS OIG and is working collaboratively on waste and fraud issues. We look forward to replying to Congressman Issa’s letter.”
Former DHHS Deputy Secretary Tevi Troy told the Daily Caller that the unimplemented recommendations are ”a real problem” and a classic DHHS pitfall.
“You put more money into the system — we’re talking about a trillion dollars for this piece of legislation — and there’s likely to be more waste fraud and abuse,” Troy said. ”You can diminish the amount of fraud,” he added, but “the problem is that the harder you look at waste, fraud, and abuse, the more controls you put in the system, and the slower money flows. The slower the money flows, the less willing doctors are to deal with the system, because they can’t get their payments in a timely manner.” Speed up the process, says Troy, and the doctors are happier, but the DHHS is back to dealing with extensive waste, fraud and abuse.
Tags: Daniel R. Levinson, Darrell Issa, Department of Health and Human Services, Deputy Secretary, Inspector General, Kathleen Sebelius, Unimplemented Office of Inspector General Recommendations
Read more: http://dailycaller.com/2010/03/17/issa-challenges-department-of-health-and-human-services-on-inspector-general-recommendations/#ixzz0iXyHYUhZ
By Mike Riggs - The Daily Caller 03/17/10 at 5:54 PM
In a letter to sent today to DHHS Secretary Kathleen Sebelius, Rep. Darrell Issa alleged that the Department of Health and Human Services is unprepared for the demands of Democrats’ impending health-care bill, and bases that supposition on the department’s performance during the last year.
“A list of unimplemented recommendations recently released by your department’s inspector general have raised troubling questions about your department’s lack of focus on addressing waste, fraud and abuse of taxpayer funds,” Issa wrote.
The list in reference is the annual Compendium of Unimplemented Office of Inspector General Recommendations, released by DHHS Inspector General Daniel R. Levinson. According to Issa’s letter, “The list contains 86 significant outstanding recommendations that if implemented,” could result in “12.2 billion in savings … with over $8.7 billion coming from Medicare and Medicaid ‘Priority Recommendations’ alone.”
While 33 of the recommendations are new, 53 of the recommendations are from Obama’s first year in office.
“The previous year’s Compendium of Unimplemented Office of Inspector General Recommendations (released May 2009), contained 63 such recommendations,” reads Issa’s letter. “Disturbingly, only 10 of these 63 significant IG recommendations from 2008 appear to have been either fully implemented by this administration during its first year in office or deemed no longer relevant by the IG – the other 53 appear again on this year’s report. I would remind you that under the Inspector General Act, federal agencies are supposed to complete final action on IG recommendations within one year.”
Issa’s letter then asks whether “the significant amount of time spent by senior officials” in the DHHS “lobbying for the president’s government health-care proposal raises important questions about whether these activities have distracted efforts to root out waste, fraud, and abuse.”
When contacted for comment, DHHS spokesman Nicholas Papas did not respond directly to Issa’s letter. “HHS is strongly committed to fighting waste, fraud and abuse and has launched an unprecedented effort, including $1.7 billion in our FY 2011 budget request to prevent and detect fraud in the health-care system,” Papas said. “Additionally, our administration has expanded its partnership with the HHS OIG and is working collaboratively on waste and fraud issues. We look forward to replying to Congressman Issa’s letter.”
Former DHHS Deputy Secretary Tevi Troy told the Daily Caller that the unimplemented recommendations are ”a real problem” and a classic DHHS pitfall.
“You put more money into the system — we’re talking about a trillion dollars for this piece of legislation — and there’s likely to be more waste fraud and abuse,” Troy said. ”You can diminish the amount of fraud,” he added, but “the problem is that the harder you look at waste, fraud, and abuse, the more controls you put in the system, and the slower money flows. The slower the money flows, the less willing doctors are to deal with the system, because they can’t get their payments in a timely manner.” Speed up the process, says Troy, and the doctors are happier, but the DHHS is back to dealing with extensive waste, fraud and abuse.
Tags: Daniel R. Levinson, Darrell Issa, Department of Health and Human Services, Deputy Secretary, Inspector General, Kathleen Sebelius, Unimplemented Office of Inspector General Recommendations
Read more: http://dailycaller.com/2010/03/17/issa-challenges-department-of-health-and-human-services-on-inspector-general-recommendations/#ixzz0iXyHYUhZ
Wednesday, March 17, 2010
The American "No Child Policy"
The American "No Child Policy"
1 DAY AGO
March 16, 2010
In my previous March 14, 2010 editorial Child "Protection" "Service" violates EVERY Human right in the United States, I stated "not even the communist government in China is kidnapping kids and operating a damnable CPS".
Of course, I am not ignoring China's infamous "One Child" policy-
Abortion Debate Thwarts U.S. Fight Against China’s One-Child Policy, Activist Says
Tuesday, March 16, 2010
By Karen Schuberg
CNSNews.com
Just this morning, I posted a video "Inside America's 'stork market" about an adopted Russian baby killed by a US couple. I have long wondered what the cause of all this "sterility" is. You know, the couple gets married and finds they cannot conceive. So these people are "desperate" to adopt.
Genealogy is quite a fad. People want to know where they came from. People want to know what their relatives were like. Adoptees never get to know. When I hear about kids adopted by Mormons who commit suicide, like Senator Gordon Smith's adopted son and Marie Osmond's adopted son, I just wonder. In case you don't know, genealogy is highly important to the Mormon religion. If you are adopted, you just cannot take your adopted family's history as your own. It's a meaningless lie.
How many abortions have there been since the Roe v. Wade decision? 49,551,703 and counting.
March 13, 2010- Waxman to Stupak: "But we want to pay for abortions"
"If you pass the Stupak amendment, more children will be born, and therefore it will cost us millions more. That's one of the arguments I've been hearing," Stupak says. "Money is their hang-up. Is this how we now value life in America?"
"Frankly I had thought that at the time Roe was decided, there was concern about population growth and particularly growth in populations that we don’t want to have too many of." -Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, July 8, 2009
Rev. Clenard Childress- "the most dangerous place for an African American to be is in the womb of their African American mother."
Isn't this a mess?
Over the past 100 years, the progressives have been "progressively" making it harder for people to make a living by stealing from them through taxation and regulation. Which progressivism creates massive poverty.
Progressivism has DESTROYED the black family, while they have blamed it on capitalism, the American way of having the freedom to make your own way in the world.
Now we are swimming in poverty as a result of "progressivism", and the "solution" is to kill the young before they are born and "end of life" counseling for you when your working years are over.
What kids in poverty really need
People who wind up in Washington's child- welfare system are often beset by "profound deprivation."
Jerry Large
Seattle Times staff columnist
Originally published March 14, 2010 at 10:00 PM | Page modified March 15, 2010 at 10:46 AM
So about the only "joy" left in life is "coitus" which does cause babies. Of course everybody is taught from grade school on about "doing it carefully" with some sort of "birth control", much of which causes health problems.
Failing that, there's abortion.
Failing that, there's "Child" "Protective" Services to come pick up the babies because of your poverty.
Giving America a "No Child policy".
http://familyrights.newscred.com/editorials/1313/the-american-no-child-policy
1 DAY AGO
March 16, 2010
In my previous March 14, 2010 editorial Child "Protection" "Service" violates EVERY Human right in the United States, I stated "not even the communist government in China is kidnapping kids and operating a damnable CPS".
Of course, I am not ignoring China's infamous "One Child" policy-
Abortion Debate Thwarts U.S. Fight Against China’s One-Child Policy, Activist Says
Tuesday, March 16, 2010
By Karen Schuberg
CNSNews.com
Just this morning, I posted a video "Inside America's 'stork market" about an adopted Russian baby killed by a US couple. I have long wondered what the cause of all this "sterility" is. You know, the couple gets married and finds they cannot conceive. So these people are "desperate" to adopt.
Genealogy is quite a fad. People want to know where they came from. People want to know what their relatives were like. Adoptees never get to know. When I hear about kids adopted by Mormons who commit suicide, like Senator Gordon Smith's adopted son and Marie Osmond's adopted son, I just wonder. In case you don't know, genealogy is highly important to the Mormon religion. If you are adopted, you just cannot take your adopted family's history as your own. It's a meaningless lie.
How many abortions have there been since the Roe v. Wade decision? 49,551,703 and counting.
March 13, 2010- Waxman to Stupak: "But we want to pay for abortions"
"If you pass the Stupak amendment, more children will be born, and therefore it will cost us millions more. That's one of the arguments I've been hearing," Stupak says. "Money is their hang-up. Is this how we now value life in America?"
"Frankly I had thought that at the time Roe was decided, there was concern about population growth and particularly growth in populations that we don’t want to have too many of." -Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, July 8, 2009
Rev. Clenard Childress- "the most dangerous place for an African American to be is in the womb of their African American mother."
Isn't this a mess?
Over the past 100 years, the progressives have been "progressively" making it harder for people to make a living by stealing from them through taxation and regulation. Which progressivism creates massive poverty.
Progressivism has DESTROYED the black family, while they have blamed it on capitalism, the American way of having the freedom to make your own way in the world.
Now we are swimming in poverty as a result of "progressivism", and the "solution" is to kill the young before they are born and "end of life" counseling for you when your working years are over.
What kids in poverty really need
People who wind up in Washington's child- welfare system are often beset by "profound deprivation."
Jerry Large
Seattle Times staff columnist
Originally published March 14, 2010 at 10:00 PM | Page modified March 15, 2010 at 10:46 AM
So about the only "joy" left in life is "coitus" which does cause babies. Of course everybody is taught from grade school on about "doing it carefully" with some sort of "birth control", much of which causes health problems.
Failing that, there's abortion.
Failing that, there's "Child" "Protective" Services to come pick up the babies because of your poverty.
Giving America a "No Child policy".
http://familyrights.newscred.com/editorials/1313/the-american-no-child-policy
Subscribe to:
Comments (Atom)