Introduction.
This is a book that requires a longer review due to the subject content. The author appeared to be in a bit of a hurry to get this book to press, for what can be described as an urgency due to children suffering and being exploited in various ways by an unjust system. I wish the author had taken more time to explain the circumstances involved in these individual cases, so I could have a better understanding of what was happening in their homes and lives.
Let’s start in the beginning. Children were being abused in some family situations and the government wanted to help. As has been seen over time in a variety of situations, when the federal government becomes involved in what should be state or local issues, there are often problems. These problems were plainly stated by a former congresswoman, Senator Nancy Schaefer:
“… the financial motive for the State to legally kidnap children was put in place in 1974 by Walter Mondale with the ‘Adoption and Families Act.’ This was later expanded by President Bill Clinton in 1997 with The Adoption and Safe Families Act that gave states cash bonuses for every child adopted out of foster care.” Pg 203.
This is another example in the history of our country when good intentions created bad results. According to Senator Nancy Schaefer, Child Protective Services (CPS) is unconstitutional. She expands further on this topic and sums it up in this way:
“The Department of Child Protective Services has become a protected empire. It’s built on taking children and separating families.” Pg 202.
After this above-mentioned bill was signed, the law went into effect that gave states federal money for every child which was taken from their original family, placed into the foster system, and then adopted by foster parents. The scramble by states for this federal money caused many problems. It provided financial incentives for states to remove children from their homes, and also from any relatives like grandparents. It did not safeguard parental rights of their children, and it did not guard human or constitutional rights of parents or their children. The author’s main concerns are only a part of this Child Protective Services (CPS) system, where children are being removed from their families due to medical kidnapping, without due process of law, and often due to a disagreement over diagnosis between the family doctor and other doctors in the healthcare industry.
This CPS system began due to problems within the home. Unfortunately, not all parents are good parents, and sometimes the children need to be removed from their homes. This is why we have CPS and a foster system. There are children who need to be protected from their parents and their home environment. The author never mentions any benefits that this service is providing, he is only focusing on one part of the CPS, which is medical kidnapping by the state, and this one part appears to be out of control and in violation of children’s and parent’s rights.
Most of us know and understand a little bit about the foster care part of the Child Protective Service (CPS) program. We have had relatives, neighbors, and friends who have or had foster children. Most of these people who want to be foster parents and have foster children are people who want to provide love and a family for children who find themselves removed from their parents and original family. Most of these foster parents who offer to bring these children into their homes have big hearts, and they want to share their hearts and their homes with these children, and to provide them with a better future.
Unfortunately, not all foster parents are good parents either. Some of these foster parents appear to be gaming the system and using children as money making objects. They realize they can get extra money if the children are diagnosed with a mental disease and given drugs. Also, they allow their foster children to be used in vaccine and drug trials by Big Pharma, because that is also good extra money. When there are monetary incentives to drug children and allow them to be used as lab rats in a drug trial, you can be sure that a certain number of foster parents will not pass up these monetary opportunities. These are some of the bad parts of the system the author is exposing, and he shows us that the end results of this CPS abduction of children can result not only in a loss of protecting of children and their rights, but rather a systemic exploitation of them for profit by foster parents, the state and Big Pharma. Financial incentives for drugging foster children and allowing them to be used in drug and vaccine trials should be removed.
What is Medical Kidnapping?
Medical Kidnapping as defined by the author: “…the state taking away children from their parents and putting them into state custody and the foster care system, simply because the parents did not agree with a doctor regarding their prescribed medical treatment for the family. In some cases it is as simple as telling a doctor you are going to seek a second opinion on a suggested medical procedure, and then ending up being charged with ‘medical abuse’ and losing your children.” Pg 10.
Unless the situation is dire, and the child is in imminent threat of death, there should always be time for a second opinion. Doctors are fallible, so this is a rule that makes a lot of sense. Emergency surgeries that one doctor believes a child needs right away are sometimes argued against by a second doctor who disagrees not only with the surgery, but also the first diagnosis as a whole. When we understand that medicine is more of an art than a science, then we can better understand the complications of arriving at a diagnosis. Medicine is not like math. There is not always one right solution. Therefore, it makes sense to get a second opinion.
When parents and their family doctor are overruled by doctors in the hospital and/or emergency room, this can allow the state to move in and medically kidnap your child “in the best interests of the child.” When children are unlawfully taken away due to medical kidnapping, and without due process of law, parents are desperate and looking for help, because this should not have happened to them. If they were bad parents and did things to the child they were ashamed of, they would probably not want the whole world to know about it. If parents seek publicity for their case, this is a sign not only of their desperation, but possibly also of their innocence. In the obverse, if the judge issues a gag order on their case, and disallows them to speak publicly about it, this is a sign that the justice system and CPS are ashamed of their actions and guilty of criminality, and don’t want others to know about it. Why else would the judge issue a gag order not to speak publicly about the case?
According to Google, Gag orders are used for several purposes:
- Protecting sensitive information
- Ensuring fair trials
- Controlling the media
In these medical kidnapping cases, the judge is not issuing a gag order to protect sensitive information or to ensure a fair trial, because there is no sensitive or confidential information related to the case and there is usually no trial. Therefore, these gag orders are issued to keep the parent’s quiet and not allow them to speak to the media.
In these instances, gag orders appear to be a violation of the parent’s First Amendment (freedom of speech) rights. What reasoning can be used to stop parents from being allowed to speak publicly about their case, after their child has been removed from their custody? You may hear “It’s in the best interests of the child,” or some such rubbish. But the truth of the matter is that the child in the case has already been removed from their parents and into state custody and/or the foster system, and this public banter will not really affect them one way or another after being removed from their homes. It is an excuse used only to make the process easier for child removal and to keep parents quiet so CPS does not get more bad press than they already have, and so they can keep their child abduction business going smoothly.
Justina Pelletier
“Justina Pelletier was taken away from her parents by force at the age of 15, and held for over a year as Boston Children’s Hospital kept her confined in their psych ward. They disagreed with the family’s doctor over her diagnosis, and had the state’s ‘child protection’ social service agency seize custody of her away from her parents, against her will and the will of her parents. What ensued was a long legal battle to get their daughter back, that probably only ended positively because her story went viral and was picked up by mainstream media, because her father refused to obey a court-directed gag order and went to the media with their story.” Pg 19-20.
There is a lot involved in this little paragraph. Allow me to attempt to break it down and do Justina and her family a little justice. Firstly, there was a disagreement between the hospital staff and the family’s doctor over her diagnosis. Here is an example of what happens when the state and local hospitals can rule over parents and their chosen physicians. The parents were obviously taking care of their daughter. They knew she had a condition that required a doctor, and this family doctor was helping Justina. It is clear that the child was being taken care of to the best of the parent’s abilities, and the parents were considering what was in the best interest of the child. But the state disagreed with the parents and their family doctor and took her from her parents based on those very grounds, “what was in the best interests of the child.” They overruled the parents and their family physician, and they medically kidnapped the child from her parents. This is wrong on many levels.
Why would they take away the child in this situation? When you look at the money involved, then you can often see the intentions behind the decisions. The federal government would be paying the hospital bills, which would be exorbitant. Also, instead of a physical disease as the family doctor had diagnosed, the hospital decided it was a mental disease. Once Justina was medically kidnapped and became a ward of the state, this allowed doctors and the hospital to give her drug treatments based on their mental disease diagnosis against her parents’ consent and against the diagnosis of their family doctor. The hospital stay and the drug treatments were expensive, and monetarily benefitted the hospital and Big Pharma.
And as usual in these circumstances, the judge issued a gag order on the case, which not only indicates the judge is involved in the maladministration of justice and complicit in this medical kidnapping, but that the parent’s first amendment rights were being trampled upon. If the hospital and their staff were really doing a good thing and rescuing this child from a terrible situation, wouldn’t they want the whole world to know how great, how loving, and how caring they are to save a child from such a terrible sitaution? All of this reeks of corruption of the justice system, the overreach of government and local medical authorities, and the abuse of the parent’s and child’s civil and human rights. All of this should not have happened. Where is the law? Why is the constitution not being followed or obeyed, even by the judge? How could this happen?
While this medical kidnapping was happening, the father called 9-1-1 and told the dispatcher he believed the hospital was kidnapping his daughter. Instead of following the law and the Constitution of the United States, the police let the kidnappers keep the child in their care and escorted the parents out of the hospital. Even local law enforcement did not follow the true code of law. They appeared more to be directed by the rule of “Pharmacracy” rather than of Democracy. A note or call from the parent’s physician given to the police should have been enough to obtain the release of the child from her forced hospital imprisonment. Later this same day, the hospital declared they would be taking over custody of the child, and they accused the parents of medical negligence, all due to a difference in medical opinion by doctors. A small moral of this story is that when profit is involved, beware of the doctor’s medical opinion, and the goals of a for-profit business.
All that was required to complete this medical kidnapping was an accusation of medical negligence against the parents by the doctors and hospital staff. Isn’t this also a violation of the constitution?
14th Amendment:
“No State shall make or enforce any law which shall abridge the privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States; nor shall any State deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law: nor deny any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws.”
What can we learn from this? All that was needed to medically kidnap the child was an accusation made by the hospital against the parents. Again, the parents’ constitutional rights were trampled upon. And also, the child’s rights were taken away, as was her liberty.
The 14th Amendment goes along with part of the 5th Amendment, which clearly states that a person should never be: “… deprived of life, liberty, or property without due process of law…” This means no person should ever be imprisoned without due process of law, which means fair procedures and trials.
She was imprisoned in the hospital for over a year against her will, against the wishes of her parents, and against the diagnosis and advice of their family doctor. It took media pressure, a court case, attorneys, and lots of money to get her out of the hospital and back to her home. Her parents were found not guilty of negligence and child abuse, and they finally got their child back home where she belonged. Therefore, none of this should have happened. And none of it would have happened if any part of this legal system was following the Constitution of the United States. The system has been corrupted by the pursuit of federal money given to states to remove children from their parents and their homes.
In a court case filed by the parents against the hospital, the hospital was found “not medically negligent” in their treatment of Justina. This means that there was not enough evidence to prove beyond a shadow of a doubt that the hospital was medically negligent due to their diagnosis and treatment of Justina. But it should have been proven they overstepped the human and civil rights of the daughter and her parents. This makes one wonder how much the justice system has been corrupted in favor of big business and against the rights of individuals. And this question brings us to a bill which was named Justina’s Law, which never became a law, but it should be, which:
“… prohibits the use of federal funds to conduct or support research involving a ward of the state in which the individual’s health is subjected to greater than minimal risk with no or minimal prospect of direct benefit.”
In other words, do not allow wards of the state to be used in drug and/or vaccine trials or any kind of experimentation unauthorized by the parents after the parents have been removed as legal guardians of the child and/or children. This bill was proposed in the Congress of the United States to be approved as a law, and it had wide public support, but it died in committee. Why would it die in committee, you might ask?
If this law were passed, then Big Pharma would no longer be allowed access to children in foster care for their drug and/or vaccine trials. This would deprive them of their guinea pigs, and it would dampen their prospects to get new drugs and vaccines approved due to lack of trial subjects. Big Pharma has corrupted the legal process. Big Pharma appears to be responsible for killing the bill. They appear to have more power in the Congress than the people who have voted for their lawmakers to be elected. This is how big the corruption of this country has become due to the money of Big Pharma.
If we disallow federal funding to individual state healthcare systems and if we follow the Constitution of The United States, then we can prevent this federal funding for state approved kidnapping from being an issue. The 10th Amendment of the United States:
“… any powers that are not specifically given to the federal government, nor withheld from the states, are reserved to those respective states, or to the people at large.”
Give the power back to the states and to the people. And take it away from Big Government and Big Pharma. Disallow federal money to be involved in internal healthcare matters of individual states.
What else can we learn from this case? It was never really resolved beyond the shadow of a doubt what was truly wrong with Justina Pelletier. What is known is that doctors and a large, highly respected hospital ruled over the wishes of helpless parents and their own medical doctor and his opinion. The rights of the individuals in this case were not upheld.
In a case where the truth of an illness is in dispute between different doctors, justice should always side with parents and their chosen professional rather than with the hospitals and their staff, and state and local law enforcement. Parents have the most to gain or to lose based upon a diagnosis, and parents have responsibility for their children until they become adults, so therefore parents and their chosen health provider should have the final say in any such decision.
If you wish to learn more about Justina Pelletier and her case, there are many stories and videos online. The following link is one such example:
Justina Pelletier: Where is the Survivor Now?
I am sorry about the length of this book review. However, it is important to address the examples provided in the book and how they are affected by the laws and their execution as implemented by the federal, state, and local powers that be.
Next week: Conclusion to the review of this book.