● For the past year, reporter Brian Sheehan of WHP-TV in
Harrisburg has done one outstanding story after another about families harmed
by child welfare agencies in Pennsylvania.
Last week, they posted a
round-up of their own that includes many of them. Not included in the round-up, but also
excellent: A primer of sorts on why, when it comes to your legal rights, child
welfare agencies have far more power than the police.
These stories are especially worth another look now, because it looks like they're about to dial up the crazy in Pennsylvania again soon. I'll have blog posts about this in the next few days.
● The Milwaukee
Journal Sentinel has a detailed account of the extreme lengths the
Wisconsin Department of Children and Families went to in order to
try to stop you from finding out what NBC News reporter Mike Hixenbaugh
found out about the behavior of “child abuse pediatricians” at Children’s Hospital
of Wisconsin. So whatever you do, be
sure to help Wisconsin DCF protect its bureaucracy! Don’t even think of reading
or sharing Hixenbaugh’s story, which
happens to be available here.
● The Washington Post
has aggregated stories about several cases in which newborns
were separated needlessly from their mothers due to hospitals’ knee-jerk
responses to false positive drug tests. This
is made all the more likely by the so-called “plan of safe care” provision of
the federal Child Abuse Prevention and Treatment Act. But ProPublica
and the Boston Globe ignored such
cases as they wrote stories that effectively call for making this provision of
a bad law even worse. Here’s
our response to those stories.
● Legislation has been introduced in Rhode Island to try to curb
discrimination by child protective services against parents with disabilities.
● In Colorado, legislation has been introduced that,
according to this
news account, is similar to Utah’s “freerange parenting” law.
