HERE is one of the most chilling articles I have ever read. The New York Times reports that a seven-month old boy was kidnapped by his own mother, who reportedly has “a history of mental illness.” The child was being held at a “child welfare” agency when the mother walked away with him. Never once in the report by Winnie Hu and J. David Goodman do the journalists question the official description of the mother or the idea that a child can be a possession of the state. An alert message was sent out on cellphone networks to hundreds of thousands of New Yorkers at 4 a.m. Wednesday. The mother was on the run in a city of government-controlled automatons. Needless to say, she was “located” a short time later.

From the article:

It was a watershed moment in the intersection of law enforcement and technology: the first mass Amber Alert sent to cellphones in the city since a national wireless emergency a

lert system was established. And, the police later said, it directly led to the child’s being located.

[…]

By Wednesday afternoon, the police said that they had found [Marina] Lopez and her son in “good condition.” Ms. Lopez was arrested and charged with custodial interference. The police said she was found after the Amber Alert led to a tip to the department’s Crime Stoppers hot line.

The child was abducted from New York Foundling, a foster care agency. “While stringent protocols are in place, we are thoroughly investigating the circumstances surrounding this unfortunate event,” the agency said in a statement. “Our agency monitors over 50 supervised visits a week with the children in our care and only two such incidents have occurred in the last 20 years.”

— Comments —

Karen I. writes:

It is hard to say if the abduction alert about the mother with the “history of mental illness” was appropriate without knowing what the “mental illness” is. If, for example, the woman has a history of severe postpartum psychosis and “voices” are telling her to hurt her children, the alert was appropriate. If she has a history of abusing her other children, as many mothers who have infants taken from them do, it was appropriate. While the idea that the state can take a child and call it’s mother an abductor is upsetting, it is important to remember that there are times when there is no other way to protect the child. There is also no good word for a state to use to describe an unfit mother who has run off with her child, so they are stuck calling her an “abductor.”

There are so many laws in place to protect patients now that states can only make vague statements like “history of mental illness” when discussing cases in public. Unfortunately, that leaves the public in the dark about the true nature of the case. Equally unfortunate is the reality that there are some mental illnesses or addictions that are so serious that mothers who suffer from them can pose a true danger to their children. The sad case of Andrea Yates comes to mind. Her children would probably still be alive if the state had stepped in when she started showing signs of severe mental illness, which went on for a long time and was well documented prior to her horrific crimes.

Laura writes:

In order to prevent an extremely rare occurrence such as the Andrea Yates case, the state would have to closely monitor everyone. It’s not the job of the government to prevent all harm or to supervise family life to that degree. I realize that it has taken on that role and many people have the expectation that government agencies should prevent child abuse. But this is an invitation to exploitation. A parent’s rights are primary and should almost always supersede those of the state. If a parent has committed a crime and is in jail, and no relatives exist, the state would appoint guardians or place a child. If this mother was indeed mentally ill, if she was incoherent and unable to function, which does not seem to be the case because she was merely described as “bipolar,” she should have been hospitalized, ideally with or near the baby, who is her child. I am curious to know why the baby was not with relatives.

What is especially disturbing is that the reporters do not probe the official description. They just matter-of-factly report the mother as a kidnapper.

Lopez should not have been described as an abductor because a mother can NEVER be an abductor of her own child and no alert should have been sent out. This is not at all what the “Amber Alert” system was intended to do. It was intended for cases in which children were abducted by strangers. If she was indeed mentally ill, she should have been very easy to find. Someone who cannot think clearly is usually not very good at eluding the police.

Buck writes:

Fatherhood and “motherhood” are hanging on, but by a thread. The state, under the guise of justice and the pretense of “protecting” the children, has, as the result of its own policies and laws, approached a near-complete authority over any child conceived or purged out of vestigial nuclear family. The “nuclear family’s” half-life is accelerating as the modern liberal state updates it and re-defines it into meaningless. Several years ago, the U.S. Department of State announced that “parent one” and “parent two” would replace “mother” and “father” on passport applications. Apparently, after a rarely successful public outcry, they split the baby. The passport application currently reads “Mother/Father/Parent.”

The “Baby Veronica” case, Adoptive Couple, Appellants, v. Baby Girl ( “v. Baby Girl !), has some of the tortured elements that open the door to the state, begging it to take over. It’s convoluted, and I haven’t studied it, but essentially it about an American Indian, a member of the Cherokee Nation in Oklahoma, who fathered a child in South Carolina. The mother immediately gave up the child to another couple who then applied for adoption. The father somehow got custody of the child and was raising her and bonded with her for the last eighteen months. The courts declared that the father had no right to custody since he did not apply for adoption, and they granted custody and adoption rights to the South Carolina couple. The U.S. Supreme Court agreed.

Mrs. H. writes:

The problem is lumping all cases where the child is “taken” as abduction and kidnapping. It actually causes people to take less seriously actual, dangerous abductions. I understand unfortunate cases where a mother or father has been granted custody, and the other parent desparately takes their own child, against the law, and so it is a crime. But the public shouldn’t be led to believe the child is in danger, because usually he is not. Most abductions by relatives are not dangerous for the child at all.

One way you can look at this–and I’m not arguing that one bad justifies another–is that the unmarried or divorced and estranged parents who put themselves in these situations get what they deserve when the State unnaturally claims custody of their child. The State has no right in and of itself, but the parents have indirectly, ignorantly, placed everything in the States hands by getting a divorce, or not handling their dispute outside of court.

Hospitals treat all parents of newborn babies like this (at least at the 3 hospitals I have delivered at). You are not allowed to leave unless they discharge you, and you will be charged with kidnapping/endangering the baby if you do. (My husband has to wear a wristband that will set off an alarm if he takes HIS baby outside the hospital before being discharged. It drives him nuts.) For our first child we weren’t allowed to take the baby for a walk outside the maternity ward, which was about 20 steps long. The nurses gave us a long lecture about how the “inconvenience” was for the baby’s safety, and we should be grateful for the technology to keep our baby “safe,” but it’s just insulting. (Also, they ask–in front of my husband–if he’s beating me and if I’m happy in our relationship.)

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