Are you aware that a study concluded that children are better off in troubled family homes than in foster care?

Yes - there are a few actual cases of crazy parents abusing their children, and those are crimes that should be handled by law enforcement, with the perpetrator placed in an institution, not the child. True child abuse is relatively rare; most children are taken from their parents for trivial reasons. If there’s a way to keep a family together, that’s what should happen. Instead families are torn apart at the drop of the hat because child welfare agencies want federal funding, and that won’t start unless they put a child in foster care. So for the love of money … families are decimated. I certainly don’t approve, and you will never get me to think that there’s anything acceptable about family devastation.

That in no way justifies the abuses that many inept social workers and the private companies that perpetuate what amounts to a “kids for profit” racket have going on.

Surely you aren’t one of those, “It’s the government so they can’t be doing anything wrong.” types.

To pretend that there’s no need for reform in a system that allows these abuses to occur is… well naive, to put it as politely as possible.

That’s all fine and dandy but in no way excuses or justifies the many innocent lives this corrupt system has destroyed.

My son was born with renal tubular acidosis. One of the symptoms of this is failure to gain weight. Rather than do the proper testing, the state-funded medical center reported me to CPS for neglect when he was two months old (they said I was refusing to feed him).

After a month in foster “care”, someone took him to a doctor who was alarmed enough at his condition (he was, for all intents and purposes, dying - a condition he was *not* in before they took him away from me) that she sent him to Grand Rapids for an ultrasound of his kidneys. It was then that they realized he had RTA. The agency, however, kept this fact a secret from both the court and the state, denying my son medical treatment. They continued to say that his condition was because I didn’t feed him, even though he had been out of my custody for a month at that point.

I went to my lawyer about it and we went to court with a motion to take my son to a real doctor. The court accused me of being insane and wasting their time, but an order to take my son to a doctor was filed. The agency never did that, and no action was taken against them for disobeying a court order. My baby continued to waste away and I was forced to watch.

After six months in foster “care”, they started saying he was underweight because he saw me once a week and it “traumatized” him so badly that he refused to eat for the rest of the week (he was eight months old).

After a year, it was still my doing, but they gave up on even trying to explain why.

After about 17 months, I was accidentally sent his state immunization records which showed that he wasn’t being immunized properly (he hadn’t gained enough weight to be safely immunized). When I presented this to the court, CPS finally admitted that my son had RTA and started treating him (improperly, his current, not medicaid, U of M Healthcare System doctor says), but also used the fact that I even brought it up as proof that I was mentally ill.

They also did a complete 180 on his condition. When it was my fault, it was absolutely earthshattering. Once it became not my fault, it was, in the words of the prosecutor, “meaningless… no big deal”. It was the whole reason they took him away from me, and then suddenly it was “no big deal”.

Finally, after 21 months, they said that if I didn’t voluntarily terminate my parental rights, they would keep him in foster “care” where he would continue to not get proper treatment for his condition. To me, it was no different from holding a gun to his head and telling me that if I didn’t do what they wanted, they’d shoot him. At that point, it wasn’t about keeping him away from my family (they gave him to my mother almost immediately and got the hell away from the case as fast as they could) as it was about covering up their medical neglect and the fact that in order to keep telling their lie about me, they nearly killed a baby.

My son is two now, and he’ll never be the person he was born to be. He’s incredibly small for his age, can’t talk, and is lethargic most of the time. CPS, in essence, murdered the man my son was meant to be and left an empty little ghost in his place… for no other reason than to be able to tell a lie about me.