Those publicized pleas for more foster “parents” are an open invitation to child predators who want to harm other people’s children in an unsupervised living arrangement.

Here we have yet another case that proves this point:

“Bergthold admitted that during the time he acted as a foster parent for the Arkansas Department of Human Services, he had sexual contact with and produced several photos and videos of a minor who had been placed in Bergthold’s care and custody.”

“Bergthold also pleaded guilty on the same day to a one-count criminal information filed in the District of Oregon, which was later transferred to the Western District of Arkansas, that charged a separate incident of production of child pornography in Oregon.”

Source: Former Foster Parent Sentenced for Production and Transportation of Child Pornography published by Market Watch, the online version of The Wall Street Journal, on Aug. 21, 2008.

Typical of Child Protective Services (CPS), two social workers showed up in a Michigan homeschool parent’s front yard with a collection of shoddy accusations. The surprised mother was in the middle of renovating a house they’d recently moved into. Though she wasn’t prepared for the surprise visit she remembered not to allow government agents into her home without a warrant.

Apparently some idiot had accused her of homeschooling, having illiterate children (ages 7 and 9), plus lack of utilities, water, heating. Homeschooling, she hastened to remind the social workers, is legal in Michigan as it is in all fifty states.

As the other trivial and spurious charges were leveled at her, she managed to deflect each of them with proof of her innocence. For example, she grabbed a bottle of antifreeze from next to the car and had them demonstrate their reading abilities. These children were reading at advanced levels, so it was clear that the person who called CPS didn’t know much about the family.

If each family could be trained to respond as wisely to a Child Protective Services investigation, most of our problems would be over. The people coming to this site after making bad decisions on how to handle a Child Protective Services investigation are the ones with problems that are difficult to resolve.

What this country needs is an intensive program of education to train parents to react to Child Protective Services investigations wisely.

Source: A Visit From CPS by Kathleen Rundle (please read this!)

One other very wise thing Ms. Rundle did was that she wrote an article about her experience and circulated it to the media. She also emailed me to let me know about her article. The fact is that the thing Child Protective Services social workers hate most is publicity. If you’re dealing with a case where you’re innocent of spurious charges, consider letting your local newspapers know. In fact, you might want to let everyone know exactly what is going on.

The public needs to know that Child Protective Services is pursuing cases that do not involve actual abuse or neglect, and that Juvenile Court judges and referees are allowing children to be taken for trivial things. They need to know their tax dollars are being wasted by the family destruction industry.

How can you let people know about your situation in a way that will make them sit up, listen, and care?

Are your legislators doing anything to help reunite children with their rightful parents? Do your legislators care whether you’ve been unjustly accused? Are they working on your behalf to help the the wrongfully accused to be vindicated, and their children returned?

For most of us, the answer is Of Course Not!

There are a few good legislators out there who have indicated they care… Senator Nancy Schaefer of Georgia comes to mind. But most legislators aren’t doing a thing to help our cause and therefore we should be very interested in having them replaced with legislators who will help us.

Unfortunately most legislators are hopelessly brainwashed or blackmailed, or bribed. (The three B’s of public office.) For one reason or another they won’t lift a finger to change the really awful laws and regulations of this country like CAPTA and ASFA. (If you’re a CPS client and don’t know what those laws are, you should.)

So… I’m presenting to you a link to a fearless, brilliant, and concerned writer, Devvy, “The Dynamite Redhead”. Her article, published today, is The Case For Hanging Errant Public Officials.

Don’t worry - she’s not recommending a lynch mob. What she suggests is that we use our option to vote for ‘write in’ candidates that agree with our issues.

A day I waited for, with a sense of expectancy and joy, has come and gone. It was my youngest child’s eighteenth birthday.

As you know, with that birthday passed, my children can no longer be victims of an agency that pretends to protect them. I no longer have to worry about that knock at the door, with a government agent investigating my children and home.

I am free.

As God wills it, none of my children have children, so there are no worries about grandchildren being kidnapped. All of my children have chosen to be childless up to now, and it is a relief to me because now I can pursue family rights activism without worrying about CPS government agents wanting to retaliate against my family.

Is that cool, or what?

In Scotland a twelve-year-old girl is sick with rickets. Her vegan diet is to blame, according to doctors who are reporting the family to child welfare authorities there.

Vegans are vegetarians who don’t use dairy products. Apparently rickets is a deficiency of vitamin D - and I find it strange that veganism is being blamed since you can get vitamin D from exposure to sunshine.

At Macrobiotics and Rickets parents speak out saying they’ve raised children on vegan diets without Rickets or any other diseases. The cases they’ve seen may be attributed to lack of sunshine in very young children, or lack of a balanced diet, for example, too much wheat, which doesn’t have vitamin D.

A Dr. Jym Moon is quoted on the macrobiotics site: “The most important thing to know about rickets is that it is not a “vitamin deficiency disease”. It is, in fact, a lack of SUNSHINE that causes rickets.

“Vitamin D” is not a normal component of the diet of most people throughout the world. The statement in the article is not accurate in that it states that it implies that “dairy products, meat and wheat” are good sources of vitamin D and calcium.

Neither meat nor wheat contain any vitamin D and dairy products would not contribute much “vitamin D” to the diet, if they were not heavily fortified.

Since sunshine, not diet, is the major factor influencing development of rickets, the article needs to be more carefully evaluated. If, for instance, dark-skinned (Asian or African, etc) macrobiotics move to Glasgow (the seat of rickets in the 1620s), they would be well-advised to provide their infants with a source of “vitamin D”, and this would effectively prevent them from developing rickets.”

The article I read about the vegan parents in Scotland cites a USA case in which the vegan parents of a child that died have been sentenced to prison for life. It seems there must be a lot more to this story; it is too bad the news agencies aren’t more forthcoming with information.

Source: Parents of ill vegan girl may face police by Mark Macaskill, published on June 8, 2008 in the Times Online: Scotland News.

Side note: I’m a long-time vegetarian and recently became vegan after a ten day cleansing diet. I’ve never felt better.

This week I received email with links to a series of news articles written by Barbara Hollingsworth about CPS injustice. She’s looking for cases in and around Washington DC, to profile them in future news articles.

Here are her article links:

Victims claim CPS officials guilty of ‘ruthless behavior - examples of CPS injustice from around the USA.

Is it child protection or legal kidnapping? - how CPS works, and how innocent parents can be accused of wrongdoing.

Bureaucrats running down the clock against parents - this is about ASFA, the Orwellian law passed in 1996 that allows CPS to terminate parental rights after keeping a child in foster care for only 15 months. This has encouraged the CPS tactic of delaying reunifications until the time limit is reached so they can adopt out children even if the parents are adequate and have done everything required. This law also gives states bonus money for each child adopted out.

ASFA = “The Adoptions and Safe Families Act” - ostensibly written to keep children from having to live in long term foster care, by encouraging adoptions. In practice it has encouraged states to rip apart young families to get the babies because they are most easily adopted out. Older “hard to adopt” children are featured on meat-market type websites where people can look through to see if they want any featured children. The states get thousands of dollars for each adoption, from the federal treasury. “Child collectors”… aka Adopters… get thousands of dollars in adoption subsidy payments. Social workers get jobs since they are the front-line in taking children from their families. It is a win-win situation for everyone except parents and children who are used, abused, and traumatized for life by this pathetic rush for money by greedy systemites.

Brenda Sullivan has been sentenced to twenty years in prison for caging a seventeen-year-old adopted child.

I became aware of this when I saw the headline, ” Mom who caged teen son gets 20 years behind bars”.

I thought - ‘What kind of mom would do that?’ - and knew that this person was most likely NOT the real mother. I suspected it was a foster parent or adopter. And I was right.

It irritates me when the news agencies use headlines that indicate a foster parent or adopter was a real mother or father. But I often know by looking at the headlines when the abusers are actually child collectors who took children out of the child welfare system - to get adoption subsidy payments.

This woman also had 13-year-old twin boys. They said they had also been in cages.

Some “mom”.

Newsflash: Foster parents and adopters do not have the genetic affinity for the children they claim to parent. Some may do an adequate job, but there’s no true love like the love of a real parent for his or her natural children.

Source: Mom who caged teen son gets 20 years behind bars, an AP article published at CNN.Com.

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Written by Linda Martin for Fight CPS.

In Germany a baby was offered on eBay by his parents. The ad was up only about two hours, and the mother, 23, insists it was a joke.

Child welfare agents there have confiscated the child, and law enforcement agents are investigating the couple for child trafficking.

Question: Do you think the child welfare agents overreacted? Should this baby have been detained?

Source: Baby offered on eBay now in state custody posted by Leslie Katz on the CNN News Blog.

(You can also leave your comments there at the CNN news blog.)

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Written by Linda Martin for Fight CPS.

A former foster child has written a memoir about her years living in abusive foster homes. My God Box has a Christian slant while exposing the damage done to children in foster homes. I discovered the book this morning by reading an editorial about it, Former Foster Child & Advocate Focuses on System Flaws in Foster Care. The editor who wrote that article seemed to totally understand our concerns about how foster care can be worse than a challenging family life.

The author of My God Box, Margaret Iuculano, was in foster care for five years. During that time she lived in fifteen different foster homes. In an interview on Tampa Bay News she said, “The foster families that I encountered, they were not positive experiences….Unfortunately for me, my foster experiences. were almost or more abusive than the environment I was removed from.” You can see this interview on the media page of her website: Margaret Iuculano.

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Written by Linda Martin for Fight CPS.

I know many of you don’t use drugs and this post doesn’t apply to you. This article is an appeal to people who think they can use drugs and be parents at the same time.

You never know how CPS agents will handle drug use. Sometimes they ignore it. Usually they’ll remove a child from the home even for suspected drug use. Sometimes drug-addicted parents can go through rehabilitation and get their children back. Sometimes they go through rehabilitation and still don’t get their children back. I find that the only consistent thing about CPS cases is that they are inconsistent.

If you are a parent and think it is okay to use drugs, even “just marijuana” - please consider this. Suppose that God is looking down on us and compassionately thinks marijuana use is okay. Suppose He put the plant here to be enjoyed, and in His sight you are not doing a bad thing.

However all around you there are people who think marijuana use is not okay. They are trained to report your drug use to CPS, and CPS agents are trained to consider your drug use as a form of child neglect. They think that if you’re using drugs of any kind, even just marijuana, you are not able to concentrate on watching your children. They think you spend your money on drugs rather than on your children. So you are on their list of people to take children away from.

In this scenario, it doesn’t matter what God thinks of you if the CPS worker is here on earth to take children away, and chooses yours.

I’m not saying that I think God approves of drugs. I’m just saying that if you think it is okay, then that’s your decision, for yourself. But once you have children to take care of, you’re responsible for them and if you know that CPS agents are looking for drug users to take children away from, you’re risking your children’s well-being and your own, because being in a CPS case is one of the most devastating things you can go through in life.

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Another type of drug use is that of CPS victim parents who are terribly depressed, confused, traumatized, lost without their children, and miserable. The temptation to turn to drugs during the course of a CPS case is very common. I know of way too many parents who could have had their children back, but instead went out and smoked marijuana during the course of the case… and somehow their CPS agent social workers found out and told the judge. Those children were adopted out to strangers.

Please don’t let this happen to you! If you’re a CPS victim parent, don’t give in to the temptation to use drugs no matter how miserable and depressed you are. This is the worst time ever to start using drugs of any kind, including cigarettes. Don’t do anything the CPS agents can use against you. It simply isn’t worth it.

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While I’m on the subject of drugs - let me tell you how I feel about CPS cases where the parents have lost their children due to drug use. First of all, I feel that drug use while parenting is foolhardy given the current laws in which children are taken away for that reason. But when a parent for some reason doesn’t realize that and doesn’t quit for the well-being of their children, if their children are taken, I do feel some sympathy for them. I want all parents to quit using drugs so they can keep their children. I want parents with children in CPS custody to rehabilitate themselves. I want families to be reunited.

No matter what, I believe it is wrong to adopt out the children of the living. I feel better about legal guardianships than I do about adoptions. I believe it is wrong to tell children to call someone else “Mom” or “Dad”… to tell them they have new “parents”. I believe that children have one set of parents and to tell them someone else took their place is like telling them it is okay to lie about who their real parents are.

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If you’re a parent, don’t use drugs unless a doctor prescribes them. If your doctor prescribes medical marijuana, find out if CPS workers in your state take children from medical marijuana users before deciding to use it. If you’re not a parent, I have nothing to say about whether you’re using drugs or not. Everyone makes their own decisions and I’m a “live and let live” kind of person. But when you have children at home - your first responsibility is to them. Doing something that could get them taken away from you by CPS is not a good idea.

I have owned this site for more than seven years. Before that I did what I could as an anti-CPS activist for ten years, including writing scathing articles about CPS that were published in newspapers. I’ve been publicly known as an activist in this field for about 18 years now, and even though I’ve had my own children living in my home all that time, they were never removed from my custody again.

I want to tell you why.

The main reason why my children were never removed from my home again is that I lived an impeccably straight and upright kind of existence. I lived for my children. I didn’t use drugs, didn’t drink to excess, didn’t do anything that could be construed as abusive. The other reason why my children were never removed from my home was that I was extremely lucky. As most of you know, if a CPS agent really wants to take your child, they can make things up, twist the truth to make you look wicked, or any number of tricks. I was disturbed that a local CPS agent came to my door several times during the last seven years, but despite his apparent interest in me due to my outspoken opinions and this website, he never had a reason to detain my children.

All I am asking, with this article, is to PLEASE not give CPS workers any reasons to take or keep your children. Drugs, whether good or bad, are a reason, so please turn away from the drug using lifestyle if that is how you’ve been living. Cure yourself with that wonderful, amazing will-power deep within you. It is right there in your heart, right next to your love for your children. Cure yourself and be free, and know that you’re doing the right thing for yourself and for your kids.

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Written by Linda Martin for Fight CPS.