Thursday, May 01, 2008 - Posts
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Via InstaPundit comes the heartbreaking story of Nancy Hey and Christopher Slitor, who have spent the last three years fighting to regain custody of their daughter, Sabrina. Like many babies, Sabrina lost weight after she came home from the hospital, but Hey took the child for repeated doctor's visits, supplemented nursing with formula, and took her to the hospital for further care when her weight gain lagged. Still, they were subject to repeated visits from social workers, who removed Sabrina from the home when she was just 3 weeks old—and at a normal weight.
I think that, by and large, social workers are overworked, underpaid, and certainly underappreciated. They often have too many caseloads and face harrowing conditions. But this case leaves me with a few questions. Barring conditions like a history of maternal drug use or a home stockpiled with loaded guns laying around, who in their right mind thinks it's a good idea to remove a healthy 3-week-old from a loving home? Wouldn't someone who was neglecting and starving their child not be the kind of person who made multiple trips to the doctor and allowed their child to be hospitalized to figure out what's wrong?
Some of what I've read about this story—an editorial in the Washington Examiner, the couple's own Web site—hints that Nancy Hey has a disability, described as "disorder that makes it difficult for her to recognize non-verbal signals from others" but doesn't say how that would affect her parenting. (And the family had hired a full-time nanny when Sabrina was born.) So while there may be elements of this story that aren't as well-known, it should be said that Hey's husband and Nancy's own mother have applied for custody but have thus far been denied. Given that governmental agencies are overburdened with these cases and there are foster-care shortages in so many places, I'll never understand the need to keep a little girl from the parents and grandparent who love her.
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