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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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A guest post from David Plotz, who writes:
That was a great post, Melonyce. It got me thinking about why my immediate reaction was so skeptical, based on what little I knew about the book. Was it just some reflexive racism of the sort you describe—no way a white kid gets sent to a poor black foster family? Or was it something else? And I haven’t really settled it in my own mind.
I think the answer is that I did a quick mental calculation that went something like this: How many white kids get placed in black foster families? How often do those foster families happen to be right in the middle of gangland, USA? What are the chances that that kid then grows up to be a gang girl and gang mascot who witnesses murders, etc.? And what are the chances that she then makes it entirely out of gangworld? And what are the chances she then turns out to be a really good writer? And what are the chances she happens to get her writing into the hands of a swanky New York publishing house? I think the result of that mental calculation was the notion that there was a small chance that each one of these things could be true but an infinintessimally small chance that they all could be true.
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