Reply #15: This happened 3 years ago [View All]

[condoleeza]

True - ST. BARNABAS HOSPITAL HAS A 49.3 PERCENT CESAREAN RATE, and by the time the patient"s second psych consult was over, she had given birth to a healthy baby. The obstetrician turned out to be wrong and nobody seems to be questioning her competence in trying to force an unnecessary procedure on a patient. Pretty sad statistics for St. Barnabas.

It is a rare woman who doesn't behave irrationally during labor. However, there are many troubling things here for me. The mother was diagnosed 12 years ago as a paranoid schizophrenic. She took herself off medication while pregnant, which is also somewhat understandable considering all the "warnings" about drugs. However, and a big however, is the fact that she IS a diagnosed paranoid schizophrenic and while there are varying degrees, I'm sure, I just don't believe that EVERYONE should be allowed to reproduce. Call me a fascist.

So - some personal history - I have a niece, my sister's child, who is a paranoid schizophrenic. She believes she was raped by everyone from Billy Graham and Bob Hope on a trip to Vietnam in the 70's, to John McCain, sometime later {this only surfaced during last years election). She's a devout Christian but somehow most of her "perps" are religious leaders, as there are many more "rapists" who are nationally prominent as well as local religious leaders and pretty well follow the news. We also have no idea why she is focused on Vietnam but she is, and the only explanation I can come up with is that my fiance was killed there in '68 when she was 9. I was pretty much her primary caregiver from birth, as my sister had 4 kids in 6 yrs. and lived down the street so I was there every day, she knew him-he loved her, she had to have sensed I was pretty traumatized-and she had to have felt a loss. Although I certainly didn't discuss it with her, no doubt it entered her psyche, as I was not myself and it must have been very confusing for her. Us Midwesterners don't "talk" about shit, we just go on being "nice".

We don't know why she focuses on rape, but she's always been focused in this direction since her diagnosis. Prior to this illness she was a Presidential Scholar before it overtook her when she was 19, she had never dated or had a boyfriend. She had a paternal aunt who was also schizophrenic and died young and her death has always been "a secret" but I suspect it was suicide. Schizophrenia most often begins to show itself when people are at the age of 18. When she is off her meds she will call at any hour, accusing anyone who crossed her path of some crime. There is no way she could ever parent a child and again I realize that there are degrees. Her mother is 80 now, still working, and in the last year has finally realized that she is in danger, so my niece is now in a "facility", as my sister cannot deal with the daily drama of on and off of meds.

Of my sister's 4 children we have 1 schizophrenic, 2 who each have one child who is autistic, and another who has never married or reproduced because she is scared shitless of passing on this kind of genetics. My own family w/o the BIL's genetics was crazy enough already, so maybe it was the combo that was the toxic mix, I don't know, but again - Jesus, I can only hope that the people who want to adopt this child, who have had custody since birth, will be able to deal with a child with possible mental issues that won't appear for another 15 years. We can debate all day about toxic metal poisoning, vitamin deficiency, etc. as causes for mental illness, but in the meantime a child is forming into a future adult and that child is more important to me than the mother and I am a mother.

This happened 3 years ago. Forgive me if I am just glad that for once the courts took the life and future of the child as paramount over parental rights, and considered, apparently carefully, what was best for the child and gave custody to the foster parents who have had custody since birth. Too often these children go home from the hospital into a nightmare. I question the forces behind the pushing of this story as a parental rights issue, as it is most often the R/Wingers who scream the loudest about "rights" and don't give a rats ass about the actual LIFE this child would have.

Schizophrenia is not a curable disease, when they are on meds and feeling "normal" they go off their meds because they believe they are normal - they will never be normal - a child deserves more than that - IMO.