The Judge in the FLDS polygamist case displays ignorance

[pnwmom]

of breastfeeding, when she compares these women to women who go back to work 6 weeks after having a baby.

For one thing, the majority of women who go back to work that soon don't breastfeed at all. Those who do, will introduce a bottle from birth, so they're ready to wean, or bottle supplement, when the time comes. By contrast, any FLDS baby who hasn't been using a bottle is likely to suffer being abruptly weaned.

I don't see what damage the Judge thinks can take place if the mothers remain under supervision with their nursing babies; it's not as if the mothers can coach the babies to give false testimony. And the Judge herself admitted that there is a shortage of foster placements for infants in Texas.

What do you want to bet that she never nursed a baby?

http://www.sltrib.com/ci_9004942

SNIP

Attorneys for the women asked the judge to consider letting nursing mothers remain with their children after negotiations with CPS on the issue stalled. They asked the judge to let the mothers stay until DNA results are in, likely to take up to 40 days.

Walther acknowledged the nutritional and bonding benefits of breast-feeding.

"But every day in this country, we have mothers who go back to work after six weeks of maternity leave," she said.

"The court has made a determination that the environment those children were in was not safe," said Walther, adding that there is a shortage of suitable placements for infants in Texas.

The judge said she would leave it up to CPS officials and the attorneys to work something out on the breast-feeding. The attorneys, however, said so far they've been unable to come to agreement.

Shari Pulliam, a spokeswoman for CPS, said the agency plans to proceed with plans to send the women home.

[Ian David]

1. Maybe she's afraid the nursing babies will return to their husbands? n/t

[undeterred]

2. Maybe the women on the career track

to become judges don't take enough time off to breastfeed. :shrug: It does sound like she's not clear on the concept.

[RB TexLa]

3. Or maybe she * * gasp * * doesn't even have any babies. Seems even at DU many just

go with the assumption that everyone has "birthed themselves some babies."



PS Just wait there will be some who will say a judge who doesn't have their own babies shouldn't be presiding over cases having to do with children.

[pnwmom]

4. I'm not assuming anything about the judge

with regard to whether she is a mother or not.

But I doubt that she was ever a breastfeeding mother, and certainly not a successful one.

[Marrah_G]

5. This wil be a learning experience for her

I would say- let them continue to nurse, but keep them under supervision so they cannot take the child and run to come other locked compound.

Additionall this could end up being a very good thing. The nursing mothers are generally younger and time away from the older and more controlling wives could give them the space they need to choose to not go back to the cult.

[MissB]

6. You are making interesting assumptions about the judge.

"But I doubt that she was ever a breastfeeding mother, and certainly not a successful one."

The babies are better off in piecemeal foster care, on a bottle, than with those fucknuts. But I'm not the judge in this case. Whether or not she has birthed a baby or breastfed/bottlefed one isn't an issue I can really get upset over. I personally don't give a shit- I just want to see the best interests of the children served.

And of course my opinion falls squarely in the category of getting them away from their fucknut parents.

[Iris]

8. In addition, there are social workers and attorneys representing each of these children.

Why aren't they educating the court about how breastfeeding works?

Besides, I'm sure other babies have had their breastfeeding abruptly stopped and have survived. No, it's not an ideal situation, but neither is putting a crying baby under a water faucet.

[Marrah_G]

10. I'm sure they are- This is all happening very quickly

The state is not prepared to handle such a huge influx of cases all at once. Things are not going to run perfectly or smoothly. Remember that we don't see what is going on, we only hear news reports.

[pnwmom]

16. Why can't they just continue, mother and baby, under the supervision

of CPS? It's not like there would be any danger of physical abuse in that situation.

[LisaL]

27. If she "hasn't birthed any babies" then maybe she should

find out something about breastfeeding rather than "some women go to work in six weeks."

[Eric J in MN]

7. The judge seems to be saying that two wrongs make a right.

Because some mothers do little or no breastfeeding, it's OK to force women who want to breastfeed into stopping.

[Breeze54]

9. The waterboarding of the babies is a concern but

I don't know why these nursing Moms can't stay in state custody, except that they want to go home.

It's a real problem but I'd rather the babies not be waterboarded. They are at risk.

Maybe the Moms will just have to ask to stay in custody and then they'll be able to keep breast feeding.

[Marrah_G]

11. It might be a matter of where to house them, logistics ect..

Or it might even have to do with some legal issues they we aren't aware of.

[Breeze54]

12. I suspect it is legal issues...

"being held against their will"? etc, but it is the Moms that are
insisting on going home, from what I've read or heard on the news.

I suppose they could pump the milk too.

[knitter4democracy]

21. I think you're right.

How can they be held legally?

[pnwmom]

17. The moms have said they are willing to remain in state custody,

as they are now, in order to stay with their babies.

They're not trying to leave.

[riderinthestorm]

18. I'm guessing there's precedent that doesn't allow for it.

But everything about this case is unprecedented. This is an enormous group of children.

I will say that we only have the sketchiest of details about how the women deal with the kids. It's possible that the mothers have other abusive behaviors that they exhibit when they are with the children that makes CPS leary of allowing the mothers to remain with their children. The mothers may not perceive of the behavior as abusive (such as not allowing laughter or playing) but we in the greater society would see it that way. The women may not be flexible enough (anymore) to be cooperative with CPS rules on some of this stuff and so they perceive it in the children's best interest to separate.

I know it would be awfully hard for me (as a mother) to see a toddler reprimanded (and in what way are they reprimanded? :scared: ) for laughing or playing for example.

[mainegreen]

13. "The judge said she would leave it up to CPS officials and the attorneys to work something out"

So the judge is saying, it's ok, but she won't mandate it? Wow, that leaves a lot of flexibility to deal with a complicated, one of a kind situation.

It actually sounds, *gasp* reasonable!

Holy shit!
Time to get my knickers in a twist!

[Breeze54]

14. I think they'd still need her approval...

But CPS are the professionals and if they and the attorney's can figure out a compromise,
then I'm fairly sure they'll have to present that plan to the judge, so she can rule.

[riderinthestorm]

15. The women are also suspects in the abuse, and therefore are also being removed from contact

There's no way to know which women participated in enabling the abuse of the minor girls, or which women participated in the physical abuse of both girls and boys, or which women participated in child abandonment, or which women participated in welfare fraud etc. Remember being an accomplice to these things is also pretty serious.

These are quite serious crimes. Since the women aren't even freely admitting who they are, and which children belong to them, in order to ascertain family ties, it's hard to begin to separate out who are the alleged criminals in order to adequately protect the kids.

If it can be ascertained that any of the women who are breastfeeding aren't part of the alleged criminal activity, then yes, they should have access to their children to nurse imo. But otherwise they will be separated from their children just like any other alleged perpetrator.

I agree that since the TX Family Services agency is so stretched, having the women breastfeed the children might be a possibility but I suspect it would probably be too difficult to engineer, present security risks, and it certainly isn't standard protocol at all when children are removed from a situation that indicates some pretty serious felonies are being committed by the parents.

[NNN0LHI]

19. These religious freaks are going to use any issue available for sympathy

This sounds about as reasonable as one can be to me.

>>>The judge said she would leave it up to CPS officials and the attorneys to work something out on the breast-feeding. The attorneys, however, said so far they've been unable to come to agreement.<<<

Your headline is disingenuous.

Don

[LisaL]

26. And you couldn't be more clueless. CPS says it doesn't place

adult women in foster care.
So, while it's up to CPS and attorneys, CPS doesn't place adult women in foster care.
So, it's not because of attorneys these mothers can not even breast feed their babies.

[Pithlet]

20. It may be a case of logistics.

As a mother who nursed exclusively, I understand the problem. It will be very hard on some of those babies. But it's a very unusual situation. It's possible ignorance is involved, but they also may not have a way to work it out where the mothers are constantly supervised. On one hand, I wish they'd been able to work something out so weening isn't so abrupt, but then again I don't know the extent of the abuse. It's an awful situation all the way around. :(

[knitter4democracy]

22. I don't think it was ignorance but practicality.

If the mothers are suspects for abuse, she has to take the babies away. The babies will survive on formula or, if they're really lucky, a nursing foster mom.

[uppityperson]

23. If the abuse they are suspected of is arranging for stat rape, still should be able to stay w/babes

If the abuse was helping arrange "marriages" aka statutory rape, then they should not be with older kids of that age, or other adults, but I see no problem with letting them stay with their baby and continuing to nurse. While living under supervision of course.

It's not just the nourishment part since yes, most any babe can survive on formula. Taking away a babe from it's mom, if nursing, even if not, isolating a babe from everyone it knows, can cause problems. I know, there are foster parents who are trained to deal with them and I sincerely hope they have them lined up.

But, I see no problem with letting the nursing moms stay with nursing babes, living under supervision, for now.

[knitter4democracy]

28. That's not the only abuse they're going after, I think.

There are allegations of waterboarding babies, so if they give back the babies only to have the mothers waterboard them to "break" them, as has been written of by the woman who escaped with her kids, then all of their hard work will have been for naught. It's not just statutory rape that they're dealing with, and I think the whole case just gets more complicated by the day.

[uppityperson]

29. I thought that was just a catch phrase for disciplining them.

I thought it was just a catch phrase, meaning more along the line of typical disciplining. Seriously? That is appalling.

I found the reference"
http://poligazette.com/2008/04/09/marching-from-zion/
(clip)
"When Warren Jeffs was jailed as an acomplice to rape in November 2007, Merrill Jessop took over leadership of the ranch. Jessop is the ex-husband of Carolyn Jessop, who fled the FLDs stronghold of Hildale/Colorado City five years ago with her eight children. The book she wrote about her experiences, Escape, has become a bestseller. It describes Merrill Jessop as a volatile, controlling, violent man. In a recent television interview, Carolyn Jessop has claimed that her ex-husband even practised a kind of “waterboarding” on his own infants, beating them and then holding their faces under a running faucet when they cried."

[knitter4democracy]

32. No, it's no euphamism. He really did that to that baby.

According to another reference of hers, he would beat the baby until it was screaming (which means that it's going to be hard to get the baby to calm down, in my experience). Then, in what he called "breaking it" (like a horse, though few trainers do it with violence anymore), he'd hold the baby's face under the running water and repeat until it learned to stop crying.

Frankly, people like that should lose their kids and be sterilized. They're too broken to raise kids.

[horseshoecrab]

30. Very complicated

Besides the awful concept of breaking children which is bad enough there's more I fear. Someone mentioned, by the way, that a video circulates, among FLDS people, showing how to do this water torture to babies?

Yet another complication is that even though people have been saying that it's statutory rape, some of the rapes may well have been forcible rape.

Add to that the government contracts that FLDS has with the US Govt., and their free labor force, many of whom are supported by public welfare and food stamps, and you have a convoluted recipe for very complex motives to hide what's been going on.

Hiding is bred into FLDS victims it seems.

If the women decide to leave - rather than to work out a way to nurse their children that CPS accepts as safe for the kids - perhaps their going will make it easier somehow for the older children to talk.

The overriding factor is that those kids must be protected from FLDS insanity.

horseshoecrab

[knitter4democracy]

33. I agree.

The video of ABC News interviewing them showed seriously odd nonverbal communication. One woman would shake her head to say yes, kept a frozen smile on her face while her eyes were dead, and she's kind of bend over as a way to avoid answering a question directly with a lie. Something bad has been going on there. Really f'ing bad.

[horseshoecrab]

24. So what if she never nursed a baby?

"The judge said she would leave it up to CPS officials and the attorneys to work something out on the breast-feeding. The attorneys, however, said so far they've been unable to come to agreement."

Somehow, I have doubts that it was the children who could not come to an agreement with CPS.

CPS wants things to be done in a particular way because, as the judge stated: "The court has made a determination that the environment those children were in was not safe." The FLDS women do not want to cooperate to the extent that CPS feels is adequate for the safety of the children.

What is not to understand here? The mothers need to go along with CPS and accede to whatever assurances CPS wants from them. They are dealing with CPS/law enforcement/the court because they and their husbands are suspects in a massive child abuse case.

Right now however, they are working on behalf of the men of FLDS to try to disrupt the protection of the children in order to try to disrupt the entire case, because that is all that they know how to do.

Flinging crapola that the judge probably never nursed a baby is just a diversion.


horseshoecrab

[LisaL]

25. Get a clue. The position of CPS is that they do not place

the adult women in foster care, only children.
Thus, the mothers gotta go.

[horseshoecrab]

31. They don't place adult women in foster care?

WELL DU-UH!

btw -- why are you an apologist for people who abuse and rape children, "lizzy" ???


horseshoecrab