Wednesday, July 13, 2011
Do extremely obese kids belong in foster care?
I don't think this debate will be going away anytime soon. I can't categorically rule out the removal of kids from their parents on these grounds, but I hope we're only talking about state intervention in very extreme cases -- extreme in terms of the reasonably certain negative health effects and in terms of parental unwillingness to take affirmative steps toward remedying the situation.
https://mirrorofjustice.blogs.com/mirrorofjustice/2011/07/do-extremely-obese-kids-belong-in-foster-care.html
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Someone named Rita commented on the article you linked to as follows: "Social services would intervene and remove a child who is being starved to death why should they not take away a child he is being fed to death?"
Arthur Caplan was widely quoted as a critic of the idea, and in an article he said, "Our laws give enormous authority to parents and rightly so. The only basis for compelling medical treatment against a parent’s wishes are if a child is at imminent risk of death — meaning days or hours — and a proven cure exists for what threatens to kill them. Obesity does not pass these requirements."
I do think Rita had a point. If a child were emaciated and clearly severely undernourished, I think there are few who would find it necessary to wait until the child was "days or hours" from death by starvation for child welfare workers to step in. I think the instant reaction from almost all quarters was partly based on a feeling that being grossly obese isn't really so bad. We take obesity for granted in a way that we would never do with malnutrition.
What I was able to read of the paper in JAMA (only the first few paragraphs) and the articles I read about it indicated to me that the kind of cases the authors were talking about were extreme ones, for example, where intervention had already taken place in the home and was not working, and where gastric bypass surgery or some other surgery was the next logical step if the child can't be held to a diet.