Who Owns Your Children?

How far should the state go in the name of protecting kids?

Last week, the State of Idaho ordered a baby be removed from his mother’s arms and taken to an undisclosed location. This week, a judge ordered the child placed with strangers in the foster care system.

The state claims that this intervention was necessary to save the life of the child, who was “severely malnourished.”

The family claims that this seizure was entirely unjustified, and perhaps even politically motivated, as the father and grandfather of the child are outspoken supporters of gubernatorial candidate Ammon Bundy. Indeed, Mr. Bundy was arrested last week attempting to intervene in the seizure.

I do not want to comment much on the specifics of the case, as I do not know the whole story. It is troubling, however, how quickly and easily agents of the state were able to remove a child from his home. Whereas law enforcement cannot simply seize a person or his property without due process, they seem to be able to take your children based on the word of a doctor, nurse, or social worker.

Defenders of state authority will point to the necessity of expediency when a child’s life is in danger. If a doctor, nurse, or social worker discovers evidence of harm then he cannot wait for due process, but must take action to protect the child from further abuse.

The question is where do we draw the line? How can we protect families from being abused by government bureaucrats while still protecting children from being abused by their families?

I believe the only reasonable answer is oversight and transparency. If the state takes the drastic step of removing a child from his parents, then it must be based on undeniable evidence. There must be oversight of the process by an impartial committee. There is an existing citizens review panel, under the auspices of Central District Health. According to the CDH website, this panel is tasked with making policy recommendations, as well as reviewing cases that have been open for more than 120 days. While this is a good start, it is small comfort to parents who are going to bed right now not knowing where their children are sleeping

Families must be able to appeal decisions to an impartial and objective committee, and there must be transparency so that Idaho families can trust that the process was followed in good faith.

Right now, we have none of that. Decisions that have severely affected a local family were made by medical personnel and unaccountable bureaucrats. There was a hearing this week before a judge, who ordered the child placed with a foster family, but I have seen no explanation as to the reasoning behind this decision. Some contend that the judge has a bias in favor of the state, and has ordered many children removed from their families based on flimsy evidence. I have heard from several families who fit the dissident profile - homeschooling, anti-vaccine, etc. - who feel afraid to take their children to the doctor for fear of having them taken in the same way.

Lt. Governor Janice McGeachin spoke yesterday morning at her weekly Capitol Clarity session regarding her attempts to get to the bottom of this incident. She said that she met with hospital administrators, who informed her that the decisions to take the child and prevent his mother from seeing him were made by Idaho’s child protection agencies. She spoke to the bureaucrats in those agencies, but came away without being given any documentation or reports corroborating their accusations of mistreatment.

I asked Mrs. McGeachin yesterday if there was anything that could be done to stop an incident like this from happening again, whether legislatively or in the executive branch. She answered that the ultimate responsibility for Idaho’s child protection agencies lies with the governor. However, according to McGeachin, Governor Little’s office declined to intervene at all, refusing to even look into the matter. It reminded me of another time the governor refused to stand up for his people. It was nearly two years ago when Mr. Little declined to intervene when police in Moscow, Idaho arrested members of Pastor Doug Wilson’s Christ Church who protested that city’s mask mandate by singing hymns outdoors. The governor’s only response was a mealy-mouthed statement washing his hands of any responsibility to his citizens.

Child protection agencies surely started with the best of intentions. Child abuse is an awful thing. The stories where a child is removed from a truly dangerous situation rarely make the news, and I would guess that the social workers of CPS would rather take ten children from good parents than let one child be abused or killed by bad parents.

Yet somewhere along the way the process became subject to the same bureaucratic decay that affects every government organization. I am sure there are social workers that see parents as the enemy - just look at how many Democratic politicians have recently been declaring that parents should have no right to decide how their children are educated. Activities and lifestyles that we believe in, such as midwife-attended home births, skepticism about the CDC vaccine schedule, and homeschooling, are seen as evidence of a dangerous situation by the bureaucrats.

Medical personnel, as well as teachers and social workers, have a legal duty to report evidence of abuse to law enforcement. However, that duty also presumably shields them from consequences for false accusations. Defenders of the state would say that holding these people accountable for their accusations would create a chilling effect, keeping them from reporting actual cases of abuse. However, it also incentivizes them to be overly broad in their reports. Nobody ever got fired for following the rules.

We need oversight and transparency. We need limits on the power of the state to break up families. We cannot have parents afraid to take their children to the doctor. We cannot have unaccountable bureaucrats unilaterally deciding to take children from their parents. The family is the foundation of society, and communities are built on strong families. It was families that created the state, not vice versa. A state that can take your children away on a whim is something out of Nazi Germany or Communist China, not America, and definitely not the free state of Idaho.