The child custody battle over Justina Pelletier is the most extreme of a handful of unusually contentious cases over the last 18 months involving Boston Childrenâs Hospital and the state Department of Children and Families. Most involve a disputed medical diagnosis, charges of parental misconduct filed or threatened by the hospital, and the inability of the state child-protection agency to provide effective intervention. The state is supposed to get to the bottom of such disputes, but the agency is ill-equipped to settle disagreements at the highest levels of medicine. Across the entire state, the only child protection staffers with formal medical training consist of one half-time pediatrician, one half-time psychiatrist, and a handful of nurses. Five years after the Legislature approved funding for a physician medical director, the agency has yet to fill the slot.
I believe this is real. There are several news sources of this if you want to look (Just google Justina Pelletier). A teenage girl is taken away from her family and placed into a hospital over what they claim to be a misdiagnosed illness and nobody knows what is going on. They refuse to send her home (at her and her family’s request) and they refuse to tell her parents anything. They’ve gone as far as to try to put her in foster care even though they have never had a reason as to why her own home is unsafe. She has not gone to school since she was taken away and her family is not allowed to even visit her.
How safe is this country if our children can be taken away from their parents for no legitimate reason and placed into a hospital to be experimented on? This is the United States, not Nazi Germany. This is sick.