brutal, but not surprising
Last week I wrote about a Pennsylvania case of Child Protective Services attempting to get custody of an unborn child because of sex crimes the father committed more than 20 years earlier.
CPS sweetened the pot with contested new allegations that the father, DaiShin WolfHawk, previously molested his daughter and that the mother, Melissa WolfHawk, is a drug taking prostitute.
Whether unfounded or not, the new charges worked. Mrs. WolfHawk gave birth Tuesday. On Wednesday, a judge gave custody to CPS. They immediately tried to take the child. The hospital refused.
"(T)he hospital then told them they weren't taking a newborn within 48 hours of birth," said Mary Catherine Roper, the ACLU attorney representing Mrs. WolfHawk.
Mr. WolfHawk says he is "appalled."
"Here's a baby being breast-fed by its mother, and they're saying that the mother's a danger to the baby," the father told Associated Press in a phone interview. "What were they doing? They were trying to grab the baby before it even had its shots, circumcised, anything."
I too have to wonder if these CPS officials aren't slightly deranged. On the surface, this looks like a case of "we've made up our minds and we'll come up with anything and the kitchen sink we can think of to get our way!"
Why did it take them till this past Monday to come up with these new charges? It took them till the day before the baby's birth to also come up with something against the mother -- something vehemently denied? That smacks of a desperate fishing expedition.
And how sane is it to rush to remove a child not 24-hours-old from the hospital? Can people who would do such a thing really have the baby's best interest in mind? Remember, this agency claimed to be acting to protect the "emotional health" of the child. How emotionally healthy is it to tear a newborn from his mother's breast?
Governmental harassment, monitoring pregnancies, cherry-picking potential parents, fishing expeditions, ripping newborns from hospitals? As I wrote in my previous article, the only thing that keeps this from being a slam dunk anti-CPS case is the father's questionable character. It clouds over CPS's possibly abusive zealotry.