If she’s already been found to be a risk to her child due to substance misuse issues and she’s failed a drug test, then the child should be taken. Further analysis can be done on the sample, but in the short term the newborn needs to be safeguarded. Babies under a year are particularly at risk of death from CP issues, and the child’s needs come first.
This is exactly the arguments used to ban abortions.
If she’s already found at risk of having an abortion she should be held in a safe birthing room until she gives birth then further analysis can be done, but in the short term the fetus needs to be safeguarded…
That’s what you sound like.
Sorry mate, you can’t just take people’s children because you’re worried, even if you’re well meaning. If you want data here you go: children fare immeasurably better in abusive homes than in the child welfare system:
Turns out being with your family (regular, abusive, or adoptive) is FAR better than any other transient arrangement of care provider, almost universally, even for terrible abuse and neglect.
So I went and clicked on the study this article is written about, and it does not conclude that children going into the system are more likely to suffer abuse, or turn out worse, than those left with their abusers. It even cautions that “he point estimates are large and relatively
imprecisely estimated, with only the delinquency and earnings results statistically significantly different from zero and none statistically different from the conditional mean comparison”
They also said that CS investigators who have higher rates of child removals, have higher rates of long term placement of the children, but that this is more of a function of how much work they do vs colleagues, rather than some sort of personal bias. They further say that the estimates against the median statistics for the general population are not far off from those of kids within abusive households, in terms of long term wealth, and delinquency, which they mention another paper that concludes that most of the long term affects are achieved in early childhood, so by the time the system receives them they are already statistically more likely to end up this way from the abuse already suffered.
Then also spend a portion of the study explaining how there are major problems with their study, but that is because most of the data they would need is either very difficult to get, or can only be gotten via unethical means. (laws around privacy make it difficult to get data from organizations, and solid experimental evidence would require knowingly allowing a group of children to be abused)
So this study isn’t saying what you are making it to say. Really even the article from a organization against government interventions of families is saying, which isn’t really surprising either.
Even at that, lower earnings and higher delinquency rates are exactly the kinds of data point that shows unnecessary intervention, like taking a child from the mother over poppy seeds, which maybe you’ll remember is what we were disagreeing about, is bad for children.
It’s clear that the “take the kids from the parents and investigate later” attitude you’re recommending causes more problems than it solves, even though it’s “well meaning” at first glance.
Eating food isn’t a reason to have your kids taken away from any parent, even one who was at risk of drug abuse. This is a known problem with the tests and they should have confirmed it BEFORE acting, not taken the baby and investigated later.
There are actually 7 studies in that article, and a link to more, however this particular article was written because of the one study that was done, and cited, 3 times.
All of these studies have the same problems, and have lots of criticism about their methodology, particularly in how to get this data. One of the biggest critiques being that they studied kids in bad homes the CS decided to not take in, vs ones they did. This is how they know a child is in a bad home, but not being ethically responsible for them staying. This automatically selects for less severe cases being the stay at homes, and the more severe being the ones taken. Then there are this issues in my last comment, like their estimations being wide. There are also many more when I started finding when putting the titles of these studies into google scholar and adding critique.
Basically these studies aren’t particularly useful because the data is hard to get (privacy laws, parents not wanting to participate, retraction of participation agreements before conclusion of data gathering, etc), the different groupings are already selected based on a varying scales of abuse severity, that it would not be ethical to select groups in a different fashion, and any experimental trials would be unethical. These foundational problems also make meta research faulty from the start. While they can pose some interesting questions, they are not able to make reliable qualitative calls on kids being removed from abusive homes because the ability to conduct this research is just not there in a way it would need to be.
You’re clearly putting a lot of effort into your responses and are being respectful. I don’t think I’ve given you the same respect so far so I’ll try my best.
I agree with the nuances you brought up. I understand you feel it’s better to intervene and be safe than sorry. I see the appeal of that.
I take the opposite stance. I know that the welfare of the child is closely tied to the stress and trauma they endure. In most families that at least nominally love their children that’s related to the stress of the parents. Stressed out parents are bad parents (all else being equal). Taking a child from their parents is a big stressor, that alone will make the child’s life worse.
To me, that’s enough motivation to say that on average the damage you cause through intervention has to be less than the life improvement you gain from intervention.
That’s a hard balance to strike. It can be appealing to say that damage to 100 families is worth it to save one child from irreparable harm.
My personal ethics say that you’re only responsible for your actions. If you don’t act and something bad happens then that’s on the people who did the bad things. On the other hand, if you do act then it’s important to validate that your actions match your intentions to improve the world, using the data you have access to, as best as you can.
I know other people have a value system that compels them to act because not acting can be as much a choice as acting. This type of value system would definitely lead you to intervening more often. I have a hard time internalizing these types of value systems because they’re very problematic at large scale and at edge cases.
I can live in a world with interventionists. But it doesn’t mean I don’t feelthe damage unnecessary interventions cause such as the one in this article.
The analogy doesn’t work because we aren’t talking about forced bodily resource donation. Long term foster care benefits is different when we’re talking about a newborn, especially as they’re particularly at risk of unlawful death.
If you have a mother who was known to be a risk to children due to her substance misuse and tested positive for opiates after birth, how do you suggest the baby is safeguarded?
Apparently even if the mother is neglectful because of drugs and the men in her life are beating her and molesting the kids that’s “better” than foster care lmao
Edit: also apparently being addicted to a substance is the same as… Hiding abortions?
If she’s already been found to be a risk to her child due to substance misuse issues and she’s failed a drug test, then the child should be taken. Further analysis can be done on the sample, but in the short term the newborn needs to be safeguarded. Babies under a year are particularly at risk of death from CP issues, and the child’s needs come first.
This is exactly the arguments used to ban abortions.
That’s what you sound like.
Sorry mate, you can’t just take people’s children because you’re worried, even if you’re well meaning. If you want data here you go: children fare immeasurably better in abusive homes than in the child welfare system:
https://nccpr.org/the-evidence-is-in-foster-care-vs-keeping-families-together-the-definitive-studies/
Turns out being with your family (regular, abusive, or adoptive) is FAR better than any other transient arrangement of care provider, almost universally, even for terrible abuse and neglect.
So I went and clicked on the study this article is written about, and it does not conclude that children going into the system are more likely to suffer abuse, or turn out worse, than those left with their abusers. It even cautions that “he point estimates are large and relatively imprecisely estimated, with only the delinquency and earnings results statistically significantly different from zero and none statistically different from the conditional mean comparison”
They also said that CS investigators who have higher rates of child removals, have higher rates of long term placement of the children, but that this is more of a function of how much work they do vs colleagues, rather than some sort of personal bias. They further say that the estimates against the median statistics for the general population are not far off from those of kids within abusive households, in terms of long term wealth, and delinquency, which they mention another paper that concludes that most of the long term affects are achieved in early childhood, so by the time the system receives them they are already statistically more likely to end up this way from the abuse already suffered.
Then also spend a portion of the study explaining how there are major problems with their study, but that is because most of the data they would need is either very difficult to get, or can only be gotten via unethical means. (laws around privacy make it difficult to get data from organizations, and solid experimental evidence would require knowingly allowing a group of children to be abused)
So this study isn’t saying what you are making it to say. Really even the article from a organization against government interventions of families is saying, which isn’t really surprising either.
The article sites 4 studies not one.
Even at that, lower earnings and higher delinquency rates are exactly the kinds of data point that shows unnecessary intervention, like taking a child from the mother over poppy seeds, which maybe you’ll remember is what we were disagreeing about, is bad for children.
It’s clear that the “take the kids from the parents and investigate later” attitude you’re recommending causes more problems than it solves, even though it’s “well meaning” at first glance.
Eating food isn’t a reason to have your kids taken away from any parent, even one who was at risk of drug abuse. This is a known problem with the tests and they should have confirmed it BEFORE acting, not taken the baby and investigated later.
There are actually 7 studies in that article, and a link to more, however this particular article was written because of the one study that was done, and cited, 3 times.
All of these studies have the same problems, and have lots of criticism about their methodology, particularly in how to get this data. One of the biggest critiques being that they studied kids in bad homes the CS decided to not take in, vs ones they did. This is how they know a child is in a bad home, but not being ethically responsible for them staying. This automatically selects for less severe cases being the stay at homes, and the more severe being the ones taken. Then there are this issues in my last comment, like their estimations being wide. There are also many more when I started finding when putting the titles of these studies into google scholar and adding critique.
Basically these studies aren’t particularly useful because the data is hard to get (privacy laws, parents not wanting to participate, retraction of participation agreements before conclusion of data gathering, etc), the different groupings are already selected based on a varying scales of abuse severity, that it would not be ethical to select groups in a different fashion, and any experimental trials would be unethical. These foundational problems also make meta research faulty from the start. While they can pose some interesting questions, they are not able to make reliable qualitative calls on kids being removed from abusive homes because the ability to conduct this research is just not there in a way it would need to be.
You’re clearly putting a lot of effort into your responses and are being respectful. I don’t think I’ve given you the same respect so far so I’ll try my best.
I agree with the nuances you brought up. I understand you feel it’s better to intervene and be safe than sorry. I see the appeal of that.
I take the opposite stance. I know that the welfare of the child is closely tied to the stress and trauma they endure. In most families that at least nominally love their children that’s related to the stress of the parents. Stressed out parents are bad parents (all else being equal). Taking a child from their parents is a big stressor, that alone will make the child’s life worse.
To me, that’s enough motivation to say that on average the damage you cause through intervention has to be less than the life improvement you gain from intervention.
That’s a hard balance to strike. It can be appealing to say that damage to 100 families is worth it to save one child from irreparable harm.
My personal ethics say that you’re only responsible for your actions. If you don’t act and something bad happens then that’s on the people who did the bad things. On the other hand, if you do act then it’s important to validate that your actions match your intentions to improve the world, using the data you have access to, as best as you can.
I know other people have a value system that compels them to act because not acting can be as much a choice as acting. This type of value system would definitely lead you to intervening more often. I have a hard time internalizing these types of value systems because they’re very problematic at large scale and at edge cases.
I can live in a world with interventionists. But it doesn’t mean I don’t feelthe damage unnecessary interventions cause such as the one in this article.
The analogy doesn’t work because we aren’t talking about forced bodily resource donation. Long term foster care benefits is different when we’re talking about a newborn, especially as they’re particularly at risk of unlawful death.
If you have a mother who was known to be a risk to children due to her substance misuse and tested positive for opiates after birth, how do you suggest the baby is safeguarded?
Apparently even if the mother is neglectful because of drugs and the men in her life are beating her and molesting the kids that’s “better” than foster care lmao
Edit: also apparently being addicted to a substance is the same as… Hiding abortions?