Tuesday, June 30, 2009

Abusive

Apparently I would make a terrible judge in child abuse cases.

Let's take case number one.
Woman caught breastfeeding baby while drinking alcohol. I would have said this was unwise behavior. I might have the woman sign up with AA or rehab. But I wouldn't likely remove her child from her or charge her with a felony or send her to jail for 5 years.

Let's look at situation number two.
Parents raise child as genderless. They never tell the child whether he/she is a boy or girl. They never tell anyone else. The child is supposed to "decide". I would say that this is abuse because the few previous cases that exist where kids have been raised in whacky gender experiments messed the person up for life. Take the boy raised as a girl for example. I do think that the kid is likely to "figure it out" correctly if he/she goes to public school. Other kids are blunt enough to say show me your parts and I'll tell you. Though I doubt the parents would accept that decision based on what they would see as flimsy evidence. Good grief.

This is where parental rights get tricky. What is damaging or dangerous? And who gets to decide? I think even in this case I wouldn't take the kid away from the parents. I would just order them to tell the physical gender of the kid.

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