Thursday, October 22, 2009

Wards of the State   [Mark Steyn]

Increasingly in the West, all children are regarded as foster children, leased out by the state hither and yon but only conditionally. From Britain's Daily Mail:

An obese couple’s seven children are all to be taken into care after their newborn daughter was removed over fears she would become dangerously overweight.

Three children had already been removed by social services before the infant was taken from her mother within hours of her birth.

Now her ‘heartbroken’ parents have learned that their three other children will be taken away from them too.

They say the children of the so-called 'fat family' are being removed over fears they would also become clinically obese.

Before she became pregnant, the mother, 40, who cannot be named for legal reasons, weighed 23st.

Why can't a grown woman be "named for legal reasons"? Twenty-three stone, by the way, is 322 lbs, and if that's the justification for taking away your children more than a few Americans would lose theirs.

But the broader point is: What happens when the state grows more comfortable with kid-confiscation? After all, if you can remove children over "fears" they might "become obese" at some point in the future, why can't you also remove them from other homes in case they "become smokers" or "become homophobes" or "become gun-owners" or almost anything of which the state disapproves?

10/22 01:33 PMShare