Parents prosecuted for having fat children

[firecat]

I'm so inured to attacks on fat adults that they mostly only make me irritated these days, but this article in a Scottish news outlet suggesting that "parents of obese children should be prosecuted for neglect" (reported via Sandy Swarcz's JunkFoodScience blog here) makes me cry and feel frantic.

I'm not a parent and I'm not a fat child any more so why should I care? Because I imagine how much more terrified my parents would have been over my size (I was plump despite their sustained and intense efforts to make me thin) if they believed they could have had their child taken away, instead of "just" being shamed and pressured about having a fat child. Because I imagine what kind of life a fat child taken away from their family and raised in some kind of institution would have.

Although this is just some random doctor sounding off in a random news outlet, and there's no official legislation along these lines as yet, such government sanctioned kidnappings have been happening fairly regularly in the US. As a member of several fat acceptance organizations I hear about one every few months (when the parents seek help from the organization. I wonder how many parents don't seek help from the organization?). Sometimes I find out the outcome and sometimes not.

Comments

[bastette-joyce.livejournal.com]

And don't forget about the woman in the Bay Area who actually went to trial after her 13-year-old daughter, who was very fat, suddenly died. I don't remember what the charges were, and in fact I'm wracking my brain trying to remember her name. It was all over the news at the time, which was around 1998 or '99, maybe. In the end, she was acquitted of the worse of the two charges, but convicted of the second. Pretty horrible.

...last name was Corrigan, maybe?

[auntysocial.livejournal.com]

The daughter's name was Christina Corrigan, I don't remember the mother's name.

[baratron.livejournal.com]

Article from The Independent (http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_qn4158/is_19980106/ai_n9650046), with formatting mangled but readable.

Article by a fat physician (http://www.dimensionsmagazine.com/dimtext/lerner/drmo78.html).