The information provided doesn’t specifically state the period of time the father was a drug addict. A “history”, and “...previous drug problems” doesn’t tell us much except to say he has a substance abuse problem.
For all we know, this may have been a problem before they were united. You are drawing conclusion that appear to be based on prejudice. Just because the family initially feared the children had been traded for a drug habit doesn’t explain the details surrounding their concern. Had he threatened his wife that very day that he would do such a thing? We simply don’t know.
Furthermore, the father was a “shrimper” Crack addicts don’t have jobs.
“...trying to teach women like this....responsible parents.” At the very least, we know she had a job. What we do not know is the details involving her longterm relationship with the father, as well as the kind of mother she was with her children. “She needs legal authorities to take control of her life.” Yes, and the “legal” authorities have quite a track record when it comes to family welfare and intervention. After all, wasn’t it you who criticized the establishment when you stated, “...bleeding heart liberals’ pathetic attempts to reform unreformable adults”, and, “...since our political/legal system evolved to do nothing
about situations like this...”
I can empathize with your frustration, but what I cannot agree with is your defeatist attitude surrounding this entire tragedy.
Prayers for the family.
The trouble is, under the current system, the legal authorities DON’T take control of these people’s lives. They often take the children away temporarily, usually send the parent to “parenting classes” and/or “substance abuse counseling” and them dump the poor helpless kids back with the totally dysfunctional parent. In the few cases that children are taken away permanently, the courts don’t see fit to disable the reproductive systems of the parents they were taken from. As a result it’s quite common to hear stories of a child murdered by mom’s boyfriend, or starved to death by mom, etc, with a post-script that another child or two was taken from the mother at the time the death was discovered AND that the mother had other children (sometimes no one can pin down exactly how many!) who had previously been taken from her and were in foster care.
So how exactly does a court reason that a woman (or occasionally a couple) is so unfit that any children in the home must be removed and put in indefinite foster care, but that it’s fine for the mother to continue popping out new ones and having custody of those? The sad answer is that bleeding heart liberals have made it virtually impossible for a court to order sterilization or even mandatory passive contraception for anyone under any circumstances. Even though with modern reproductive technology, ordinary means of sterilization — i.e. vasectomies and tubal ligations — can be completely by-passed with IVF, so that for the one in a hundred thousand or so of these dysfunctional adults that eventually gets their act together, they could still have children then.
The continuing growth of the problem of children being subjected to neglect, abuse, and murder by parents/boyfriends who had a documentable history of behavior completely incompatible with parenting, is due almost entirely to misplaced sympathy and the dogmatic insistence that these people are fixable. The kids need sympathy and help. The adults just need forcible restraint.