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.
The mother did not commit a crime. We cannot assume she is unfit as a mother because we were not provide with details that would prove as much. The father has a drug problem, they had to move recently due to a flood, he confronted his wife at her place of employment, he’s a shrimper, he demanded money, and threw their children off a bridge, therefore, she is an unfit mother? It is not that cut and dry.
You and I are in complete disagreement when siding on the issue of sterilization. Our Founding Fathers did not risk everything, including their lives, so that our government could command such authority. But that is another matter all together.
The social/economic/political/moral issues that have impacted our society in this way cannot be completely, let alone touched on, addressed on this thread, or even in one book for that matter.
I would agree that laws need to actually be enforced. Drug dealers should be executed. Drug addicts should be incarcerated.
One thing is true; she won’t be accused of being an unfit mother in the near future. She has no more babies to be accused of neglecting.
I will not say that this mother is unfit, though. As a parent, she has my prayers and sympathy.