Medical Kidnapping: Legal analysis of Baby Cyrus seizure
Frontline News covered Idaho’s Child Protective Services' (CPS) sudden seizure of an underweight baby in, “Medical Kidnapping? Breast milk-dependent infant deteriorates in state custody” and the state’s release of the baby in “Baby Cyrus returned to parents after Frontline News inquiry to CPS."
Medical Freedom attorney weighs in
Author, attorney, medical freedom advocate and rabbi Dovid Smith, in an exclusive statement to Frontline News on the “Baby Cyrus case,” declared,
While it is difficult to know all the facts in this case, please understand that day in and day out families suffer at the hands of Child Protective Services (CPS) and Adult Protective Services (APS) throughout the country.
CPS infuriated when parents do not acquiesce
These agencies are particularly hostile to people who know their rights and contest the authority of the state to override their parental and individual rights.
That certainly applies to Baby Cyrus’s case, where his parents stood up to CPS’s demand that he be evaluated in an abuse center, as noted above in questions 7-9 to CPS. Smith continues,
This is exacerbated when the citizens involved are exhausted, upset and angry, unwell and/or there is a hint of non-mainstream behavior and beliefs. The agencies seize on the ‘hostility’ as further evidence of the incompetence of the parents.
Rubber stamping
It would seem fair to assume that the courts level the playing field between CPS and parents, as the separation of power between the executive and the judiciary would require. The judge is expected to be neutral, no more likely to side with one side than the other.
Familiarity with the system, however, quickly disabuses one of that assumption. Rabbi Smith explains how judges are reduced to merely rubber stamping CPS “recommendations”:
These agencies are given extreme deference and a nearly saintly status by the judges who rarely override or even question the agencies. I have seen this firsthand in an APS case where we successfully defended an elderly person against involuntary guardianship. I have also seen a congregant with a child unable to properly digest food - the family’s innate terror over the perplexing situation and the intense suspicion of the state creates a recipe for disaster.
Not only are judges afraid to refuse the agency petitions lest they, the judge, be blamed for anything that goes wrong, but it is these same agencies that run training programs for the judges on how to handle these cases!
Family court judges are thus loath to risk opposing a CPS recommendation for removal for fear that a child may later die or be severely injured in their parents’ care as a result of their decision.
The same fear does not exist in the case of removal, as the parents do not have the opportunity to investigate the foster or adoptive parents. The judge is not in possession of any recommendations at all about any potential danger of being in their care, despite the fact that children are much more likely to die or be abused in foster care than in parental care.
Moreover, the Women's Justice Center reports that,
When a case becomes complicated or contentious, or is just more work than the judge wants to handle, the judge simply turns the case over to one of these evaluators to look into the case and come back to the judge with a set of recommendations. In nearly all cases, juvenile court judges blindly rubber stamp these recommendations with no further ado …
Dismantling CPS
Rabbi Smith concludes with a look to the future,
It is laudable that people have rallied to the defense of this family. Let us not focus on just one family, though. Throughout the nation families are suffering, particularly minority families, from these agencies.
The only way to defeat the CPS agenda to increasingly police parents is to dismantle these so-called ‘protective service’ agencies and to rise to the defense of the families who have no one to rally for them.
