Mother considered too stupid to care for child, child taken

[rsmccoy]

http://women.timesonline.co.uk/tol/life_and_style/women/families/article6396039.ece

Will a legal Robin Hood save this dumb damsel from the Sheriff of Nottingham??

I have to say, this is a dangerous precedence. Not sure about the UK, but if parents were tested in the US to se if they were "too stupid" to care for their children, we wouldn't have a facility large enough to keep all the babies. I'm not a geneticist, but isn't there a good chance most of the babies would also be too stupid to procreate? Hmmm, about high time we dusted off the old sterilization project to weed out "undesirables" from the gene pool.

Historical note, when President LBJ was told that that 50% of all Americans were below average in intelligence, he was astounded (I can't make this stuff up).

[Caz]

Hopefully this rule will soon be applied to politicians..."You're too stupid to run the country, we're taking it back."...If only.
   

[Ed]

Yeah, I was listening to this being discussed on, ahem*cough*Radio2*cough, the other day, and they were saying the woman wasn't actually mentally impaired - it was something the social worker had put in her notes and, from that moment onwards the woman got pigeonholed. I think there's something strange going on there, though, when you consider she was seventeen and the father was in his sixties. Could be she's got a fetish for older men, I suppose

I'm against eugenics - we need thick people to do all the menial jobs the clever folks don't want to do. Society would break down without the little people like me doing all the dirty work

[Pharosian]

It's a shame when cases like this come up and cause such an uproar, because on the one hand, you've got a lot of  people who truly want to prevent a travesty, and on the other hand, you've got a lot of people getting their knickers in a twist before they have all the facts.

Based on the link rsmccoy supplied, it would appear the woman (Rachel) is now 24 and the daughter is 3. So how Rachel could have been 17 when the pregnancy occurred is beyond me, though I suppose that article could have got her age wrong. That article linked to a previous article indicating her IQ has been tested at 71. She may not be "impaired" (there's a lot of interpretation in that word, I'd say), but what kind of a job does she have? What's her housing situation? Can she provide a stable environment? What is she going to be able to teach her child? I don't know the answers to any of these questions, but presumably neither do most of the people who are so vehemently fighting for her to keep her offspring.

As unpopular as this view might be, it sounds (based on an insufficiency of facts) as though the child might be better off with the adoptive family. What really stinks here is "the system" that is set up apparently without any checks and balances, and which gives social workers the ability to "play god" with families' lives... and yet where is the outrage being directed? At the single instance rather than at the system that allowed that situation to get as far as it did. So whether Rachel wins or loses, everyone will just go back to business as usual when it's over and the structure will still be in place to allow another situation like this to happen again.

[Ed]

I can't account for the discrepancy in her stated age, but by any standards I'd say she was very young to be sleeping with a guy in his sixties (unless they got his age wrong as well, that is). It happens, though.

Nice as it would be to make sure everybody is in a stable relationship and earning (by legal means) a decent enough living to raise a child, before conception, it just isn't feasible, and financial wealth isn't necessarily any indicator of an individual's ability to provide a nurturing environment in the first place. The very rich often leave the child rearing to a nanny and then, as soon as the kid's old enough, they send them to boarding school. At least the poor tend to spend more time with their kids, and they're often in extended social networks, which form an excellent safety net, from an emotional standpoint, and from the point of view of day to day childcare.

My childhood was impoverished from several standpoints - my parents were hard working, and honest, but dirt poor. The family next door to us were even poorer. They had five kids, all wearing hand-me-down clothes, which started off as second hand from charity shops. Their dad made them shoes by cutting up old car tyres and stitching or gluing the parts together. The kids had a happy childhood, grew up without an ounce of fat on them, and all went on (driven by their impoverished start) to have good jobs and reams of chubby, spoilt children.

Social issues are fascinating, but massively complex, aren't they?

[rsmccoy]

Indeed. I don't think the system is a well oiled machine in either the US or UK.

Not sure how the case started to begin with. If neglect was involved and proved and that's how she popped up on the radar, then perhaps evaluation is warranted. I don't see social workers doing spot checks house by house. Usually, something happens for you to get in the system in the first place.

My issue is with the determination of intelligence of a personal that by the courts own admition is not mentally disabled. The world needs ditch diggers too, and unless it is proved that she deflected the child or couldn't feed the child assuming she will fail because of her IQ is irresponsible.

If the government gets into preemptive assessment of a parents ability to raise a child, where does it stop? Where is the line drawn?

The system needs to get involved only when there is a prema facia case of neglect or abuse and not try to predict future success or failure based on opinion.

[Ed]

When you have a kid here, you're assigned a health visitor, who visits regularly to make sure you're coping with parenthood and gives you lots of stupid advice from textbooks. None of the dozy spinsters my wife was assigned had ever had kids of their own and were, to a woman, useless. Trouble is, if you fall out with them, the next person knocking on your door tends to be a social worker, with 'concerns'. If you fall out with them, then things can get very sketchy, as this woman found out.