Yanking babies from their mothers' breasts

It goes without saying that the Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints is one creepy outfit. It takes its sexism so far that it amounts to an allegory: Its polygamy not only requires abuse of its girl children, but turns a large number of its boys into so much surplus to be gotten rid of. As the New York Times reported, the church brutally expels many of its teenage boys from the community, into a world they hardly know.

Yet I can’t count the ways the raid on the Texas compound of the FLDS outrages me. Let me start with the one that hits closest to home for me in this week after I gave birth: the separation of nursing mothers from their infants. Any mother, especially one nursing her baby, will tell you that a mother and her infant aren’t truly separate beings. I am connected to my daughter by cords that begin tugging as my breasts fill, within as little as an hour or two. To break these cords is to do irreparable violence to both mother and child.

Lawyers for the FLDS women asked the judge overseeing the arrangements for the children to grant a restraining order allowing mothers of babies under one to remain with their babies. Get what the judge said when she refused:

[Judge] Walther acknowledged the nutritional and bonding benefits of breast-feeding.
"But every day in this country, we have mothers who go back to work after six weeks of maternity leave," she said.

Apparently our broader mistreatment of mothers justifies mistreatment of these infants and mothers. Here again we seem to have entered the realm of allegory.

Texas Child Protective Services showed equally impeccable logic. "Our main thing is to protect children from abuse and neglect,” said a spokesperson. I fail to see what you can call separating a nursing infant from its mother besides abuse and neglect.

Walther later reversed her decision. That didn’t help the hundreds of older children wrenched from their mothers. With so many children to place, the system was overwhelmed, undermining CPS’ claim that it was acting to protect the children.

The scale of this case and the glaring failure to plan for it have grabbed attention. Perhaps the fact that the FLDS-ers are white helped too. Children of color are disproportionately likely to be placed in the child welfare system. African Americans make up 37 percent of the children in foster care, yet they represent only 15 percent of American children. To remove a child from its parents is to calculate that the risk of harm from leaving the child with its parents is so dire as to overbalance the terrible harm the removal itself inevitably causes. The racial disparities in those decisions suggest that disruption of African American families counts for less than disruption of white families. The huge numbers of children swept into our child protection system—vastly more than in European countries—suggest an unwillingness to look at fixing the systemic ways America fails to support parents. Why can’t we, say, provide secure, decent housing or drug treatment to mothers rather than dump their children into the foster care system? Why can’t we help women escape from the abusive, patriarchal clutches of the FLDS, rather than treating the women themselves as criminals and their children as so much detritus? And, indeed, why can’t we provide paid parental leave so that women can nurse their babies?