Pro/Con: Does obesity qualify as child abuse?

Severe obesity can be life-threatening, but is it cause for removing a child from parents?

August 29, 2011|By Jessica Pauline Ogilvie, Special to the Los Angeles Times

What strikes me as odd about this proposal is that the proponents want to take the child out temporarily and return the child once they feel it's safe. Well, the only way they are going to make it safe is to work with the family and teach good practices, and since they are going to have to do that anyway, why take the child out? We are not taking about an abuse situation where the child could be killed at any moment. Obesity is a long-term problem, so there's no real urgency to take the kid out.

The proponents also want to reserve this for only extreme cases, but when we try to implement these kinds of policies and limit them to only the appropriate cases, it just doesn't work out. We know that decisions are sometimes made in arbitrary ways, and there are often racial and socioeconomic undertones. So removal from the home may not be done in a fair way.

In some cases, the state may be too quick to intervene. An intensive process of working with the family can take time and resources, and child protective workers often are overworked, with caseloads that are frequently too high. If putting the child in foster care is a choice that requires less time and supervisory involvement, it may be very tempting to take that path.

When a child is taken away from his or her family, it's very traumatic. So before you do that, you want to make sure you absolutely have to do it. It's a matter of what's best for the child. We know that removing a child from parents is harmful and psychologically damaging for the kid, and we don't yet know that state intervention will help with obesity, so you are weighing an almost certain harm against a speculative benefit.

health@latimes.com

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