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40% to 80% of Parents in U.S. with Intellectual Disabilities Lose Custody of their Children

Last week, the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) Office for Civil Rights (OCR) announced an agreement with the state of Oregon to develop a system to ensure the state’s child welfare agency does not discriminate against parents with disabilities, a move that could benefit one in ten parents in the United States. The agreement stems from a case involving Amy Fabbrini and Eric Ziegler. Fabbrini and Ziegler endured a five-year battle with the state of Oregon to regain custody of their two sons, who were both taken into foster care after their respective births. No abuse was alleged against Fabbrini and Ziegler, who say their below-average scores on state-sanctioned IQ tests are why Oregon held the children in foster care until their court-ordered releases in late 2017 and early 2018. Fabbrini and Ziegler’s case is not unique. At least 40 percent to 80 percent of parents in the United States with intellectual disabilities will lose custody of their children, according to a 2012 report from the National Council on Disability, on which I was the primary author. This discrimination is not only harmful to families—it is also unlawful. Indeed, both Section 504 of the Rehabilitation Act and the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) prohibit child welfare agencies and courts from discriminating against disabled parents. These federal laws also require child welfare agencies and courts to provide reasonable modifications in policies, programs, and procedures to ensure disabled parents are offered an equal opportunity. For example, Deaf parents must be provided sign language interpreters, and parents with intellectual disabilities should receive individualized services based on the family’s needs. Yet, nearly 50 years since the Rehabilitation Act was passed and 30 years since the ADA became law, discrimination continues to persist. As a result, families are being torn apart. Such discrimination is a long-standing issue in U.S. history, rooted in eugenics practices.

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How One Judge Almost Eliminated Foster Care Simply by Applying the Law – A National Model?

The Washington Post recently featured a judge out of Louisiana, Judge Ernestine S. Gray, who has reportedly "reduced foster care numbers to levels unmatched anywhere in the country" in Orleans Parish. Richard A. Webster, writing for the Post, reports: Between 2011 and 2017, the number of children in foster care here fell by 89 percent compared with an 8 percent increase nationally. New Orleans children who do enter the system don’t stay long. Seventy percent are discharged within a month; nationally, it’s only 5 percent. Gray has effectively all but eliminated foster care except in extreme situations, quickly returning children flagged by social workers to their families or other relatives. “We shouldn’t be taking kids away from their parents because they don’t have food or a refrigerator,” she said in explaining her philosophy. “I grew up in a poor family in South Carolina, and we didn’t have a lot. But what I had was people who cared about me.” The greatest threat of harm for most of the children who appear before her, she stresses, is being unnecessarily removed from their families. “Foster care is put up as this thing that is going to save kids, but kids die in foster care, kids get sick in foster care,” she said. “So we ought to be trying to figure out how to use that as little as possible. People have a right to raise their children.”

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USA Today Exposes Florida Doctor Medically Kidnapping Children and Destroying Lives

USA Today reporter Daphne Chen has just published an article on Dr. Sally Smith, a pediatrician who is the head of the child protection team in Pinellas County, Florida. Published in the "Torn Apart" section of GateHouseNews.com, this article is reportedly the first in a series investigating Florida’s child welfare system. Chen refers to Dr. Sally Smith as: "the 61-year-old pediatrician [who] is one of the most powerful figures in the child welfare system along Florida’s Gulf Coast. As the head of the Pinellas County child protection team, Smith examines virtually every child funneled to All Children’s Hospital with suspicious injuries. Among prosecutors, her word is like gold." The USA Today Network reportedly investigated hundreds of Dr. Smith's cases, and: "found more than a dozen instances where charges were dropped, parents were acquitted or caregivers had credible claims of innocence yet suffered irredeemable damage to their lives and reputations." Reporter Daphne Chen discusses several cases that involved Dr. Smith, including: "Beata Kowalski, a 43-year-old mother of two, died by suicide in 2017 after Smith accused her of Munchausen syndrome by proxy — a rare disorder in which a parent fakes a child’s illness for sympathy or gain. Her family members are now suing Smith and All Children’s Hospital for what they said were trumped-up claims. John Stewart, a Marine Corps veteran, spent 300 days in jail on Smith’s allegation that he killed his girlfriend’s son by throwing him repeatedly against a soft surface. Prosecutors dropped the charges after a neuropathologist contradicted Smith’s findings, according to internal memos."

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North Carolina Military Family’s Breastfed Infant Daughter Medically Kidnapped for 305 Days

When a family welcomes their firstborn, no matter how difficult the labor, how long the labor, whether instrumentation had to be used to get the baby out, or whether an emergency cesarean is done to finally welcome their new bundle of joy, all of this is a distant past with the arrival a new baby.  With ten fingers and ten toes, doctors and nurses unconcerned about the events that took place during birth, you assume you are blessed and have happy, healthy baby.   Families are starting to realize these events that occur during labor can result in underlying conditions that can lead to false allegations of child abuse and tear families apart.   A military family from North Carolina tells us about their almost one-year long ordeal that threatened to take their daughter away from them forever. After taking their baby to the emergency room, they were transferred to the University of North Carolina Chapel Hill Children’s Hospital, where the Beacon Team, with their Child Abuse Specialists, accused them of abusing their baby.

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Federal Investigation Determines that Oregon CPS Violates Parental Rights of Disabled Parents – Too Low of IQ Not Reason Enough to Take Away Children

Back in 2017 Sherrene Hagenbach, an Oregon volunteer Social Service Agent (SSA), reached out to Health Impact News regarding a couple she was mentoring at the time, Eric and Amy Ziegler, who lost their two children when social workers determined that their IQs were too low to be parenting. Sherrene was not happy with how their parental rights were being violated, and became a whistleblower.  Both parents had highschool diplomas, and there was no history of abuse. But Oregon CPS took away their children as soon as they were born. We published the Ziegler story, interviewing both Sherrene and the parents, and soon the story went viral, gaining national media attention. An Oregon judge eventually returned custody of both children to the Zieglers last year (2018). Due to all the media coverage of their story, the Office for Civil Rights (OCR) at the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services began to investigate Oregon CPS and their practices of removing children from disabled parents. They allegedly found out that Oregon's practice of discriminating against parents with disabilities was not limited to the Ziegler case. Today (December 4, 2019), it was announced that the OCR reached a "voluntary resolution agreement" with the Oregon Department of Human Services concerning the rights of parents with disabilities in Child Welfare Programs.

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Will Paul Petersen and His Accomplices in Child Trafficking Ever See Justice?

Arizona Maricopa County Assessor Paul Petersen, who was indicted in three different states for illegally trafficking children through his adoption agency, has requested that his trial in Arkansas be delayed for almost a year. He is currently free on bond. The hub of Petersen's alleged illegal activities was Maricopa County, in Arizona, where he serves as the County Assessor, an elected official. Authorities in Arizona have been unsuccessful in removing him from office so far, but they recently seized many of his assets. So far, no one in the mainstream corporate-sponsored media seems to be doing any investigative work on their own to try to uncover this scandal further. It is hard to believe that Paul Petersen could have accomplished this operation on his own, especially since he served in a public office as County Assessor for Maricopa County. Health Impact News has conducted its own investigation, and if federal law enforcement is serious about stopping child trafficking flowing through Arizona, Mr. Petersen's connections should be investigated. What about the judges who approved these adoptions? What connection does Paul Petersen's case have to former Arkansas Senator Linda Collins-Smith's murder? Here is what our own investigations have uncovered so far.

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New York Vaccine Police State: Proposed Mandatory Gardasil Vaccine to Target Homeschoolers?

Given recent legislative actions in New York, as well as proposed new ones, to remove any exemptions to vaccines and mandate that all children must be vaccinated, the idea of New York becoming a vaccine police state is no longer a theory or warning. It is happening in full public view, thanks to what one lawmaker refers to as "the corruption in Albany." A new proposed bill in New York would mandate the HPV Gardasil vaccine as a requirement for school attendance, both private and public, including daycare. Parents who no longer can enroll their children in schools, whether public or private, due to the loss of religious and medical exemptions to vaccines, are apparently turning to homeschool education as their only option left to educate their children. But a lawmaker from Warsaw, Assemblyman David DiPietro, has stated that lawmakers are planning on outlawing homeschooling, because they want to be able to vaccinate the children in the schools, without parental approval or knowledge.

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Texas Mom Tells her Story of How a Child Abuse Pediatrician Used CPS to Medically Kidnap her Baby

In the middle of the night on May 23rd, 2016, my husband, Tim was caring for our 4-month-old infant son, Tristan, our third of three boys, while I was trying to get some rest. Tim awoke to find our son completely unresponsive. He immediately woke me up and told me to go to the emergency room as fast as possible. I rushed him to the hospital without a moment’s hesitation; no wallet, no phone, no shoes. I will never forget the pure fear of those moments holding my unresponsive baby in my arms praying to God not to take my baby. When I got to the hospital, the ER doctor told us Tristan had a small subdural hematoma and at the time we had no idea what that was. After a day of testing, our prayers were finally answered when Dr. Sandberg, Tristan’s Neurosurgeon, came in with his diagnosis of a tiny subdural hematoma caused by birth injury. He let us know it would resolve itself in the next couple of days, that he was canceling the scheduled MRI, and that we could go home, as he said there was no reason to intubate and bathe our baby in that much radiation. This was the moment that our family had been praying for, and for the first time we felt relieved to know that Tristan was going to be ok and we would all be going home soon. But unbeknownst to us, our nightmare was just beginning.  While we were taking in the comfort in Dr. Sandberg’s diagnosis, the child abuse pediatrician (or CAP) was formulating her own diagnosis for Tristan’s medical emergency… Abusive Head Tramua.  She used CPS to medically kidnap our baby.

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Black-Listed Documentary Banned in Europe on History of Child Trafficking in Switzerland Premieres Online

5 years in the making and black-listed in Europe, filmmaker Omar Agustoni along with co-producer Neal Sutz has just released the documentary, Trees of Shame, which premiered online November 24, 2019. The film documents the history of child trafficking in Switzerland through Child Protective Services and the Juvenile Court system, with riveting interviews of former and current victims. According to the history of the International Social Service (ISS), today's "Child Protection" child welfare system which exists in most Western countries, originated in Switzerland just after WWI in 1920 in an effort to deal with "displaced" children, or "orphans." The headquarters was established in Geneva, Switzerland, in 1924, and the U.S. branch was established in New York City in 1926. During the Great Depression, the Social Security Act established under President Franklin D. Roosevelt in 1935 allocated funds to establish child welfare programs throughout the U.S., and is the birth of modern Child Protection Service agencies nationwide. While Simonetta Sommaruga, former President of Switzerland and the current Vice President, allegedly apologized for past crimes of child trafficking against the Swiss people by the Swiss government in April of 2013, where many of these children labeled "orphans" were trafficked as child laborers, much like the old "orphan trains" in the U.S. back in the mid 1800s, Trees of Shame documents how these crimes of child trafficking still happen today. This is similar to what is happening in the U.S. today, as we have documented for the past 5 years at Health Impact News on our MedicalKidnap.com website, where the modern day Foster Care system is a massive multi-billion dollar child trafficking system. Trees of Shame can be rented and viewed online at: http://www.treesofshame.is/

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California Parents Flood School Board Meeting – Demand Parental Rights Sanctuary Regarding Vaccines and Sex Education

This week the Murrieta Unified School District in Southern California saw hundreds of parents turn out for a school board meeting to protest the loss of parental rights when it comes to the issue of mandatory vaccines and the sexualization in sex education of their children without parental approval. They brought a proposal to make their community a "sanctuary city for parental rights," claiming that if illegal immigration can be protected by a sanctuary status, then so can parental rights. Reporter Michelle Mears was present, and published a report at the California Globe. "Hundreds of residents in a Southern California community swarmed a school board meeting Thursday night to speak out about the loss of parental rights in schools. Anxious parents, many with children in tow, students, pastors and doctors demanded the Murrieta Unified School District become the first sanctuary city for parental rights in California. For two hours people waited to speak out on the action item titled, 'To consider Proposal by Community Member to Become a Sanctuary School District.” Those in favor of the sanctuary status understood the trustees could not change the laws set by the state. However, their argument is, if illegal immigration can be protected by a sanctuary status then so can parental rights.' One of the highlights of the night was a reading of an affidavit by a nurse known on Facebook as "Sandra RN." Police attempted to block her efforts and remove her from the room, but when she stood up for her rights as she was being filmed, police backed down and allowed her to speak.

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