Family Defense Center in Illinois Documents Medical Ethics Violations in Medical Kidnappings

The Family Defense Center’s mission is to advocate justice for families in the child welfare system. The Family Defense Center works on cases of wrongly-accused families who are targeted as a result of Hotline calls to child protective services. The Center is able to represent only a tiny fraction of the wrongly accused family members in medically complex cases, and resources like the Center provides are not available to the vast majority of family members who encounter the child protection and medical care establishment in these cases. Unfortunately, we see little sign that the child protection and medical care establishment are addressing in a meaningful way the harmful impact of erroneous child abuse reports that have resulted from questionable ethical practices that this Paper documents. Physicians have an ethical responsibility to mitigate damage to families. Yet, in no case handled by the Center has this responsibility been met by the medical community; after exoneration, no family has received any offer of assistance or healing by any of the physicians who have caused them injury.