The Decision to Remove an Obese Child From His Mother: A Lawyer Differs
Sherry Kolb, a lawyer, Cornell professor and law clerk to former Justice Harry Blackmun, voices her views on the recent decision by a South Carolina court to remove a child from his mother's custody. Here are a few paragraphs from her FindLaw column:
This past May, the South Carolina Department of Social Services accused Jerri Althea Gray of unlawful neglect of a child, because her 14-year-old son, Alexander Draper, weighed 555 pounds. After a hearing was scheduled to determine whether Gray was in fact medically negligent in caring for her son, Gray and Draper fled the state. They were found a few days later in Baltimore. The police arrested Gray and placed Draper in protective custody in South Carolina. Though Draper's weight is extreme (and may well reflect a metabolic disorder), the arrest of his mother and his removal from her custody raise an important question about parental obligations and nutrition: Might it be child neglect simply to feed our children the Standard American Diet?
Why Jerri Gray Should Still Have Custody of Alexander
Without venturing very deeply into the issue of over- versus under-nutrition, it is readily apparent that taking Jerri Gray's son away from her was the wrong decision. Here we have a woman who loves her son and who has spoken out publicly, explaining that she works so many hours at more than one job – to support herself and Alexander – that she must rely on fast food far more often than she would like. She is not saying that she believes strongly in a fast food diet and wants her son to eat it in great quantities so that he can remain morbidly obese.
Gray has no commitment to unhealthy food. If the government is prepared to spend time and money helping her son, Alexander, lose weight and eat the right kinds of foods, then she would seem by all appearances to be more than happy to receive such aid. Gray stated, convincingly, that "[m]entally he needs to be with me. We both need to be included together in whatever program that they have to offer so that we both can benefit from it. So as our lives go on together, then we will have learned how to control it and keep it under control."
Rather than employing people to take away Gray's beloved child, in other words, the government could spend considerably less money providing her with healthy food and information about nutrition. What she evidently lacks are resources, not love or concern for her son.
Imagine a contrasting scenario. A single father has a 14-year-old daughter who is severely underweight. Preliminary investigation reveals that the daughter suffers from anorexia nervosa and refuses to eat more than a few hundred calories each day, because she believes she is fat. The father tells his daughter that she is too thin and should eat more, but she refuses to do so and in many contexts eats (or fails to eat) outside the presence of her father (because he is at work, or she is in school). The father is unfamiliar with the condition of anorexia nervosa and does not realize that there are mental health treatments for it.
In this situation, a government official wanting to help the anorexic girl might begin by notifying the father that his daughter is suffering from a dangerous mental illness, an illness that could prove fatal if left untreated. The same official could give the father information about places that assist victims of anorexia. Indeed, the official might even encourage the father to have his child forcibly admitted to a hospital and given nutrition, if all else fails.
What would not make sense, however, would be for the government to remove the daughter from her father's custody on grounds of child neglect. Doing this would break apart an otherwise loving family and needlessly add psychological trauma to an already fragile child's life. And in the case of Jerri Gray and her child, that seems to be exactly what has happened.
Read the rest of Sherry Kolb's column at FindLaw