By Susan Brinkmann, OCDS
Staff Journalist
Outrage is building over a claim by a Harvard academician that some parents should lose custody if their children are severely obese.
ABCNews.com is reporting that Dr. David Ludwig, an obesity expert at Children’s Hospital Boston and associate professor at the Harvard School of Public Health published an article in the Journal of the American Medical Association yesterday saying that the state should intervene in cases of extremely overweight children.
“In severe instances of childhood obesity, removal from the home may be justifiable, from a legal standpoint, because of imminent health risks and the parents’ chronic failure to address medical problems,” Ludwig co-wrote with Lindsey Murtagh, a lawyer and researcher at Harvard’s School of Public Health.
The idea sparked anger among health experts as well as families, such as that of three year-old Anamarie Regino of Albuquerque, New Mexico who was taken from her parents because she weighed 90 pounds.
“Literally, it was two months of hell. It seemed like the longest two months of my life,” said her mother, Adela Martinez.
The girl didn’t improve in foster care and was eventually returned to her parents. She was later diagnosed with a genetic predisposition.
“They say it’s for the well-being of the child, but it did more damage that any money or therapy could ever do to fix it,” Martinez said.
Anamarie, who is now 14, agreed.
“It’s not right, what [Dr. Ludwig] is doing, because to get better you need to be with your family, instead of being surrounded by doctors,” she told ABC.
The Regino case was an example of a state intervention that didn’t work, he said, and while this option is no guarantee of a good outcome, “to do nothing is also not an answer.”
Removal of an obese child from their home should only be used as a last resort, he added.
However, many experts, such as Dr. David Katz, founder of the Yale Prevention Center, said that there simply is no evidence that the state would do a better job of feeding children than their parents.
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