Eat Poppy seeds before giving birth and the government takes your baby. :-(
 

http://www.postgazette.com/pg/11200/...pid=newspanel4

Last time, it was a bagel with poppy seeds. This time, it's pasta salad containing the tiny kernels that caused a positive test for opiates at Jameson Hospital, and the subsequent seizure of a newborn from his mother by Lawrence County, according to a lawsuit filed in federal court.

Eileen Ann Bower gave birth to a son, Brandon Brothers II, at the hospital on July 13, 2009, according to the complaint filed late Friday by attorney Stanley T. Booker. After conducting a routine urine test on Ms. Bower, the hospital sent word of a positive result to Lawrence County Children and Youth Services, it said, which took Brandon when he was 3 days old and kept him in foster care for 75 days.

Ms. Bower realized only later that the result could be attributable to poppy seeds, which contain opium-like compounds, in the dressing of the Supreme Pasta Salad she ate at a picnic.

Ms. Bower's accusation comes while New Castle mother Elizabeth Mort pursues a similar case against the hospital and county, accusing them of removing her child, Isabella, in April 2010 after a poppy seed bagel caused a false positive finding of opiate consumption.

Both cases accuse the hospital of using a too-low threshold for deciding that a person has tested positive for drugs, and the county of ignoring due process before taking newborns. The county and the hospital have filed motions to dismiss Ms. Mort's case.

Representatives of the county and hospital could not be reached for comment on Ms. Bower's case.

Ms. Bower, 22, of New Castle, was at a barbecue, eating pasta salad moments before she went into labor, the complaint said. She went to Jameson's North Campus, where the test was conducted and she gave birth.

According to Mr. Booker, Jameson's policy appears to call for reporting a positive drug test to the county when the level of opiates exceeds 300 nanograms per milliliter. That threshold is much lower than that used by the federal government, and Ms. Bower's result was even lower, showing only traces of opiate.

Nonetheless, the hospital reported it, and the agency took the child, although Ms. Bower "pleaded that there must be some mistake, as she is not a drug user," the complaint said.

"Eileen was forced to experience the unbearable: The forcible seizure of her infant son by the state without any justification and the fear that she might not get him back, the loss of the experience to breast feed and bond with her infant child, the emotional turmoil and stress she was forced to endure in hopes that one day she would be reunited with Baby Brandon," the complaint said.

"The baby's doing well," said Mr. Booker, although "he just bursts out crying" when separated from his mother.

The complaint against the county agency, its caseworker and Jameson Health System alleges negligence, invasion of privacy and violation of due process. It is assigned to U.S. District Judge Terrence F. McVerry.

In October, Ms. Mort and the American Civil Liberties Union sued the county and the hospital over the seizure of her baby, Isabella Rodriguez.

A mediation effort has failed, and the county and hospital have filed motions to dismiss the case. They said that governmental employees are immune from liability and the complaint doesn't spell out a constitutional violation. Judge David S. Cercone has not yet ruled on the motions.



Utterly Insane


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I can't imagine what I would do if the government took our newborn baby away for almost 3 months, for no reason.... and then tried to say that they were federal workers, and had no liability????



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that is so disturbing :(

WTF They don't test new moms for drugs routinely. That's crazy.

Thats the thing. most federal works including state prosecutors have NO LIABILITY. Just look at what happened with the Casey Anthony case and the info about the google searches she was doing.

that is messed up on many levels

federal workers should be just as liable as normal workers when they abuse power and fuck up royally

at the very least they should be fired and removed from duty.

i cant imagine this happening to us, id probably end up in trouble over it

I'll just generalize here because I'm busy working and just needed a break from looking at so much porn.

Zero tolerance = zero common sense.. Literally. A zero tolerance approach to ANYTHING literally means you will NOT employ your brain on each individual instance. It means there is no such thing as mitigating circumstances, such as "well maybe it was in her bagel or salad dressing". Nope, zero tolerance. Opiates = take baby. It's seriously bad policy in every case.

Lets bring back tolerance to our lives. We all need the slack at some point.

wow that is retarded

that is crazy..

someday we will live just like Logans Run... :2 cents:




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What kinda gestapo hospital is that? You go in to get help, pay to get help and they decide to run some extra tests on you and report the results to the police.... wtf :(

i don't see a problem at all.

dope fiend babies and their crack head moms are a huge cost to the system, i think it's smart to test.

Maybe we should all become snitches like in east Germany? :Oh crap

What a bunch of idiots.

snitching is a 3rd grade concept.

Very sad to hear about the baby crying for the mom.

Any pics of this womans house or how she lived?

You can spot a crak head tweeker within seconds just by looking in side their house..

Why are they drug testing her? Is this common practice these days? I have never heard of this before. Was she exhibiting some kind of behavior that made the suspect she was on drugs? It seems like we aren't getting the full story. It says a "routine urine test" but don't you have to consent to a drug test or is that now part of the general treatment consent form you sign when you come to the hospital?

Then call ti something else, like infiltration... the word the Stasi used to use.

btw: one of the groups the Stasi targeted first for infiltration were nurses because of their frequent contact with the public.

i don't see this as nazi behavior so i don't really think a police state definition is appropriate. based on the article, i find this more along the lines of bureaucratic ineptitude. now if this was the 300th time split amongst a variety of locations, i could see how this is by design, but the fact is that there is no operation in place where the government is trying to confiscate the babies of moms testing positive for opiates.

A lot of problems would be resolved if they were expected to behave like the rest of us mortals.

Good questions. Anyone?

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What I don't understand is why they're using a drug test that can't discern between illegal opiate use and bagel consumption. I'd think that relying on a test that useless is, in itself, reckless and likely to incur liability.

I see it as the government overstepping its bounds. It starts with hospitals reporting information to the police. Information that is being used to determine whether or not a woman is fit to be a mother.

What's next? The hospital doing credit checks to see if the parents are in debt? Can't possibly be a good parent if you are in debt, so lets take your child away. Or, what about if some religious government officials decided that a child must be raised by both a father and a mother and that single mothers are unfit to raise children? etc...

Those example may seem far fetched but the principle is the same.

And what about the trust between a patient and her doctor? Next thing you know, pregnant women who in the past have used drugs will stop going to the doctors...

from the 1st lawsuit last year, the aclu filed on behalf of the 1st woman

http://www.aclupa.org/downloads/Mortcmplnt.pdf

to me, this reads that a PRIVATE hospital elected to have rather harsh policies associated with their child birth care but made that publicly available information.

caveat emptor.

Reminds me of an episode of The Shield where a suspect voluntarily gives a DNA sample and is busted based on that DNA evidence. When they ask him why he was willing to take the test in the first place he answered: "it's a government test. I figured 'how accurate can it be?"

you do realize we are experiencing a population explosion involving a huge # of unfit parents? you won't get me to agree to anything that lets people have children willy nilly. it's already out of control and a huge burden. what, 9 billion people now?

http://www.futuretimeline.net/21stce...-2050-2100.jpg

Ok, now there's a hospital I would boycott if I was living in that area.

cancel all welfare programs and those people will no longer be 'a burden'.

Births in the United States have been dropping for over a decade. Blame Malaysia!

or the popularity of anal sex :)

totally agree.

srsly, the government doesn't give a shit, in fact, cps has a history of over-stepping its boundaries. tough issue because they deal with children and i wouid want them to err towards over-protecting than under-protecting.

nevertheless, i've watched enough seinfeld reruns to know a poppy seed muffin can be enough to cancel a trip and get you fired. ;-) so if i read that clause, i'd make sure and tell my old lady to not eat a fucking poppy seed bagel if she's set on popping out a rug rat at jameson.

Look at this, it's all of the shit countries: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of..._by_birth_rate

More reason to stay out of their civil wars!

so is that graph wrong? last i checked we are on track to reach 600million americans in 75 years.

It appears that I unfairly singled out Malaysia. Sorry Malaysians!

I hear they like gift baskets :)

Neither of us are particularly wrong. Birthrate is steadily declining. But, exponential growth is where the graph comes in.

All they had to ask is "have you had any food that could contain poppy seeds within the last 48 hours or so" if she says no... then you may have reason to believe there is an issue. A lot of problems can be solved with one or two simple questions.

obey my dog!
http://i147.photobucket.com/albums/r...k31/mugatu.jpg

Crazy shit in the U.S. is already coming. Imho, it's the dumb fucking sheep of this country, the U.S.A. that will not say word until we are under some sort of martial law and then it will be too late. So don't worry, nothing to see here, please go back to your TV and Facebook...


the article below is a good case in point...
http://www.thenewamerican.com/usnews...-organizations

That's the problem with bureaucrats, they only ask the questions they have been told to ask.

lolz, this reminds me of the seinfeld episode where elaine ate a poppy seed muffin and hilarity ensues! :1orglaugh

:1orglaugh good call....

look they're breakdance fighting.... :thumbsup




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crap, i should of included this part when i quoted from the aclu lawsuit above

16. This policy is not required by any state or federal law or regulation, and there are
no national standards delineating specific criteria for drug-testing pregnant women.

You can not tell a crak user from looking into their house or their pee. You can tell a POTENTIAL, even probable, crak user from looking in their house or pee. Then you ask questions, you investigate a little, you confirm.

The entire point was the epic fail of trying to judge a book by it's cover, even if it's an alarming looking cover.

If broke MoFos shooting you at the ATM to feed themselves is not a burden then
go for it.

:1orglaugh

If you think people that can't get jobs are going to just starve quietly then you
have not read too much history of this world.

Most people in prison are there for committing crimes to get money.
There is a clear reason why poor neighborhoods have more crime than middle class.
It's the fucking money!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Ending welfare abruptly without job placement will only bring a wave of crime
larger then we've ever seen.

I'm willing to pay my $5 dollars a year tax that goes to welfare so that I don't get
shot in the head by a hungry MoFo to get my $20 at the ATM.
It's a good deal to not get shot and save $15 at the same time.

I'll take the deal.

That's why I gave up eating anything with poppy seeds on it...I use to love poppy seed muffins

So the solution to people potentially stealing your money is to give them your money? :winkwink:

Those welfare programs accomplish 1 thing: they make people dependent on others.

I understand what you are saying, but keeping a system that breeds corruption in place is never a solution.

Which system in this world doesn't breed corruption?????
Do you think the cops are less corrupt than welfare moms?


http://ooaz.com/gfy/niggaplease40.jpg


There are just systems that we tend to focus on and complain about more.

My point is that the problem is not going away without a whole lot of new
jobs that have never come before and I just want to survive it all.

Further more, you are making a lot of assumption about how a program makes people
behave when you've never been on the program before.

Believe it or not, people do not want to be on welfare. They give in to it when they
can't find another way out.

That stuff about them becoming dependent on others is just something you pulled
out of your ass because it sounds good to you.

Politicians have just played the welfare angle up to get votes for so long that
we are inundated with attacks on the system.
Not to even mention that welfare is a "code word" for niggas in this country so
politicians have used welfare to "race bait". The game has been to gain the majority
vote by pitting them against the minority.

People keep falling for that game, so politicians keep playing it.

the US will need all those people for several reasons:
1. to pay taxes.
2. to fight wars.

perhaps i got the order or the two mixed up?