Circumcision Decision Taken By State Against Mother’s Will: Alabama Rape Victim’s Story Gets Ever More Harrowing
As the state grows in power, so to do its minions. Think about every petty, dull-witted bureaucrat you’ve ever encountered at the DMV or post office. Now think about these types of people have the power to make decisions affecting your life and the lives of your children and loved ones, decisions which could ruin lives.
There is a fine example of this kind of dim-witted overreach by bureaucrats going on right now in Alabama, a terrible story of medical kidnap of a young rape victim’s son.
And it is only getting worse: now the state has decided to schedule the boy for circumcision, an optional procedure that the mother, a 14-year-old rape victim had already decided against.
But back to the origins of the story: a young rape victim decided to keep her baby, prompting cries of “hero” and “courageous” from people of all walks of life. No matter your stance on abortion or politics or anything really, all humans possessing an iota of empathy can agree that rape is wrong, and that the decision whether to keep or abort or put up for adoption a child that is the product of rape must be difficult, to way the least.
So if an when any rape victim decides to keep her baby, she deserves praise.
It was only 51 hours into the life of baby Braelon when those praises turned into something horrific: the Alabama child protective services came to the hospital in the company of police officers and took the child away from his young mother–who, let’s remind ourselves, was already traumatized from not only the rape of nine months previous, but also childbirth.
Now, following this added trauma on top of trauma, the young mother has learned that the state has decided, in all its wisdom, to circumcise her son–despite the fact that after conferring with her doctor, she decided against the procedure.
Now it is being reported that a different doctor has been pushing the mother to change her mind on circumcision, highlighting the oft-criticized research that makes what some have called dubious connections between not being circumcised and risks of STDs and urinary tract infections.
But despite the mother continuing to reject approving the procedure for her boy, the state has set an appointment for the child to undergo the knife.
Despite the fact that state laws prohibit the release of information surrounding cases like this one while they are being investigated, it would seem apparent that the state has some answering to do for making such a permanent, life-altering decision against a parent’s will.
As these sorts of outrages continue to crop up, we must not become inured to them, we must not become complacent. Once things like this become commonplace, all pretense of living in the land of the free are lost.
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