The following is a story by Michael P. Farris, Esq., the founder and chairman of the Home School Legal Defense Association. It isn’t a story about home schooling. It’s about the metastatic cancer that has crept into obstetric medicine. When OB/Gyn’s perform abortions with routine, they need to callous themselves in order to preserve themselves. Somewhere along the way a piece of their humanity gets lost. The same for the rest of the medical staff. In the end, they begin to hold parents in contempt. It is the arrogance of those who abuse their ability to control who lives, and who dies; the seductive and insatiable thirst for power and control.
This story, by Farris, is bone-chilling. That an entire medical staff could behave this way suggests that they have done so in the past with impunity. Here’s Farris:
Newborn Seized in Hospital by Police, Social Worker
Michael P. Farris, Esq.
HSLDA Chairman
I am not content to sit on the sidelines while the government gradually usurps the very essence of parental rights. I hope you share my determination. We need to stand with people like Scott and Jodi Ferris (obviously no relation to someone named Farris). Here’s their story:
Jodi went into labor a bit earlier than she had expected—and the baby was coming rapidly. Given their location and other factors, the midwife they had hoped would deliver the baby at their home encouraged them to get in an ambulance and head to the hospital.
Their baby, whom I will call “Annie,” was born in the ambulance in the parking lot of the Hershey Medical Center—a government hospital in Pennsylvania. Hospital personnel arrived very quickly and took charge of both baby and mom.
As any mother would do, Jodi immediately began to ask the nurses and attendants how her baby was doing. The hospital staff was utterly unresponsive. When they started to give Jodi an injection, she asked what it was and what it was for. They gave her vague answers like, “It’s just to help.” Only after giving her the injection of oxytocin did they tell her what it was and then asked, “You aren’t allergic to that are you?”
Jodi persisted in asking about Annie. No one would tell her anything other than “she’s in good hands and you’ll be able to see her soon.”
Eventually a doctor told her that Annie scored a 9 on a physical exam applied to newborns known as the APGAR test. A score of 8 or higher is considered healthy. (It is unclear when the score was given since she was in the ambulance at birth.) But shortly after this a different doctor told Jodi that Annie was “very sick” and would need to stay in the hospital. This doctor’s comments were accompanied by an explanation of his disdain for midwives saying, “Too many people think they know what they’re doing.”
About an hour later, another hospital staffer finally brought Annie to Jodi and said, “The baby is doing good. She will be able to go home in no time.”
Legal Requirements?
However, several hours later yet another staffer told Scott and Jodi that Annie would have to stay in the hospital for 48 to 72 hours for observation. Even though they persisted in asking why Annie would need to stay, his only answer was that “the law requires us to keep the baby for 48 hours.” When they asked for a reference to this supposed law, he answered, “you’ll have to get that from risk management.” (By the way, there is no such law in Pennsylvania.)
The risk management staffer eventually told them that even though they saw nothing wrong with the baby, they just like “to keep babies like this” for 48–72 hours. The Ferrises were told that Annie would not be released for this period since it was “unsafe for her to leave the hospital.”
Eventually, a risk management staffer admitted that the risk that was being managed was not the health of Annie but the risk that the hospital might get sued if something went wrong after she was discharged.
Ultimately, risk management said that they would be satisfied with a 24-hour stay and that Jodi and Scott could remain with the baby overnight.
You have been Accused
Late in the afternoon, a government social worker named Angelica Lopez-Heagy came into Jodi’s room announcing that she was there to conduct an investigation. Jodi asked to know the allegations. The social worker claimed that it would be against the law for her to show Jodi the allegations.
Jodi replied that she would not be comfortable answering the questions if she couldn’t know the allegations. Immediately the social worker proclaimed, “Since you’re not going to cooperate, I’ll just go and call the police and we can take custody of the baby.”
Fearing that the social worker would carry out her threat, Jodi replied that she was willing to cooperate.
The social worker soon intimated that the issue was Jodi’s refusal to consent to medical treatment for the baby. Jodi replied that she had no idea why anyone would say that. The social worker claimed that she had refused to allow a Vitamin K shot for Annie. Jodi replied that no one had asked her about such a shot. Moreover, she had overheard hospital staffers saying that they had already given Annie such a shot.
Neither the social worker nor any hospital staffer ever gave Jodi or Scott any example of any medically necessary treatment that they had refused for Annie.
At this point, Scott left the hospital to tend to their older children who were staying with friends.
Ordering Tests
Shortly after this, the hospital asked to check Annie’s white blood cell count and to perform a strep test. Jodi agreed to the testing.
Then the hospital demanded that they give Annie shot for Hepatitis B. Jodi said that she would agree only if they tested her or Annie to see if either of them were positive. If so, then she was quite willing to have the shot for Annie. The hospital claimed that they had forgotten about this earlier when it was still possible to test that day, and that they needed to give the shot anyway without any testing.
When the social worker pressed her to make an immediate decision about this shot, Jodi asked her if they could simply wait until Scott got back before they decided.
Put yourself in Jodi’s shoes at this moment. You gave birth that morning in an ambulance. The hospital has made wild and conflicting claims about your baby’s health all day long. You are exhausted. You are in pain. Your husband has gone to check on your children. And a social worker who has threatened to take your baby into police custody is standing in your hospital room demanding that you make an immediate decision.
Jodi simply said, “Please can’t this wait until my husband gets back.”
The social worker renewed her threat. If Jodi would not answer her question right then, she would call the police. And then the social worker started adding conditions. She and Scott would have to agree to sign a safety plan before she could conclude her investigation.
Jodi said that she wanted her husband and an attorney to look at the plan. She felt she was in no position to read such a document and really understand what she was being pressured to sign.
Thrown Out
And then the story turns ugly.
The social worker left the room and called the police. Without a court order they took custody of Annie, immediately claiming that she was suffering from illness or injury—a patently false claim.
The social worker consented to the administration of the Hepatitis B shot even though no blood test had been done.
The police made Jodi Ferris get up out of her hospital bed and escorted her to the entrance—they were expelling her from the hospital because she had not signed the “safety plan.”
Scott met her at the entrance to the hospital. The police escorted them both off of the grounds of the hospital.
Jodi was told that she would be allowed to return every three hours to nurse the baby through the night.
Jodi and Scott were forced to spend the night that she had given birth in their car in the parking lot of a nearby Wal-Mart. You read that right. They kicked this mother out of the hospital, and in order to be close enough to feed her child, she had to sleep in the car.
To add insult to injury, Jodi was given access to Annie only sporadically and not every three hours.
Coming Home 
The practice of fear and intimidation in health matters as it relates to children has become so prevalent in our society the perpetrators have become brazen. More women will seek healthcare outside of the “system” in order to hide from these thugs. How many women must give birth in unsanitary, unsafe back alley clinics before we stop this atrocious behavior? When will we as a people stop the mental and emotional harassment of women when they are at their most vulnerable as they seek needed medical attention? Women have a RIGHT to medical care, for themselves and their newly delivered tissue mass. That tissue mass came from the woman, is made from the woman’s biological matter, and therefor belongs solely to the woman.
Join the fight now! Become a feminist! My body, my choice! Stay out of my womb and off the product of my womb!
There is not a single reputable news outlet that corroborates this story. Furthermore, the “source” of this story, hslda.org is asking for money to defend the case.. This looks like a total scam to me.
P,
Because it hasn’t been reported doesn’t mean it didn’t happen. Sadly, these things are more common than one would think. HSLDA is a reputable agency and I trust their word implicitly, or I wouldn’t have posted the story.
My first question is WHY? Why would the hospital do this? What led the doctors and nurses to apparently believe that the parents presented a risk to the baby? Somehow, I doubt the topic of homeschooling came up — what was the red flag? What made them act that way?
I wonder this, because I was in a similar situation when I had my third baby, the only one of my kids to be born in Tokyo.
The nurses did not want me to take him home. They insisted they needed to keep him in the hospital and “observe” him for at least a week — even though he was clearly fine, and breastfeeding well.
Four days after he was born, I checked us both out, against medical advice. No one threatened to call the police, but nurses followed me down the hall, begging me, for my baby’s sake, to return to my room.
I tried to control my boiling rage and smiled as sweetly as I could, and thanked them for everything — and hailed a cab, and went home.
I still wonder what they were thinking. And I wonder what the nurses in this case were thinking, too.
Power trips.
After putting a restraining order on him and separating from my violent husband, the Guardian ad Litem told me that I needed to take a parenting class with him.
I told the GAL I did not feel comfortable taking this class with my husband because he had threatened to kill me recently and had been violent with me throughout the marriage. I told the GAL I would take the parenting class anytime she wanted me to but I did not want to take it with him.
Because of this, I was put down on record as being the “uncooperative parent.”
“Child Protective Services” is nothing but a bunch of legal kidnappers running a racket.
[…] Coming Home shares HSLDA president Michael Farris’ shocking “I can’t believe this happened in America” story about a family who came face to face with an unreasonable and controlling medical bureaucracy upon the birth of their child. […]
To L above, because they had prenatal care through a midwife in plans for a homebirth! Homebirth parents, even when they decide later because situations have changed to go to the hospital are routinely abused by hospital staff. It’s not remotely uncommon. Doctors and nurses aren’t even subtle about it, they’ll actually say to parents ‘well that will teach you to try for a homebirth’ or other such nonsense in the middle of abusive, nonconsenting procedures. My son’s doctor, after he was transfered for complications, actually put in his chart “despite a homebirth parents seem to have a normal concern for their child’s safety”. This women came to a hospital after getting non-hospital prenatal care, as far as the god-complex doctors and nurses (and apparently one likeminded social worker) are concerned that is enough cause and excuse to do whatever they want to punish the parents, including illegally taking a baby, lying, and kicking a post-labor mom out of a hospital bed.
Jespren, I think you might be correct. My own birth plan was for an elective c-section, and I think some of the nurses may have concluded that someone who chose a “surgical birth for convenience” was deficient in maternal instinct, and wanted to observe the baby as long as they could. I was also in a lot of pain after the surgery — no morphine in Japan! — so I kept sending my son back to the nursery, and they might have feared I wasn’t bonding with him. Also, my husband only came to visit once because we had no family in our city so he was home caring for our younger children, so they might have incorrectly assumed I was a single mother.
I will be following this case because I am a big supporter of parents’ rights, and because of my own experience.
L, are you familiar with http://www.parentalrights.org ? Great site to keep up with this type of stuff.
And yeah, in a place like Japan it does sound like they probably made such incorrect assumptions. And no pain meds after major surgery?? I am both sympathetic and empathetic. I have a pain condition and was off meds for my pregnancy but birth itself was extremely difficult on me physically, everything was in my charts ahead of time with my last birth so I could get my pain medication promptly, but it took them 12 hours to get it to me and the nurses were extremly dismissive of my pain level because it wasn’t a c-section.
It’s just horrible that you didn’t get post op pain control, I don’t know in Japan, but given U.S. doctors and your previous discription of the nurses, I’ve got to wonder if they withheld meds to ‘punish’ you for the elective c-section.
Jespren, I am familiar with that site. I am actually mostly a supporter of the U.S. Convention on the Rights of the Child (particularly since I live in Japan) — not everything in it, but a great deal of it.
In Japan, strong narcotics are rarely given after childbirth, whether vaginal birth or c-section. The thinking is that the drugs can taint the mother’s milk, so only a bad mother (like me!) would take that risk and ask for morphine. I specifically asked for it (since I had it after my first two c-sections) and they refused to give it to me, so I wonder if that is what set off the “red flag” about me? The other possibility is that it was a Catholic hospital, and on the admission form I had put “none” for my religion.
I understood the nurses were probably only very concerned about my baby, but still, it made me angry, and I understand the anger of the Ferris family.
When I was having children, my doctor often did home births and he was known as “the breastfeeding doctor”!. We always had trouble in the hospital with the nursing staff who often tried to keep the baby in the nursery and given the babies bottles – thus thwarting early attempts to nurse. My husband walked in one time shortly after the birth of our 3rd child and overheard the nurses saying , “oh this one is one of dr. S’s patients. They are a real problem.” He calming scooped up our baby and took her to me. Then went to get the bassinet. The attitude of the nurses was the main reason I had our fourth at home – they truly believe the babies belong to them! I experienced bullying by nurses in the hospital after my second child was born. It was a good woman doctor who threw the nurses out of my room and told me I was a great mom and that she would personally sign the discharge papers. I can believe almost anything today.