本文发表在 rolia.net 枫下论坛Jul 26, 2004 1:53 AM
* Report Abuse
THE live video footage taken in the maternity ward by the father of the newborn child is deeply shocking. It shows his wife lying peacefully, but exhausted, on the bed after her caesarean, their baby still covered in vernix cradled in her arms. Suddenly, a policeman, in uniform, accompanied by a social worker, burst through the door. The next scene is the most heart-wrenching: the baby is gone and the mother lies slumped and defeated on the maternity ward floor.
Child welfare campaigner Penny Mellor pushes the pause button on her remote control. She has seen the disturbing images of this mother, who subsequently came to her for help, many times. But they tear her apart each time.
"Why did they have to take her baby in that barbaric way?" she asks, her face creased in anguish and anger. "Why did they have to take the baby away at all?" According to Penny, at least six British mothers of whom she knows personally - including Karen Haynes, whose dramatic story we featured last week - have had their newborn babies snatched from them at childbirth in this inhumane manner. A further six mothers, including Sally Clark who was wrongfully jailed for smothering her sons Harry and Christopher, have lost their liberty and been sent to prison for infanticide.
And she knows of more than 100 mothers who, in the past six years, have had their older children taken from them by family courts and put into care.
All of this has happened, she says scathingly, because of incorrect or insufficiently proven allegations of Munchausen Syndrome by Proxy (MSbP).
Unlike Munchausen Syndrome, a rare malady where a depressed mother is said to harm herself as a perverse cry for help, in MSbP a mother is said to cause harm, not to herself, but to her children.
Almost all of these "tragic" child removals have been sanctioned on the say-so of experts, the main one being Sir Roy Meadow, the inventor of MSbP back in 1977, and whose evidence and use of statistics was revealed after Sally Clark successfully appealed against her conviction in the High Court.
Until the release of Sally Clark last month, Penny was a feisty voice in the wilderness coming to the aid of terrified mothers gagged by the family courts. She is currently helping 50 such mothers fight social services' departments up and down the country, which, she says are armed with nothing more than an opinion by Sir Roy and are threatening to take away their children.
These 50 mothers do not have a history of child abuse; their children have neither physical scars nor burns or blemishes. Rather, they are ordinary mothers - middle class and working class - who keep on pestering their doctors for answers to their children's undiagnosed illness and who, one day, out of the blue, suddenly find themselves stigmatized with the poisonous allegation of MSbP.更多精彩文章及讨论,请光临枫下论坛 rolia.net
* Report Abuse
THE live video footage taken in the maternity ward by the father of the newborn child is deeply shocking. It shows his wife lying peacefully, but exhausted, on the bed after her caesarean, their baby still covered in vernix cradled in her arms. Suddenly, a policeman, in uniform, accompanied by a social worker, burst through the door. The next scene is the most heart-wrenching: the baby is gone and the mother lies slumped and defeated on the maternity ward floor.
Child welfare campaigner Penny Mellor pushes the pause button on her remote control. She has seen the disturbing images of this mother, who subsequently came to her for help, many times. But they tear her apart each time.
"Why did they have to take her baby in that barbaric way?" she asks, her face creased in anguish and anger. "Why did they have to take the baby away at all?" According to Penny, at least six British mothers of whom she knows personally - including Karen Haynes, whose dramatic story we featured last week - have had their newborn babies snatched from them at childbirth in this inhumane manner. A further six mothers, including Sally Clark who was wrongfully jailed for smothering her sons Harry and Christopher, have lost their liberty and been sent to prison for infanticide.
And she knows of more than 100 mothers who, in the past six years, have had their older children taken from them by family courts and put into care.
All of this has happened, she says scathingly, because of incorrect or insufficiently proven allegations of Munchausen Syndrome by Proxy (MSbP).
Unlike Munchausen Syndrome, a rare malady where a depressed mother is said to harm herself as a perverse cry for help, in MSbP a mother is said to cause harm, not to herself, but to her children.
Almost all of these "tragic" child removals have been sanctioned on the say-so of experts, the main one being Sir Roy Meadow, the inventor of MSbP back in 1977, and whose evidence and use of statistics was revealed after Sally Clark successfully appealed against her conviction in the High Court.
Until the release of Sally Clark last month, Penny was a feisty voice in the wilderness coming to the aid of terrified mothers gagged by the family courts. She is currently helping 50 such mothers fight social services' departments up and down the country, which, she says are armed with nothing more than an opinion by Sir Roy and are threatening to take away their children.
These 50 mothers do not have a history of child abuse; their children have neither physical scars nor burns or blemishes. Rather, they are ordinary mothers - middle class and working class - who keep on pestering their doctors for answers to their children's undiagnosed illness and who, one day, out of the blue, suddenly find themselves stigmatized with the poisonous allegation of MSbP.更多精彩文章及讨论,请光临枫下论坛 rolia.net