Harvard Doctor Wants Obese Kids To Be Wards of the State

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Dr. David Ludwig, an obesity specialist at Harvard-affiliated Children’s Hospital Boston, and his colleague Lindsey Murtagh, a lawyer and a researcher at Harvard’s School of Public Health, argued in Journal of the American Medical Association, that extremely obese children should become wards of the state.

Yes, that’s right, wards of the state, a concept rooted in the same political ideology espoused by Lenin and Stalin, leaders of the now failed Union of Soviet Socialist Republics.

NPR notes that “its authors [Ludwig and Murtagh] are joining a quiet chorus of advocates who say the government should be allowed to intervene in extreme cases”.

Ludwig believes state intervention is in the best interest of children and will provide them with the assistance that for whatever reason their parents are unable to supply.

State intervention ideally will support not just the child but the whole family, with the goal of reuniting child and family as soon as possible. That may require instruction on parenting, said Ludwig, who wrote the article with Murtagh.

“Despite the discomfort posed by state intervention, it may sometimes be necessary to protect a child,” Murtagh said, which means “The State” would be granted with ultimate authority and control over its citizens’ children, stripping parents of autonomy in favor of an arbitrary exercise of state authority.

NPR notes that in a commentary in the medical journal BMJ last year, London pediatrician Dr. Russell Viner and colleagues said obesity was a factor in several child protection cases in Britain, a crumbling imperial empire whose citizens (now Americans) once struggled against autocratic rule, and where now there is a camera on every street corner.

Ludwig and Murtagh provide a litany of shocking statistics and alarming personal accounts and war stories from events that occurred at Ludwig’s obesity clinic.

But not only are some children predisposed to obesity at birth based on heredity, two-thirds of the entire country is obese — the evidence of an obese epidemic is everywhere! Should we all be placed under House Arrest?

And as University of Pennsylvania bioethicist Art Caplan notes, obese children are victims of advertising, marketing, peer pressure and bullying — things a parent can’t control, he said.

Should we ban high fat food, and criminalize its marketing and advertizing?

If Ludwig’s policy is ever implemented and used to justify snatching children from their parents for medical reasons, it’s only a matter of time before other perceived health risks are exploited by the state to the same end.

Ludwig points out that state intervention for child obesity problems doesn’t necessarily involve new legal requirements, because health care providers are required to single out and report children who are at “immediate risk” due to any number of reasons.

But even if no formal legal requirement is mandated, and an informal policy is adopted, by having an “obese” policy in place, state workers would no longer scrutinize a child’s general welfare, and instead inadvertently focus first and foremost on over weight children as suspect, and place them under review for removal by the state.

Small-minded, gossip-mongering neighbors, babysitters, school teachers, and day care workers would become state informants; every chubby kid in America would live in fear of becoming a ward of the state, and their parents would be viewed as conspirators of a crime.

Jerri Gray, a Greenville, South Carolina single mother who lost custody of her obese 14-year-old son two years ago, said authorities don’t understand the challenges families may face in trying to control their kids’ weight.

“I was always working two jobs so we wouldn’t end up living in ghettos,” Gray said. She said she often didn’t have time to cook, so she would buy her son fast food. She said she asked doctors for help for her son’s big appetite but was accused of neglect.

And who would pick up the tab for housing, supervision, retraining, instruction, education, and healthy food, as part of this state intervention? Why the taxpayer of course.

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