Posted on 10/07/2016 8:47:19 AM PDT by rickmichaels
She was proud to be a vegan, and wanted her son to live like she did. But her family members said she took her food choices too far – her diet became a danger, in their eyes, something closer to an obsession than a healthy lifestyle.
“She was going to live on water and sunlight,” her sister-in-law told CBS Pittsburgh.
When the 33-year-old woman from western Pennsylvania, Elizabeth Hawk, began feeding her 11-month-old child sparse meals of only fruit and nuts, however, that was beyond the pale.
The boy developed what the sister-in-law, Brandy Hawk, described as a severe rash. He seemed to have lost control of his motor skills, she said, rendering his hands useless. Elizabeth Hawk countered allergies were the reason for his apparent malaise, not the diet.
That argument did not convince Jerry Hawk, Elizabeth’s separated husband and the father of the child. He removed his son from his estranged wife’s care, taking the boy to a Children & Youth Services agency in nearby Fayette County. From there, reported Philly.com, the agency transported the child to a hospital in West Virginia.
An attending physician said the lack of nutritious food, according to Pennsylvania’s WKBN, caused a “failure to thrive.” Malnourishment had hindered the boy’s ability to develop, and ignoring the skin condition could have led to septic shock.
It is not inevitable that a vegan-only menu would doom young children to sickness or starvation, as The Washington Post wrote in July. But a commitment to veganism can make raising a healthy child more challenging, as parents must ensure that a child ingests sufficient calories and the correct balance of nutrients.
(Excerpt) Read more at news.nationalpost.com ...
There are laws requiring kids be adequately fed. Failure to thrive, absent an underlying medical condition, means the mom was essentially starving her baby.
A friend of mine became obsessed with doing everything natural
while also latching onto fear of the liberal agendas of pediatricians. She had a home birth and didn’t take her baby to a two week check up because “pregnancy isn’t a disease “ and clinics are germ infested and they will force immunizations. She was right but carried it to such an extent that she missed that this baby was tongue tied and wasn’t able to nurse properly. By four months he went from his 7 lb 6oz birthweight to 5 lbs. I believe postpartum depression coupled with her firm beliefs kept her blinded to reality. If someone hadn’t alerted the county, he would have died even though she loved him dearly and wanted what was best for him.
Once a parent is on CPS’s radar, they can take the kids away just for not having enough food in the house. No animal fat is very bad for babies and CPS will act on it.
Sorry, not familiar with PN film, or TV appearance.
Sorry, not familiar with that PN film, or TV appearance.
Not necessarily. A failure to thrive is a physical symptom of most auto-immune diseases. If a failure to thrive is determined to be the result of parental neglect such as an improper or inadequate diet, then CPS might be called. If the cause is suspected to be something else like say Crohn's Disease, then the CPS is unlikely to be involved.
The story didn’t say whether she was nursing the poor thing. 11 months is not too old for him to still be nursing and in fact getting a lot of his nourishment that way although if mom is undernourished her milk probably dried up. I saw a family like this at the local Whole Foods Mart a few years ago. The children looked very undernourished. All the food that they were buying was vegan. Sad. They almost found that my first born had failure to thrive at one year at about 18 pounds although he had not only breast milk but lots of other yummies and we were not vegetarian or vegan. I did make a lot of his baby food though. The next one was such a strong nurser and ate so much that he was 30 pounds at one year.
Should have been I’m glaad i didn’t say it.
If she had breast fed the child until he was three, he could probably do well on a properly balanced vegan diet. She would have to know what one was, and follow it herself, in order to provide enough milk.
Nuts for a child under the age of one could be risky, and ascribing a rash to allergies without addressing the allergies is idiotic - “it’s okay, it’s a vegan rash.”
I never knew where they came up with that term. Classic movie!
We shouldn’t really be looking into laws, to solve these kinds of problems. The bottom line is that children are going to suffer all kinds of abuse, dietary and otherwise, whatever the laws say. The best approach is to bring back the idea that this mother would be essentially unwelcome and shunned anywhere she tried to go. And anyone befriending her would suffer a similar fate. And any business hiring or interacting with her would suffer financially. Let her isolation and misery serve as warning to others.
In other words, trust in the collective wisdom of the masses (who are far more intelligent than any legislator or judge), and, culturally, grant the masses the legal right to enforce non-violent punishments as they see fit.
This is the only real long-term solution, but would require a massive cultural change.
Vegans are nuts. By their own stupid philosophy they shouldn’t eat anything.
I knew a young woman who claimed she was vegetarian but would order pepperoni pizza and throw the pepperonis in the garbage. That still angers me. The animal was killed and for all her holier than thou beliefs, she threw in in the garbage. She’d eat pork ‘n beans until someone pointed out the “pork” on the label really meant pork. She was book smart but had no common sense.
The child obviously needs his vegan diet balanced with
added sugar & salt, high fructose corn syrup, aspartame, processed grains, boxes & bags of non food, high fat dairy,
then the good Doctor will say the child is healthy. Lol.
Our brains are composed of a high percentage of fat. Kid's brains are growing and need fat in their diet to assist with brain development.
Yes. Darwin’s Law.
Agreed. You will never be able to outlaw, ‘Stupid’ or, to be kinder, ‘Uneducated.’
None, but starving your child is illegal. It’s a good thing the father stepped up
I did a little research. You can lose your children due to depression or other mental illnesses, being disabled, drug use, a whole host of things.
I guess it doesn’t hit the news cycle very often, and is kept quiet as it benefits Liberals.
More parent-less children under Government control! Yippee!
*SPIT*
But you can punish “parents” who starve their children.
I don’t know that any one-size-fits-all approach or law to address such issues is even possible. Court cases do, and probably will continue to, be raised to resolve them on a case by case basis.
As well she should be.
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