These parents killed their child; they should be punished.I'm torn on this. At what point do we draw the line? In the UK, they are wanting to take kids away from fat parents, because of course, "obesity kills."
Yes, there are always gray cases, which is a big part of the reason why public policy is so tricky to formulate and enforce. And perhaps nobody saw the distress this young girl was in, perhaps the parents hid it. In that case, the only thing left to do after the tragic result is to provide for a penalty for such behavior, in hopes of deterring others from engaging in it.
There's nothing easy about such situations.
BTW, I didn’t intend to imply that the removal of obese kids from their families is a gray case. That’s clearly going too far...sending the parents to a re-education camp for a few months should suffice to take care of that problem. (heh)