To think that an overweight mother should not have her newborn taken away?

[oska]

Dundee Social Services has taken away a woman's baby hours after birth as she is overweight. I find this utterly disgraceful that yet again, SW are interfering when they should be tracking down real abusers! Poor little baby not able to breastfeed mummy's milk, listen to mummy's reassuring heartbeat and bond. Poor Mum having her new baby taken away to some god knows who foster family. I don't know the detail, but the face of it, it's outrageous!

oska- Ninewells Hospital in Dundee are second to none when it comes to helping new mothers to breastfeed. They recommend that you breastfeed for at least two years and there is a lot of support immediately after the birth and when a mother goes home.
Surely it would make sense to help this mother breastfeed her new baby?

I just feel the whole situation is incredibly sad, whatever the reasons are. I hope there is a resolution to it all.

There is nothing to say that the mother would have BF, you also do not know the reasons, for all you know they could have made it clear they were going to move away once the baby was born or any multitude of other things. The process of over-feeding a baby can start straight away with parents who put rusks in the milk bottles, wean far too early and so on. Obviously some parents do these things and do not take it to extremes but the mother may well have done this with the 3yo from the start giving ss good reason to be worried.

The fact is that, contrary to popular belief, SS do not swoop down and snatch children with no thought, planning or compelling reason.

oska
YABU
you know nothing at all about why these children were removed. They would not remove a NB without serious concerns far far above the risk of future obesity.
FWIW I know of a case where a mother's baby was removed days after birth and the LA provided daily contact, bought an electric breast pump and ferried the ebm to the foster carer's house daily. She was working towards returning home with the baby though, but they should still provide for ebm to be provided if possible.

However in some cases the baby's right to bm is superceded by the baby's right to be safe

baby

Here is a link to the news item. From what I understand, the family have been given a lot of opportunities to lose weight and were already in the news before announcing they were expecting the baby. It must be hard for such a large family to change their lifestyle but faced with losing their children should have been the biggest incentive anybody would have.

From my experience mothers are allowed 10 days to breastfeed their babies if they choose to before the baby is taken

Thanks for the replies, as I stated in the beginning, I did not know the detail of the case and this has helped me enormously. Have to leave now and do the Sat chores...

With children already in the care of social services maybe they could have been advised that those children should be the priority and getting them back and healthy should be the number one concern.

To have another child whilst in the process of loosing the others was maybe not wise, and yet still it feels harsh to take a babe from the mother (there must have been some pretty large problems !!!)

I understand the children were also subjected to physical abuse and neglect as well as being overweight.I think the overweight thing has been emphasised by the papers to sensationalise the story when in fact it was not the main factor.

GentleOtter, I don't need to google one specific case to know that mistakes are made, thanks

Replying with 'google' one specific case exactly illustrates the point I was making infact

Individual mistakes do happen yes - and no, they shouldn't - but my point is the system is working 24 hours a day, 365 days a year, when you're not even giving it a second's thought or googling specific incidents, to help, support, and protect, and save many hundreds of children

weight will be highly unlikely to be the main factor here

All I can say is, in general, not this specific case, because I don't know but in my general experience, a child will only be removed at this stage because the risk of harm is so severe as to not be able to be taken. And then everyone is "how could they have let that poor baby go home that that"?

Don't know anything about this case (hadn't heard of it before reading this) but if older children have already been taken into care becasue of concerns about their wellbeing for whatever reason be it emotional / sexual / physical abuse or neglect it would be usual to take any subsequent children into care while the issues leading to the first child(ren) being removed are addressed.

Imagine a situation where older chidren are removed because of genuine concerns about their wellbeing but a new baby is allowed to remain in the same environment and exposed to the same risks? Then something terrible happens to this baby as a direct result. The whole country would be up in arms and looking to strig the responsible social services dept up by the balls (and not unreasonably so)

So YABU. The safety of the new baby is by far the greatest concern not issues of bonding for the mother. Clearly after the baby was removed the risks were assessed and not felt to be that great so the baby was returned to the family. Better this imho than leaving the baby potentially at risk while those investigations were carried out.

As to whether it was reasonable to take the older children into care which for me is the reason why the baby has been, I can't possibly comment as I know nothing about this case but the weight of the children as stated in various posts in this thread are shocking

It has been said by Dundee Social Services that they would not remove a child purely because of obesity, and I have also read an interview with the parents of these children who stated that obesity was not the only issue here.