There was three years between the child being taken to hospital and them suspecting abuse, and the child being adopted. For two years, and until last year, the couple had contact with the child. When the adoption was finalised last year, contact ceased.
It is a bit of an unusual case in that an infant bleeding from the mouth, with indications of a broken jaw, is going to be a rare representation and abuse did need to be ruled out. It seems it took a very long time for the blood condition to be diagnosed.
So how long do you keep young children in foster care, bearing in mind that the family court had decided that this was abuse, and three years has passed? For the foster parents, having a child who could be taken away at any point for three years would be very difficult.
I'm wondering if the foster parents would consider allowing access again, as the birth parents did have it until last year, but that's very different to the type of adoption that seems to have been agreed and I'm not sure who would win a legal challenge to that, probably the new adoptive parents.
The couple must be in so much pain that they lost their child, but there are so many children who die from abuse too, and somehow it needs to be balanced so that those who are being abused or at risk can be removed and resettled with a new family as quickly as possible, so they spend critical years with primary caregivers in a family environment, and so that adoptive families are more likely to be found. Is it fair to anyone to make that wait longer than three years?
I suppose it depends if the courts knew that the baby had a potential diagnosis which would challenge the abuse ruling, or if that came out of the blue after the adoption had gone through.