DC Lawyer’s Remark About Wanting a Girl Spurs Parental Fitness Probe
A Washington, D.C., lawyer remarked to her doctor soon after the birth of her son that she had been hoping for a girl.
Karen Piper, a lawyer with the U.S. Department of the Interior, would soon regret the words, columnist Marc Fisher writes for the Washington Post. Piper was not allowed to bring her son, Luke, home, supposedly because she had failed to bond with the boy.
“Like too many parents before her, Piper had fallen into the rigid, overlawyered maw of a child protection system that substitutes mandatory reporting for the judgment and human sensitivity medical professionals should exercise,” Fisher writes.
For three days, Piper, a single mother, had to contend with lawyers, investigators and hospital workers. One social worker wanted to know the details of Luke’s conception. A psychiatric intern wanted Piper to spell “world” backward.
After the probe, Piper was allowed to keep her child. Child welfare officials said they got involved after hospital officials reported concern. But Piper’s lawyer, Joel Anders, told the Post that hospital medication was part of the problem.
“To accuse Mom of neglect as a result of her not spending adequate time with the child in the hospital is just extraordinary, especially since Ms. Piper was postoperative and highly medicated,” Anders said.
