Source: mitchieville.blogspot.com
November 22, 2007
A mother-to-be, Fran Lyon, has fled her home after social workers threatened to take her baby minutes after the child will be born:
She insists that the mental health problems she had as a teenager - she started self-harming at 15 and has been treated at psychiatric hospitals for borderline personality disorder - are now behind her and there is no evidence she will harm her child.
Miss Lyon moved out of Hexham after receiving a copy of her "birth plan" from social services at Northumberland County Council.
It says she will be given a maximum of 15 minutes with her baby - who she has already named Molly - before she is taken into care.
She is now in the Birmingham Yardley constituency of Liberal Democrat MP John Hemming, who has taken up her case and is campaigning to overturn the decision.
The social workers in this case have said that they fear Ms. Lyon will develop *Munchausen's syndrome by proxy*. The authorities have even banned Ms. Lyon from breastfeeding over fears that she might poison her newborn baby.
There are a few things to take into account here. The first thing to remember is that the British gov't have introduced *adoption targets*, which, as the name implies, means that the gov't has strict targets of taking away babies from their natural mothers in order to give these kids to adoptive parents. That's hard to fathom.
Secondly, Ms. Lyon has done nothing wrong, she has committed no crime. Mental illness is not a crime, and what she did when she was 15 should have no bearing on how she raises her baby. Sure, at one point she suffered from mental illness, but according to British stats, so do 1 out of 10 teenagers and a full 1/3 of the population at some point in their lives. She seeked help, got it and mended.
Thirdly, telling a mother that you will be taking away her child minutes after the baby is born is nothing short of barbaric. The mother is even willing to let social services oversee how she raises her child, in a controlled setting none-the-less, but the message from social services is clear: If you have mental illness, they will steal your baby.
Finally, after hearing about this story, why would any woman (or man for that matter) with mental illness, ever seek help from social services?
I'm appalled and disgusted by this story. This is an assault on basic rights, and an assault on the mentally ill. The madness isn't in the head of this young lady, the madness resides in the head of a wonky government.
