THINK OF THE CHILDREN

"I kissed the baby bye-bye, but my wife couldn’t because she was so upset.’"

How many pounds are there in a stone? I know, what stone and are we talking British currency here? The English use "stones" to measure weight in people for reasons of tradition and likely inertia. The rest of the system tends to be metric, but this one hangs on for some reason. To answer, its 14 (or about 6 kg).

The reason I ask is this little quote from a recent news story in the Daily Mail:

Before she became pregnant, the mother, 40, who cannot be named for legal reasons, weighed 23st.

At that time one of her children, a toddler, weighed 4st, her 13-year-old son weighed 16st and an 11-year-old weighing 12st.

So that ends up 322 pounds for the mother, 56 pounds for the toddler, 224 pounds for the 13 eyar old, and 168 pounds for the 11 year old. So what does this family look like?


Actually they're overweight, but not as corpulent as you'd expect from those numbers. Some people carry weight better than others, and if their build is large enough it can look less noticeable than you'd expect. The younger kids especially don't look all that fat, at least from the back.

But they were so fat and such a problem that the British government decided to step in. In March of 2008, social workers told the family that they had to lose weight, and if the younger kids didn't slim down, then they would have to "intervene." In September of that year, the city government took the oldest children away and put them under government minders: three specialists paid about $190,000 a year to get them slimmed down.

When the mother gave birth via C-Section last week, the Social Services folks swept in and took the baby away. The family has been trying, unsuccessfully, to recover their children from the government for over a year and now just had their newborn baby taken away.

Here's how the Daily Mail explains it:

The family first came to the attention of social services in March 2008 when they asked for help in caring for the children, including the three-year-old girl, who has developmental problems.

But social workers who visited the family were shocked at the size of them - including a 21-month-old boy, who they claimed was overweight at 1st 12lb.

The council then took the radical step of threatening the mother and her husband that, unless all the children lost weight, they would be removed from the family home.

They were also ordered to send their children to dancing and football lessons to help them lose weight.

The family say they were also warned that their six children would be take into care if they failed to lose weight.

Is there more to the story? I expect so, the Mail is nothing if not reactionary and sensationalistic, but the city council isn't being very helpful:

A council spokesman said: ‘We will not comment in detail on any family with whom we are involved, but we have made it clear on numerous occasions that children would not be removed from a family environment just because of a weight issue.’

He added: ‘Any decision about a child’s situation is given full and careful consideration.

'It is never taken lightly and always at the forefront is what is the best course of action for the welfare and safety of the child.

‘The decision to remove children from any parent’s care on a compulsory basis is not made by councils but by the children’s hearing system.’

Basically, the UK government's bureaucracy is set up in such a way that the "Children's Panel" has so much power they can take children when they wish and do so based upon absurd categories such as "your baby might get fat." Well, in a nation where the cost of health care is skyrocketing and the quality is plummeting, I guess from the government's perspective this kind of thing is a reasonable cost cutting exercise for the benefit of the collective.

Think about that a moment. The reason they think this is reasonable is because the government is paying for health care out of everyone's exorbitant taxes. Because overweight people are deemed to be a greater burden on the health care system, the government thinks it is perfectly reasonable to step in and seize children from families to slim them down. After all, that cost is passed on to everyone, and it is the government's responsibility to care for everyone's health. Think of the children.

Whether these kids are this way because they are eating a lousy diet or because they are genetically predisposed to storing fat (or have some kind of medical condition) is really beside the point. The point is that the UK continues to be a screaming warning sign of how socialism and well meaning tyranny actually works out.

Where are kids better off: under grossly overpaid "specialists" in the government clinic, or with their parents who may not feed them the ideal diet? Given that a lot of recent research suggests that carrying extra weight isn't as dangerous or health-destroying as previously thought, this seems like a pretty easy question to answer.

Yet when the government has more power and more responsibility over your life, this becomes a more difficult question to answer, for detached bureaucrats, at least. The more power you give the government to do what you think you want or need, the more power it has to take away from you what it thinks it needs. That line has to be drawn pretty carefully, and Britain has sailed so far over that line its past the horizon.

How did they get there? Inch by inch, incremental changes and a people who didn't fight it, or even thought they wanted each of these changes. A people who surrendered their personal responsibility so much the father just kissed his baby goodbye when the government showed up to take it. Just how heartless a government drone do you have to be to take a baby out of its mother's arms just after birth?

But by all means, lets have government run insurance here, too. After all, it works so well in other nations.