It's infuriating how much of our world requires having an insider to find the right magic words for you, or for you to have the right amount of privilege to make bureaucracies cough it up themselves. https://twitter.com/ReporterTopher/status/1250402353993392130

Parents who lack that privilege accurately, if not precisely, understand that once they temporarily take your kids from you, you may never get them back. Severing the parental bond is the civil equivalent to the death penalty, and yet it can start just like this.

Its been a minute since I studied this, but a first approximation, parental rights (sidebar, they do not truly exist, but you will see they are important) create a domain of discretion that parents can wield over their children that government and neighbor cannot override.

For example, it is a Very Bad Idea to, say, raise your children to be racist shitheels, but parental rights mean that the police can't break down your door and snatch your kids away for doing it.

However, there are times when parental rights can be overridden. When the health and safety of children is threatened. Neglecting them to the point of nourishment and squalor, abusing them to the point of beatings, that sort of thing. Then the state temporarily removes the child.

The problem is, at some point of removal, at some point of staying with foster parents, at some point of state mandated separation, we change the question. Not "is this so bad we ignore parental rights" but "what are the best interests of the child?"

Reader, how often do you think it looks to a judge that staying with kindly, white, upper middle class, two-parent foster family looks like the best interests of the child?

What do you think the judge's family looks like?

It really can end up that the parent improves their situation to the point where the state would not have been able to remove the kids in the first place, but where because of the new standard and the time that the kids have spent away from home, they can't get them back.

This doesn't even account for when the initial removal was bullshit due to class prejudices. This doesn't even account for racist bullshit like the removal countless indigenous children to the point we had to make federal laws granting extraordinary rights to tribes.

I said up top parental rights don't really exist. They do, doctrinally, but that doctrine is wrong. A child has rights, held in trust by their parent, their next best friend in the whole world. That trust can be, will be broken. But you can't assume it will be.

Without the prophylaxis of parental rights, all parenting becomes at the mercy of an easily outraged majority. A comfortable one, who does't have to deal with difficulty, destitution or disease. One whose primary goal is not to end suffering, but their perception of suffering.

All this, starting from a hospital not remembering to let some kids stay in their mother's room while their dad died.