When I went to college in Boston back in 1989-1993, I was fascinated by what I thought of as the Yankee Enlightenment — that is, the 19th century advancement of medicine in Boston by guys such as Oliver Wendell Holmes Sr. and William T.G. Morton.
In 1843, Holmes published his essay “The Contagiousness of Puerperal Fever.” Like Professor Ignaz Semmelweis in Vienna—who made the same observation around the same time (I am not sure if he read Holmes’s paper)—Dr. Holmes was initially ridiculed, but later vindicated, for his findings.
William T.G. Morton made history on October 16, 1846 at Massachusetts General Hospital when he successfully anesthetized a patient to undergo a surgery without feeling any pain.
I used to stop before the Ether Monument, erected in the Boston Public Garden in 1868, and marvel at how much pain and suffering had been spared by the development of anesthesiology.
I imagined that T. S. Eliot—as an undergraduate at Harvard in the years 1906-1914—had also visited the Ether Monument, which he might have been thinking about when he wrote “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” in 1911, with its vivid opening lines:
The Center for Gender Surgery (CfGS) at Boston Children’s Hospital (BCH) was the first pediatric center in the United States to offer gender-affirming chest surgeries for individuals over 15 years old and genital surgeries for those over 17 years of age. In the four years since its inception, CfGS has completed over 300 gender-affirming surgeries.
I found the paper’s second author—Elizabeth R. Boskey—to have an especially conspicuous profile.
Short Biography
Elizabeth Boskey (she/her). PhD, MPH, MSSW is currently the research lead for the Center for Gender Surgery. She received her PhD in Biophysics from Johns Hopkins University in 2000 and her MPH from Johns Hopkins School of Public Health in 2001. Dr. Boskey also holds a Masters of Science in Social Work from the University of Louisville (2015). Dr. Boskey is a licensed independent clinical social worker, an AASECT Certified Sexuality Educator, a Certified Health Education Specialist, and is WPATH GEI SOC 7 Certified. Her research interests are focused on ethical and access issues in transgender care as well as more general sexual and reproductive health issues for sexual and gender minority populations. She is currently a member of the World Professional Association of Transgender Health; American Public Health Association; and the American Association of Sexuality Educators, Counselors, and Therapists.
How does one get to be “the research lead for the Center for Gender Surgery” at one of the most prestigious Children’s Hospitals in the world?
Medical kidnapping of children may be far more prevalent than anyone has realized. When Health Impact News launched MedicalKidnap.com in October of 2014, we believed that these stories were only a small fraction of the larger group of Child Protective Services cases where children were taken away from their families.
As we got deeper into our investigation, we realized that the problem was much more widespread than we ever could have imagined. We now know that medical issues are involved in at least half to as many as 80% of all the cases involving the removal of children from their homes.
The late Georgia Senator Nancy Schaefer may well have been the first to use the term ‘kidnapping’ in the context of the State taking children from their families.
Senator Schaefer was a trail-blazer, speaking out for families who had been brutally ripped apart by the system at a time when there was very little public recognition of this threat to American families.
She championed the rights of parents, exposing deep corruption and problems within the system.
Pulling no punches, she referred to what she saw as “crimes against humanity for financial gain.”
She blasted the Clinton administration’s Adoption and Safe Families Act of 1997 (ASFA) as well as the earlier Child Abuse Prevention and Treatment Act of 1974 (CAPTA). She called for the abolition of federal and state financial incentives for taking children:
Those [tax] dollars have turned CPS into a business that takes children and separates families for money.
See this article, and listen to her powerful speech that she gave at the 5th World Congress of Families in Amsterdam in 2009:
Medical kidnapping has been defined as the State removing a family member from their home for medical kinds of reasons, such as parents asking for a second opinion or disagreeing with a doctor. It is a subset of the larger issue of “State-sponsored kidnapping,” where Child Protective Services seizes custody of children from their families.
Lou Pelletier used the word “kidnapping” in an interview with Beau Berman of Fox 61 News, telling him that “It was kidnapping” when Boston Children’s Hospital and Massachusetts CPS seized his 14 year old daughter Justina from her parents’ custody over a medical disagreement.
Mr. Pelletier defied an unconstitutional gag order in order to tell the public what was happening to his daughter, and their story made national news as concerned Americans watched in horror to see the tyrannical power of Boston Children’s Hospital and CPS.
It was through Justina’s story that we learned that children who are wards of the state – foster children – can legally be used in medical research projects and pharmaceutical drug studies without their parents’ knowledge or consent.
A doctor at Boston Children’s Hospital was conducting a study on somatoform disorder when Justina came into their emergency room. He disagreed with the diagnosis of mitochondrial disorder by her regular doctors at Tufts Medical Center, saying that Justina actually had the condition for which he needed another subject for his study.
Former U.S. Representative Michelle Bachmann sponsored “Justina’s Law” on Capital Hill in the attempt to thwart such unethical behavior by doctors. She told Fox 61 News:
We know that this is happening all over the country in all 50 states, that children who are designated wards of the state, are having medical research done on them that may not have any direct benefit whatsoever to the child and in Justina’s case she was made paralyzed by this medical research. (See link).
The bill went nowhere, and to this day, the practice of medical experimentation on foster children is still legally allowed to take place.
There Were Others
Before Justina’s story captured the (brief) attention of the mainstream media, medical kidnappings had been taking place all over the country for years, with the public remaining unaware of either the possibility of it happening or of the extent to which children were being medically kidnapped under our noses.
There were a few other stories that made headlines. Health Impact News covered these stories after local media reported them, including:
the Godboldo family of Detroit, where CPS sent a SWAT team in 2011 after a mother who refused to give her daughter dangerous psychotropic drugs. See story here.
the Nikolayev family in Sacramento, California, in 2013. The parents wanted a second opinion before allowing surgeons to perform heart surgery on their baby. When they took their baby out of the hospital, CPS sent police to their home to seize the baby. See story here.
Isaiah Rider, the Missouri teen who had surgery in Chicago. When doctors told them that there was nothing they could do for Isaiah’s pain and seizures, his mother wanted to take him to another hospital. CPS was called and Michelle Rider was kicked out of the hospital. See our extensive coverage of their story here.
Many parents tried to speak up, but their voices were silenced by the courts or ignored by mainstream media.
There were others who were afraid or ashamed to speak out about their stories. The seizure of children and adults by state agencies remained largely a secret, hidden in the shadows.
The Pelletiers opened the door to more news coverage of these stories, and MedicalKidnap.com was established as a division of Health Impact News near the end of 2014.
Medical Kidnapping Is Everywhere!
We started investigating stories that came to us. We didn’t know if there would be an occasional story to report or a steady stream. One thing is certain: none of us were prepared for the sheer volume of stories that continue to come our way every day.
We have reported many hundreds of stories since then. For every story we publish, there are always more that we cannot get to or who choose not to go public with their story.
It has been almost 4 years, and it hasn’t stopped. Hardly a day goes by that someone doesn’t contact us, including Christmas, Thanksgiving, and the 4th of July.
We quickly learned that some children simply have the misfortune of being diagnosed with the very condition that a doctor at that hospital wants to study for medical research. A child with a rare medical condition can literally be worth millions of dollars to a drug or medical research company. It is irrelevant what the parent has or has not done if the doctor or hospital wants the child badly enough.
I originally believed that “medical kidnapping” stories were a small subset of the much larger group of “State-sponsored kidnapping” cases. However, almost every story that came to us had some kind of medical element involved, whether it was a disagreement over a treatment plan, desire for a second opinion, a medical condition that mimics abuse, or the drugging of the children after they were placed into foster care.
The circle of cases that had some type of medical element kept growing wider, the more we investigated. Even so, the high percentage of children in the system who have been labeled as having medical issues surprised me.
Medical Issues Involved with MOST Children in the System
The percentage of children in foster care with medical issues are stunning. Far more children in the foster care system have medical problems than children who are not in the system.
According to Pediatrics, there are more than twice the number of foster children with significant health needs than children in the general population:
In a 2008 report to a House Subcommittee in Washington D.C., the American Academy of Pediatrics, represented by Dr. Laurel K. Leslie, stated that:
… nearly half of all children in foster care have chronic medical problems, about half of children ages 0-5 years in foster care have developmental delays, and up to 80% of all children in foster care have serious emotional problems. (See link).
The numbers reported in the 2011 Pediatrics Journal are similar:
The majority of children in the foster care system come from poor families, but poverty alone does not account for the high numbers. Even when children taken from their families are compared to children who are on Medicaid but not in foster care, there is a significant difference. Dr. Leslie writes:
Several decades of research has firmly established that the health care needs of children in out-of-home care far exceed those of other children living in poverty. (Source).
The U.S. Administration for Children and Families combines the number of foster children with physical health needs with the number of foster children with various kinds of developmental and psychological concerns to conclude that most of the children involved with the Child Welfare system have serious medical needs of some kind:
When behavioral, emotional, and developmental concerns are taken into consideration, the estimated proportion of foster children with serious health care needs jumps to over 80%. (Source).
Do Children Enter Foster Care with More Problems than Other Kids?
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