Your child, who receives treatment for a condition diagnosed by doctors at Tufts University Medical Center, is transported to Boston Children’s Hospital to receive medical treatment. Instead of receiving the medical treatment your daughter needs, she is denied that medical care and YOU are accused of medical child abuse only because you are providing the care that the doctors who diagnosed her prescribed. The denial of medical care by Boston Children’s Hospital is because new doctors, ones who disagree with the medical doctors at Tufts University Medical Center, consider the symptoms as psychological and not physical. Your daughter is put in a locked psychiatric unit and not provided medical care. The State of Massachusetts takes “custody” of your daughter and allow the new doctors to keep you away from your child and to treat her as if she does not have the condition as diagnosed by doctors at Tufts. For over a year, you must fight in the legal system to regain custody of your child and to get her the medical care she needs (while her condition deteriorates)!
This was the somber reality Justina Pelletier and her parents faced in 2013 when she was just 14. Justina was rushed into the Boston Children’s Hospital after receiving treatment for mitochondrial disease at Tufts University Medical Center. At Boston’s Children’s Hospital, Justina’s new doctors determined that the girl’s health problems were manufactured due to psychiatric issues. When her parents refused to cooperate, the doctors claimed the parents’ behavior was indicative of medical abuse. The parents were barred from seeing their daughter who was then locked away for a year. The ordeal was severely traumatic for Justina and her parents who suffered not only emotional anguish, but financial hardship in their fight for custody, exhausting their savings and going bankrupt.
Now, 7 years later Justina and her parents are pursuing their claims against the hospital and individual doctors for violation of their rights. Among the claims: the hospital’s threat that, if her parents didn’t cooperate in accordance with the doctor’s new treatment plan, contrary to Justina’s regular doctors diagnosis and treatment plan, the hospital would call for the State to take custody and to bar the parents from even seeing their child, all in direct violation of their rights.
ParentsUSATM believes the US Supreme Court’s decisions on the rights of parents would provide that, so long as a parent is substantially complying with the diagnosis and treatment plan of a medical doctor licensed to practice medicine, the state (any state and any government agent) must accept the parent’s decision and the state should not be permitted to use any resources or apply any perceived authority to seek any other course of action for that child. If the state takes any action contrary to the decision of a parent to follow the diagnosis and treatment plan of an M.D., even if a different M.D. may disagrees, the state then violates the rights of the parents.
When you become a parent-member, you add your voice and your dues to that of other parents across the USA making ParentsUSATM more powerful and, thereby, more effective in protecting the parent-child relationship and the rights of parents.
Check out the rest of the article about the status of the Pelletier family’s battle and its history, here: