So much for motherhood.
Most of the 'Amber Alerts' around here are warnings that one parent is trying to take a child away from the other parent. This is obviously not an emergency situation, and it's usually a toss of the dice as to which parent would really be worse for the child. It's a cry-wolf waste of the Emergency Broadcast System, and trivializes (even skips!) the rare cases where a life is truly at stake.

When I wrote this about Amber Alerts last week, I was hearing the false 'emergency' tone on the TV for an alert involving Tina Carlsen. This case turns out to be more bizarre than trivial, and exposes a wild contradiction in our laws.

Carlsen was taking her toddler away from a hospital that wanted to give him dialysis treatment; she wants to provide 'alternative' treatment at home. Obviously I don't know any of the inside details; it could well be that the official treatment will undoubtedly save his life, and the 'alternative' will undoubtedly kill him. Statistically, though, the odds are not so strong. Hospitals make plenty of mistakes, and somewhere around 100K Americans are killed each year by medical errors. (Many of those deaths would be prevented by the simple step of bringing doctors into the 19th century if not the 21st: forcing them to type prescriptions.)

A piece of the story:

The state won custody of Riley [the kid] after Carlsen refused surgery. The court order currently prohibits Carlsen from seeing her son without special approval, but Carlsen says that fight is not over.

“He's my baby, I'm gonna fight until I die,” said Carlsen. “I'd rather sit in prison than not fight.”

Carlsen appears back in court next month to fight for custody.

Carlsen, 34, was released from King County Jail Thursday after pleading not guilty to kidnapping charges in King County Superior Court. Just hours earlier, a judge did away with her $500,000 bail, allowing her to go free on her own recognizance.

"It’s been a nightmare. From the day he was born, I've been fighting this. And it’s OK. It'll get good," she said.

In short, what we have here is a tigress of a mother - the type of mother every child deserves - whose theory of medical care differs from the official theory. Because her theory differs, she's being charged with endangerment and kidnapping.

If she had been the opposite kind of mother - an aborting kind of mother - the state would have encouraged her choice, and would have given her a special police escort into the abortuary if any Christians were seen in the vicinity.

Wildly contradictory on the basic level of life and death, good and evil. Not so contradictory on the level of practical politics, though. MDs and abortuaries have tremendous representation in legislatures; Congress contains almost as many MDs as lawyers lately. Motherhood has no lobby.

Full story here.
  ¶ 7:12 PM