State demands child take cancer-causing drugs

Goes to court insisting that boy endure dangerous course of medication

By Bob Urich

In what is being seen as a preview of a fully implemented Obamacare, government officials in Michigan are demanding that a 9-year-old child follow standard procedure and take a dangerous course of cancer medications that can cause additional cancer – even though the boy has had three scans indicating an absence of the disease.

The case is being fought on behalf of Ken and Erin Stieler and their son Jacob by attorneys with the Home School Legal Defense Association.

The organization concerns itself with home school rights, responsibilities and restrictions but also intercedes in cases that could have a significant impact on child and parental rights.

The HSLDA’s chairman, Michael P. Farris, confirmed today that the Michigan Department of Human Services has filed suit to force the parents to administer the chemicals to their son even though he’s been clean of cancer on scans over the past year. In addition, lower courts twice have ruled against the demands of state agency officials.

Now the state agency has filed an appeal with the Michigan Court of Appeals demanding Jacob be given the chemicals, including ifosfamide, etoposide and doxorubicin, even though the U.S. Food and Drug Administration states that for ifosfamide and etoposide, the “safety and effectiveness in pediatric patients have not been established.”

The warning for doxorubicin is stronger, stating, “Pediatric patients are at increased risk for developing delayed cardiotoxicity.”

Farris told WND that the facts of the case are important, because Jacob underwent treatment for cancer and has been clean on the last three scans over the last year.

Further, the treatment demanded by the state, which insisted that prosecutors bring a medical neglect case against the parents, is not guaranteed to help and not even guaranteed to be safe.

On the HSLDA website, Farris wrote, “If they succeed they will force Jacob to resume chemotherapy despite the fact that the drugs in question are not FDA approved (either for children in general or for this particular cancer). Moreover, these drugs do not promise anything close to a guaranteed cure. And, the FDA requires the drug manufacturers to disclose that these drugs cause new cancers to form, heart disease in children, failure to sexually mature, and many other serious side effects in some cases.”

Farris told WND that there is concern about the outcome of the case, as the state’s argument is that the drugs are demanded in the “national standard of care” for the condition.

That’s the same type of concern that has been raised by many organizations and individuals about Obamacare, which is to face arguments before the U.S. Supreme Court later this month.

Farris told WND that parents have the right to make such medical decisions, not the state.

David Ackerly, director of marketing for the Michigan Department of Human Services, took a message from WND requesting comment on the case but did not respond.

Farris said it would be different if there was a clear and present medical danger, the treatment was proven and the family still refused.

He said the parents have asked for an individual evaluation of their son’s case, only to be reminded about the “standard” that the state intends to follow, which is described as dangerous.

“If we are put in a position where national standards are established, whether by practice or the government, it comes out the same,” he said.

It was in December when a trial judge dismissed a medical neglect case against the family. Now, at issue is “the ability of parents to make medical decisions contrary to the views of doctors.”

“This case may well shape parental rights principles for the long haul. We believe that parents, not doctors, should make tough decisions like this,” Farris said.

The HSLDA earlier reported how Jacob was diagnosed with Ewing Sarcoma, a dangerous bone cancer, and he had surgery to remove a tumor and then chemotherapy to follow up.

“The treatment was incredibly difficult, and Jacob’s mom, Erin, told me that when she looked her son in the eyes, she knew in her heart that he simply could not survive many more rounds of these drugs,” Farris reported.

They tapped into a prayer network and were joined by hundreds to pray for their son’s recovery.

“After all of these rounds of chemotherapy were completed, there was a PET scan done to check on the status of the cancer. There was no evidence of cancer detected in Jacob’s body. Jacob’s family and friends rejoiced in his healing – praising God for this wonderful outcome,” Farris said.

But he said the doctors demanded to continue chemotherapy and radiation, citing their “standard of care.”

Jacob’s parents “begged the doctors to make an individual diagnosis, rather than simply following unbending standards. But the doctors were steadfast. All children with this cancer needed multiple rounds of these drugs – regardless of PET scan results, the doctors contended,” HSLDA reported.

The parents refused, and the doctors contacted Child Protective Services to ask that the parents be charged.

When the local CPS agency and prosecuting attorney refused, the doctors called the state to pressure the agency to file charges.

Farris said key to the case, which was decided in favor of the family before being appealed, is the treating physician.

“‘Have all of these drugs been approved by the FDA as safe and effective for children?’ I asked Jacob’s treating oncologist,” he said. “‘Yes,’ she replied, they have been FDA-approved for children.”

However, according to the official package inserts mandated by the government to describe the drugs contained and their complications, she was “flat wrong,” Farris said.

“In fact, as it turned out, the treating doctor had never even seen, much less read, these official FDA-required package inserts,” he reported.

A warning accompanying another drug demanded by the doctors, vincristine, was typical of those in the case, he said.

That warning said, “Patients who received chemotherapy with vinchristine sulfate in combination with anticancer drugs known to be carcinogenic have developed second malignancies.”

“This is not an easy case. It is not a case where a child has a current illness and the treatment is tested and proven to be safe and effective – those cases are easily resolved. The best evidence is that Jacob no longer has objective evidence of cancer. And not a single drug that the doctors want to give Jacob is FDA-approved for children for his kind of cancer,” Farris said.

He said it is a judgment call, a balancing of risks, and the issue is who makes that decision.

“The doctor told me during the deposition that she thinks that she should make the call – for every child in this situation. And she would give the same answer every time, rather than making an individual judgment,” Farris wrote. “I can’t imagine a more clear case of the need for parental rights.”

He said the project is being supported by the organization’s Homeschool Freedom Fund.

Source http://www.wnd.com/2012/03/state-demands-child-take-cancer-causing-drugs/

Court: Aunts have no visitation rights with nieces - Minnesota

by Bob Collins

Sorry, aunts. You don't have any right to visit your nieces and nephews, the Minnesota Supreme Court ruled this week in the case of a woman who wanted visitation rights with the daughter of her now-deceased twin sister.

The court ruled on the appeal of Kelli Rohmiller. After her sister and her boyfriend, Andrew Hart (the girl's father) split up, the girl and her mother lived with Rohmiller for five weeks. But when Ms. Rohmiller's sister died, Hart was awarded custody of the girl and cut Rohmiller off from visiting her niece.

A district court granted Rohmiller and her father unsupervised visitation with the girl, but the Court of Appeals reversed the ruling, saying Minnesota law does not grant a right to visitation to aunts.

In Minnesota, the law grants visitation rights to grandparents and great-grandparents as well as people with whom a child has lived for at least two years if the parent of a child is deceased. But Supreme Court Justice Lori Gildea said neither provision applies in this case.

"If the legislature wanted to include aunts as a class of individuals who could petition for visitation, it could have," she wrote.

Rohmiller said it would be "absurd" for the legislature to exclude step-parents, step-grandparents, step-siblings, cousins and "significant others" from visitation simply because they had not lived with a child for two years because "there is no magic relationship that is formed after two years."

The Supreme Court rejected the argument. "We have not found any reported Minnesota cases in which, over a fit custodial parent's objection, visitation was awarded to a non-parent who was not standing in loco parentis (ed. note: had parenting functions) with the child," Gildea said.

Since the father allowed the girl's grandfather to visit her, the Court said its decision this week would not prevent Rohmiller from being present when he does.

Here's the full opinion.

Source http://minnesota.publicradio.org/collections/special/columns/news_cut/archive/2012/03/court_aunts_have_no_visitation.shtml

Supreme Court Approached on ICWA Issue - Cherokee Nation

By Carol Berry

The Cherokee Nation and one of its members have asked the U.S. Supreme Court to decide issues raised by a ruling of the U.S. 10th Circuit Court of Appeals that disputed the right of tribes to define tribal membership in Indian Child Welfare Act (ICWA) cases.

Specifically, the high court will be asked to consider whether a federally recognized Indian tribe’s membership criteria determine whether a child is a “member” of that tribe for ICWA purposes.

Tribes may have the exclusive right to determine their membership for tribal purposes, but not if they seek to define membership in order to expand a federal (ICWA) statute, a three-judge panel of the 10th Circuit ruled last April.

The current petitioners charge that the federal appeals court erred in distinguishing between membership for tribal and federal statutory purposes, because “tribal membership is bound up in the tribe’s sovereign self-determination—as it is in ICWA, where the statutory focus on tribal membership is designed to ‘promote the safety and security of Indian tribes.’”

The issues arose when, in 2007, Britney Jane Little Dove Nielson, then 17, relinquished her parenting rights for her day-old son, C.D.K. and consented to his adoption, but later sought a District Court ruling to invalidate the relinquishment, citing ICWA safeguards against removing Indian children from their families. Nielson herself became a Cherokee tribal member within the next year.

The Cherokee Nation intervened on Nielson’s behalf, arguing that C.D.K. was an Indian child under ICWA because of a section of the Cherokee Nation Citizenship Act which provides that every newborn “who is a direct descendant of an original enrollee shall be automatically admitted as a citizen of the Cherokee Nation for a period of 240 days following the birth of the child.”

Nielson also argued that the termination was invalid because it violated an ICWA provision that imposes a 10-day period before a parent can consent to the termination of parenting rights over an Indian child, and the District Court agreed, tossing out the termination

A subsequent appeal to the 10th Circuit turned on “whether C.D.K. is an ‘Indian child’ within the meaning of ICWA,” the court said, noting that the ICWA definition of “Indian child” applies to an unmarried person under age 18 who is a tribal member and C.D.K. “was thus an Indian child at the time of the relinquishment hearing if, and only if, he was a member of the Cherokee Nation at that time.”

He was a member if the Citizenship Act applied to him at the time of the hearing as a direct descendant of an original enrollee, which the federal appeals court accepted, and if the Act could permissibly extend him citizenship in the ICWA context, a conclusion with which the court disagreed.

ICWA does not apply to the 240-day citizenship awarded by the Cherokee Nation Citizenship Act, the court said. “We find that Congress did not intend the ICWA to authorize this sort of gamesmanship on the part of a tribe—e.g., to authorize a temporary and nonjurisdictional citizenship upon a nonconsenting person in order to invoke ICWA protections.”

Petitioners to the Supreme Court disagree with the “gamesmanship” argument that “a child may not be a ‘member’ of a tribe for ICWA purposes even though he or she is a member for internal tribal purposes,” because the distinction would undermine fundamental purposes of tribal sovereignty.

In BIA guidelines for implementing ICWA, “the determination by a tribe that a child is or is not a member of that tribe…is conclusive,” state the current petitioners, who also charge that the federal appeals court has ignored congressional intent in ICWA “to preserve tribal sovereignty and safeguard Indian children.”

Source http://indiancountrytodaymedianetwork.com/2011/12/10/supreme-court-approached-on-icwa-issue-66774

Minnesota - High court: State, not tribe, must preside over adoption

Decision reverses two earlier orders favoring White Earth Band of Ojibwe. Parents' rights had been terminated.

Article by: ABBY SIMONS, Star Tribune

Updated: October 26, 2011 - 9:27 PM

Adoption proceedings for an Indian child whose parents' rights were terminated must take place within state courts, not tribal courts, the Minnesota Supreme Court ordered Wednesday.

In the 4-2 decision, the court reversed two earlier orders granting the White Earth Band of Ojibwe permission to handle the child's adoption within its tribal court.

In its order, the Supreme Court reasoned that under the Indian Child Welfare Act, tribal authority is limited to foster care placement and termination of parental rights -- not adoptive placement.

The child in question, identified in court documents as L.S., is an enrolled member of the White Earth Band of Ojibwe. The mother is white, and the couple's five older children have all been removed from parental care or have had their parental rights terminated. According to documents, neither parent lived on the White Earth Reservation.

After parental rights were terminated, a Fillmore County judge granted the White Earth Band of Ojibwe permission to transfer pre-adoption proceedings to its tribal court under the rules of the Indian Child Welfare Act. A guardian ad litem for the child objected, but the Court of Appeals upheld the ruling in favor of the tribe.

In its reversal, the Supreme Court said there is no language in the federal law granting tribes jurisdiction over adoptive placement proceedings for children not living on the reservation. Because the language in the law was ambiguous, the court reasoned that adoptive proceedings should be excluded, not included.

The court also reasoned that the White Earth tribal court also lacked jurisdiction over the termination of parental rights because the mother was not a member of the tribe and the child did not live on the reservation.

The case will now return to Fillmore County District Court, where a guardian ad litem will be re-appointed and pre-adoptive placement will take place under state jurisdiction.

In his dissent, Justice Paul H. Anderson wrote that there is no language in the law that prevents transfer of pre-adoptive and adoptive placement proceedings to a tribal court in cases involving Indian children who do not live on or are not from their tribe's reservation. In light of the law, which is meant to favor tribes, the omission should instead be interpreted as granting the tribe permission to preside over the child's adoption.

Source http://m.startribune.com/local/?id=132640213