Self-proclaimed liberal Elizabeth Bartholet wanted to force every pregnant woman to admit a spy into her living room from pregnancy until the child was preschool age.
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Last month I wrote a post about how what was once the Next Big Thing in “child welfare” – “predictive analytics” increasingly is being seen for what it really is: an Orwellian nightmare of computerized racial profiling that bears an uncanny resemblance to some of the worst aspects of Project 2025 – the right-wing vision for a second Trump presidency.
I included this
video from The Lincoln Project dramatizing what one aspect of Project 2025,
omnipresent surveillance of pregnant women, really would mean:
I noted that unlike Project 2025, using predictive analytics once was embraced by many on the left. It was the subject of gushy stories in mainstream media – even though one of the designers of one of the most prominent algorithms actually said “Yes, it’s Big Brother…”
But while preparing
my recent presentation for the Kempe Center’s virtual conference,
I was reminded that there was an old-fashioned analog scheme for mass
surveillance that was even worse. It,
too, was embraced by many on the Left at the time. In fact, the creator of this
scheme never tires of beginning her presentations by reminding everyone that,
at least in her own eyes, she’s a liberal.
The scheme comes
from Harvard Law School Professor-Emeritus Elizabeth Bartholet. She long has been one of America’s most extreme
devotees of taking away children. For
decades she led what should be called child welfare’s “caucus of denial” – that
group which insists practitioners of “child welfare” somehow are so much better
than everyone else that they have created the one and only field in American
life magically immune from racism.
Nothing in my
description of Bartholet’s scheme that follows constitutes inference on my
part. It is all laid out in depressing
detail in her 1999 book Nobody’s Children – see especially pages 164 to
171. It is a plan so extreme it
would make the authors of Project 2025 blush:
She called for a
spy in every living room.
The plan is a
bizarre extrapolation from something that has gained wide favor among advocates
for traditional child abuse “prevention” – home visiting. The idea is that a professional (in the most
promising of these programs, a nurse) would offer to come to the home of
pregnant women and new parents, perhaps once a week, to offer advice, support
and, at its best, concrete help.
The key words there
are support and offer. The
purpose of the visits is help – though anyone choosing to let them in would
have to consider the fact that the visitors probably would be mandatory
reporters of “child abuse.” (This is a
classic example of how mandatory reporting backfires.)
But the visits
would be strictly voluntary. Parents
would be free to just say no.
When these programs
first were proposed the only real opposition came from some on the extreme
right. They charged that the plan was
really just a subterfuge by liberals to put an agent from Big Government into
every American home. It was easy to dismiss that as a paranoid delusion – until
Elizabeth Bartholet, (who wants to be sure you know she’s a liberal) came along
and proposed almost exactly that.
She called for a
home visiting program that would be mandatory, not voluntary. The starting line would be even earlier than
predictive analytics algorithms. As with Project 2025, the spying would begin
with pregnancy. (Bartholet doesn’t say
if women would have to self-report their pregnancies or if their doctors or
maybe their neighbors would turn them in.)
But however it
would be done, once your pregnancy became known, government agents (presumably
from private “helping” agencies, but contracted by government) would be sent
into your home and every other such home in America - from pregnancy until your
child was old enough for preschool (at which point, presumably, teachers could
take over the spying).
Under Bartholet’s
plan, the visitors can demand entry at any time, and you must let them in. Yes,
they’ll try to help. But their primary
job is to conduct – this is Bartholet’s term - “surveillance” of your pregnancy,
your child-rearing practices and environment. If they believe any of those
practices, or anything else, endangers your child’s “well-being” they must turn
you in to the family police who can -- and Bartholet maintains, should -- whisk
away your children and set in motion the process for taking them away forever.
That
brings us to Bartholet’s definition of “well-being.”
Bartholet
says having those spies in the living room watch out only for things that
threaten children’s health or safety is not enough. She said the system should
be willing to remove children “even if physical safety is not an issue,”
[p.204, emphasis in original]. Indeed, Bartholet says, the so-called Adoption and Safe Families Act,
which blew huge holes in earlier federal law theoretically requiring
“reasonable efforts” to keep families together, should have gone further. ASFA should have declared reasonable efforts
null and void whenever they might jeopardize a child’s “well-being.” [p.27].
Bartholet
said this is essential because, in large numbers of neglect cases, a child’s
physical safety really isn’t in danger.
And
we should stop right there for a moment.
Bartholet and her disciples, then and now, invoke the worst horror
stories to justify the massive over-policing of families and over-removal of
children. But in her own book, Bartholet
effectively admits she knows better.
In
large numbers of “neglect” cases, she admits, children are not in danger at all
– except materially. One needs a
“well-being” standard only if the real target is any case in which a parent’s
poverty is preventing a child from having all the same opportunities rich
children
have. In short, you need a spy in every living room to police “well-being” only
if the goal is to accomplish a massive reallocation of children from the poor
to the rich.
Repeatedly
in her book, Bartholet equates “well-being” with “well-off.” She indicates her
strong preference for adoption by strangers is based in part on the fact that
prospective adoptive parents “are generally relatively privileged in
socioeconomic terms … and live in neighborhoods with better schools and
community facilities, which are relatively free from drugs, crime and violence”
[p.89]. She complains about kinship foster care in part because relatives “live
on the economic margins” [p.157].
She
quotes with approval a researcher who says entire poor communities often are
“almost unsalvageable” and the system should look for placements that provide
“physical … and environmental advantages … even if they require some
discontinuities to achieve them”[p.185].
Fortunately,
both on the Left and the Right, people are catching on to the enormous harm of
child surveillance and child confiscation schemes, whether it was former House
Speaker Newt Gingrich’s proposal to shovel poor people’s children into
orphanages or Bartholet’s spy-in-every-living room scheme.
But still, there are too many of my fellow liberals who forget everything they claim to believe about civil rights and civil liberties as soon as someone whispers the words “child abuse” in their ears.