The Blood of Babies

I heard about this while listening to Glenn Beck on the radio. It sounded a little out there so I decided to do a little investigation of my own.

The story on the radio was about a nurse in Minnesota filing a lawsuit against the collecting and saving of the blood taken from infants that is used to test for diseases. Minnesota along with all other forty-nine states have mandatory blood testing for infants born in the state. The blood is tested for certain diseases that can be caught early and prevent some of the complications that otherwise would go unnoticed until it was too late. Minnesota law reads that the blood samples are to be destroyed after testing for these diseases.

That doesn’t sound too far out of line. Many states may exceptions for religious reasons. Yes, some people don’t believe in giving blood or receiving transfusions. That’s a whole nother blog.

SIDE BAR ISSUE: In the state of Nebraska, they don’t make exceptions for religious reasons. One couple who stood against the tests for religious reasons felt the wrath of the government. They had birthed their child at home using a midwife. The child was doing fine. The parents went down to get a birth certificate and the problems began. While going through the court process, one brave judge felt he was above the law and ordered the police to enter their house and take the infant away by force. The mother who was nursing had the child taken away before she could finish feeding it. The police ignored the infants cried for food and his mother, the cries of the other children and the sobs of the mother begging to at least let her finish feeding her baby. The mother wasn’t allowed to pump her milk to be given to the infant.

The parents took the police, child protection and the judge to court. They sued for violation of their constitution right as parents. In the end, they won the case but little or nothing happened to the people in authority that abused their power by tramping over the parent’s rights.
The original story is about the hospitals in Minnesota performing the blood tests that are required by law and then not destroying the samples. A lawsuit was brought and the presiding judge ruled that the blood samples had to be destroyed. The defendants say that they weren’t going to destroy them and then appeal the judge’s order. It turns out that the court of appeals judge also ruled that they blood samples had to be destroyed. Once again the defendant refused to destroy the samples. They are currently trying to get a law passed preventing them from being destroyed. The defendants have been violation the state law for the past ten years.

http://www.texascivilrightsproject.org/?p=1096

Once on the net I discover another similar case going on in Texas. They are "claiming they have unlawfully and deceptively collected blood samples from their children at time of birth and stored those samples indefinitely for undisclosed research purposes, without plaintiffs’ knowledge or consent."

Why the big fuss over a few drops of blood taken because of a mandatory law? "The suit also claims that the agencies violate standard, mandatory medical research protocols of obtaining informed consent from subjects before they are studied, using a method that clearly explains to them all the privacy ramifications."

Are these crazies who want to stop testing infants? "The Plaintiffs do not object to the state’s mandated newborn screening program so long as safeguards are in place to destroy an infant’s samples within a reasonable period."

The government, "They claim they are doing some kind of ‘research,’ but to do research you don’t need to have the blood and genetic material from everyone in society. This raises the specter of a DNA data bank, which can too easily be matched with other personal information the government collects, such as social security numbers and fingerprints."

What would be the purpose of a DNA Data bank?

What are the opportunities of abuse?