Afterborn: Removing Infants From Mothers Without Adequate Cause
Afterborn: Removing Infants From Mothers Without Adequate Cause.
What is it and why is it harmful? By Fiona Donovan.
What is afterborn?
Afterborn is the practice of removing the child newly born to a parent who already has another child involved in the foster care system.
This practice is based on the assumption that a parent who mistreats one child is more likely to mistreat another child in care.
Negative Impact on Mothers.
Mothers who have their children removed from their care are forced to deal with the mental and physical effects of having their newborn baby, a child they have been growing and caring for, ripped away from them quickly after birth.
Mothers are unable to see their infants other than to breastfeed and are stripped of their ability to bond with their babies.
Negative Impacts on Infants
The ability of an infant to bond with their mother at the beginning stages of their life is crucial.
Even short-term removals can have disastrous consequences, creating long term psychological harm, negatively impacting their attachment styles, and subjecting them to increased levels of fear and stress hormones.
What is ACS?
ACS is the Administration for Children’s Services in New York City. ACS is responsible for bringing child welfare cases against parents.
What Happens When ACS Removes a Child?
When ACS removes a child, they require the parent to fulfill a “service plan.” This is a series of requirements they must complete in order to have their child returned to their care.
These service plans can include supervised visitation, parenting domestic violence, and anger management classes, finding new housing and more.
Afterborn is not mentioned in any law.
The practice of afterborn is not explicitly mentioned anywhere in the Family Court Act, which is the law governing child removal and neglect and abuse proceedings.
This practice should be stated within the statute to require judges to meet a higher burden before removing infants.
Mothers want to hide their pregnancies from ACS out of fear of afterborn.
But eventually most pregnancies become impossible to hide. Mothers are left in a near impossible situation. Mothers can either fulfill their ACS service plan and reveal their pregnancy, stripping their reproductive autonomy, privacy, and risking afterborn. Or they can hide their pregnancy, by not complying with ACS, and risk their child who is in ACS care.
ACS also disproportionately targets low-income families of color.
A 2020 internal audit done by ACS described, the city agency as a system that “actively destabilizes Black and Brown families and makes them feel unsafe.”
The report also found that ACS “penalizes poor parents for their struggle to provide food, housing, and resources for their children without offering pathways toward economic stability.”
Proposed Solutions.
1. Explicitly regulate the practice of afterborn or derivative neglect in the Family Court Act.
2. Require independent proof of neglect so healthy babies are not removed from mothers care.
3. Require the risk of harm to be substantial and imminent before removal.
4. Require any or pending previous neglect proceeding with an older child to have been within the past 12 months.
Sources:
Slide 2: https://www.nyc.gov/site/acs/about/parenthandbook.page
Slide 3 & 4: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0149763417302749#:~:text=First%20postnatal%20hours%20may%20be,may%20induce%20harmful%20epigenetic%20changes. https://www.psychologicalscience.org/publications/observer/obsonline/how-mother-child-separation-causes-neurobiological-vulnerability-into-adulthood.html
Slide 5: https://www.nyc.gov/site/acs/about/about.page
Slide 6: https://yourfamilyyourrights.org/assets/files/BDS_YFYR _CUPBrouchure.pdf
Sources:
Slide 7: https://www.nysenate.gov/legislation/laws/FCT/A10
Slide 9: https://www.nyclu.org/press-release/new-report-details-nyc-children-services-agency-discrimination-against-black-and#:~:text=In%20a%202020%20internal%20racial,their%20struggle%20to%20provide%20food%2C