What does happen to the child? The child usually is placed in foster care before they are placed in a permanent setting. In a certain percentage of the cases, the abuse continues in foster care and to a lesser extent in an adoptive home. People, who want to build their own self-esteem by abusing children, do place themselves in a position to have access to children. Occasionally, the child comes to the attention of someone like me. They may be in a foster home, adoptive home or with other family, often grandparents, but they are with someone who actively seeks to build a healing environment for the child.
My youngest foster daughter entered the system when the state terminated her parents’ rights. She was one of those children you read about in the paper. Her abuse started before she was born. Her mother drank while pregnant.
In defense of the mother, she didn’t know alcohol would cause brain damage, and she had no concept that half a pint of vodka a day was excessive drinking. Nobody told her drinking was a problem until she was four months pregnant then she did cut way back. Still my daughter has brain damage from alcohol, beatings, near downing and malnutrition.
I did try to build a healing environment for her. I found clinical psychologists to work with her. I advocated for special supports for her at school and finally homeschooled her for nine years. She had vision therapy, art therapy, music therapy, physical therapy, drama therapy, speech therapy and anything else I could think of to try. She had a horse, music lessons, dance lessons, and a therapy dog. Did all this help? Some.
The reality is that kids who have suffered the abuse you read about never recover. My foster daughter bumps along okay. She is angry most of the time. She lives alone, unable to tolerate the activity of other people around her. She gave up keeping a pet because she couldn’t meet the needs of a dog. She tried working, but is very vulnerable to manipulative abusive people and ended up seriously injured.
So who paid for all my daughter’s therapies? Hubby and I put a little over a million into her rehab and Medicaid paid in about five hundred thousand.
Medicaid still pays her medical bills. A person with my daughter’s background will have a compromised immune system, digestive problems, lung damage and heart damage. The early prenatal alcohol exposure deformed her bones so her joints don’t work correctly. She’s in pain much of the time. Medicaid pays for her frequent doctor visits and medications.
So we now have fifty percent of our population jumping up and down in glee over cutting off this person’s medical care. What will happen?
Sadly, people like my daughter will have the last laugh. If she doesn’t have medical care and access to the medications that keep the germs under control, she will probably die before she is fifty, and without that control, she becomes a wonderful host for all sorts of diseases, and she doesn’t realize that if she has hepatitis she should not go out in public. This is how epidemics spread. Vulnerable people get the disease first then carry it around in public where more vulnerable people get sick and carry the disease to those around them. This is why we read about epidemics in third world countries.
People like my daughter need health care so they don’t become disease vectors. It is called a public health issue. While it may make people feel good to be superior to those with histories like my daughter, it really is not in their best interest to create a class of people that form a breeding ground for epidemics. Epidemics have a way of reaching into even the homes of the elite and taking their beloved children or grandchildren.