A mother loses her child because she is vegan. It really happened in the small town of Luaris, France, where a couple suspected of mistreatment, lost custody of their five-month-old baby, who weighed only five kilos.
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A mother loses her child because she is vegan. It really happened in the small town of Luaris, France, where a couple suspected of mistreatment, lost custody of their five-month-old baby, who weighed only five kilos.
Céline, Julien, her partner, and Joachim, their child, in fact, have no longer been a family since theand authorities accused the parents of imposing a vegan diet on the child, with “lack of care and deprivation of health-compromising care or food”. What beyond the Alps has been renamed “Joachim case”, it begins with a medical examination at the “Timone” hospital in Marseille, last May 17th.
Worried about not seeing the baby gain weight normally, Céline and Julien, she is vegan and he is an omnivore, visit their son. Doctors discover that the baby weighs only 4.950 kg, less than the average weight of a child his age. Social workers intervene on the spot, why? the child seems undernourished. And her mother is accused of imposing her diet, free of cruelty and animal derivatives, to the child, hindering their growth.
Even the choice of submit the child only to mandatory vaccines it does not at all convince the health professionals, who try to put pressure on parents to opt for an extensive vaccination. Result? The baby has been in a reception center in Avignon for four months. Today he weighs 7 kg and the parents they can visit him four times a week, for two hours. But she still suffers from chronic constipation issues, despite a diet rich in water, magnesium, prunes, and even glycerin suppositories.
“Doctors prefer to ignore this fact and they strive to look for hypothetical psychomotor problems with invasive tests extremely painful and mostly unwarranted, such as a muscle biopsy. Today, a seven-month-old baby is locked up in a daycare and his parents cannot visit him for more than eight hours a week. Imagine the shock of him after living with his family surrounded by love. Imagine he must feel lost, abandoned, devoid of any emotional sign ”, we read in the text of a petition launched by parents on Change.org.
La legal battle of Céline and Julien, meanwhile, it is in full swing: reject the court order and they claim that Joachim was fed normally and never had any diet whatsoever. “They said we didn't feed him, that we voluntarily malnourished him for three and a half months. And they also told me that my diet was a problem and that I belonged to a philosophical way of life, which required me to give the baby only a few milliliters of milk a day, "said Celine, who she fed her son with rice milk for infants purchased at the pharmacy.
Refusing to pass her veganism as a "sectarian drift," she and her partner appealed the decision. The trial has just begun at the Nimes Court of Appeal. "Mother's veganism is not allowed as an indictment, but it is tacitly considered an anomaly that necessarily involves deviant educational implications ", explains Emmanuel Ludot, the couple's lawyer. Also because the rice milk formula used by the mother would be indicated precisely for the feeding of infants, so much so that it is prescribed in cases of food intolerances of the little ones.
The parents, who, in order not to interfere with the judges' decision, have decided to close their blog, will know on November 14 if they can regain full custody of the child, only real victim of this witch hunt, of the fears and beliefs, sometimes unfounded, that still circulate today in the medical field on veganism. Is "justice" still willing to ignore common sense?
Roberta Ragni
