May 9, 2007
In the news today: Vegans sentenced for starving their baby.
A little sensationalism and bias, anyone? Why not, “Vegans kill babies, not animals” for the headline?
According to the article I read (by Greg Bluestein, Associated Press), an Atlanta, GA couple were sentenced to life in prison for starving their baby to death. The parents fed the boy “a diet largely consisting of soy milk and apple juice.” The baby weighed less than four pounds when he died on April 25, 2004.
Prosecutors accused the parents of neglecting the baby by not only starving him, but also by refusing to take him to the doctor after he became obviously ill. The defense stated that the parents did the best they could. The parents insisted they did not starve their son.
While this is a tragedy, the parents’ veganism is not the issue. I have no idea what a 6-week-old infant should eat. However, if meat is appropriate, and the parents made a conscious choice not to feed their baby meat … did they not notice the jars of fruits and vegetables in the baby food aisle at the grocery store?
Perhaps these parents were tragically unprepared to care for a child. And would have been unprepared regardless of their dietary and lifestyle choices.
Perhaps the child had a medical condition that manifests as starvation. Don’t the officials involved in this case watch House? House is a fictional TV show where things are usually not what they seem. The doctors analyze a patient’s symptoms and history, make a diagnosis, and then inevitably re-analyze after the patient gets worse. Sometimes they start with a simple, common diagnosis … and the patient ends up having a rare, obscure disease. Sometimes they start with a more exotic diagnosis … and the patient’s condition ends up being caused by something relatively simple.
Maybe these parents did intentionally starve their baby to death.
But maybe they didn’t.
Was a full autopsy performed in this case? The article doesn’t say. In 2005, a Miami couple was accused of killing their five-month-old daughter with a vegan diet, feeding her “only wheat grass, coconut water and almond milk.” Turns out, the baby’s low weight was actually due to an “almost nonexistent” thymus gland and she probably died of an infection. Oops.
By the way, the diets in these two cases are liquid diets. Why didn’t the headlines trumpet, “Parents starve baby with liquid diet” or “Liquid diet baby death”?
PS: I searched Google for the term “vegan baby death” and it returned over 1 million results—many cases in addition to the two above.