A Florida mom is facing criminal charges after refusing to feed her newborn baby a physican prescribed formula. The baby lost ten percent of his body weight and had become dehydrated. Sarah Markham is a vegan and chose instead to supplement her breastmilk with a vegan soy formula. The doctor also insisted that Markham bring her son to the hospital for treatment, which she chose not to do. She apparently was waiting to see whether the soy formula helped, before bringing the baby to the hospital. The baby was removed from her custody when he was just two weeks old. But was that the right choice?
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I'm gonna go with a big fat "NO" on that one. When I first read this story there was no mention of the baby's age at the time he was removed from his mother's home and charges were filed and I assumed that the weight loss issue must have been going on for some time. And I was alll, "Yeah, lock her up." But seriously? A newborn? This honestly could have happened to me. Four days after his birth, my son had lost more than ten percent of his body weight and become dehydrated as well. It's totally normal for babies to lose weight in the week following their birth. Ten percent is an arbitrary number that has been set as a benchmark for concern among the medical community, but it's not the end-all be-all.
My son was fine the entire three days we were in the hospital, but it just so happened that my breastmilk took a little longer to come in and he was still only getting colostrum by the time we visited his pediatrician on day four. Because he had lost just a bit too much weight and appeared dehydrated, the pediatrician told us to supplement with formula for a few days and to return to the office for a another weight check at that point. No big deal. Again, there were no red flags while we were in the hospital–no mention of concern, so there was absolutely no way we could have prevented this. My milk ended up coming in the very next day and between the breastmilk and supplemental formula he had consumed in a single weekend, he had surpassed his birth weight by the time he was a week old–something that many babies don't do until they are about a month old.
Scenarios like this ensue with many, many newborns. Both the mother and the baby need time to settle in, to adjust and to learn what feeding methods are going to work best for their family–two weeks is just way too short of a time to determine that someone is an unfit mother because of how she is feeding her baby. A mother who fails to feed her baby at regular and frequent intervals or even at all, is a mother who is neglecting her baby, not a mother who is feeding a baby often and well and just needs some time for him to be able to put initial weight loss back on. She was feeding him a perfectly safe and adequate formula along with breastmilk–he was not going to starve.
It seems to me that Markham just needed a few more days and maybe a little help to figure out how to change her diet so that her milk was more nutritious for the baby. Had she been given that opportunity before the baby was so prematurely removed from her care, I'm certain the baby would have been just fine. In fact, the baby has been in the custody of Markham's parents since June and they have fed him the very same soy formula that Markham purchased initially all of this time, and he is no longer underweight.
Again, I might be inclined to side with the doctor if the baby had been consistently losing weight for months and was living in a chronic state of dehydration or if it had became clear that Markham was making no reasonable efforts to help her child gain weight, but man he didn't even give this family a chance!
Thankfully, Markham went before a judge earlier this week, and was granted custody of her little boy with the condition that she meet with a nutritionist. She still faces criminal charges, but I'm hopeful that once the state sees that the child is thriving and loved, they will drop the case. What a horrifying ordeal to go through as a new mom…
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