The Mothers Act – Urgent, Important Human Rights Alert

By FredrickHobbs

A disturbing piece of legislation is being sneaked into U.S. law that will have a detrimental effect on the civil liberties and constitutional rights of all Americans, particularly those starting a family.

A sweeping new policy for all births in the United States has just passed the House of Representatives and is now headed to the Senate.

The “Mother’s Act” will make it compulsory that all new mothers are screened by means of a list of subjective questions that will determine if each mother is mentally fit to take their newborn child home from the hospital.
Under this Act, after your child is born, you can be told that you can’t take them home because a multiple choice questionnaire wasn’t answered “correctly.”

You can be placed in the position that the only way you can take your child home with you is if you or your spouse goes into treatment or on anti-depressants. Anti- depressants can cause psychosis, delusions, and even homicidal or suicidal thoughts. This is a matter of very extensive documentation and the harm done by anti-depressants is currently the subject of a great deal of controversy, with human rights, health and consumer groups campaigning to bring the dangers to public attention.

Many people, for health, ethical, religious and other reasons reject drug taking and have turned instead to modern nutritional remedies for their mental well-being as well as prayer, meditation and so forth.

Modern advances in nutrition have tended to render the need to take dangerous pharmaceutical concoctions outmoded the way medical advance once did to leeches and witch’s brews. However, it appears that under this new law such people may not have a choice but to take drugs and suffer the consequences thereof, if they want to have their new-born child come home with them. The law may grant a psychiatrist the power to overide your own judgement or conscience in the matter.

The problem is, one cannot be absolutely certain of the exact consequences of this legislation as it is on a “fast track,” which means no public debate, no public disclosure of the broad impact of it upon our society and very little opportunity for watchdogs such as the Citizens Commission in Human Rights to warn the public of any dangers.

When a Bill is fast-tracked in this way, carefully avoiding public scrutiny, one can be forgiven for suspecting the motives and concluding the new law contains measures the public will not like. Otherwise, why fast-track it?

By the time the bill is law, of course, it will be too late. The American citizen will then have a hell of a job on his hands getting the bill OFF the statute books again so as to protect his freedoms.

Meanwhile, psychiatrists can decide on the basis of a subjective questionnaire whether you keep your baby or not. In so doing they will not have to produce ANY scientific evidence for their new questionnaire, nor for interpretation of your answers or the resultant diagnosis.

Human Rights groups such as the Citizens Commission on Human Rights (CCHR) argue that the documented record of psychiatry is so poor in terms of case failure and human rights abuses and the lack of true science behind its use of drugs, electric shock and other interventions, that basing such critical assessments in psychiatric hands is extremely dangerous.

The Melanie Blocker Stokes Mothers Act, to give it its full title, will of course make a great deal of money for the psycho-pharmaceutical industry because It will place mothers under pressure to take antidepressant and other dangerous psychiatric drugs. These drugs are documented by the U.S. FDA and many other professional bodies to cause birth defects, psychosis, mania, worsening depression, suicidal and homicidal ideation. From this writer’s experience in the drug rehabilitation field, psychiatric medications are WORSE in their effects upon the person than even street drugs.

The MOTHERS Act is a federal bill named after Melanie Stokes, a woman who suffered emotional difficulties after giving birth. Nutritionists will argue that the emotional effects experienced by some mums after giving birth can be handled with nutrition to correct nutritional deficiencies, plus rest and so forth. Melanie Stokes was not so lucky and was prescribed instead a cocktail of intensely controversial psychiatric drugs including anti-psychotic, anti-anxiety, and anti-depressant drugs, before being subjected to ECT treatment.

ECT (electro convulsive therapy) is an intervention whereby parts of the brain are intentionally damaged by electric shocks so as to “restore” a person, purportedly, to mental health. Psychiatry has used this highly controversial and hotly disputed method of electric shocks to the head for years without producing any evidence that it has any therapeutic value at all beyond what might be expected from giving someone a head injury.

Melanie Stokes was in the mental health system, was prescribed drugs, was hospitalized, was subjected to ECT and only AFTER receiving extensive mental health “treatment” did she commit suicide.

This case history is hardly a recommendation for psychiatric intervention. It is ironic therefore that Melanie’s name has been appended to a bill that proposes to expose many more mothers to similar interventions.

There is nothing in the Mothers Act that will guarantee mothers being “screened” for postpartum depression are granted the right of “informed consent.” This, per the legal definition, means they would be warned about all the risks of the proposed treatments and all the alternatives. Without that guarantee, this bill represents a clear and present danger to all mothers.

At the very least the public have right to have this bill fully and scrutinized and debated and its human rights and health implications thoroughly examined before it becomes law.

Please stand up for the rights of mothers and don’t let this bill sneak through: Vote NO on this lethal legislation.

The Mother’s Act violates your Constitutional right to privacy and your right to liberty. That is why CCHR and the cause of human rights needs YOUR help to stop this.

You can, for instance, call and email each Senator on the HELP Committee and tell them you STRONGLY OPPOSE the MOTHER’S ACT and that you are OUTRAGED that there was NO public debate or disclosure on the impact this would have on society as a whole.