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May 15, 2008 6:28 am US/Eastern
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NYC Enacts Tougher Child Welfare Laws
NEW YORK (AP) ―
Child welfare authorities are allowed to remove newborns from homes if the parents had other children taken from their custody and the case is still open, under a new policy enacted by the city.
The policy was influenced in part by the death of Pablo Paez, an 11-week-old whose older sibling was taken from the same home a year earlier and placed in foster care, said John Mattingly, commissioner of children's services.
Pablo's mother, Kiana Paez, 23, was charged in April with second-degree murder in the beating death of the child. Child welfare workers had been in frequent contact with Paez since the first baby was placed in foster care because of violence in the home, but they did not try to remove Pablo.
Officials said Paez had been monitored since her first child was placed in foster care, and she was showing signs that she had become more responsible.
The child welfare policy includes a provision for "extraordinary instances," where the child may need to stay in the home, and removals are not automatic. When caseworkers learn of a pregnancy, they must have a safety conference with family members to evaluate the risk for the infant.
If the caseworker feels the baby should stay in the parent's home, a supervisor must sign off on the decision. Otherwise, the agency will start proceedings to take the child from the parents.
Mattingly said the policy shift had been in the works for a while and had been toughened in 2006. It was revised again April 21.
"When I got here three and a half years ago, the assumption was the child would stay in the home," Mattingly told the New York Times. "Most of us in the country have the view that if older siblings are in foster care, and the court has affirmed that they are at substantial risk of harm, it makes very little sense to make the opposite assumption about a 6-pound baby coming into the home."
It wasn't clear whether city officials had removed any babies from homes under the new policy. About 150 to 200 infants a year were born into families with children in foster care, officials said.
(© 2008 The Associated Press. All Rights Reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed.)
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