mother threatened with jail if she did not sign consent for child to be circumcised

This is horrendous!

A judge in Florida ordered that a mother would be jailed indefinitely until she agreed to sign a consent form for her child to be circumcised.
Already shackled in chains and feeling like she had no other choice, she signed the consent form in court while sobbing.

https://www.theguardian.com/society/2015/may/24/florida-woman-son-circumcision-freed-jail

The woman's name is Heather Hironimus. The child is 4 years old.

She had earlier been jailed for 9 days for refusing to come to court, because she knew once she was there the judge was going to force her to sign the consent form.

The judge also issued a gag order, ordering all parties not to talk to the media about the case.

 

So the state can force you to mutilate sexually your underage child ? That's quite dystopian. The judge and the father should be in jail, not the mother.

 

the judge is forcing his religion on this woman, he should be removed from the court

 

March 2015

A Florida mother has an arrest warrant out for her and remains in hiding with her 4-year-old son after refusing to appear in court last week to hand over the boy to be circumcised.

A lawyer for the woman, Heather Hironimus, said the boy is "scared to death of the procedure and doesn't want it."

"There have been no safeguards put in place to protect the child's psychological and emotional condition with regards to this surgery," the attorney, Thomas Hunker, told the SunSentinel last week.

The case has dragged on for more than a year and garnered national media attention, as the boy's estranged parents - neither of whom is Jewish - battle it out in court over whether he should be circumcised.

The boy's father, Dennis Nebus, testified last year that he thinks circumcision is "just the normal thing to do," according to the SunSentinel, which says Nebus claims his son has a condition called phimosis which prevents retraction of the foreskin and causes the boy to urinate on his leg. The mother refutes this.

She has appealed to other anti-circumcision activists, writing that she was pleading with them to "help me save my son, his foreskin, his rights and hopefully other children from allowing the 'system' to make these decisions," according to the New Times Broward-Palm Beach.

https://www.haaretz.com/jewish/.premium-boy-4-is-face-of-anti-circumcision-campaign-1.5340878




This was the picture from the GoFundMe site for the child who's name is Chase and was four and a half years old at the time.

The child was later diagnosed with leukemia.

 

What's interesting is that this case had nothing to do with medical or religious reasons.

What happened is that the mother initially agreed to give custody to the father, but later changed her mind when she found out the father was going to get the child circumcised. At that point, the judge basically said it was too late and she had already signed the agreement giving the father consent power over the child.

 

Yeah. The judge was not forcing a circumcision, he was enforcing a parental agreement that she had signed and recognizing her effort to abscond with the child and her failure to appear in court when summoned to explain why she refused to honor her own agreement.

https://www.theguardian.com/society/2015/may/24/florida-woman-son-circumcision-freed-jail

https://www.sun-sentinel.com/local/...sion-parents-court-ruling-20151224-story.html

 

I think it was the judges religious beliefs, not the parents

what this judge did was not reasonable in anyway

the judge also let off a bank robber if he agreed to spend a year at the Lords way and did not get into any trouble

 

Are you aware that IS a medical situation where circumcision is necessary? Google phimosis

 

even if it was, his forcing her to sign was wrong - was there a second and third opinion, she says the father is lying and the child does not have a problem peeing

but again, even if he did pee on himself because of this, forcing her to agree to the circumcision is wrong, they needed her permission to do it, it's not really her permission if she was forced at gunpoint to sign against her will, I read nothing about infections or anything else other than he peed on his leg by the father

https://www.healthline.com/health/mens-health/phimosis#treatment

"If there is no infection or other disease causing phimosis, and it appears that the tight foreskin is simply a naturally occurring development, there may be several treatment options available. Depending on the severity of the condition, daily gentle retraction may be enough to treat the problem. A topical steroid ointment can be used to help soften the foreskin and make retraction easier. The ointment is massaged into the area around the glans and foreskin twice a day for several weeks."

from the judge

"Brought before Judge Jeffrey Gillen on Friday, Hironimus again declined to sign a consent form for the surgery, and was advised she would remain jailed indefinitely. After the hearing recessed and she reconsidered, she reluctantly agreed to sign, sobbing as she put pen to paper."

I would like to see a few doctors in the court testifying on this matter that have examined the child

if the judge felt it was medically necessary, he could force the circumcision without the parents permission imo, but he better have a couple medical experts at least agree with him on the record

 

It sounds like that was just being used as an excuse by the father.

The details are not entirely clear from the articles, but it sounds like the circumcision wasn't absolutely needed.

What you may not understand about a condition like phimosis is it's not always an either/or, yes or no, thing.
It's actually extremely common for small children (who have not been circumcised) to sometimes have an uncomfortably tight foreskin. That does not mean something always needs to be done. And even when something does need to be done, there are often alternative ways to treat it that do not require removal of the foreskin.

The mother in this story refuted the claim by the father that the boy had phimosis.
Which tells us it was either a very mild case and it wasn't too tight, or that it was an extremely mild case of tightness which definitely did not need need circumcision, but the father was just using that as an excuse, with the father's primary reason being he wanted the boy to be circumcised so he would be like him (an extremely common reason given among fathers).
That is, the primary reason the father wanted the circumcision likely did not have to do with phimosis. That was just a minor additional reason being used as an excuse to help win the court case.

If the boy "definitely had phimosis" and it was a plain objective fact, why did the mother and her lawyer deny that was the case?

 

Unfortunately medical experts can be extremely biased on this sort of thing. You could get medical experts to say opposite conflicting things depending on which medical experts were called to testify.

This isn't an issue that all medical experts agree on.

 

At the very least, the mother must have had some reason to believe it may not have been absolutely medically necessary.

It sounds like the father was just going with it because "that is what is normally done" in that situation. But normally done doesn't mean it absolutely needed to be done and there could be no other way.

I would be really curious to know what the child himself actually thought about this. The story in the articles seem to give some indication that he was very scared, and then had a lot of anxiety before the procedure was going to be performed. But presumably he was going along with what the father told him "needed" to be done. I really wonder if anyone asked his opinion or what he wanted to choose.

 

Do you consider it horrendous because the mother was forced to sign the consent form or only because it was for a medical procedure you disagree with? Would you opinion be different if the procedure was a cochlea implant to give a deaf child hearing, blood transfusion for a non-terminal illness or an organ transplant to save the child's life? Those are all things that some people strongly object to and will sometimes choose to refuse for their children so could end up in a very similar scenario. Or what if there was a valid clinical reason and the mother was the one who wanted the circumcision so was refusing to sign the consent for any alternative treatments?

My core point is that such cases are rarely as straight forwards as they appear (or are presented) and our initial knee-jerk reactions often won't take account of the nuances or complications.

 

Mainly a medical procedure I do not agree with, but the manner in which she was forced to sign just adds kindling to the fire and makes this all the more worse.

I would still have greatly objected (out of principle) if the medical procedure was one which I approved, because it was being forced.
And we are really not talking about a life or death medical procedure that was with certainty absolutely necessary.

I would be a lot more okay with this if the child had given their consent and was choosing the choice of their own free will. I believe the child should have been old enough to at least have some conception about whether this was a decision they wanted.

 

I do wonder whether a story like this has ever played out in a Muslim country, only except it being a girl child instead of a boy.

 

right, but I would expect both sides to get an expert

 

I think he was enforcing a parental agreement this woman signed off on which specifically included a provision on this exact matter after she dissappeared with this same child and ditched a pending court proceeding. This is a woman who needed a lesson that she was not going to call the shots as some lone wolf. There is another equally relevant parent, and a court between her and complete autonomy.

 

Where was your principled objection when you specifically read and signed on the dotted line? I will tell you. Nowhere to be found, or you would have refused to sign any parental agreement that included such language. You don't get to pick and choose which sections offend you AFTER you signed an agreement. It would not have had to be in that agreement, if the two parties already could agree, and trust each other to honor a verbal understanding. Those issues that are sitting in legal language are by nature the 'big deals' that demand serious compromises which the court is duty bound to enforce.

 

I don't like the idea that the woman cannot change her mind here. She did not know or realize everything the agreement might entail at the time. It's impossible to predict (pragmatically, realistically). The judge should have been willing to go reexamine the agreement, or make a special exception for this one issue, but it appears he wasn't. Under those circumstances, I think the woman wasn't wrong to run off. Obviously she wanted the best for her child. And I presume she wasn't just taking off with the child without the child's input into the decision. (Although I get the impression from the story the child could have been swayed either way depending on which parent they were with)

I also suspect there wasn't the best relationship between the father and mother, and the father might have been using this as some sort of power trip over the mother. (This is common after separation or divorces, they fight over custody issues concerning the child, but the conflict really is not about the child)
Why wasn't the father more flexible and willing to explore other options?

The woman knew the judge was going to let the father force the procedure on the child, and that he was not going to let them modify the original custody agreement.

That, in my opinion, was wrong, and so saying "the woman need a lesson" is really harsh.

 

No its not. Women are adults. They have long ago been given the right to sign contracts and other legal documents but with that comes the expectation that they will read them with care, seek legal advice as needed, and know that they too will be bound by them. Why are you treating her as though she was not intelligent enough to foresee that what she signed would be binding, or worse that she should get a pass to breach a lawful agreement to the direct detriment of another party?

Its absurd to blame an officer of the court for enforcing a legal document that sits right in front of his face.

 

That's not how child custody agreements do, or should work.

The woman shouldn't have to assume full-time (or half-time) custody of her child for her to still be able to have some input in something like this in the future. Especially when the child wants to side with what she wants to choose.

But this is not really all about the rights of the mother, this is about the rights of the child. Those rights should be protected. Here we have a case where one parent wants to do something to the child and the other doesn't. Which makes the violation of rights against the child all the more odious.

 

I somehow feel there is more to this.....

 

Its exactly how parental agreement works absent a court ruling superimposing the court's view over the parents. This court has not made a finding that the child's interest is compromised by enforcing the MUTUALLY agreed upon parental agreement which both parties signed on to.
The mother was not asking for 'imput'. That presumably happened long before the agreement was signed, because the reason its sitting in there, was that is was a point of contention between the two parties. She had four years of stalling and plenty of input. She was unilaterally refusing to comply with a section of an parental agreement that she freely entered into. She made a promise when she signed that she was in serious breach of. The Judge was refusing to come down from Mt Olympus undermine that agreement. If he did anything else, it would have been an act of judicial arrogance and activism.

 

exactly, so if the father wants to preform a sex change on the child next week, should she be forced to sign that she approves

she should not be forced to agree with every medical decision the father makes

especially if like in this case, the child wants what mom wants

"Why wasn't the father more flexible and willing to explore other options?"

agree, that is what I want to know too

 

What do you mean? Muslims circumcised their boys too.

Religion is all superstition and whim and a religious authority enforcing mutilation and other forms of sacrifice is thus not at all shocking, but rather expected. However, a country with a Constitution based on the Liberal principles of individualism, liberty, freedom and reason enforcing it is shocking and very disturbing.

I did not know nor expect this to happen in America, to be honest.