A journey into the shaken baby syndrome/abusive head trauma controversy

Judges can issue preliminary injunctions before trial in all places in the world. A justice system that can't take any coercive action until the end of a trial would simply not function.

In particular though, cases like this aren't even related to the presumption of innocence. The state believes that the child has suffered harm, so a judge takes them in protective custody. Who is harming the child remains to be determined, but taking the child into custody is supposed to protect the child immediately.

Of course, this can be, like in this case, wrongly applied to disastrous effects. But it has also saved many children from abusive parents, where leaving them without state protection for years while the trial advances would have scarred them permanently or killed them.

Of course it makes much more sense that there was a massive conspiracy across the medical, legal, prison industry, and press to put more people in prison. Rather than some doctors and legal professionals assuming SIDs was a simple explanation for a not very well understood medical phenomenon probably with many causes.

https://www.seattletimes.com/seattle-news/child-abuse-or-med...

This also reminds me a lot of the indoctrination we went through at the hospital when my daughter was born.

Despite being a high risk pregnancy we were railroaded into a natural birth. After nearly 24 hours of horrific labor she spiked an extremely high fever and they had to do a c-section, making us feel like failures. They found that our daughter wouldn’t have made it otherwise.

We were castigated because my wife took medicines that entered her milk and were made to feel like failures for considering not breast feeding. She had to pump milk at five AM before she took any medicine to minimize the exposure to the extremely toxic medicine that would be present in her milk. She didn’t produce enough milk and we were at wits end. The nurses and doctors at the hospital were unhelpful and treated us like abusers. When we went to our local pediatrician he laughed and said entire generations were raised on formula and to stop killing ourselves. It was the best advice we were ever given.

Likewise my daughter couldn’t sleep on her back. She wailed every night. I read everything I could find on SIDS and I realized the correlation for back sleeping was very weak - almost statistically irrelevant - and even then the prevalence of SIDS was very low. Yet I knew for 100% my daughter wasn’t sleeping. I knew if I told anyone I would be lectured, and I worried might even be reported. The after nearly a week of not sleeping I flipped her over one night with my heart pounding. She fell asleep immediately. She didn’t die.

She’s nine now and an incredible athlete and has a sharp and brilliant mind. None of the doomsday stuff occurred. No autism, no weak immune system, no weight problems, intellectual deficiency, or all the other warnings we were given about c-section, formula, or belly sleeping. Over the years I continued to read the research and there’s basically nothing compelling about any of this advice, at least not at the level of stridency parents experience.

Perhaps something to help you cope with this is that our brain although fragile has a lot of redundancy around it.

On a fall or bounce our neck will decelerate our fall/bounce, there is no need to be an athlete, our muscles have a contraction reflex if they are violently streched (myotatic reflex), less so for very young babies with weak neck muscles (think less than 6/9 months).

Then our skull is filled with fluid which has inertia so the force on the skull is not directly transmitted to the brain. You have to slush the liquid around quite a bit before your brain experiences any meaningful force.

Effectively it is only with some extreme force or internal bleeding compressing the brain that brain damage would occur.