This supports my theory that vegan diets lower IQ by 50 points.

In any case, I see no real "structural" social problem here. This is really just NATURAL SELECTION working as Arawn(my fav Druid god) intended it to -- MORONS will not produce viable offspring and thus be consigned to the ash-heap of evolution.

"How stupid do you have to be..."

Vegan. Probably Lefty. Say no more.

There is a very good chance that these people would have breastfed their baby if only, you know, the mother was physically substantial enough to provide milk to her own child.

My own wife was no waife after my daughter's birth but her milk never really came in. Maybe we didn't give it enough time... etc, etc.

But any mother so wrapped up in veganism that she inflicts it (yes, INFLICTS IT) upon her own babys is probably so see-through that she'd have trouble carrying a healthy 25lb baby. There is such a wide variety of baby formula on the market that I am sure these idiots could have found something to meet any of their special dietary requirements, unless anything "manufactured" goes against their sick rules.

This is just plain sick and pisses me off as a father.

Regarding Purple's first comment, this has little to do with any sort of Darwinism. Veganism is purely intelectual. It is an idea that is passed on without regard to genetics. Maybe some people are more genetically predisposed to believe anything preached at them repeatedly? I don't know.

But you can't hold anything against that baby for the way its genetics relates to veganism. The parents are just plain stupid and they're going to jail for child abuse as the law demands.

The worst part of this whole thing is that Ice will likely end up back with his parents and brought up vegan after his body can survive the treatment, er diet.

"If God didn't want us to eat animals then why did He make them so tasty?"

The parents are just plain stupid...

Stupid is clearly genetically influenced. Look at the Kennedy family.

Face it, the poor kid (who I have much empathy for since you don't choose your parents or genes) was doomed to be a hopeless retard with parents like that.

Bottom line: Clueless tards like this shouldn't shouldn't breed and nature, via various mechanisms, ensures the results will be unfavorable when they do.

Nature isn't "fair", never has been. If your parent(s) are freebasing skanks who feed you cockroaches and flat Genesee Lite, there's a pretty good chance you die in a tenement fire or starve because they locked you in a filthy apartment for 3 weeks with your other 5 siblings while they went off on a bender.

This IS Darwinism on a social scale, just like Socialism self-destructs on a somewhat larger national scale.

Natural selection isn't just biology or nature, its about "systems" in the broadest engineering, free market and social senses.

I'm just glad that one can be sentenced for being criminally stupid.

By the way, my husband is a strict vegetarian (not a vegan, but let's not get started on that debate) -- and he cooks the best steak for me. Also, it was his idea to feed lamb sausage to our toddler, because he thought she wasn't gaining enough weight. For =some= parents, their kids' physical well-being comes before promulgating their own particular lifestyle choices.

Regarding Purple's first comment, this has little to do with any sort of Darwinism. Veganism is purely intelectual. It is an idea that is passed on without regard to genetics.

Ideas are subject to a certain Darwinian selection on their own. Universal celebacy, for example, never really lasts in a community.

If God didn't want us to eat meat, why do we have 'CANINE' teeth?

I love the line in the story where the dad was given a reduced sentence because of his "reduced mental capacity."

If there was ever a more true statement, I have yet to read it.

So where was grandma and grandpa and aunts and uncles and every other friend, relative, and neighbor? The kid was premature but she only weighed 3 pounds at birth. There is no way they ever took their kid to the doctor for an exam, genetic testing, vaccines, etc. How easy would it have been for anyone to just drop a dime to children services to come check this kid out.

1) These people were not vegans, they were fruitarians, and crazy ones at that. Understand the difference, commenters, please, before issuing knee-jerk rants.
2) Being a vegetarian (or a vegan, for that matter) does not deny you entrance to the conservative club.
3) For a conservative, religious understanding of the issue you could do worse than read Matthew Scully's _Dominion_. It might make you rethink that whole jokey "animals taste good" business.

That should have read wasn't premature yet weighed three pounds.

Fair enough, Pandalume.

I does seem to me that the vegan/vegetarian lifestyle is overwhelmingly a silly lefty thing. Please forgive anyone (including me, I'm guilty also) of assuming that a vegan/vegetarian might be a hippie airhead. Thanks, though, for pointing out that this isn't always the case.

Sorry about my tone earlier. Many is the time that I've been told that eating soy and reading National Review were incompatible, nay contradictory, activities. Speaking of NR, check out Rod Dreher from a few years back: http://www.nationalreview.com/dreher/dreher071202.asp

Oh Christ, if there is anything I do not want to see, it is a rehash of the whole Crunchy-con thing.

Please. God. No.

Just prove that the vegetarian diets so pushed by hollywood celeberties and PETA idiots just dont hack it they are indeed unhealthy so blow this out your ears PETA and PAMELA ANDERSON

I love salads and some vegetables, but they are not food. They are what food eats.

Sorry, couldn't resist.

I'm actually pretty sympathetic to pandalume's arguments regarding lifestyle choices and political ideology. I've met some very conservative 'hippies' (I do live in Maine after all) and also met some very liberal suit-wearing bankers.

And "Dominion" is a fantastic book.

I am absolutely mortified to say this, but I identify with the idiot vegan parents.

When my eldest son was born, we wanted to breastfeed so badly that even though my wife was not producing adequate amounts of milk, nevertheless we kept at it even though our boy was thin as a rail. We had read lots of material from the La Leche League and were convinced that we were bad parents if we didn't breastfeed. Finally, though, our doctor warned us that the situation was getting critical, which caused me to wake up and ask myself why I was sacrificing my son's health on the alter of someone else's ideology. So we switched to using formula from a bottle (gasp!) and our son immediately gained wait and health. This year he is a sophmore in college and eats like a horse.

So I know how it is to be blinded by ideology. I just thank God my foolishness was stopped before I did any real damage to our son.

Slublog,

I'm an Oregonian, so I know plenty of conservative hippies, and even have a few hippy tendencies of my own.

If these people were fruitarians, that's an even deeper level of stupid. But for a vegetarian to starve a child like this would require that they be unaware of the myriad of soy-based formulas and other animal-free food options for babies that DON'T REQUIRE TREATING THEM LIKE CONCENTRATION CAMP INMATES!!!!!!!

I'm sorry, I have Absolutely NO sympathy for these schmucks whatsoever. I'm a new father, and even at this early stage in the job I get that the Lad's well being comes first. Period.

Oregon, how long did you wait? We pretty much went through the same situation, but after about 9 days it was apparent that it just wasn't gonna happen, and we went to formula.

She's a college sophomore too, so we all pretty much got the same guilt crap.

That's what I don't like. Food choices as a political movement. Or, being so obsessed with food that you spend in ordinate amounts of time shopping for, planning, cooking, etc, in order to avoid certain foods. To me that is what the hard core vegans are doing.

We were in the same boat when it came to breast feeding vs. formula. The Lad was a preemie, so he never got the hang of breast feeding. pretty early on we resolved ourselves to a combination of pumped breast milk and formula.

I'm not sure where in this fine state OregonMuse is, but here in Eugene (Berkeley North), breastfeeding's almost a religion. Thankfully, the lactation consultants at Sacred Heart Medical Center had enough brains and common sense to remember and remind us that the baby's health is the primary concern. They were a big help.

Mark me down as a member of the vast vegetarian neo-con conspiracy. Moral vegetarianism is one of the few beliefs I eagerly absorbed as a callow impressionable undergraduate that has stood the test of time.

Vegetarianism and veganism are perfectly healthy diets, if you (a) pay a little more attention to what you eat and (b) not be a complete nutjob, like these people.

Crunchy-con...I like that term.

Two comments -generally speaking- babies don't need anything but breastmilk for (at least) a full year, so if these nimrods had at least done that, the baby would have been better off.

And -at times - women do not produce enough milk (or have enough fat in their milk) because they 1) did not eat enough while pregnant 2) are trying too hard to lose the weight afterwards. This is OBVIOUSLY not always the fact, I just want to throw it out there. Women are not meant to look like twiggy after birth, and if they do - they might fail at the breastfeeding thing. I imagine a vegan diet - practiced by someone of questionable intellect - might result in a woman not producing milk with enough fat in it.

Vegan's , even the "hippies", come down petty hard on the Swinton's.
This vegan blogger actually got a call from Silva Swinton asking for assistance in her case. That was denied. The blogger, however, got Silva's side of the story directly, The blogger feels Silva was just ignorant and and wrong, but well-intentioned, and that educaton could have helped society and the Swintons more than prison.

Most of the commentors are not as generous.

The dad's mental defect is apparently an IQ so low he is classified as mentally retarded.

On a different angle....

If [literal] retarded people are going to have children, and they do, where are the people that are making sure they are able to care for their children? i.e. A social worker? A doctor? A public health nurse? A relative? A friend? Anyone? Someone must've noticed the absence of a bottle or a boob in this child's mouth as well as absence of teeth and/or absence of weight at some point before he or she (Ice?) was a year old.

I'm sure it wasn't breaking news when the court mentioned the dad was mentally retarded. Most mentally retarded people have social workers in the first place because---hey!---they are at risk for not being able to take care of themselves without at least some degree of help from others.

The fact that nobody helped until the child was severely malnourished and nobody noticed sooner is a shitty commentary on society-at-large.

Hey! I have a college sophomore too!

Anybody have a buck I can borrow for lunch?

Brian B:

I am in Eugene, too.

Dave in TX:

How long did I wait? Stop trying to embarrass me! I hate to say it was approx. 2-3 months. We had a lot of stuff happening about that same time, we had to go back east to attend to my wife's father's death and funeral and some other things. I wish it had only taken me 9 days to wise up. I've been mad at the La Leche League ever since. Good info on breastfeeding, no doubt about that, but it's not supposed to be a religion, is it? Sheesh.

Years later on some blog I was reading, one frustrated mother referred to the LLL as "the nipple nazis." That sounds about right.

Oregon, sorry, didn't mean to come across as badgering you. We didn't wise up so much as got some good advice from our doc's nurse who commended us for giving it a shot, but said "this ain't happenin".

My wife was still guilt-ridden for months, particularly every time our daughter got the sniffles.

Oregon & Dave:

My wife went through the same thing with both our kids. She gave it a shot for about a month, and then we bottle-fed. Then, of course, she felt like she wasn't a 'real' mom.

I appreciate all the benefits of breast feeding, but the way it's pushed has turned into a moral obligation, rather than a sound nutitional practice.

"How stupid do you have to be..."

Very. Note that even one of the judges was stupid enough to dissent, saying they might just not have known their diet was having an effect. What parent could fail to note that a child was severely underweight and not growing, and not take it to a doctor - at least that last refuge, the emergency room?

But it could have been worse. Recently in Massachusetts a couple were found to have refused their child proper food or to see a doctor, and when the child died taking the body to a woodland and burying it. Why? Because a relative had a "vision" about how to feed the kid.

rather than a sound nutitional practice

errrr - something of a Freudian slip, I imagine.

OM,

"Nipple Nazi's" Heh. Quite right. You know what it's like here, then. When I read articles from the rest of the country about people having a cow because some woman breast fed in public, I chickle. Here, they'll give you the evil eye for feeding your child in public for any source OTHER THAN a boobie. My wife still deals with guilt that she couldn't breastfeed our son, and the insensitive comments from well-meaning "progressive" Eugene Neohippies don't help any. I've taken the same attitude in defending her that I suppose parents in other places have to take when defending breastfeeding: We're doing whatever it takes to care for our child, and if you don't like it, go pound sand.

Dave, I knew you weren't trying to badger me, my mock exasperation did not come off well in text.

I know what your wife went through. We have photos of our son from during those "lean" months and I still get a twinge when I look at them and see how thin he was.

That's chuckle, not chickle.

What?

I don't know if this is true or not, but I remember hearing that the first liquid that comes from the mother is colostrum, which contains the antibodies and such. That's pretty important.
After that comes the milk, which is not so much.

Brian:

Quite right. I finally got to the point where I could say, "gee, I know I'm a bad parent and all that for going to a bottle, but is the La Leche League going to be here to help out when my son's heath fails?" That's when I said screw 'em. What's the point, to have a healthy baby, or to have ideological purity?

And still my wife had to endure the "oh, you didn't do this right" or "you didn't do that right" second-guessing from the nipple nazis but by then their admonitions were falling on deaf ears. Like you said, they can pound sand.

And on another subject, didn't you used to work at Stream?

OM,
*shudder* Promise me you will never speak of that place again.

That's a heartbreaking story, but those folks are as much vegans as Fred Phelps is a Christian.

I've got a good story about this kind of Vegan stupidity.

See here, if you like.

What "good intentions" justify starving your child? Please describe them to me. More liberal crap.

Okay, so what sort of Vegan diet would a baby thrive on?

Later,
bbeck

Okay, so what sort of Vegan diet would a baby thrive on?

As if those diapers didn't stink enough, sigh.

In my experience, people who are vegetarian for "moral" reasons sure like to pretend that they're doing it for "healthy" reasons instead of acknowledging that they're trying to cheat their natural biology for the sake of ideology.

But it could have been worse. Recently in Massachusetts a couple were found to have refused their child proper food or to see a doctor, and when the child died taking the body to a woodland and burying it. Why? Because a relative had a "vision" about how to feed the kid.

You sure that didn't have something to do with a cult and sexual jealousy?

bbeck, my daughter is now two-and-a-half and around the 95th percentile for her height. Her language, memory, and creativity seem advanced compared to other children her age. A typical day of food looks something like the following:

Breakfast: Cheerios w/ fortified rice milk.

Lunch: macaroni and fake cheese made from nutritional yeast; additional oil

Supper: udon soup (noodles) with tofu and mushrooms

Before Bed: soy yogurt w/ crushed multi-vitamin

Snacks: cashews, banana, blueberries, carrots, cookies

Drinks: water, vanilla/chocolate soy milk

Nels, I was asking about a baby.

Later,
bbeck

Sorry, bbeck, I misunderstood. Breast milk is vegan, plus there are soy-based formulas for those who prefer that route.

"they're trying to cheat their natural biology for the sake of ideology."

Pretty good thumbnail definition of marriage, though - actually, of society itself.