Rood, L. (2023, January 8). Their foster child died after Iowa removed him. They went public and got a warning to stop. The Des Moines Register; Des Moines Register. https://www.desmoinesregister.com/story/news/investigations/readers-watchdog/2023/01/08/iowa-foster-care-parents-criticized-dhhs-after-baby-died/69724658007/
The failure of state child welfare agencies to acknowledge warnings from medical professionals and foster families frequently exposes vulnerable children to physical abuse, profound emotional abuse and neglect, resulting in permanent personal injury and damage. According to a January 2023 report written by Lee Rood from the Des Moines Register, this devastating reality unfolded in Washington County, Iowa, after a 7-month-old infant died shortly after the Department of Health and Human Services (DHHS) removed him from the home of his foster parents, John and Nicole Gish. After the infant’s sudden death in September 2022, John Gish, the elected Washington County Attorney, took to Facebook to express his grief and explicitly criticize DHHS for relentlessly increasing the infant’s visits with a neglectful mother, saying that the baby routinely returned malnourished and suffered severe respiratory problems. The Gishes had previously submitted twelve pages of concerns to the court, and the baby’s doctor had even written a formal letter to DHHS warning of the child’s malnourishment during maternal visits. However, instead of addressing the medical evidence, DHHS removed the child from the Gish home and placed him in another foster setting where the new family immediately reported the same respiratory and nutritional neglect right up until his death. A DHHS supervisor also threatened the Gishes with revoking their foster license if they did not delete the Facebook posts criticizing the agency, prompting the couple to voluntarily surrender their license rather than be silenced. Highlighting a broken system still struggling in the midst of the highly publicized starvation deaths of Iowa teenagers Natalie Finn and Sabrina Ray, Gish argues that DHHS keeps a defensive culture that aggressively rejects input from outside medical and legal professionals as well as the safety and survival of the state’s most defenseless children.