Jennifer Guskin and baby Iris. Photo provided by family.
by Health Impact News/MedicalKidnap.com Staff
A Maryland couple followed the advice of their doctors, and now their baby has been taken away from them by Child Protective Services.
First time parents, Jennifer Guskin and Scott McFalls, were concerned about their baby’s weight, but none of the three pediatricians they consulted noticed that baby Iris had a tongue and lip tie.
By the time they found a doctor who figured it out, CPS had already decided to take their baby from them.
It is the kind of nightmare scenario that could happen to any family. Doctors may not always be able to figure out why a child isn’t gaining weight, but as soon as the baby is diagnosed with failure to thrive, Child Protective Services is often quick to blame the parents and seize the child.
Jennifer told Health Impact News:
It seems like the doctors were more interested in working with CPS than actually finding out why she wasn’t gaining weight.
Unlike most families, Jennifer Guskin and Scott McFalls know all too well what kinds of horrors possibly face children taken by CPS and put into foster care. Jennifer was adopted as a baby herself, and she has recently gone public with horrific details about her childhood and how she became a victim of child sex trafficking and experimentation.
Jennifer and Scott recognize the danger that their baby is in, and that thought terrifies them.
Accidental Homebirth
Jennifer and Scott have been together for 10 years, and they live in the home that Scott grew up in and bought from his parents. Their pregnancy was a surprise. Once they got used to the idea that they were going to be parents, they determined to do things as safely and naturally as possible.
They fixed up the nursery and ordered diapers and wipes that are chemical-free. They eat organic as much as possible. Jennifer planned to have a natural birth in a hospital and to breastfeed. She writes:
Breast milk is the healthiest form of food for an infant, and it builds a closeness that can never truly be undone. It’s health for mother and child’s not just physical health, but mental, emotional and even spiritual well being.
She didn’t realize she was in labor. She thought it was just something she ate, until the baby started to come. They called 911 and she gave birth to Iris at home.
The baby latched on for her first feeding in the ambulance on the way to Howard County General Hospital. All was good.
Iris was tiny but healthy, weighing in at 5 lbs 12 oz.
Newborn baby Iris started out life small. She was full-term, but weighed only 5 lbs 12 oz.
Because Iris was born at home, it triggered a call to open up a CPS case. Jennifer says social workers told her that it was state policy in Maryland that CPS gets a call for every homebirth to do a walk through of the home “to make sure it’s prepared for a baby.”
The walk through went well, and social workers told the parents that the case would be closed by the end of the month.
Breastfeeding Sabotaged by Poor Medical Advice
Jennifer said that she breastfed on demand, but she supplemented with formula during the first couple of weeks, because hospital staff had told her that she would need to do so until her milk came in.
Anyone who has studied lactation knows that this is not how breastfeeding works. It is supply and demand.
The more milk that is removed, the more milk is signaled for the body to produce the next day. Every bottle of formula, especially in the first few weeks when the supply is being established, tells the mother’s body that it doesn’t need to produce that amount of milk.
Jennifer didn’t realize that this advice would sabotage her milk supply. Iris didn’t like the formula and would spit it out. She gained back to her birth weight by the time she was a week old.
At her one week visit, with pediatrician Dr. Alvaro Ramos, Jennifer says that the doctor asked if there was any soreness with breastfeeding. She said that there was, but it was not something she was complaining about. She was determined to push through it, but she says that he recommended nursing less frequently. According to the medical records, the doctor:
discussed breastfeeding/adjust feedings to every 2 hrs as opose [sic] of on demands.
That advice was counter-intuitive to Jennifer, but she complied with his recommendation. Over the next few weeks, Iris grew in length and head circumference, but gained weight very slowly.
She was meeting her other developmental milestones, but her slow weight gain concerned her parents. They asked about it at every doctor visit, only to be told not to nurse as often and to space out feedings to two to three hours.
As time went on, Jennifer asked about going back to feeding on demand, but according to medical records, the doctor continued to recommend scheduled feedings.
By March 2, the parents decided to stop seeing Dr. Ramos and find another pediatrician.
Iris was described as an alert, happy baby. She rarely cried because either Jennifer or Scott held her most of the time. She had 10 to 12 wet diapers a day and a bowel movement every other day. There are no reports of dry skin or sunken fontanels. All of these are indicators that baby is getting enough milk, except for the fact that she was not gaining weight.
Clearly, something wasn’t right. Jennifer and Scott knew it, and they sought out answers.
Iris smiles as her daddy holds her. Photo provided by family.
Meanwhile, Dr. Ramos called Child Protective Services to report his “concerns about Iris’ weight gain and missing appointment,” the appointment they “missed” because the family decided to find another pediatrician. Dr. Ramos also called Jennifer’s number numerous times to repeat the PKU test.
Scott later expressed concern that the doctor’s office kept losing the PKU test and needing repeat heel sticks to get the baby’s blood. The blood samples collected from newborns goes into a national DNA database, something that many parents are not comfortable with. See:
It took a month for them to be able to get in to see another pediatrician. They had an appointment with Dr. Cheryl Parks of Blackwell White Pediatrics on Monday, April 2, 2018.
That doctor, as well, reportedly told Jennifer to schedule feedings and space them out at least every 2 to 3 hours. She also recommended supplementation with formula. During the visit, the doctor did not communicate any real concern. Later that day, she called Jennifer and left a message concerning supplementation with formula.
Things got strange after that, Jennifer reports:
A few hours after that, she called again to say that she didn’t think Iris would survive the week and we should bring her to the ER on Thursday.
The doctor told her to wait till Thursday, because she would have someone there who could evaluate her on Thursday, specifically.
That seemed very odd, because if it were truly an emergency, wouldn’t they have needed to take Iris to the ER that night, or at least the next day?
A real emergency would not wait 3 days. Jennifer and Scott decided then and there to seek a second opinion. They told Dr. Parks that her services were no longer needed.
Nowhere in any of the medical records is there any mention of advice to increase nursing or skin-to-skin contact. There is no mention of breast compressions being recommended, and the possibility of a foremilk/hindmilk imbalance was apparently not considered.
Jennifer says she was never counseled to utilize any of the herbs that are traditionally recommended to increase milk supply such as fenugreek or blessed thistle.
The tried and true methods of increasing a breastfeeding mother’s milk supply seemed to be notably absent.
CPS Shows up with the Police to Seize Baby with No Warrant – But Medic Clears Baby’s Health After 5 Hour Standoff
Jennifer and Scott immediately began searching again for a pediatrician, and Jennifer went back to nursing on demand. She was fine with her baby nursing “all the time” if that was what it took. They knew that their baby was small, and they were searching for answers.
They consulted an online lactation consultant and watched Iris closely for any signs of dehydration or illness.
They were stunned at the knock on their door on Friday evening, April 6, at 6 p.m. Two social workers and 4 Baltimore County police officers showed up with a “writ” from CPS saying that they were there to take the baby.
There was no warrant or court order – nothing signed by a judge.
The doctor had called CPS telling them that the baby would be dead by the end of the week. It was a harrowing ordeal that lasted almost 5 hours. They recorded most of the ordeal on Facebook Live. (
View here.)
Most of the police officers acted compassionately, and they were able to negotiate for a medic to come to evaluate the baby.
The medic said that the baby was indeed very underweight, but, otherwise, she was doing well. She would certainly need to be evaluated by a doctor soon, but she did not appear to be in any immediate danger.
The police decided not to take the child out of the home that day.
The social workers did not appear to be happy with the decision. Records show that they had come to the home with the intent of seizing Iris.
Vaccines Refused – Parents Threatened by Doctor
That Monday, they saw yet another pediatrician, Dr. Teresa Fuller. She recommended supplementing with formula every 3 hours, and they scheduled a follow up appointment in 3 days.
Baby Iris was not vaccinated, which presented a problem to Dr. Fuller. Jennifer told her that she would not agree to any vaccinations until her baby was gaining weight appropriately. Dr. Fuller informed her that if she continued to refuse vaccines, she would be dismissed from the practice.
Baby Had Tongue and Lip Tie
During Friday night’s Facebook Live recording, numerous people mentioned the possibility of tongue and/or lip tie. Monday afternoon, after the pediatrician visit, Jennifer took Iris to pediatric dentist, Dr. Robert Marcus.
None of the 3 pediatricians looked for or noticed that Iris had both a tongue and lip tie.
La Leche League, a recognized authority on breastfeeding, says that a short frenulum can cause pain, soreness, and plugged ducts in the mother and can cause slow weight gain in the baby. The baby may want to nurse constantly and still have difficulty gaining weight. (
Source.)
The signs were there that this was a problem, but they were missed. No one checked for the tell-tale “heart-shaped tongue.”
It is not uncommon for doctors and nurses to overlook the possibility of tongue or lip tie. Mothers and babies suffer needlessly, and the milk supply may never be established adequately, resulting in babies being labeled “failure to thrive.”
“Failure to thrive” is increasingly a diagnosis used by Child Protective Services to take babies from their parents.
The solution is relatively easy. Dr. Marcus performed the frectomy, the surgical clip of the frenulums, on Monday, April 9.
Jennifer was relieved when she finally found out what was wrong. There was a reason for her baby’s slow weight gain, and it was something that could be fixed. If the tongue and lip tie are diagnosed early enough, breastfeeding generally resumes quickly.
Iris, however, was already more than 3 months old. La Leche League notes that it can take a week or two after frenectomy for baby to “adjust to his tongue’s greater mobility.”
One has to wonder how differently things would have turned out if the doctors had originally checked for tongue tie. What if the first pediatrician had tried to discover what was causing Iris not to gain weight instead of recommending spacing out feedings?
She and Scott took Iris to Greater Baltimore Medical Center (GRMC) that Thursday, April 12, for a follow-up evaluation. Doctors were very concerned about her weight and began supplementing via a feeding tube.
Iris was not really given a chance to relearn how to breastfeed effectively. A supplemental nursing system is an effective method by which a baby can learn how to suckle at the breast, but there is no mention of this solution in the medical records until they had been at the hospital for an entire week. It was finally started on April 20. Iris responded well.
She balked at first at being fed formula. Her mother said that she would spit it out.
The baby began gaining weight, and she was medically cleared to leave the hospital by April 23.
The hospital had a list of goals for discharging Iris, including conditions that the parents had to meet or agree to in order for them to take their baby home. The only one they did not agree to was to leave the baby in the room without them in order to meet with CPS and hospital staff for a team meeting. Jennifer and Scott refused to allow Iris out of their sight because they were afraid that CPS would take her.
They had every reason for that fear.
Child Abuse Specialist – Never Examines Child but Makes Recommendations
A report by Dr. Michelle Chudow, Director of the Child Protection Team at GRMC, appears to have played a big part in what happened next.
Dr. Michelle Chudow – Director of GBMC Child Protection Team, Photo
source.
On April 25, CPS medically kidnapped Iris and kicked her parents out of the hospital.
The Shelter Care Authorization paper states as grounds for her seizure:
Caregivers, Jennifer Guskin and Scott McFalls are refusing to agree to follow through with the discharge agreement for Iris’ intensive follow up for medical care.
The document lists the plan that the parents allegedly refused to agree to.
However, the medical records clearly state that “Mom and Dad [are] in agreement with POC [plan of care].”
Dr. Chudow was consulted by CPS since Monday, April 9, the day that the baby’s tongue and lip tie were addressed. She admits in her report:
Of note, I have not examined this patient myself as of the writing of this note, nor have I had any direct interaction with the patient’s family.
She states that the parents “accused the SW of trying to take the baby away from the parents” on April 6, which is exactly what the records show the social worker was attempting. The parents’ fear was accurate.
Chudow took issue with Jennifer being caught co-sleeping with her baby:
The patient’s mother has been asked repeatedly to not place the baby on her breast in between defined feeding times, in order to fully monitor her intake, and to increase her ability at self-soothing, yet multiple nurses have commented that almost every time they walk in the room, the baby is on her mother’s breast.
She stated that she was concerned that if the parents are allowed to take their baby home, she might fall behind on her development.
Photo supplied by family.
Another major issue that Dr. Chudow seemed to have was Jennifer’s comments that:
CPS is trying to steal her baby for the purpose of trafficking the infant or in order to receive a bonus at work.
The patient’s mother even mentioned one time that she, herself, was sexually trafficked as a child….
Jennifer is on disability for Post Traumatic Stress Disorder because of the things that she has experienced, but an evaluation in the hospital for Postpartum Depression rated her at low risk for that. She has no other psychological diagnosis.
That evaluation apparently did not convince the Child Abuse Specialist. Dr. Chudow wrote that she was afraid that Jennifer has an underlying psychological illness that prohibits her from:
being able to trust and engage with both medical and child protection personnel, and not allow her to see past her own paranoid delusions regarding people trying to steal and traffic her infant. [Emphasis added]
In other words, without any evidence to the contrary, the horrors that Jennifer experienced growing up, things for which she has a recognized disability of PTSD, are chalked up as being “paranoid delusions,” used as justification for taking her child.
Mother Trafficked as a Child and Suffered Unimaginable Horrors – “A Human Experiment”
Not long before Child Protective Services and the police showed up on their doorstep, Jennifer Guskin released the first two in a set of YouTube videos in which she had began to talk about some of what she went through growing up in foster care, and part of a nationwide pedophile sex trafficking operation.
The videos describe allegations of unimaginable horrors of child sex trafficking and experimentation, and a pedophilia network that allegedly reaches to highest levels of government and society.
WARNING: GRAPHIC CONTENT ABOUT TOPICS SUCH AS CANNIBALISM, CHILD SEX, TORTURE, MURDER, ETC. NOT SUITABLE FOR CHILDREN
These videos reveal a dark underbelly of corruption and evil on a level that most of us cannot even fathom. They are things that should never happen to another human being, let alone small children and babies.
When a victim, such as Jennifer, decides to go public with such atrocities, most of the public, which is totally unaware that such things are happening in the U.S., will have a hard time believing that these accounts are true. The abusers and perpetrators of these child sex trafficking networks use their influence and power to silence the abused, and it is often difficult or impossible to expose them.
Here at
Health Impact News, we have heard such stories for years, but only since last year have we been able to publish any actual cases of this happening in the U.S., as we (and other media sources) were able to publish the case of David Frodsham in the military town of Sierra Vista, Arizona, where he was arrested and convicted for running a child pornography pedophile ring out of his state-approved foster home in June of 2017. (
Story here.)
The fact that the U.S. foster care system is the #1 recruitment source for putting children into pedophilia child sex trafficking networks is not even disputed any longer. To learn more about this, see our previous stories:
Jennifer and Scott fear that their baby might be subjected to some of the same atrocities that Jennifer went through. Jennifer says:
For all I know, they’re planning to put her [Iris] through the same thing.
That is why I am fighting so desperately to get her back.
On the night that CPS came to their house in the first attempt to take Iris, Scott said:
We live in the state of Maryland, right next to good old DC, “human trafficking central.” So you’ll forgive me if I don’t want to let CPS walk off with my 3-month-old daughter.
9 Vaccines Given to Baby Who Went into “Full Code”
Iris was discharged from the hospital 2 days after CPS took her. Before they released her, they gave her a total of 9 vaccines, without her parents’ consent.
- Pediarix – diphtheria, hepatitis B, pertussis (acellular), polio, and tetanus vaccines
- DTaP – diptheria, tetanuss, and pertussis (acellular) vaccines
- Hib – Haemophilus influenzae type b
Jennifer was shocked to see in the medical records that her baby went into “Full Code” for which CPR was administered, the same day that she was given all the shots.
No one will elaborate on what happened to her daughter.
Yet, CPS and Iris’s guardian insist that they need to give her a second round of vaccines. Jennifer refuses to consent unless and until they get the full medical records and find out what happened to cause her baby to need CPR.
She said that when they were allowed to see Iris 2 days later, she seemed lethargic.
She was swollen, shaky, not making eye contact, or holding her head up the same way she was before. Her coordination had suffered and she had bruises on her hands, indicative of IVs. I knew on sight that they vaccinated her against our wishes, and she had an extremely bad reaction.
Why was baby Iris given an IV after she was taken from her parents? Why did she need CPR? Was it due to multiple vaccines given to her? Photo provided by family.
Next Court Date Is Months Away
The CPS investigation has closed. They still accuse the parents of refusing to agree to the conditions for release despite evidence to the contrary.
Iris was placed with a family member, but Iris’s parents do not believe that their daughter is safe.
The next court hearing is scheduled for October 25, but Jennifer and Scott plan to request an emergency hearing.
How You Can Help
They are begging for help to save their daughter. In one of the videos, Jennifer pleads:
If anybody can help, please help…. I don’t want her going through the same things I did. Nobody deserves to go through that….
I can’t let them hurt my daughter!
Larry Hogan is the Governor of Maryland. He may be reached at (410) 974-3901 or contacted
here. The official governor’s office website contains contact information for the National Human Trafficking Hotline – 1-888-373-7888.
Deloris Goodwin Kelley is the State Senator for the family’s district. She may be reached at (410) 841-3606 or contacted
here.
There are 3 delegates representing their district in the House of Delegates:
Benjamin T. Brooks, Sr. may be reached at (410) 841-3352 or contacted
here.
Jay Jalisi may be reached at (410) 841-3358 or contacted
here.
Adrienne A. Jones may be reached at (410) 841-3391 or contacted
here.
Michelle Malkin
Leonard Cottrell Jr., 40, of Millstone, NJ. (Courtesy of Leonard Cottrell)
