The Children’s Corner
incentive for pregnant women to seek
out treatment for their addiction. But
such is not the case here. Although access to services may provide barriers
in some instances, mother had gotten
treatment through approved sources
and lost that opportunity due to her
own conduct.28 Mother’s choice to use
drugs accessed on the street, without
proper medical monitoring, is fraught
with danger in a host of ways, including abuse of Suboxone itself.29
Justice Robinson’s eloquent dissent in
M.M. sets forth in full why such an analysis may be fraught with peril, as the majority’s analysis at least in part focuses on the
risk of harm mother exposed the fetus to
while in utero, as well as directly after birth
as the infant experiences withdrawal. In
Justice Robinson’s view, that focus should
not be the sole basis for a determination
that a MAT compliant mother at the time
of the child’s birth was unable to provide
proper parental care for the infant, noting
that the opiate crises in Vermont has had
the effect of:
exacerbating the already Herculean
challenge of determining which circumstances warrant state intervention in families for the protection of
children, and which do not. By rejecting presumptions about the effects of
opioid addiction on parents and calling for findings concerning the effects
of a parent’s addiction in each case, I
don’t seek to make the jobs of hardworking child protection workers and
of the equally hard-working trial courts
even more challenging. But these are
exactly the kinds of circumstances that
require courts to be exceptionally diligent to ensure that, in every case, we
ground our rulings in evidence and
law, and not supposition and personal
judgment.30
The bottom line, however, is that the
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