Why Every Family Needs to Know a Good Lawyer

Do parents need a lawyer to protect their children and their family from separation by the state?  The Texas case of the Pardo family exposes that every family at least needs to know a good lawyer to call any time, particularly when Child Protective Services (CPS) may assert that it is protecting a child. 

As reported by CBN News, “the Pardos' battle with CPS began in June when CPS representatives, aided by uniformed police, entered the Pardo home and seized their four-year-old son, Drake, taking him into protective custody. The Pardos say authorities did this with no explanation, with no one telling them why or giving them any information about the allegations against them.”

Apparently, CPS claimed the couple was guilty of medical child abuse, but not for depriving their fragile son of medical treatment. Rather, they were accused of seeking medical care the child did not need. It seems that when the family wanted a second medical opinion the first doctor handed Drake's medical files over to the "Child Abuse" office of the hospital, “setting in motion the process that culminated in that momentous knock on the door and with the state of Texas taking a child from his parents, even though there had never been a whiff of abuse in the family.”  

From there, as the Pardos went to court to fight for their son, "it became clear that all medical care Drake had ever received had been prescribed by his attending physicians, none of whom CPS had ever spoken to before deciding to remove him from his home," according to Texas Home School Coalition, who fought on behalf of the Pardos throughout this ordeal. CBN reports, “The facts, it seemed, never entered into the actions taken by Child Protective Services. The agency continued to doggedly pursue its case and kept Drake in foster care until the Texas Supreme Court ordered him released to his parents on October 24th. Even then, CPS refused to dismiss the case. That is until Tuesday, December 3rd, when Judge Gray signed the dismissal order.” The president of the Texas Home School Coalition, the organization that supplied legal counsel to the Pardos, said, "We're really happy for the family," according to The Texan. "It's a total travesty that this case ever came to this point."  

Now the concern by parents everywhere should be that this kind of abusive action does not happen to other families.  At Regent Law students in the Family Law course are learning how to represent parents based on the fundamental constitutional principle that parents have the right to direct the upbringing of their children.  Here, future lawyers are trained to be ready when a family needs one.