"What about the children?" is the most common response I get from apologists for CPS, who demand that CPS should act with impunity to strike terror in the hearts of families because the good they may do to two or three children somehow justifies the bad they do to 100. Here is my response on a message board to a foster parent who asked precisely that question:

What ABOUT the kids, XXXXXXXXXXX?

Let me start my response by stating that I will extend to you the benefit of the doubt. While others may see it differently, I believe in reading your words that you are one of those gems that we need to keep within the foster care system. Your love for these children is obviously genuins, and it is precisely that love that would spur you to activism.

I would like to correct you on the point of these being "your" kids, but others have already done so, so I will stay with my main point.

CPS is the only government agency I know of which allows NO outside oversight in most areas. The "citizens" on the review board are carefully vetted cheerleaders of everything CPS undertakes who will absolutely never return a finding of guilt against the agency, only against individuals, and even then, only as rarely as necessary to protect themselves from the PR fallout. Can you imagine if there were nobody to hold our government accountable? the resulting actions would be mindboggling.

CPS has overburdened the foster care system for profit. By seizing more children, they make more money, so they look for justifications for more seizures. This makes the job of you and other caring foster parents more difficult, as CPS stretches out the emotional resources of many by giving them more children than they can handle. If all the children were abused and neglected, that would be one thing. But the compelling and consistent evidence that they aren't means that the children who ARE abused and neglected are too often denied the services and attention they actually need in their fragile state because the money can only go so far. They deserve better.

CPS also does not place many foster homes under the same scrutiny as they do birth parents. I lived in a foster farm, and I recently revisited the place where this family has taken in foster children for over 20 years. The place was a pit then, and it is a pit now. If birth parents could see the conditions of homes like this where their children were living, many of them would have their children returned in a heartbeat, because, quite simply, these conditions are often WORSE than the conditions from which the children are removed.

And so I again repeat your question back to you: What ABOUT the children? Don't they deserve better than to be treated as chattel, traded back and forth between homes, and brought up in homes without love? There are many poor homes in America where the money is absent, but the love is abundant. It is many of THESE homes that CPS targets, and it is precisely BECAUSE of these homes that you and everyone else who cares about the children, should be passionately arguing for a RADICAL reform of the system.