Firstly, this statement from the mother:
After Carlsen's court appearance this morning her friend, Megan Tormey, said she was angry that it took four days to get Carlsen a working breast pump in jail. "If the doctors were so concerned about Riley's health, why weren't they demanding his milk?" she said.
This is actually a rather telling statement -- but NOT in the way you think it is.
The baby is 9 months old.
The protective factors in the mother's milk runs out after about six weeks of nursing. By 6 months, most infants are interested in chewing and want to try semisolid food. By 9 months, most infants worldwide are being given "adult foods"... because our bodies have adapted to a birth cycle of babies being roughly 9-12 months apart.
You can't nurse three children simultaneously. Ther's not enough mammary glands and the energy drain on a woman to become a "milk cow" and produce milk for a number of infants and toddlers is enormous (and part of the underlying reason why in primitive cultures twins are considered unlucky.)
The mom's snipe there at the doctors shows that whoever she's getting her medical advice from has some flaws in basic health.
She belongs to a group that believes in some form of natural care. I did a bit more research and found this:
www.king5.com...
The baby's father says Carlsen believes in a natural form of care. She now has a group with similar belief's behind her, although one member of the group has reportedly been under investigation by the Department of Health.
...
While they say they have good intentions, according to published reports, Debra O'Connor is described as a midwife who take natural childbirth to the extreme. She has been under investigation for her connection to the deaths of three babies
So the group offering this advice has already tried its own methods, which resulted in the deaths of three infants in the group within the past few years.
It's a small group. 3 infant deaths in 100,000 births would be tragic but expected. 3 deaths in 20 births means something is terribly wrong and that they apparently don't recognize life-threatening situations when they see them.
CPS had stepped in to take the baby away from the couple (so someone ratted them out and someone saw something that concerned them) :
www.king5.com...
So ...
* we have a baby whose condition was known at birth.
* the docs had said from birth he would eventually need a transplant and/or dialysis.
* at some recent point the baby was sick enough to require hospitalization.
* the baby has had a feeding tube inserted in his abdomen. This is done when the child can't eat and may not have been eating (in these cases the child often vomits up everything he's given to eat, so the "mother's milk" is really not an issue here.)
* the group that the mother is involved with which promotes "naturopathic treatments" has already had 3 infant deaths.
Now... humor me for a moment -- let's look at naturopathic treatments for something we all know about and that can sometimes require medical intervention: kidney stones.
www.google.com...
If you explore the pages, you'll notice that there's not a consistant recommendation and there's not even a consistant dosage recommendation. So one site recommends bayberry (in unspecified quantities), another recommends Cantharis, another recommends fasting and vitamin C, another recommends no proteins (a dangerous recommendation for a child!), another recommends vitamin B6 instead of C, aromatherapy (go smell something and your kidney stones will get better), and on and on and on.
There's nothing consistant.
There's no "we ran this treatment on 2,000 people and here's what hapened to them" reports.
All we have is a group that has already managed to kill three of its children recommending treatments and practitioners to a set of parents with a child that has a severe medical condition.
Riley has some form of chronic renal failure that at some point (shortly in the future) will tip over into acute renal failure: www.kidney-failure-symptoms.com...
Scan that list of symptoms -- bleeding, blood in stools or vomit, easy bruising.
Now... review your mental checklist of what a baby who's been physically beaten by his parents might look like. Yep... blood in the diaper, brusing. CPS may have been sent out because someone thought the parents were beating the child.
The issue of when the state should step in is a dicey one at best. There's no doubt they prevented many deaths, but they get hammered when they step in (stealing children from their parents!) and hammered when they don't step in (why didn't you keep this baby away from that psychotic mother!)
Until we develop better methods of predicting the future, I doubt the matter will be resolved to anyone's satisfaction.
) are responsible for a whole lot more than just three deaths. 
