Heavy Heart

Mary Anaya's story has completed. Here is a link to an article written in the Omaha World-Herald.

http://www.omaha.com/article/20091022/NEWS01/710229910

About two years ago, when I first heard of her story and did some digging, I blogged about the atrocity of the removal of her youngest son Joel, from her home. With my own tiny one at home, the thought that someone could remove, at gunpoint, a newborn from his mother's arms, and it all was ordered by a judge, sickened me. Mary's crime was that she did not allow a state official to lance little Joel's heel and take five circles of blood from him, to test him for the state's mandated metabolic screen test. For that, many armed police officers burst through her door one morning, and in front of her frightened small children, grabbed baby Joel from her. The battle for her tiny baby went on for quite some time, while sympathetic social workers and the foster mother allowed her to (unlawfully) sneak visits five times a day to drop off pumped milk, and to nurse him. Joel eventually was returned, and this year, a higher court ruled that while Mary did indeed break Nebraska's (useless, stupid, liberty-killing) law, the lower court overreached their bounds by ordering his removal. I like to think my (and thousands of others) letter writing campaign played at least a small part! Surprisingly, that series of blog posts that I did was published in a Human Right's Advocacy project on the part of a group of lawyers that were collecting such violations.

Mary's tenacity and strength of character was truly something to behold. I never had the pleasure of meeting this wonderful woman, but countless people in many counties of Nebraska and Iowa benefitted from this woman's very giving nature.

Mary leaves behind a husband, Josue, and ten children, and a legacy that will be hard to fill. She joins her extremely tiny, far too premature little one, who died only hours before she did. God rest her peaceful, admirable soul.