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I was innocently reading my New York Times last week when I was startled by this ghastly headline:

“Judge Let Abusive Parents Keep Daughter. Days Later, She Was Dead.”

As we shall see, this wasn’t a mistake; it was the logical consequence of a demented ideology that demands “reuniting” helpless children with their psychotic parents.

See if you can spot any telltale signs that Ella Vitalis should not have been sent back to her parents, Johnson Vitalis and Lafeyette Browne, ever, under any circumstances, even if they were the last people on Earth.

Ella first came to the attention of the authorities last year when she was just 3 weeks old and police, responding to a domestic violence call, found her with two broken ankles, a fractured skull and a brain hemorrhage. The parents had no explanation for any of this.

Child welfare authorities promptly placed both Ella and her 1-year-old brother, Liam, in foster care with their grandmother.

Just a month later, Ella’s father was left alone with her during a child visitation and, in that short amount of time, managed to slice the little girl’s tongue with a “sharp object,” requiring her to be fed intravenously for six days.

So far, Ella’s parents had spent a total of three weeks and a few hours with her, during which time she ended up with multiple broken bones, a brain hemorrhage and a bloody, mangled tongue.

So naturally, when family court judge and de Blasio appointee Erik S. Pitchal was assigned Ella’s case this past August, he ordered the children to be “reunited” with their parents. What a happy homecoming that must have been!

Over the next month, Ella’s parents managed to avoid sending her to the hospital, but judging by the cuts and bruises found on her body in September, it was not from lack of trying. The parents blew off all five follow-up appointments with child welfare specialists, so in September, case workers returned to court and again asked Judge Pitchal to remove the children.

He denied the request. (If only they’d said the parents were objecting to Ella becoming a transgender!) The next day, her parents delivered the fatal blow, striking Ella’s head with a blunt object, leaving her unresponsive. They explained to authorities that the welts all over her body resulted from her “drinking too much milk.” After five days on life support, she died.

Who could have seen that coming besides anybody? One of the judge’s defenders, Gladys Carrion, a former children’s services commissioner and currently a senior fellow at the Columbia Justice Lab (and apparently a world-renowned expert on circling the wagons), told the Times, “This is not an exact science.” It’s not “science” at all. It’s having the common sense of a basset hound.

Most people have no idea, but the obsession with keeping “families” together is another zany progressive cause. Part of the reason is that godless liberals who dismiss religion as a bunch of hocus-pocus believe there’s some mystical, supernatural connection between kids and their biological parents — even if the parents are Charles Manson and Lizzie Borden.

But a big reason are those fatal words, capable of annihilating everything in their path: “Disparate impact.” It seems that black parents are more likely to abuse their kids than white parents. As put by NBC News/Pro Publica last year, inspired by “the 2020 demonstrations for racial justice nationwide, family rights activists have made a renewed push to change the child welfare system — including the repeal of the [1997 child safety law].”

(They’re great people, aren’t they?)

Before the “rights activists” dismantle another basic pillar of civilization in the name of “social justice,” let’s pause to remember why the 1997 Adoption and Safe Families Act was passed in the first place.

In 1996, Sister Josephine Murphy, who worked at St. Ann’s Infant and Maternity Home, appeared before Congress, begging members to reconsider the “families first” policy of the Family Reunification Act and replace it with “children come first.”

Here’s a portion of her testimony:

“Alice, a little 2-year-old who had to have stitches for vaginal lacerations because she had been raped. Kathy, 2 weeks old, came to us with gonorrhea of the throat. Pam, who at 15 months of age suffered from venereal warts. She had been sexually abused by her mother’s boyfriend and needed surgery because of it. Surgery was scheduled, but before it took place, she was discharged to her mother and right back to the same situation.”

A report by the U.S. Advisory Board on Child Abuse and Neglect listed some of the ways children had been killed by their parents in 1993: Here are a few:

2-month-old: force-fed fatal amounts of Epsom salts and liquid antacids;
5-month-old: scalded to death;
1-year-old: beaten with shoe heel;
2-year-old: severely beaten after bed-wetting;
3-year-old: forcibly hung by neck;
7-year-old: bludgeoned to death;
8-year-old: stabbed in heart.

At that time, about 1,200 to 1,500 kids were being killed by their parents every year. After passage of a law putting kids’ safety above keeping “families” together (and avoiding racial stereotypes!), that number was cut in half. Today, about 700 kids die at their parents’ hands every year.

Under Joe Biden’s active, hands-on leadership, progressives are getting everything they’ve ever wanted. They’ve flung open the border, emptied the prisons, embroiled the nation in faraway wars and established anti-white racism as our national creed. Giving homicidal parents a “second chance” is surely coming up on the agenda.

Let Ella Vitalis’ hideous death remind Americans why we shouldn’t let progressives anywhere near child welfare laws.