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Why Was Heidi Howard Arrested?

Can This Saga be Unraveled and Understood?

February 2002

What was the crime of Heidi Howard?

She refused to destroy her family.

That has become a crime in Massachusetts. For violating that crime, she and her husband, Neil, were arrested, handcuffed and shackled.

The employees of the state wanted Heidi Howard to leave her husband. They wanted her to get a free divorce from Greater Boston Legal Services. She refused because she loved her husband and children. As a result, the bureaucracy became very hostile and tried to destroy her.

Town police were instructed by state employees to come to her home at a time when they knew she would be alone. They wanted to separate her from her husband and children. She was taken to a mental hospital in a police ambulance and kept in the hospital against her will, under the supervision of state employees, for over two weeks. It wasn’t until she agreed to leave the area, go to a “shelter” in Springfield and not return to her home that they released her. When she left the shelter after a few days, she had committed the ultimate sin.

Records from her medical file at Emerson Hospital show that the social workers were in charge and told the hospital what to do.

Because she was enthusiastic about breastfeeding her children and did so until the child no longer desired it, the state employees filed a formal complaint against her for that.

State lawyers spent hundreds of hours of work in court fighting Heidi and her husband. The obvious object was to simply wear them down and make it impossible for them to respond.

The state even demanded that a busy judge decide whether she should be allowed to nurse her two-month-old baby.

When she and her husband hired a lawyer in an attempt to respond, the state’s lawyers went to court and demanded that she have her own lawyer because there was a conflict of interest between her and her husband.

The only thing that saved the Howards, they say, was that Atty. Chester Darling volunteered to represent her for free or else the state would undoubtedly have been successful in keeping and putting their children up for adoption.

The attempt to wear them out went on for a year with their lawyers being forced to attend 30 hearings, many times having to wait for hours before the case would be heard.

There is always talk of settlement in any lawsuit. Judges always require such talk, but not when an unlimited amount of money from the state is funding their lawyers to fight these troublesome people. That becomes the tactic, to just destroy and punish the other side with paper and hearings. There will be no settlement.

Innocent parents, such as the Howards, have no idea that as soon as  they enter any maternity ward in any hospital in the state, they have been engulfed by a network of snooping, prying persons, many of whom have rigid personalities. They like to dominate others. The Howards were apparently engulfed by such unknown, faceless persons at Spaulding Rehab Center, Boston.

The Howards were fortunate in being assigned a retired judge who was not necessarily concerned with “getting along” for the next 30 years by going along with everyone in this new, large industry.

Heidi’s independent, inquisitive nature had drawn such ire from state employees that their desire was to keep taking any more babies she could produce. This would give them more clean, white children that were easily adoptable which would, in turn, give them more money to hire their friends for all types of consulting, visitation centers, batterer courses, etc. This all takes millions of taxpayer dollars a year, but it is worth it to the consultants many of who now drive expensive sports cars.

A parent must be very careful because if the children are taken away for even a day, just that separation from the home is serious trauma. Even if the foster parent is perfection itself, although in most cases they are not, the children suffer real abuse at those homes, just as the Christopher and Ethan did in this case.

Although a state statute requires that a hearing be held within 72 hours after any child is taken from its home, the courts do not even pretend to enforce this law. The state can do exactly what it wishes. Because this is not a “criminal” process, there are very little Constitutional rights recognized by the judges. The rights of a drug dealer are zealously protected by the judges, as they should be, but they have no such compunction where families are concerned.

The social workers have become judges because the real judges have abdicated their role. But there is no accountability for these new judges. If a regular judge is arbitrary or capricious, a complaint can be filed with the Judicial Conduct Commission. But there is no viable complaint procedure for the new judges.

Many observers disagree whether the status of the system is: (a) The inevitable result of bureaucrats who do not like to be crossed. (b) A greed for more and more money and power. • A visible display from those women who suffer from an extreme dislike of men.

The intellectualization of social service workers at Boston University where that group became a profession and obtained their own, independent college in the late 1930s has given them their own domain which they control without oversight. Just like the education colleges, they award their own PhDs and have created their own religion. They are a power unto themselves and are answerable to no one. They have alumni, mostly female, everywhere throughout the state, many of whom have a strong antipathy for the traditional, nuclear family, such as the Howards. They sincerely believe that women such as Heidi, to whom their husbands and family are the most important thing in the world, have a serious psychological problem.

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