Andrea Dunlop

It's not a crime.

And there's some legislation in Texas that they've been trying to get passed.

In the current climate, it is hard to imagine that making much progress because there are people who are very against any such laws, specifically people who are very strongly anti-vaccine and want to preserve their ability to not disclose the fact that they have not vaccinated their children, for example.

And obviously, it's something that a law that would have to be carefully written.

But what I want people to understand about these cases is we are not talking about subtle things.

We are not talking about a parent saying they vomited three or four times when they vomited twice.

They're not saying, you know, a fever was a point higher than it was.

These are dramatic saying that your child tested positive for cancer when they didn't.

It's blatant lies.

It's over a period of time.

This is not an easy crime to even detect, let alone prosecute.

So I think right now we have no laws against Munchausen by proxy abuse.

And so when people are criminally prosecuted, which is extremely rare,

They are prosecuted under laws that are injury to a child or aggravated child abuse, depending on the state and the statute, where they essentially have to prove some physical harm.

The crime then is not the abuse itself.

It's that they took blood out of their child and caused anemia or they died.

They suffocated their child.

It has to be some pretty extreme physical intervention.

And even more than, you know, laws, because child abuse, how we handle it in this country, there's sort of these two tracks right where you're looking at the child welfare system, which is social workers and dependency and family court and that kind of thing.

And there's only a couple of states that even have this as a designation.