The cycle of child abuse.

• Author: Wear, Nancy C.
• Position: Letters - Letter to the Editor

The President's Page in the June Journal exhorted lawyers to send $45 to The Florida Bar Foundation to "provide legal assistance to children through grants to legal aid and other legal services programs across Florida."

Instead, we lawyers should be lobbying the Department of Children and Families to include, in the "plans" that DCF is mandated to offer its clients, full access to all forms of family planning, including the contraceptive patch and pill, the "morning after" pill, and condoms, as well as the permanent options of tubal ligation and vasectomy. Lawyers can and should be lending every effort to lead (or goad) DCF to provide these services to all of its clients.

Any Florida lawyer who spends any time in juvenile court knows that children having children is likely to produce fodder for pimps, jails, and prisons. And to stand by while drug-dependent women and their boyfriends reproduce like bunnies is to sanction child abuse. One of the cases I handled at the appeal stage for the Miami-Dade Guardian ad Litem Program involved a drug-abusing mother whose parental rights were terminated for the sixth time (the second time in a year). DCF never offered her a tubal ligation, or her partner (father of at least three of the children) a vasectomy. Neither "parent" was even offered a box of condoms (cost $4.99 retail). The kids, placed with relatives, are growing up in their dysfunctional mother's environment.

The latest Miami-Dade DCF scandal centers on an abused foster child who became pregnant while still in DCF custody, and, at 20, allegedly murdered her three-year-old child. (This mom's latest...