Today in awful: Fearing their infant daughter would become fat and therefore gross, one Wisconsin couple attempted to limit their child’s food intake to preserve her sexy bikini ready baby physique. Now, the baby’s in protective custody and they’re being charged with child neglect. Meanwhile, in another neighborhood in Whattheeverlovingfucktown, an Ohio woman has been charged with involuntary manslaughter after starving her teenage daughter with cerebral palsy to death. Dr. Spock is spinning in his grave so fast that he’s creating an electrical current.
The New York Daily News case of Wisconsin couple Chris and Mary Sultze and their infant daughter caught the eye of the authorities when doctors noticed that she only weighed 7 pounds, 9 ounces at her four-month checkup. For months, they told doctors that some children just gain weight more slowly than others and that she’d catch up on her own schedule. In September, nearly a year after her 4-month checkup, the baby weighed only 13 pounds and doctors said she had no subcutaneous fat. The parents said the baby just had high metabolism and that they were feeding her plenty.
After much hemming and hawing, they allowed a local hospital to hold the baby for observation. She gained 8 ounces on the first day she was there, which upset her parents, who told doctors they wanted to take her home. Her father told doctors that he didn’t want to have fat kids, and that since he’d had heart problems, he was trying to prevent them in his daughter. That’s funny in a claw your hair out kind of way, since starvation can lead to the weakening of the heart muscle. But, you know. Parents know best.