Bagel Leads to Government Child-Snatching

Courtesy of Grimm Reaper from my alternate-history forum:

http://criminaljustice.change.org/blog/view/losing_a_baby_over_a_poppy_seed

Now that I've gotten your attention with the headline, time for discussion...

For starters, a drug test more stringent than the federal government's, a drug test that can be failed if someone eats a bloody bagel, is entirely too strict.  I agree that they should change that immediately.  Even the child protection types said they had problems with this hospital before.

One of the comments suggested that informed consent be required for any test, while another comment said that according to some of the documents, the hospital does the drug-testing in order to ensure the child won't be at risk of drug withdrawal soon after birth.

However, wouldn't it be a good idea to drug-test the infant, as part of the usual battery of tests they do on newborns, rather than drug-testing the parent?  An infant is not going to be eating a bagel with poppy seeds on it, after all.

I will take a moment to show some empathy for the hospital--if they do the drug test and send the kid home with parents they suspect to be on drugs and something happens to the kid, they're going to catch hell if it gets found out.  The state of Pennsylvania overreacting with an order to take the child when they could have simply sent one person (not several people and certainly not cops!) to maybe talk to the parents to see what is going on is probably the worse outrage of the two.

I hope the parents take everyone responsible to the cleaners.