Mother's Breast-Feeding Query Leads to Year's Separation from Child

UNDATED Undated (AP) _ Denise Perrigo's tale makes parental blood run cold: how she posed a simple question - about breast-feeding - to the wrong people and suddenly found herself in jail, in court and separated from her 3-year-old daughter for a year.

''I've had moms call me and start bawling, imagining it happening to their own child. And then I start crying again, too,'' said Perrigo, 29. ''There's been a lot of pain reflected in their voices, imagining what we've been through. A lot of anger, that this could happen. A lot of fear.''

The Onondaga County Department of Social Services in Syracuse, N.Y., which declined to discuss the case, has also heard from frightened parents, said Diane Erne, DSS deputy commissioner.

''There's a lot of breast-feeding women out there saying, 'Heavens, could I lose my child?' But as a policy statement, this department has never removed a child because a mother was breast-feeding,'' Erne said.

''It was never described as breast-feeding,'' countered Ralph Cognetti, an attorney for Perrigo who is preparing a lawsuit against DSS and others. ''They twisted it and called it sexual abuse - 'placing the mouth on the breast.' If it wasn't so serious, it would be laughable.''

It began in January 1991, when Perrigo, who lives in Lafayette outside Syracuse, called a community volunteer center to find a phone contact for the local La Leche League, a breast-feeding advocacy and support group.

She wanted to know whether it was normal to become aroused while nursing. Had she reached La Leche, she would have learned that yes, many women experience such feelings.

Instead, she was referred to the Rape Crisis Center, where the volunteer apparently equated Perrigo's question, and the fact that she was nursing a 2- year-old, with sexual abuse.

The center called the child abuse hot line. Perrigo spent the night in jail. Her daughter was taken by the DSS workers.

During a five-hour police interrogation, Perrigo said, ''I was just focusing on, if I could just explain it to these folks, if they could just understand that it was just a mistake, that we could get this whole mess straightened out, and that would be the end of it.''

It wasn't. Criminal charges were dismissed immediately, but DSS filed sexual abuse and neglect charges in family court and kept her daughter, whom she didn't see for a week. Perrigo's court-appointed attorney, Karin Marris, was shocked by the case, her first involving abuse allegations.

''I was well-read about nursing and what's normal,'' said Marris, a young mother who breast-fed her own children. ''I was in touch with the right people immediately.''

Meanwhile, Perrigo's parents filed a petition for custody of their granddaughter. Despite the deparment's policy of making every effort to place children with family or friends, it failed to act.

''We were after them for months on this,'' Marris said. ''And finally, we received a one-page letter where they said essentially that Denise's parents were unacceptable because they did not believe any abuse had taken place.''

Perrigo's parents were forced to hire their own attorney. Eight months after Perrigo's daughter was put in foster care and $8,000 of their own money later, they were granted custody.

In the interim, Perrigo's own visitation with her daughter became increasingly restricted. For months, she saw her only two hours once every two weeks, in a small room at the county office building, while a social service worker stood by.

''At first, she kept asking to nurse. And I said, 'You can't, honey, you really can't,''' Perrigo said. ''And then the older she got, and the more time we spent away, it would be, 'Mommy, when can I come home? Mommy, let me tell the judge I want to go home.'''

In April, Family Court Judge Leonard Bresani found that no abuse or neglect had taken place and ordered Perrigo's daughter returned. He cited testimony by La Leche League officials who had spoken about the normalcy both of nursing toddlers and having feelings of arousal while breast-feeding.

The department persisted.

''I feel the caseworker assigned to the case felt Denise was guilty from the very beginning,'' Marris said. ''It became very mean-spirited.''

Instead of returning the child, DSS filed new charges before a different judge the next day. Among these were allegations that Perrigo had inserted foreign objects in the girl's vagina; later, it was decided that this was the child's description of having her temperature taken rectally.

An imminent danger hearing, normally a procedure completed in a matter of weeks at most, dragged on for five months as DSS dredged up every potentially damning detail from Perrigo's past.

''She had lived for a while with her pastor and his wife, and the department implied that she had been involved with her pastor,'' Marris said, adding that the department made much of the fact Perrigo is a single mother.

Cognetti said DSS also brought out that she had sought counseling because she believed she was too easily drawn into sexual relationships with men and had been abused at age 12 by an uncle a year older.

''This is all after-the-fact stuff they dug up to make a bad situation look good,'' he said. ''They had absolutely nothing. They were scrambling.''

In November, Judge Edward McLaughlin found that no abuse had taken place but that there had been neglect.

McLaughlin cited Perrigo's failure to wean earlier, along with some other, puzzling reasons for finding Perrigo neglectful. Among them: the fact that she sought counseling for her daughter after one of the child's friends was abused, and that she subjected her daughter to DSS interviews by making her phone call in the first place. Marris is appealing.

Perrigo believes the social stigma against nursing older children in the United States fostered the kind of ignorance that made her ordeal possible. One of the officers who arrested her, for example, told her it was physically impossible to nurse a 2-year-old.

''I never expected to nurse a 2-year-old,'' Perrigo said. ''But it worked so well for both of us, it was really the easiest way for me to care for her. And she was a very happy nursing little girl.''

The international average length of nursing is 4.2 years, said Dr. Ruth Lawrence, a University of Rochester pediatrician and one of the nation's foremost authorities on breast-feeding.

''There are hundreds of thousands of women who do nurse their toddlers, but because of the public reaction to it, they don't nurse publicly,'' she said.

The Perrigo case is not the only one where extended nursing has been used against a mother in court. Dr. Niles Newton, a behavioral sciences professor at Northwestern University, said she was contacted a year ago by a woman who lost custody of her breast-feeding toddler in a divorce case.

''They felt she was not a good mother because she nursed so long,'' Dr. Newton said. ''My response to that is, she was an especially good mother exactly because she nursed so long.''

Perrigo credits the bond forged by breast-feeding for easing her child's return home Jan. 6. Still, the outgoing, talkative toddler taken from her came back a clingy little girl who fears strangers, cries out in her sleep and wants to be cuddled constantly.

''Mommy, my heart has been so empty of you, because you weren't there,'' she says. ''Please hold me. Fill my heart back up.''

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