Government Background Checks for Parents of Newborn Babies?

Parents of newborns may soon experience more government red tape. In fact, all parents of newborn babies may soon go through a background check before the baby is released to the parents in the hospital.


State Automated Child Welfare Informations Systems (SACWIS) and the Child Abuse Central Index (CACI) are proposing these background checks. They could soon be collecting information about you to build a case that you may be unfit to be a parent.

C. Patience Summers writes:

The eventual goal of SACWIS is to have it interlinked from state to state, across the United States of America and to eventually pass a law making it standard to run everyone’s name through the system prior to releasing their newborn child from the hospital to them to decide whether or not they should be permitted to have custody of their child.

Yes: soon, people will need to pass this “background check” in order to take their own newborn child home from the hospital.

As it stands, only a few states are interlinked and the ones who do check the system only check when there is a reasonable suspicion that something is wrong; however, the goal is to eventually run everyone who has a child through this system before any hospital releases their child to them.