Vegan Parents Starve Baby to Death on Soy Milk/Apple Juice Diet

Amazing. And sad."Vegan parents guilty in infant murder 6-week-old died of starvation after being fed diet of soy milk, apple juice"

read more digg story

***************************************************

I usually don't do this, but one issue I had with this story on Digg was the assinine comments made on it. Some of the real sore thumbs follow:

"Poor parents, they must be traumatized....I'm surprised they never mentioned the fact they were vegans to their doctor, a nutritionist could have easily helped them support their baby on a vegan diet." -dacrazydude

"'I know they're vegans, but was there something wrong with feeding the kid the milk from her breasts?'
That would be an animal product. " -chompy

"No offense to all the veggie eaters but I hate to break the news to you we are no herbivores, we're omnivores. Could they be any dumber really? Women don't have breast milk for no reason you know, proof right there we are to eat dairy and products of animals. " -richiestang78

"Proof positive that humans are not meant to be vegans. If you decide to be a vegan that's all well and good, but let your kids make decisions for themselves, and in the mean time feed them a healthy, normal diet that an omnivorous species like us is supposed to have." -dgh1973

And so on and so forth.

***************************************************************

The parents did not do this because they're vegan. They did this because they're extremely stupid and cruel. First off, she could have breastfed the baby or fed him a soy-based formula, both of which are vegan options that are perfectly healthy for a baby. Also, if she had fed the baby a large enough amount of the soy milk, he would have survived, he just wouldn't have been very healthy. So not only were they feeding the wrong food, they were feeding him a much smaller amount than any baby could have survived on.

That's not even the biggest mistake they made. I could understand not knowing any better and doing that for a couple of days, but when your baby is losing weight instead of gaining, there's a problem. When you have a six-week-old infant that weighs less than four pounds, there is no way in hell that you don't know that something's wrong. The reason they deserve every minute of their lives in prison is for ignoring their son's well-being and not even bothering to take him to a doctor until he was already dead. In my opinion, they used the vegan thing as a crutch, hoping it would get them off. I know many vegan mothers who have raised vegan children who are perfectly healthy. Hell, if you can't breastfeed, they sell vegan formula at Wal-Mart. Come on.

The thing that really gets me about the whole mess is that these people are going to reflect on the vegan community even though they're the exception, not the rule. There have already been cases where vegan children who are perfectly healthy have been taken by CPS because of their parents' dietary choices. (These children were all eventually returned to their parents.) Then you have people like the commenters above who get the completely wrong idea about things.