By Selwyn Duke

It perhaps was your grandparents’ birthing experience. But this certainly isn’t your grandparents’ government. A Washington state couple has had their children seized by Child Protective Services, allegedly because they refused to take them to a hospital for a check-up and treat their older child with steroids — for eczema.

Cleave and Erica May Rengo (shown with their children) certainly are do-it-yourselfers. The Bellingham residents eschewed a traditional marriage ceremony and instead, as Cleave put it, “just prayed and invited God to bless our relationship so we'd have a family built on a firm foundation.” Soon afterwards their first child was conceived, and nine months later Erica delivered him at a birth center. But when the new mother found herself pregnant again in short order, the couple returned to their independent ways and decided on home birth. Erica related the reasoning and desires behind this decision: “I've done a lot of research about other women who have done it and they said the spiritual experience was so much more wholesome,” she told media outlet King5.com. “It was just us. We wanted to preserve that sanctity and sacredness in our birth.”

But the home birth, on October 2, was not without surprises. Having forgone an ultrasound, the Rengos never expected a daughter to be born — on the heels of their second son. They’d had fraternal twins.

The deliveries themselves, however, were problem-free. The babies were healthy, and Erica “describes her homebirth as ‘exquisite’ and ‘empowering.’ Morna Kai Grace and Daniel Clemente were born into their parents’ loving arms,” wrote Terri LaPoint at MedicalKidnap.com.

But the post-partum period was anything but problem-free, with the couple getting a harsh lesson in how the state has been empowered.

Read the rest here.