I had never heard of Justina Pelletier until today. As someone with substantial familiarity with how things work in the social services portions of Massachuset

I had never heard of Justina Pelletier until today. As someone with substantial familiarity with how things work in the social services portions of Massachusetts state government as well as the culture of the state (I grew up and currently live in MA) her story does not surprise me in the slightest. This general pattern of one wrong call in how a case is handled being perpetuated through the rest of the case is not an uncommon pattern when things go badly. People in this state very much take for granted that the administrative portion of government is competent and knows what it's doing. Government here is generally competent but there are many pockets of incompetent political appointees and totally under-resourced teams and there's no way of telling which is which from the outside. People also take as fact the word of big important prestigious organizations that are experts in what they do (and with good reason, they are usually right). BCH and similar may be experts as a whole and government may be competent in general but these institutions are made up of people and people aren't perfect and they get things wrong sometimes. Someone at BCH clearly made the wrong call. That wrong call got plopped on the desk of some overworked bureaucrat who takes it at face value because they're overworked and they're experts so why not trust them, they made the wrong call. So then the next person at BCH sees in this girl's file that she came in for X, got referred to the state, the state took her from her parents and that influences how they treat her going forward. This goes on and you get a heck of a feedback loop because everyone is just content to assume that the state and the experts know best and the parents are just whining about it. Nobody is in a position to evaluate the big picture and even if they do how do you stop the loop and say "hey wait, this looks wrong". I could fill a novel with all the sob stories like this that I know though most of them relate to drug addicts and the elderly so they wouldn't tug a heartstrings nearly as much as this story does. The culture of the state simply does not equip people in "the system" (both the government and private institutions like BCH) to doubt or re-evaluate the prior results of the system and the conditions of the state bureaucracy are not sufficient for the bureaucrats to reliably make the right calls the first (and often only) time around. It's sad but it is what it is. This is a complex problem that many societies grapple with and not the kind of thing any individual can change on their own. Regarding Martin Gottesfeld, I am not informed enough to comment.