Vegan parents who put baby girl on strict diet leaving her severely malnourished avoid jail: 'At 20 months she weighed only 11 pounds'
A vegan mother and father, whose three-year-old daughter has been sent to foster care after facing developmental problems, have narrowly avoided a prison sentence.
The 33-year-old mom, who reportedly decided who ate what at home, and her 35-year-old husband, who is not vegan but under fire for allowing it to happen, cried in a court in Sydney, Australia, as Judge Sarah Huggett ripped them a new one. Hugget revealed that the parents' negligence put their child in considerable danger of injury, "falling short of death".
According to Metro, the couple was very secretive about their child and did not even let her go out, so much so that their neighbors did not even know that they had a daughter. When she was found, the toddler was 20 months old, weighing a mere 11 pounds. Authorities had initially assumed that she was just three months old. Her mother’s forced diet choices still affect her to this day even though she is in foster care now.
When questioned in court, the mother claimed that she would feed her daughter a cup of oats and rice milk and half a banana in the morning, toast with jam or peanut butter for lunch and tofu, rice or potatoes in the night. The girl, who was described as a "fussy eater" by her mother, had undetectable levels of vitamin D, lack of calcium, phosphate, vitamin B12, vitamin A, iron, and zinc.
Her husband's barrister argued that he could not be blamed because the mother was in charge of the household diet and "he is not and was not a vegetarian or a vegan". The father, however, also drew flak from the judge for what happened to his daughter. The couple has since separated.
Three years old now, the girl has not developed properly and has, instead, developed rickets. She is still much smaller than her peers, suffers from obesity and cannot speak more than about 20 words.
Her foster caretaker was quoted as saying, "For the first 19 months of her life (the girl) did not receive the basic care to grow and develop. ‘[The girl] was defenseless and unable to protect herself from her parents. Caring for [the girl] was like caring for a very young baby."