The Attack on Parental Rights and the Constitution
April 25, 2019 12:00 ET

Parents across America are fighting for the lives of their children, and losing. Doctors, judges, and hospitals are ignoring parental decisions for their children in myriad situations which have created some major lawsuits around the globe. This presentation puts forward the notion that an international children's rights framework pulls kids away from parental protection to instead be guarded by the state. That result is failing children and their parents all around the world, and even here in the United States. At the same time, the notion that the State can protect the child by affording children rights rather than supporting and upholding parental protection of that child's best interests is a destructive international law value that seeps into American court decisions to allow hospitals, doctors, and judges to prevail over parents, which breaks down parental rights protections guarded by the U. S. Constitution. This presentation will discuss the preservation of parental rights and provide valuable insight on what concerned Americans can do to fight back against government erosion of those cherished rights.

Lynne Marie Kohm (B.A. Albany, 1980, J.D. Syracuse, 1988) is Professor and John Brown McCarty Professor of Family Law at Regent University School of Law. She is licensed to practice law in New York, Massachusetts, Virginia, D.C., and Florida, and practiced in upstate New York for several years before joining the faculty at Regent University.

Professor Kohm has taught Family Law at Regent University's law school since 1994, at William and Mary School of Law in 2000, and guest lectured at Cornell University in the 1990s. Her work has focused on legal research and scholarship on marriage, women's issues, children, family fragmentation and other family law issues, for which she received the Chancellor's Award at Regent University in 2005. She teaches courses in family law, bioethics, human life & death, wills, trusts & estates, and elder law. Her professional service includes the Virginia State Bar Family Law Section Board of Governors, the Virginia Bar Association Domestic Relations Council, the Chief Justice's Task Force on the Family Court in Virginia, and the Governor's Advisory Committee on Child Abuse and Neglect.

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