One Question Led To Year Of Pain -- Mother Lost Her Child Over Query About Breast-Feeding

Denise Perrigo's tale makes parental blood run cold: how she posed a simple question - about breast-feeding - to the wrong people and suddenly found herself in jail, in court and separated from her 3-year-old daughter for a year.

"I've had moms call me and start bawling, imagining it happening to their own child. And then I start crying again, too," said Perrigo, 29.

The Onondaga County Department of Social Services in Syracuse, N.Y., which declined to discuss the case, has also heard from frightened parents, said Diane Erne, DSS deputy commissioner.

"There's a lot of breast-feeding women out there saying, `Heavens, could I lose my child?' But as a policy statement, this department has never removed a child because a mother was breast-feeding," Erne said.

"It was never described as breast-feeding," countered Ralph Cognetti, an attorney for Perrigo who is preparing a lawsuit against DSS. "They twisted it and called it sexual abuse - `placing the mouth on the breast.' If it wasn't so serious, it would be laughable."

It began in January 1991, when Perrigo, who lives in Lafayette outside Syracuse, called a community volunteer center to find a phone contact for the local La Leche League, a breast-feeding advocacy and support group.

She wanted to know whether it was normal to become aroused while nursing. Had she reached La Leche, she would have learned that many women experience such feelings.

Instead, she was referred to the Rape Crisis Center, where the volunteer equated Perrigo's question, and the fact that she was nursing a 2-year-old, with sexual abuse.

The center called the child-abuse hotline. Perrigo spent the night in jail. Her daughter was taken by the DSS workers.

During a five-hour police interrogation, Perrigo said, "I was just focusing on: If I could just explain it to these folks . . . that would be the end of it."

It wasn't. Criminal charges were dismissed immediately, but DSS filed sexual abuse and neglect charges in family court and kept her daughter. Perrigo's court-appointed attorney, Karin Marris, was shocked by the case.

"I was well-read about nursing and what's normal," said Marris, a young mother who breast-fed her own children. "I was in touch with the right people immediately."

Meanwhile, Perrigo's parents filed a petition for custody of their granddaughter. Eight months after Perrigo's daughter was put in foster care and $8,000 of their own money later, they were granted custody.

In the interim, Perrigo's visitation with her daughter became increasingly restricted. For months, she saw her only two hours once every two weeks, in a small room at the county office building, while a social service worker stood by.

"At first, she kept asking to nurse. And I said, `You can't, honey, you really can't,' " Perrigo said of her daughter. "And then the older she got, and the more time we spent away, it would be, `Mommy, when can I come home? Mommy, let me tell the judge I want to go home.' "

In April, Family Court Judge Leonard Bresani found that no abuse or neglect had taken place. He cited testimony by La Leche League officials who had spoken about the normalcy both of nursing toddlers and having feelings of arousal while breast-feeding.

Instead of returning the child, DSS filed new charges before a different judge the next day. Among these were allegations that Perrigo had inserted foreign objects in the girl's vagina; later, it was decided that this was the child's description of having her temperature taken rectally.

In November, Judge Edward McLaughlin found that no abuse had taken place but that there had been neglect.

McLaughlin cited Perrigo's failure to wean earlier. Marris is appealing.

Perrigo believes the social stigma against nursing older children in the United States fostered the kind of ignorance that made her ordeal possible. One of the officers who arrested her, for example, told her it was physically impossible to nurse a 2-year-old.

"I never expected to nurse a 2-year-old," Perrigo said. "But it worked so well for both of us, it was really the easiest way for me to care for her. And she was a very happy nursing little girl."

The international average length of nursing is 4.2 years, said Dr. Ruth Lawrence, a University of Rochester pediatrician and one of the nation's top authorities on breast-feeding.

Perrigo credits the bond forged by breast-feeding for easing her child's return home Jan. 6. Still, the outgoing, talkative toddler came back a clingy little girl who fears strangers, cries out in her sleep and wants to be cuddled constantly.

"Mommy, my heart has been so empty of you, because you weren't there," she says. "Please hold me. Fill my heart back up."