Parents Fed Baby Girl Vegan Diet For 19 Months Until She Ended Up In Hospital

Babies are cute. They’re also helpless and completely at our mercy.

So, if we want them to wear a pumpkin, they’ll wear a damn pumpkin.

And if you want to dress them up as a German dictator, well, then they’ll have to be a Nazi baby.

What if you want to force your veganism on your baby? Voilà, you’ll have a vegan baby.

You’ll also have a severely malnourished baby.

Vegan baby gets a seizure

That’s what happened to one Australian couple when they put their newborn baby on a “conservative vegan diet”.

They fed her only oats with olive oil, rice milk, vegetables, rice, potatoes, tofu, and fruits.

After 19 months of this vegan diet, their daughter had a seizure and had to be admitted to the hospital.

After carrying out some tests, doctors discovered the girl was severely malnourished.

According to the BBC, the young child was brought to the hospital with “blue lips, cold hands and feet, low blood sugar and little muscle tone”.

She was so malnourished that she looked like a three-month-old baby, even though she was 19 months old.

She also did not have any teeth and had very thin bones.

Consequences

Her parents managed to avoid serving jail time.

Each parent was sentenced to 18 months in jail to be served as an intensive corrections order and 300 hours of community service.

However, they also lost custody of their daughter.

The baby’s foster carer who took her in after she was taken out of her parents’ car said the baby was “behind other children” in her psychological and physical development.

“She couldn’t sit up, she couldn’t speak any words, she couldn’t feed herself, she couldn’t play with toys… she couldn’t roll over all the way,” she said.

Parents slammed

Sydney District Court Judge Sarah Huggett said the parents were “initially unable to accept that their daughters’ condition was due to malnutrition”.

She criticized both parents for the mistreatment of their daughter:

“This is not the case of an isolated act or omission or a momentary decision made in a pressured context, that led to a danger of serious injury to their child,” Huggett said.

She added that there was “ample opportunity for her condition to be acted upon”.

The parents pleaded guilty last year to failing to provide the necessities of life, causing serious injury.

Their daughter is now three years old. She lives with relatives but continues to suffer from height and weight deficiencies.

The couple has visiting rights, but access to the child is supervised.

So, parents, if you want to dress your baby in a pumpkin, you can still do that. Just don’t force your beliefs on your children, especially if it comes at the expense of their health.

And, most importantly, do not force them to eat oats with olive oil.