PART 4 — THIRTY-SIX HOURS
Here is why I signed, and it is three things.
The first is that you cannot do what they were trying to do at a bedside.
A parent in this state cannot contract away custody of a three-day-old in a leather folder. Relinquishment of parental rights is a court process with a statutory waiting period, specific formalities, and — for a child that age — protections that exist precisely because women are asked to sign things three days after surgery.
That instrument was worth nothing the moment it was drafted. Beatrix had told me in the September exactly what such a document would look like if it ever appeared, because she had seen it before.
The second is that the waiver on page nine could not do what they wanted either.
You cannot privately contract away somebody’s ability to report a regulated trust account to the body that regulates it. And in any case you cannot waive a complaint that has already been prepared, by an attorney, on the instructions of a former employee, and which was going to be filed whether I signed anything or not.
And the third is the one that actually finished them.
Twenty-two people stood in a hospital family room and watched a man offer a woman two hundred thousand dollars in cash for custody of two three-day-old infants, with a clause about his company’s trust accounts buried on page nine.
There is a camera in that room.
There was a nurse who did not leave and a social worker in the doorway with a lanyard on.
I did not arrange any of that. Deshawn Pryor had been assigned to me on the second day because the twins were early and I had come in without a birth partner, which is standard.
He wrote his own note about that meeting before he went off shift, because that is his job.
Beatrix filed at nine the next morning.
Not one thing. Four things, in a specific order, and it took her about forty minutes.
The complaint to the state licensing board with Mira Kazan’s report attached.
An emergency motion, because Adelaide Thackery had told me they were coming for the boys in the morning and I had a room full of witnesses to it.
A request for preservation of the hospital’s recording.
And a notification to the company’s own trust account auditor.
Adelaide and two of the sisters arrived at Kelvin Memorial at ten past nine.
They did not get past the desk, because a maternity unit does not hand over infants to anybody, ever, and because there was already a note on my file.
The licensing board’s investigator was at the Thackery Row office by the Thursday. That is not normal speed and I have been told since that it was the size of the number that did it.
