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 What Really Happened to The Andressohns Raw Vegan Baby?
by Jinjee Talifero - 1/21/05
  
(The Andressohns with their four children. Raw Vegans under attack. Doctors say these obviously healthy and alert chubby cheeked cherubs above were "malnourished"!!! Children siezed, fed meat and dairy, parents jailed, haven't seen their children in eighteen months!)
The Raw Vegan Movement online is rallying to the support of the Andressohns,
a family who lost their 5 month old baby eighteen months ago. On the same
day that their baby Wohyah died their four older children were taken from
Joseph and Lamoy Andressohn by the state of Florida and they haven't even
glimpsed them since. The couple were charged, jailed for 99 days and released
on bail under house arrest. How has this been allowed to happen?
When I first read the articles about this incident in the Miami and other
newspapers my reaction was that the state was right to take these children.
The articles reported that the baby had died of malnutrition and that the
older children were malnourished also. One article said that Joseph and
Lamoy Andressohn fed their children only three kinds of raw vegan foods:
carrots, corn and avocados. Naturally I felt that this family was
taking things to an unhealthy extreme and I moved on.
Since then eighteen months have passed. Every once in a while I read an
article that mentions the death of this raw vegan baby as an argument
against the raw vegan diet and I usually respond that this family was
following an unusually restricted diet. But I was wrong because I was
mislead by the media that didn't know any better because they themselves
were given false information.
Suddenly in the past month I have been receiving numerous letters seeking
support for the Andressohns' legal battle to get their children back. Due to
the tremendous amount of support for this family I realized I needed to
research the story in more detail. This was easily done because all of the
links seeking support led to the website http://www.rawfriends.com/andressohns.html which
gives the Andressohns own side of the story. In a nutshell it says that the
baby died of DiGeorge Syndrome, a birth defect, that the older children were given
glowing bills of health, and that there is no valid excuse for what the
state has done to this family. The website also shows pictures of the family
all of whom appear very healthy.
I phoned the creator of this website, Steven Gibb, a retired owner of a
telecomm company who is now a raw vegan. When he heard that after a year the
Andressohns still hadn't seen or recovered their children he was moved to
contact them. He spent three weeks interviewing them and winning their trust
enough to get their whole story. He then spent the next few months putting
together the RAW FRIENDS website in order to help them. And help of all kinds
has been pouring in! Steven says he is amazed at the humility of Joseph and
Lamoy. They are not angry. They accept that there is a reason for all that
is happening to them.
Now as a mother of four healthy raw vegan children I can barely imagine the trauma
that this brave couple is enduring. I myself am furious. Every day hundreds of
children die in the US because their parents pretend to not know any better
than to feed them a diet consisting primarily of junk food and fast food.
Not one of these parents is ever jailed or has their other obese children
seized by the state! According to the CDC (Centers for Disease Control) over
a third of all children in the US are overweight! Childhood diseases such as
leukemia, diabetes, and heart disease are at record highs. The CDC has
declared an obesity epidemic saying that this generation of children will be
the first in many generations to have a lower life expectancy than their
parents!
Joseph and Lamoy Andressohn are a couple who are trying to change things and
to provide a higher quality of life for their children. Through the
challenges of the dietary discipline that they face every day they are
paving the way for a better future for everyone. And yet they peacefully and
with humility accept the consequences of their courage; the ultimate extreme
punishment that society has dealt them. I can think of no greater torture
than to have my children taken from me. When I look at the peace and love in
Lamoy's beautiful face I am moved to tears. The picture on the rawfriends
website was taken in the midst of all this tragedy! Surely she is a highly
evolved human being.
I have been helping to spread the word about the website where the
Andressohns' story can be read. And several people have asked me the same
question, which I will answer here. Some articles reported that the baby who
died was only 7 lbs. at 5 months. People have been asking me why this didn't
alert the parents that something was wrong. First of all their were four
different birth weights recorded, one of them showing 13 lbs., another
showing 7 kilograms (which is roughly the same). However baby Wohyah was
born with a birth defect and had no thymus gland. Babies with this
condition sometimes die before they are two months old. It is a testament to
the raw vegan diet and the spirit of the Andressohns that Wohyah was blessed
with 5 months to experience the love of his parents and siblings before
taking leaving of this plane.
Many other facts have been left out of the Andressohns' story online for the
sake of brevity. I learned these in my conversation with Steven Gibb. For
instance out of 60 friends of the Andressohns who were called to the stand,
58 of them had nothing but good things to say. Only two people gave negative
comments. One was that the Andressohns exercised with their kids in the hot sun; a
"crime" most of us are surely guilty of every summer. And the other was a
neighbor who said that the children had refused candy when offered, and had
said that it was bad for you when questioned why.
There are still more facts that prove beyond a doubt that the Andressohns
have been wrongfully treated and that they never deserved to loose their
children. However Steven Gibb has asked me not to publish these because the
Andressohns' legal team are keeping these facts as their "ace cards" in
order to win the case to get Joseph and Lamoy reunited with their four
children.
Many wonderful things have happened that inspire me with the belief that
this trauma will soon be ended. The top trial lawyer in Florida has taken on
the Andressohns' case . They have a top legal team including Justice
Fields, a vegan attorney who moved to Florida to work on this case. And many
raw vegan authors have given hundreds of raw food books to give out to
people who donate funds to the cause at the rawfriends website.
So take a look at the Andressohns' side of the story at
http://www.rawfriends.com/andressohns.html and click the button at the bottom of the page
to contribute whatever you can to aid in this battle. Please forward this
article and the one on rawfriends as widely as you can. The future of the raw vegan
movement is at stake. This case may determine the freedom or lack thereof
for all people in this country to choose how to feed their own families. It
may even determine whether families will be free to practice being
vegetarian, vegan, and raw-vegan or not!
A statement from Lamoy Andressohn, the children's mother:
”God has somehow chosen me to walk this path and I’m not sure why. I know I must follow it for bigger reasons than I understand and I don’t hold any ill will toward any part of the state because they are doing what they are trained to do. I am honored that God chose me to walk this path and I will embrace it until the end. I know how much my pain and suffering will effect the rights of others and I can’t afford to be selfish knowing this will affect the rights of the children of the future who choose to live this lifestyle.”
For more information see http://www.rawfriends.com <http://www.rawfriends.com/>
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About Jinjee Talifero
Jinjee Talifero is a 37 year old raw-vegan Mother of four home-birthed, home-schooled children. She is co-author with her husband Storm Talifero of several eBooks on Raw Foods including "The Garden Diet", "Raising Raw Vegan Children", and "The Anti-Aging Guide". She maintains a website about her family's experiences on the Raw Foods Diet at http://www.thegardendiet.com and an Internet Newspaper entitled "The Raw Vegan Times" at http://www.thegardendiet.com/news which is updated monthly. She also publishes "The Daily Raw Inspiration".
You can contact Jinjee via email at info@thegardendiet.com.
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Please feel free to use or share this article freely. For more information contact info@thegardendiet.com
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