Taking her baby away

[Alex]

Short of sending you there to talk to the people involved yourself, what would be necessary to overcome the unbelievableness of this story?

Personally, I don't find it all that unbelievable. Bureaucracy has a way of producing very out-of-touch behavior, especially when given a mandate to predict and protect the "common good." Forced sterilizations, eugenics programs, unethical medical experimentation, etc. I don't have a problem at all believing that some committe somewhere looked at statistics and said "abuse as a child has an XX increased risk of abusing their own child so it makes policy sense to shift those children." Which is probably true, in a purely abstract world.