“Despite the discomfort posed by state intervention, it may sometimes be necessary to protect a child.”—Lindsey Murtagh, a researcher at Harvard University’s School of Public Health, advocating that the government should have the right to remove severely obese children from the care of their parents. Murtagh and Dr. David Ludwig, a specialist at Children’s Hospital Boston, recently wrote an opinion piece for the Journal of the American Medical Association that argued placing obese children in foster care—where presumably less permissive foster parents would be charged with moderating the child’s diet—is more ethical in some cases than obesity surgery. Ludwig says such intervention “ideally will support not just the child, but the whole family with the goal of reuniting child and family as soon as possible. About 2 million children in the United States are labeled as extremely obese. (Associated Press)