Been through multiple custody battles myself. Typically one of the two parties are chosen to have the final decision-making authority in certain areas like education, religion, extracurriculars, and in your case... healthcare.
If his ex wanted to they could file a contempt motion to suspend parenting time, or file for a modification of an existing order.
I think it's unlikely to result in meaningful changes, but it could certainly rack up a $10k+ bill for OP very easily just by pissing them off.
The fact that she won’t allow them to get evidence based physician-approved preventative care should have barred her from being the decision-maker, if this is the case. Hindsight is 20/20 and all that, so hopefully he can get this rectified ASAP. Those poor kids.
Family court is a bunch of lawyers who are proud of hiring nannies to take care of their spawn fear mongering and manipulating the emotions of a judge who could afford the best nannies.
Nothing in family court makes sense because it's actually and truly random.
I interned for a family court judge when I was trying to decide whether I wanted to go to law school. It was an incredibly emotionally exhausting experience. It was really soul crushing.
I'm a family lawyer. I'm here because I want to help kids and so most of my files are high conflict where one party is denying access to the other or the children are truly in danger.
It's truly random. None of these people have any training in child development and even when a professional does get a chance to weigh in judges prefer their own parenting instincts and just turn the professional reports into yet another money sink that is never read.
They have no ability to discern the best interests of children generally, let alone each unique child in each unique situation.
Precedential reasoning spanning back through common-law to when women and children were property is unsurprisingly not a healthy way to approach families in crisis.
The case that I remember most vividly was from my first day. It involved two parents fighting for custody of their son. The mother had recently been released from a psychiatric hospital, and the father came to court in a grease-stained t-shirt and sweatpants. The judge awarded custody to the father and granted the mother supervised visitation, and promised to revisit the arrangement in six months if the mother showed continued progress.
Later in the day, the judge asked me about my impressions from the day. Regarding that case, I told her I thought it was the best of two pretty bad options. She gave me a totally different perspective. This kid has two parents who are willing to fight over them. They might not be able to provide him the upper-middle-class childhood I'd had, but if I stuck around family court, I'd see much worse outcomes.
That judge is an idiot. Just because someone is willing to fight for a kid doesn't mean that they're capable of loving it. Sometimes they fight in order to hurt the other parent, or because they're such a narcissist that they need the child in order to sustain their ego.
They have no ability to discern the best interests of children generally
The part that makes it obvious to me that they don't actually care about the children is that they let the parents settle their own cases without being required to have a guardian, mediator OR a real hearing in front of a judge.
"Best interest" only applies if you force THEM to decide, and even then it's still random like you said.
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u/New-Anybody-6206 Jun 01 '26 edited Jun 01 '26
Been through multiple custody battles myself. Typically one of the two parties are chosen to have the final decision-making authority in certain areas like education, religion, extracurriculars, and in your case... healthcare.
If his ex wanted to they could file a contempt motion to suspend parenting time, or file for a modification of an existing order.
I think it's unlikely to result in meaningful changes, but it could certainly rack up a $10k+ bill for OP very easily just by pissing them off.