Meeting Public Comments

Oliver Bardwell [Iowans 4 Freedom]

As a concerned citizen and advocate for parental rights, I am strongly opposed to HSB164. While the bill aims to clarify custody arrangements, it presents significant risks to the fundamental rights of parents and the welfare of children.This bill would allow courts to assign specific decisionmaking rights to one parent within a joint custody arrangement. While this may seem reasonable on the surface, it creates the potential for dangerous overreach when it comes to critical decisions regarding a childs upbringing, particularly medical decisions.Parents should have equal input when making choices that can have lasting consequences for their children. HSB164 threatens to erode the balance of joint custody, replacing cooperation with conflict. It risks silencing one parent and stripping them of their right to participate fully in their child's life and future. Our legal system should foster collaboration between parents, not empower one to impose significant medical and other decisions on their child against the other parent's objections.I urge our legislators to reject HSB164 and prioritize policies that uphold parental rights, promote joint decisionmaking, and safeguard the wellbeing of Iowa's children.

Steve Krug

Steve Krugon behalf of all nontypical children of IowaI would urge all to reject this lanuange. It is nothing more than forcing the court to micromanage a parents ability to parent, and it also promotes conflict between parents. This, when the court currently has nothing in place that audits their "judical discretion" to provide feedback as to it's viability in a child/rens life, one year, two years, or even at any point down the road. I can't think of a worse business model to have in place. I can say that I have first hand knowledge of how bad this language is as I once was a parent without any legal say in my son's life for four of his most critical years. I watched as our special needs child regressed, became self injurious, and he had little to no advocacy in and through the I.E.P process. It required me to wait, document, and watch while irreparalbe harm came to our son and his once positive outcome became completely stagnant. Now, with the above completely reversed, and having full legal gaurdianship, I find myself attempting to do the impossible for my son at 19 years old. Some things in life cannot be fixed, they can only be carried..Currently, and to my best of my knowledge, there are no standards or guildlines for the court to apply when bringing a nontypical child/ren through family divorce court. Instead, they rely only on those set forth for a typical child. Again, I urge you to reject this language as it will also aid to a 65 billion dallor a year industry known also as family court.

Courtney Collier

I urge you to carefully consider whether this bill is in the best interest of children. To me, the verbiage seems dangerous. This bill could allow a parent to petition the judge to gain unilateral decision making or power in a custody conflict and it could lead to harm for a child. For example what if one parent is opposed to affirming a childs gender confusion and the other parent is in favor of doing so and is given the legal power via a judge due to this bill? Bills like this can be weaponized by bad actors. We must protect innocent child caught in the middle of adult conflict.