(Texas Scorecard) – This session, lawmakers passed legislation to place checks on Child Protective Services’ powers and strengthen parental rights.
Although the Texas Family Code explicitly ensures that parents have the right to direct the moral and religious upbringing of their children as well as the duty to support their children with medical care, those rights have sometimes been curtailed by state agencies.
In a House Human Services Committee hearing, State Rep. Valoree Swanson (R–Spring) reported that one of her constituents had her daughter taken away by the Texas Department of Family and Protective Services (DFPS) because her daughter’s injuries had been falsely attributed to physical abuse, rather than her pre-existing medical condition.
Introduced by State Rep. Lacey Hull (R–Houston), House Bill 2071 addresses structural conflicts of interest that exist within medical evaluation procedures. The current system allows the party that reports suspected abuse or neglect to act in court as a neutral consultant and to serve on an investigatory review team or a multidisciplinary team.
Under the new law, the reporting party is prevented from participating in any other step of the process in order to produce objective assessments of child or family health. Moreover, it requires DFPS to furnish all relevant parties with full access to the medical records used by the agency.
In March 2025, Andrew Brown, vice president of policy at the Texas Public Policy Foundation, testified at the House Human Services Committee hearing in support of HB 2071: “How could we possibly forget the stories of families who had been wrongfully torn apart? Some [parents] … had spent some time in jail because an underlying medical condition that their child had was misdiagnosed as resulting from … intentional harm to that child.”
HB 2071 will go into effect at the beginning of September.
Another piece of legislation intended to further protect parental rights is House Bill 1151, also filed by Hull. The law enables parents to refuse certain treatments for their children without it being considered statutory medical neglect or abuse.
Multiple parents came to share their run-ins with doctors and medical professionals who involved or threatened to involve Child Protective Services because of their legitimate concerns regarding certain medical treatments for their children.
Some parents, like Vanessa Sifuentes, were actively harmed by state interference.
After refusing to consent to a recommended medical regimen for her daughter, the doctor reported Sifuentes to DFPS. DFPS then terminated Sifuentes’ parental rights, and her daughter was given the prescribed medical treatment, which led to permanent brain damage and irreversible damage to her hormone production. Moreover, the family spent hundreds of thousands of dollars in attorney’s fees to regain custody of Sifuentes’ daughter.
In Sifuentes’ testimony to the Human Services Committee, she asked, “Why is it that adults can have medical freedom to seek safer treatments, but when a parent tries to seek out the best possible care for their child, they are accused of neglect?”
When introducing the bill to the committee, Hull stated, “Medical decision-making is one of the most important duties of a parent. Texas law is very clear: parents have the right to make medical decisions for their children.”
The bill was signed by Gov. Greg Abbott in May.
House Bill 1106 further advanced parental rights for Texans. Deemed controversial by many LGBT activist groups and the Texas ACLU, HB 1106 allows parents to not to affirm their children’s expressed sexual orientation or gender identity without being considered abusive or neglectful.
The author of the bill, State Rep. Matt Shaheen (R–Plano), made clear the need for this bill before the Human Services Committee: “If I tell my child there’s two sexes, that can’t be used against me in a court of law. A judge cannot look upon me and say it’s abuse if I told my child that there are two sexes: male and female.”
Across the nation and in the state of Texas, some parents have faced scrutiny for refusing to socially affirm their child’s purported gender identity. In 2022, North Texas father Jeff Younger lost custody and visitation rights after refusing to affirm the “transgender” identity of his seven-year-old son.
Other families in California and Indiana have faced painful repercussions because of their choice to affirm their children’s biological sex rather than their gender confusion.
While other states, such as Colorado and California, stand as warnings to how so-called “anti-discrimination” legislation can harm parental rights, Texas continues working to protect families from undue interference by state actors.