e resolved within the family or, in extreme cases, by grossly underfunded state and local child welfare agencies and through local family and juvenile courts. However, in the postwar period, rising divorce and illegitimacy rates documented the growing breakdown of the American family. According to Trost (1998, January), "child abuse was not formally identified as a medical condition until 1962" when an article in the Journal of the American Medical Association identified the 'Battered Child Syndrome' (p. 184). The Children's Bureau of the federal Department of Health, Education and Welfare published a model child abuse reporting statute which by 1967 had been enacted by every state and territory. Under the Child Prevention and Treatment Act of 1974 (CAPTA), 42 U.S.C. secs. 5101-5106, funds were appropriated and allocated to the states for the identification, treatment and prevention of child abuse. To be eligible to receive federal funds, each state had to provide for reporting of child abuse, immunity for child abuse reporters, investigate reported incidents of child abuse and otherwise provide for the health and welfare of abused children. Trott said "CAPTA's express purpose was to help states implement programs to deal with the problem of child abuse" (p. 193). Since then CAPTA has been amended several times, most importantly in 1984, when amendments required states seeking matching federal funds to take steps to protect handicapped newborns, which were prompted by the controversy over the Baby Doe controversy in 1982 in which an Indiana court ruled that the parents of a baby born with certain congenital defects had the right to refuse to permit surgery to be performed on the child who died. The constitutional rationale for child abuse, prevention and treatment laws is that the government has a legitimate interest in protecting the health of children. According to Foster et al. (1999, Fall), the Department of Health and Human Servic...