Kylo's Law began in Kentucky. It does not end there. This is a multi-state mission: one standard for children, carried state by state, working to unite the states in what matters most — the children. No child, in any state, separated from a parent on an unconfirmed drug test. No parent, in any state, judged by a case plan they were never given. Kentucky is the first statehouse. Ohio is already in conversation. The goal is every state.

 

My name is Christine Kohus. I am a mother from Grant County, Kentucky, and I am asking you to stand with me for every child in Kentucky's foster system — starting with my son.

 

 

 

My baby boy Kylo is twenty months old. On August 4, 2026, the Commonwealth of Kentucky took him from me — and when they took him, they never gave me a drug test at all. Three days later they gave me a hair follicle test, and I passed it. The science cleared me before there was ever a test to clear. My son is still not home.

Then a different screen — a presumptive result, a first guess from a laboratory, never confirmed — was used to cancel three straight weeks of my visits with my baby. I paid out of my own pocket to prove the truth: the confirmatory laboratory test on the original specimen — the gold-standard LC-MS/MS — came back negative on September 4. The visits were never given back. To this day, I have never been given a case plan — the written roadmap that is supposed to tell a mother what she must do to get her child back. Kentucky's own Ombudsman investigated and cited the Cabinet in my case — for the missing case plan, the missed deadlines, the missing safety plan, the missing face-to-face contact. The citation changed nothing. That is why this law must exist.

 

The man who wrote the rules of this fight just put his name on this cause

 

Martin Guggenheim is one of the most respected family-law scholars in America — the NYU law professor who, as chief counsel in Santosky v. Kramer (1982), won the Supreme Court ruling that the state must prove its case by clear and convincing evidence before it can take a child from his parents forever. He founded the nation's first Family Defense Clinic. He coined the term "legal orphan" for children the system severs and forgets — children like the one I used to be.

 

On October 26, 2026, after reading this bill, he wrote:

 

"I am, of course, happy to add my name to the cause."

 

And, because he deals in truth and not flattery, he added the charge that now falls to us:

 

"The bill will need the robust sponsorship of a legislator."

 

Your signature is how a legislator hears that Kentucky is watching.

 

This is bigger than one baby. It is a fifty-year battle — and Kentucky is its front line.

 

In 1997, Congress passed the Adoption and Safe Families Act — the law that put a fifteen-month clock on families and pays the system to move children toward adoption. Professor Guggenheim has called it, in print, "the worst law affecting families ever enacted by Congress." I became a ward of the state the year after that law was enacted — fourteen years old, a "legal orphan" before I knew the term existed. Now the same law's clock is ticking over my son.

 

In 1999, the other side published its manifesto: Nobody's Children — arguing the state should take children faster and preserve fewer families. Guggenheim answered it in the Harvard Law Review with a title that said everything: "Somebody's Children."

 

My first book is called Nobody's Child. My series is called Everyone's Child. I chose those names out of my own life, before I ever knew his — because I know what these children are. They are not nobody's. They are somebody's. They are everyone's. And a system that takes them on an unconfirmed test, hides the plan, and runs out a federal clock is a system Kentucky can fix — this session.

 

The numbers are Kentucky's own: 8,828 children in state care, at $90.08 per child, per day. The Auditor's Ombudsman examination found children sleeping in state offices — hundreds of them, at a minimum cost of $3,924.20 a day. We are paying a fortune for a machine that separates families on guesses. Kylo's Law costs a fraction of that: a confirmatory test costs about $40.

 

What Kylo's Law does

 

1. Confirm before you separate. No child removed, and no visit cancelled, on an unconfirmed drug screen. The Cabinet pays for the confirmatory test. If the screen is disproven, cancelled visits are restored.
2. The plan, in ten days — complete. A parent's compliance clock does not run on a plan she has never been given. A signature on a partial plan is void.
3. Teeth for the Ombudsman. A citation cannot be closed until the correction is verified. Counties are reported on, publicly, every quarter.
4. Evidence in fourteen days. Parents see the evidence against them — no more fighting blind.
5. Kin first — on paper. A documented search for family and fictive kin in every case. A blank kinship page is a deficient report. Interstate placement paperwork moves in five business days, not sixty.
6. A real lawyer for every parent. Effective counsel, with the time and the file to matter.
7. Sunlight. Annual public reporting, so Kentucky can see what its system does — in numbers, not anecdotes.

Effective July 1, 2027.

 

Sign. Share. Be the sponsorship.

Pass Kylo's Law in Kentucky first, and carry sister bills in every state until the standard is national.

 

Professor Guggenheim gave this cause his name and told us what it needs next: a legislator with the spine to carry it, and a public loud enough that carrying it is the obvious choice. That public is you.

 

Sign this petition. Share it with every parent, grandparent, pastor, nurse, teacher, and neighbor you know. And when a Kentucky legislator asks why it matters, tell them: because a mother in Grant County proved the test wrong, asked for her plan for three months, and is still waiting to hold her son — and because the man who made the state prove itself in the Supreme Court says this law deserves his name.

 

For Kylo. For every child. For the families Kentucky can still bring home.

 

— Christine Kohus, mother of Kylo, author of Nobody's Child

kyloslaw.org · kohuslegal.com