The Lie We Love

The Lie We Love
http://www.foreignpolicy.com/story/cms.php?story_id=4508&page=0

More info. on international adoption ethics: http://www.brandeis.edu/investigate/gender/adoption/index.html

By E. J. Graff
November/December 2008 AF

Foreign adoption seems like the perfect solution to a heartbreaking imbalance: Poor countries have babies in need of homes, and rich countries have homes in need of babies. Unfortunately, those little orphaned bundles of joy may not be orphans at all.

ALEXANDER MARTINEZ/AFP/Getty Images
Who's your mommy?: Parents might never know if their adopted child is truly an orphan.

Web Extra: For a photographic tour of the global baby trade, visit: ForeignPolicy.com/extras/adoption.

We all know the story of international adoption: Millions of infants and toddlers have been abandoned or orphaned—placed on the side of a road or on the doorstep of a church, or left parentless due to AIDS, destitution, or war. These little ones find themselves forgotten, living in crowded orphanages or ending up on the streets, facing an uncertain future of misery and neglect. But, if they are lucky, adoring new moms and dads from faraway lands whisk them away for a chance at a better life.

Unfortunately, this story is largely fiction.

Westerners have been sold the myth of a world orphan crisis. We are told that millions of children are waiting for their “forever families” to rescue them from lives of abandonment and abuse. But many of the infants and toddlers being adopted by Western parents today are not orphans at all. Yes, hundreds of thousands of children around the world do need loving homes. But more often than not, the neediest children are sick, disabled, traumatized, or older than 5. They are not the healthy babies that, quite understandably, most Westerners hope to adopt. There are simply not enough healthy, adoptable infants to meet Western demand—and there’s too much Western money in search of children. As a result, many international adoption agencies work not to find homes for needy children but to find children for Western homes.

Since the mid-1990s, the number of international adoptions each year has nearly doubled, from 22,200 in 1995 to just under 40,000 in 2006. At its peak, in 2004, more than 45,000 children from developing countries were adopted by foreigners. Americans bring home more of these children than any other nationality—more than half the global total in recent years.

Where do these babies come from? As international adoptions have flourished, so has evidence that babies in many countries are being systematically bought, coerced, and stolen away from their birth families. Nearly half the 40 countries listed by the U.S. State Department as the top sources for international adoption over the past 15 years—places such as Belarus, Brazil, Ethiopia, Honduras, Peru, and Romania—have at least temporarily halted adoptions or been prevented from sending children to the United States because of serious concerns about corruption and kidnapping. And yet when a country is closed due to corruption, many adoption agencies simply transfer their clients’ hopes to the next “hot” country. That country abruptly experiences a spike in infants and toddlers adopted overseas—until it too is forced to shut its doors.

Along the way, the international adoption industry has become a market often driven by its customers. Prospective adoptive parents in the United States will pay adoption agencies between $15,000 and $35,000 (excluding travel, visa costs, and other miscellaneous expenses) for the chance to bring home a little one. Special needs or older children can be adopted at a discount. Agencies claim the costs pay for the agency’s fee, the cost of foreign salaries and operations, staff travel, and orphanage donations. But experts say the fees are so disproportionately large for the child’s home country that they encourage corruption.

To complicate matters further, while international adoption has become an industry driven by money, it is also charged with strong emotions. Many adoption agencies and adoptive parents passionately insist that crooked practices are not systemic, but tragic, isolated cases. Arrest the bad guys, they say, but let the “good” adoptions continue. However, remove cash from the adoption chain, and, outside of China, the number of healthy babies needing Western homes all but disappears. Nigel Cantwell, a Geneva-based consultant on child protection policy, has seen the dangerous influence of money on adoptions in Eastern Europe and Central Asia, where he has helped reform corrupt adoption systems. In these regions, healthy children age 3 and younger can easily be adopted in their own countries, he says. I asked him how many healthy babies in those regions would be available for international adoption if money never exchanged hands. “I would hazard a guess at zero,” he replied.

THE MYTH OF SUPPLY

International adoption wasn’t always a demand-driven industry. Half a century ago, it was primarily a humanitarian effort for children orphaned by conflict. In 1955, news spread that Bertha and Henry Holt, an evangelical couple from Oregon, had adopted eight Korean War orphans, and families across the United States expressed interest in following their example. Since then, international adoption has become increasingly popular in Australia, Canada, Europe, and the United States. Americans adopted more than 20,000 foreign children in 2006 alone, up from just 8,987 in 1995. Half a dozen European countries regularly bring home more foreign-born children per capita than does the United States. Today, Canada, France, Italy, Spain, and the United States account for 4 out of every 5 international adoptions.

Changes in Western demography explain much of the growth. Thanks to contraception, abortion, and delayed marriages, the number of unplanned births in most developed countries has declined in recent decades. Some women who delay having children discover they’ve outwaited their fertility; others have difficulty conceiving from the beginning. Still others adopt for religious reasons, explaining that they’ve been called to care for children in need. In the United States, a motive beyond demography is the notion that international adoption is somehow “safer”—more predictable and more likely to end in success—than many domestic adoptions, where there’s an outsized fear of a birth mother’s last-minute change of heart. Add an ocean of distance, and the idea that needy children abound in poor countries, and that risk seems to disappear.

But international adoptions are no less risky; they’re simply less regulated. Just as companies outsource industry to countries with lax labor laws and low wages, adoptions have moved to states with few laws about the process. Poor, illiterate birthparents in the developing world simply have fewer protections than their counterparts in the United States, especially in countries where human trafficking and corruption are rampant. And too often, these imbalances are overlooked on the adopting end. After all, one country after another has continued to supply what adoptive parents want most.

In reality, there are very few young, healthy orphans available for adoption around the world. Orphans are rarely healthy babies; healthy babies are rarely orphaned. “It’s not really true,” says Alexandra Yuster, a senior advisor on child protection with UNICEF, “that there are large numbers of infants with no homes who either will be in institutions or who need intercountry adoption.”

That assertion runs counter to the story line that has long been marketed to Americans and other Westerners, who have been trained by images of destitution in developing countries and the seemingly endless flow of daughters from China to believe that millions of orphaned babies around the world desperately need homes. UNICEF itself is partly responsible for this erroneous assumption. The organization’s statistics on orphans and institutionalized children are widely quoted to justify the need for international adoption. In 2006, UNICEF reported an estimated 132 million orphans in sub-Saharan Africa, Asia, Latin America, and the Caribbean. But the organization’s definition of “orphan” includes children who have lost just one parent, either to desertion or death. Just 10 percent of the total—13 million children—have lost both parents, and most of these live with extended family. They are also older: By UNICEF’s own estimate, 95 percent of orphans are older than 5. In other words, UNICEF’s “millions of orphans” are not healthy babies doomed to institutional misery unless Westerners adopt and save them. Rather, they are mostly older children living with extended families who need financial support.

The exception is China, where the country’s three-decades-old one-child policy, now being loosened, has created an unprecedented number of girls available for adoption. But even this flow of daughters is finite; China has far more hopeful foreigners looking to adopt a child than it has orphans it is willing to send overseas. In 2005, foreign parents adopted nearly 14,500 Chinese children. That was far fewer than the number of Westerners who wanted to adopt; adoption agencies report many more clients waiting in line. And taking those children home has gotten harder; in 2007, China’s central adoption authority sharply reduced the number of children sent abroad, possibly because of the country’s growing sex imbalance, declining poverty, and scandals involving child trafficking for foreign adoption. Prospective foreign parents today are strictly judged by their age, marital history, family size, income, health, and even weight. That means that if you are single, gay, fat, old, less than well off, too often divorced, too recently married, taking antidepressants, or already have four children, China will turn you away. Even those allowed a spot in line are being told they might wait three to four years before they bring home a child. That has led many prospective parents to shop around for a country that puts fewer barriers between them and their children—as if every country were China, but with fewer onerous regulations.

One such country has been Guatemala, which in 2006 and 2007 was the No. 2 exporter of children to the United States. Between 1997 and 2006, the number of Guatemalan children adopted by Americans more than quadrupled, to more than 4,500 annually. Incredibly, in 2006, American parents adopted one of every 110 Guatemalan children born. In 2007, nearly 9 out of 10 children adopted were less than a year old; almost half were younger than 6 months old. “Guatemala is a perfect case study of how international adoption has become a demand-driven business,” says Kelley McCreery Bunkers, a former consultant with UNICEF Guatemala. The country’s adoption process was “an industry developed to meet the needs of adoptive families in developed countries, specifically the United States.”

Because the vast majority of the country’s institutionalized children are not healthy, adoptable babies, almost none has been adopted abroad. In the fall of 2007, a survey conducted by the Guatemalan government, UNICEF, and the international child welfare and adoption agency Holt International Children’s Services found approximately 5,600 children and adolescents in Guatemalan institutions. More than 4,600 of these children were age 4 or older. Fewer than 400 were under a year old. And yet in 2006, more than 270 Guatemalan babies, all younger than 12 months, were being sent to the United States each month. These adopted children were simply not coming from the country’s institutions. Last year, 98 percent of U.S. adoptions from Guatemala were “relinquishments”: Babies who had never seen the inside of an institution were signed over directly to a private attorney who approved the international adoption—for a very considerable fee—without any review by a judge or social service agency.

So, where had some of these adopted babies come from? Consider the case of Ana Escobar, a young Guatemalan woman who in March 2007 reported to police that armed men had locked her in a closet in her family’s shoe store and stolen her infant. After a 14-month search, Escobar found her daughter in pre-adoption foster care, just weeks before the girl was to be adopted by a couple from Indiana. DNA testing showed the toddler to be Escobar’s child. In a similar case from 2006, Raquel Par, another Guatemalan woman, reported being drugged while waiting for a bus in Guatemala City, waking to find her year-old baby missing. Three months later, Par learned her daughter had been adopted by an American couple.

On Jan. 1, 2008, Guatemala closed its doors to American adoptions so that the government could reform the broken process. Britain, Canada, France, Germany, the Netherlands, and Spain all stopped accepting adoptions from the country several years earlier, citing trafficking concerns. But more than 2,280 American adoptions from the country are still being processed, albeit with additional safeguards. Stolen babies have already been found in that queue; Guatemalan authorities expect more.

Guatemala’s example is extreme; it is widely considered to have the world’s most notorious record of corruption in foreign adoption. But the same troubling trends have emerged, on smaller scales, in more than a dozen other countries, including Albania, Cambodia, Ethiopia, Liberia, Peru, and Vietnam. The pattern suggests that the supply of adoptable babies rises to meet foreign demand—and disappears when Western cash is no longer available. For instance, in December 2001, the U.S. immigration service stopped processing adoption visas from Cambodia, citing clear evidence that children were being acquired illicitly, often against their parents’ wishes. That year, Westerners adopted more than 700 Cambodian children; of the 400 adopted by Americans, more than half were less than 12 months old. But in 2005, a study of Cambodia’s orphanage population, commissioned by the U.S. Agency for International Development, found only a total of 132 children who were less than a year old—fewer babies than Westerners had been adopting every three months a few years before.

Even countries with large populations, such as India, rarely have healthy infants and toddlers who need foreign parents. India’s large and growing middle class, at home and in the diaspora, faces fertility issues like those of their developed-world counterparts. They too are looking for healthy babies to adopt; some experts think that these millions of middle-class families could easily absorb all available babies. The country’s pervasive poverty does leave many children fending for themselves on the street. But “kids are not on the street alone at the age of 2,” Cantwell, the child protection consultant, says. “They are 5 or 6, and they aren’t going to be adopted.” That’s partly because most of these children still have family ties and therefore are not legally available for adoption, and partly because they would have difficultly adjusting to a middle-class European or North American home. Many of these children are deeply marked by abuse, crime, and poverty, and few prospective parents are prepared to adopt them.

Surely, though, prospective parents can at least feel secure that their child is truly an orphan in need of a home if they receive all the appropriate legal papers? Unfortunately, no.

NURSERY CRIMES

In many countries, it can be astonishingly easy to fabricate a history for a young child, and in the process, manufacture an orphan. The birth mothers are often poor, young, unmarried, divorced, or otherwise lacking family protection. The children may be born into a locally despised minority group that is afforded few rights. And for enough money, someone will separate these little ones from their vulnerable families, turning them into “paper orphans” for lucrative export.

Some manufactured orphans are indeed found in what Westerners call “orphanages.” But these establishments often serve less as homes to parentless children and more as boarding schools for poor youngsters. Many children are there only temporarily, seeking food, shelter, and education while their parents, because of poverty or illness, cannot care for them. Many families visit their children, or even bring them home on weekends, until they can return home permanently. In 2005, when the Hannah B. Williams Orphanage in Monrovia, Liberia, was closed because of shocking living conditions, 89 of the 102 “orphans” there returned to their families. In Vietnam, “rural families in particular will put their babies into these orphanages that are really extended day-care centers during the harvest season,” says a U.S. Embassy spokeswoman in Hanoi. In some cases, unscrupulous orphanage directors, local officials, or other operators persuade illiterate birth families to sign documents that relinquish those children, who are then sent abroad for adoption, never to be seen again by their bereft families.

Other children are located through similarly nefarious means. Western adoption agencies often contract with in-country facilitators—sometimes orphanage directors, sometimes freelancers—and pay per-child fees for each healthy baby adopted. These facilitators, in turn, subcontract with child finders, often for sums in vast excess of local wages. These paydays give individuals a significant financial incentive to find adoptable babies at almost any cost. In Guatemala, where the GDP per capita is $4,700 a year, child finders often earned $6,000 to $8,000 for each healthy, adoptable infant. In many cases, child finders simply paid poor families for infants. A May 2007 report on adoption trafficking by the Hague Conference on Private International Law reported poor Guatemalan families being paid beween $300 and several thousand dollars per child.

Sometimes, medical professionals serve as child finders to obtain infants. In Vietnam, for instance, a finder’s fee for a single child can easily dwarf a nurse’s $50-a-month salary. Some nurses and doctors coerce birth mothers into giving up their children by offering them a choice: pay outrageously inflated hospital bills or relinquish their newborns. Illiterate new mothers are made to sign documents they can’t read. In August 2008, the U.S. State Department released a warning that birth certificates issued by Tu Du Hospital in Ho Chi Minh City—which in 2007 had reported 200 births a day, and an average of three abandoned babies per 100 births—were “unreliable.” Most of the hospital’s “abandoned” babies were sent to the city’s Tam Binh orphanage, from which many Westerners have adopted. (Tu Du Hospital is where Angelina Jolie’s Vietnamese-born son was reportedly abandoned one month after his birth; he was at Tam Binh when she adopted him.) According to Linh Song, executive director of Ethica, an American nonprofit devoted to promoting ethical adoption, a provincial hospital’s chief obstetrician told her in 2007 “that he provided 10 ethnic minority infants to [an] orphanage [for adoption] in return for an incubator.”

To smooth the adoption process, officials in the children’s home countries may be bribed to create false identity documents. Consular officials for the adopting countries generally accept whatever documents they receive. But if a local U.S. Embassy has seen a series of worrisome referrals—say, a sudden spike in healthy infants coming from the same few orphanages, or a single province sending an unusually high number of babies with suspiciously similar paperwork—officials may investigate. But generally, they do not want to obstruct adoptions of genuinely needy children or get in the way of people longing for a child. However, many frequently doubt that the adoptions crossing their desks are completely aboveboard. “I believe in intercountry adoption very strongly,” says Katherine Monahan, a U.S. State Department official who has overseen scores of U.S. adoptions from around the world. “[But] I worry that there were many children that could have stayed with their families if we could have provided them with even a little economic assistance.” One U.S. official told me that when embassy staff in a country that sent more than 1,000 children overseas last year were asked which adoption visas they felt uneasy about, they replied: almost all of them.

Most of the Westerners involved with foreign adoption agencies—like business people importing foreign sneakers—can plausibly deny knowledge of unethical or unseemly practices overseas. They don’t have to know. Willful ignorance allowed Lauryn Galindo, a former hula dancer from the United States, to collect more than $9 million in adoption fees over several years for Cambodian infants and toddlers. Between 1997 and 2001, Americans adopted 1,230 children from Cambodia; Galindo said she was involved in 800 of the adoptions. (Galindo reportedly delivered Angelina Jolie’s Cambodian child to her movie set in Africa.) But in a two-year probe beginning in 2002, U.S. investigators alleged that Galindo paid Cambodian child finders to purchase, defraud, coerce, or steal children from their families, and conspired to create false identity documents for the children. Galindo later served federal prison time on charges of visa fraud and money laundering, but not trafficking. “You can get away with buying babies around the world as a United States citizen,” says Richard Cross, a senior special agent with U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement who investigated Galindo. “It’s not a crime.”

ROCKING THE CRADLE

Buying a child abroad is something most prospective parents want no part of. So, how can it be prevented? As international adoption has grown in the past decade, the ad hoc approach of closing some corrupt countries to adoption and shifting parents’ hopes (and money) to the next destination has failed. The agencies that profit from adoption appear to willfully ignore how their own payments and fees are causing both the corruption and the closures.

Some countries that send children overseas for adoption have kept the process lawful and transparent from nearly the beginning and their model is instructive. Thailand, for instance, has a central government authority that counsels birth mothers and offers some families social and economic support so that poverty is never a reason to give up a child. Other countries, such as Paraguay and Romania, reformed their processes after sharp surges in shady adoptions in the 1990s. But those reforms were essentially to stop international adoptions almost entirely. In 1994, Paraguay sent 483 children to the United States; last year, the country sent none.

For a more comprehensive solution, the best hope may be the Hague Convention on Intercountry Adoption, an international agreement designed to prevent child trafficking for adoption. On April 1, 2008, the United States formally entered the agreement, which has 75 other signatories. In states that send children overseas and are party to the convention, such as Albania, Bulgaria, Colombia, and the Philippines, Hague-compatible reforms have included a central government authority overseeing child welfare, efforts to place needy children with extended families and local communities first, and limits on the number of foreign adoption agencies authorized to work in the country. The result, according to experts, has been a sharp decline in baby buying, fraud, coercion, and kidnapping for adoption.

In adopting countries, the convention requires a central authority—in the United States’ case, the State Department—to oversee international adoption. The State Department empowers two nonprofit organizations to certify adoption agencies; if shady practices, fraud, financial improprieties, or links with trafficking come to light, accreditation can be revoked. Already, the rules appear to be having some effect: Several U.S. agencies long dogged by rumors of bad practices have been denied accreditation; some have shut their doors. But no international treaty is perfect, and the Hague Convention is no exception. Many of the countries sending their children to the West, including Ethiopia, Russia, South Korea, Ukraine, and Vietnam, have yet to join the agreement.

Perhaps most important, more effective regulations would strictly limit the amount of money that changes hands. Per-child fees could be outlawed. Payments could be capped to cover only legitimate costs such as medical care, food, and clothing for the children. And crucially, fees must be kept proportionate with the local economies. “Unless you control the money, you won’t control the corruption,” says Thomas DiFilipo, president of the Joint Council on International Children’s Services, which represents more than 200 international adoption organizations. “If we have the greatest laws and the greatest regulations but are still sending $20,000 anywhere—well, you can bypass any system with enough cash.”

Improved regulations will protect not only the children being adopted and their birth families, but also the consumers: hopeful parents. Adopting a child—like giving birth—is an emotional experience; it can be made wrenching by the abhorrent realization that a child believed to be an orphan simply isn’t. One American who adopted a little girl from Cambodia in 2002 wept as she spoke at an adoption ethics conference in October 2007 about such a discovery. “I was told she was an orphan,” she said. “One year after she came home, and she could speak English well enough, she told me about her mommy and daddy and her brothers and her sisters.”

Unless we recognize that behind the altruistic veneer, international adoption has become an industry—one that is often highly lucrative and sometimes corrupt—many more adoption stories will have unhappy endings. Unless adoption agencies are held to account, more young children will be wrongfully taken from their families. And unless those desperate to become parents demand reform, they will continue—wittingly or not—to pay for wrongdoing. “Credulous Westerners eager to believe that they are saving children are easily fooled into accepting laundered children,” writes David Smolin, a law professor and advocate for international adoption reform. “For there is no fool like the one who wants to be fooled.”

Adoption & the Fight for Human Rights

EDITORIAL: International Adoption and the Fight for Human Rights

International adoption has quietly become a large, lucrative business. While international adoption agencies would no doubt like to keep it this way, adult international adoptees are now asking questions. They are participating in a debate over whose best interests the practice actually serves, or should serve: the adopter or the adoptee? Taking a critical look at the practice of international adoption, chairman of United Adoptees International Hilbrand Westra explores its disturbing overlaps with free market practices and religious justifications, and lays out solutions for practical legal reform. Westra shows the power of an emerging collective adoptee voice shaping what was once seen as an inevitable inequality.

International Adoption and the Fight for
Human Rights
By Hilbrand W.S. Westra
Chairman, United Adoptees International

AUGUST/SEPTEMBER 2009 CONDUCIVE

"There are simply not enough healthy, adoptable infants to meet Western demand - and there's too much Western money in search of children. As a result, many international adoption agencies work not to find homes for needy children but to find children for Western homes."

From, 'The Lie we Love', E.J. Graff, associate director and senior researcher at The Schuster Institute for Investigative Journalism

Saving children from starvation and death will always make news headlines. In the case of adoption, especially intercountry adoption, this is far from the reality most of the time. What once was presented as a last resort for children without parents has become a global enterprise where children seemingly are sold to the highest bidder under the supervision and agreement of involved nations.

The practice of adoption has become an international market where children migrate mainly from relatively impoverished countries to more affluent countries with the help of funding from churches, NGOs, and financial institutions. Prospective adopters find themselves in a cafeteria system, where they can choose between domestic or intercountry adoption, and then have their pick from a variety of genders and skin tones. These consumers can also decide whether or not they are up to the task of raising a child with a physical or mental handicap. The final cost will determine which international program they will be limited to. For some it’s not a matter of money because banks and financial institutions, especially in the United States, will provide loans to facilitate overseas adoptions.

Some people will be shocked by this characterization of adoption which is commonly perceived to be a purely humanitarian gesture. But, for those of us who do intercountry adoption research, such indicators of a warped child welfare system can be seen everywhere in the Western world, from Australia to Europe and from the United States to Canada.

What is even more shocking is to learn that race and gender are big factors in assigning a monetary value to those children made available for adoption. Caucasian boys generally carry the highest price tag with Asian girls following close behind. Prices can reach as much as $35,000 according to an ABC News report, depending on demand which usually hinges on the child’s racial and/or ethnic background.

The undeniable correlation between annually increasing infertility rates in Western countries and the growing demand for children put up for adoption forces one to question why the general public is slow in calling for the protection of the most vulnerable members of society.

Instead of establishing and funding good healthcare and social services, countries like South Korea and the United States have used adoption as a means to export their socially ostracized or racially undesirable children to families in countries like the Netherlands.

Organizations like UNICEF, International Organization for Migration, Save the Children, the European Union for Fundamental Rights Agency, Terre des Hommes, and even World Vision report on child abduction, trafficking, and trade worldwide for the purposes of adoption. Academics, such as David Smolin and Brian Stuy, followed by Kay Johnson, report regularly about children stolen for adoption, as well as the flaws and weaknesses in adoption laws, if such laws even exist, in both sending and receiving countries. Authors, such as Mirah Riben (The Stork Market: America’s Multi-Billion Dollar Unregulated Adoption Industry), and Roelie Post, a European Commission official (Romania for Export Only: The Untold Story of the Romanian Orphans), have written extensively on how deep international politics has penetrated the racket of trafficking children. They have exposed a horrific money-making scheme that is motivated by pure political and financial interests.

But, lest we forget the role of the Church in paving the way for child trafficking, initially within Western countries and later in their colonies, Carine Hutsebaut, criminologist and founder of ICMAC (International Center for Molested and Abducted Children), wrote a very important book (Kleine zondaars – Kerk en kinderhandel [Little sinners – The Church and Child Trafficking]), explaining how the Catholic church had a hand in trafficking children to childless parishioners in different cities and countries.

The fortress that religious groups, adoptive parents, agencies and politicians have built to protect their monied interests and feelings of entitlement to other people’s children appears to be almost impregnable. However, the first cracks in their bastion are slowly becoming visible. The question we must ask ourselves, though, is who else is willing to push for necessary changes? Until now, the group fighting for children’s rights and family preservation programs is small, but committed.

Establishing Legal Protections

There is an urgent need to come up with solutions to the problems plaguing the practice of intercountry adoption; if not for the sending countries that are reconsidering their views on intercountry adoption due to the exchange of information amongst themselves, then certainly for those adult adoptees who are the victims of falsified birth certificates, identity theft, or embezzlement of their origins by authorities who do not want them to find out the truth behind their adoptions. But, first and foremost we need to acknowledge the close relationship between money and adoption that leads to charges of modern-day slavery and cultural appropriation for the single-minded interest of procuring babies and children for the well-off.

A switch from private to state-controlled adoption agencies should be initiated. First, in order to put a stop to the coercion and corruption caused by the exchange of money and adopting a child, an internationally accepted range of fees, independent of the child’s origins, should be established. Also, a switch from private to state-controlled adoption agencies should be initiated.

Next, an independent international agency should be established quickly. It would be charged with monitoring and enforcing international adoption procedures in order to protect first parents and their children from exploitation and corruption. Child trafficking for the purpose of adoption should be treated as seriously as any other type of human trafficking. International criminal law should be enhanced to apprehend and prosecute those who would abuse adoption for financial gain. This mission would be to uphold each person’s physical and mental integrity in the face of possible exploitation and abuse during the adoption process, being especially mindful of the vulnerability of children.

The present Hague Convention on Intercountry Adoption should be regulated and policed to eliminate corruption in adoption

Finally, the present Hague Convention on Intercountry Adoption should be regulated and policed to eliminate corruption in adoption. I also advocate working through the existing legal frameworks of technical assistance and aid, ratifying the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child.

For more information on child trafficking and international adoption see
The Schuster Institute for Investigative Journalism
Against Child Trafficking

Related Stories:

Transnational Adoption and the "Financialization of Everything"

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Here, Veronica, Here Girl

© Photographer: Roughcollie | Agency: Dreamstime.com

"It is hard to fathom this Court allowing the enforcement of an adoption decree entered in direct contravention of the Oklahoma and U.S. Constitutions." 

  ~ Justice Noma Gurich ~

Our entire nation watched a traumatized four year old girl be taken from her family.  We not only watched it, our government escorted her.  It was far from "peaceful" for her.  It is state-sanctioned abuse.  Without the excuse of "adoption", any other child would have been saved from such a kidnapping.        

Adoption law turned her into a non-person.  She has no more rights than a dog being led away from its breeder.

"Adoptive Couple VERSUS Baby Girl" should teach us that our adoption system in America is not only flawed, it is abusive.  The adoption industry has brainwashed our entire nation to the point we let a child be kidnapped on national television.   

Veronica is the face of adoption in our country now.  And the atrocity it did to her is not just one-time collateral damage.

Coercion, fraud, conflict of interest, biased "counseling", and LOTS OF MONEY (disguised as "fees" and "expenses") continue to turn adoption into a "business" model that ignores human rights and best interests of children and their families.  The adoption brokers that bought and sold Veronica are still in business.  Even in "good" adoptions, money still exchanges hands and identities are stolen.  Adoptees live their entire lives as someone else, with no access to their genealogy. They are non-persons.  

It reminds me of one of the ridiculous comments I heard made during the Adoption Review Task Force meetings I attended at our state capitol.  Mind you, the majority of this "task force", charged with making recommendations in adoption law, was comprised of those who earn their living off adoption.  My colleague and I arrived a little early and introduced ourselves to two other ladies. When we mentioned that we were an adoptee and a first mother, we got the same familiar blank looks we are used to...most people are speechless to meet a real live adult adoptee or first mother. What took the cake, though, was the response of one of these ladies.

"Well, I don't have any PERSONAL experience with adoption...but I have a special puppy!"  Like that was comparable?  We looked at each other with disbelief when later during the meeting she was introduced as the presenter from the Department of Mental Health, invited to speak about "Trauma".  Of course, she was clueless and it showed.

The sad part about this story ~ adult adoptees are used to this.  It didn't surprise me at all...but it did sadden me, considering this is the mindset of those who are considered "professionals" in the field.  Those who legislators were looking to for "recommendations" to address the 2006 OK Grand Jury Report regarding unethical behaviors of adoption brokers.  More lip-service. 

This is the typical societal attitude about adoption ~ children are blank slates, much like puppies. They can be tossed around and given new "papers" and new homes, new identities, and new lives without much thought...except for the expectation to be grateful that someone would "take them in." Sadly, dogs have more accurate pedigrees than most adoptees have accurate birth certificates.

Do a search for "adoption" on any newspaper's website and try to weed through the dog pound "adoption" articles listed right along articles regarding adoption of children...they are always lumped together ~ and, unfortunately, our society doesn't treat the adoption of children much more ethically . Adoption is the highest money-making unregulated industry in America.

When questioned about the Federal Adoption Incentive, and how this could be an influencing factor in the overall philosophy & policies governing how we "care" for Oklahoma's children, the presenter "did not know the numbers."

DHS (Oklahoma "Swift Adoptions") receives a $4,000 (or higher) "bonus" from the federal government (our tax dollars) for most finalized adoptions of kids in state care. That added up to $1.5 million last year alone. Tell me this doesn't influence the WAY in which state government operates ~ from parental termination of rights decisions, to preparation (or lack thereof) of potential adoptive parents, to which children we focus on "saving" (and how).  That could be why our child welfare systems are in trouble.  We are neglecting the children who need our help in order to focus on how to increase our federal matching dollars.

In 2008, Oklahoma had the 3rd highest adoption rate in the nation.  Our ICPC Officer (who is contracted and paid by DHS to approve all inter-state adoptions) is also the owner of an adoption agency.  The same attorneys involved with Veronica's adoption are still in business and babies such as Deserai and Jarred are still in legal limbo over the same unregulated and contested issues. 

I'm only talking about all this because this is the state we live in.  The state that failed Veronica.  A state very invested ~ from top to bottom. 

Money and adoption can never be ethically intertwined. Yet here we are.  And there Veronica is in a strange home, with people who reportedly may have been unfit to adopt a child in "public" care, but who our court systems allowed to kidnap a child away from her own father...through money and unethical adoption brokers. 

Any father who would fight in court for his daughter from the time she was four months old (when he was finally informed of the adoption "plan") is far from the "abandoner" he is being made to look in mainstream media.  Even though Veronica was whisked out of state at birth, the adoption was never finalized and Dusten was awarded custody two years ago, because it had been unethical and contested from day one. 

S.C. Judge Malphrus (the only court that actually held a trial) concluded that Dusten had been a "thwarted" father.  See the ruling here:  http://www.scribd.com/doc/169266799/2011-Malphrus-Ruling

"Even if ICWA does not apply I find that birth father's consent to the adoption was necessary and he has not consented to this adoption.  I find that he was a 'thwarted father' as that term is defined in Abernathy vs. Baby Boy.

When parental rights and the best interest of the child are in conflict, the best interest of the child must prevail.  In this case, I find no conflict in the two.  The best interests of the child are protected by not terminating father's parental rights...a child is not property."

Veronica had been living happily with her natural family in Oklahoma for two years.  Why should she have to pay for an unethical court and adoption system whose appeals process treated her more like a piece of property, rather than a human-being with rights to her own family? 

Adoption agencies are notorious for using unethical practices against pesky fathers.  It makes adoption too "risky" for their customers. Why would they work so hard to turn Dusten into a "criminal", except to deflect this atrocity off the real reason America allowed this child to be transferred like a piece of property...the largest unregulated industry in America.  Someone has to pay in order to ensure society continues to buy in to a positive philosophy of adoption.  Veronica is paying the cost.

We sit back and watch a child be subject to state-sanctioned abuse.  Her best interests were completely ignored for the purpose of making sure the "establishment" of adoption is preserved.  For whose best interest?

Here, Veronica, here Girl...come get your cookie.

For the best overview of this case click here:  http://www.dailykos.com/story/2013/10/03/1243613/-Adoption-Series-part-2-Veronica-Brown

Money plays too big a role in adoption

Money plays too big a role in adoption

She says she is battle-weary and very disillusioned by all the wrongs she has come across over the past years.

Ina Hut, director of Wereldkinderen (World Children) the largest adoption agency in the Netherlands, is calling it a day. She is handing in her notice in protest against the way things are run in the world of international child adoption.

In the Netherlands there are more than 30,000 children adopted from abroad. In the early years, international adoption was legalised in the mid 1970s, the children mainly came from South Korea, Indonesia and India. In a relatively high number of cases the adoption parents’ motives were idealistic. ‘Even if you can just save one of them,’ was a statement you heard a lot in those days, referring to children who led a miserable life, for example, in prostitution or in impoverished children’s homes.

Children from China
Today most children come from China. The attitude of many Dutch would-be parents has drastically changed over the past 30 years, says director Ina Hut from World Children:

“Would-be parents have strong desires, and I understand that. Everybody has the right to want children, but you don’t have the right to children. Children have the right to parents. The right to children doesn’t exist on this planet.

For me the last straw was an important political meeting in June. Once again it became clear that in the debate around international adoption it is not in the interests of children that come first, but in the interests of the would-be parents, or gay couples who want to adopt, and also in the commercial interests of the Netherlands and that of politicians who are afraid of losing votes. All other interests than that of the child.”

Stolen son
About seven years ago, Ina Hut left her job as university director and entered the adoption world, where she was amazed by the large role money played. According to her, especially Americans are prepared to pay a lot of money to cover the expenses of adopting a child. Therefore a relatively high number of children are allocated to the US.

Large sums of money are said to encourage the trade in children, China is notorious for this. A Chinese mother whose son was stolen explains what it is like to have to work everyday in the shop where her child disappeared:

“We have no choice. We cannot leave here, because just imagine that he tries to return and we have already gone. No way…"

Lack of communication
But there is more, says Ina Hut. A children’s home offering children up for adoption can often give more information about the identity of a child than they are doing now. This applies to China, but also to many other countries. And the Dutch government has acted spinelessly against this lack of communication. The Ministry of Justice recognises that China in particular has a fragile adoption system, but overall they consider it satisfactory, with good intentions.

According to the ministry an in-depth investigation could actually damage commercial and diplomatic interests. This infuriates Ina Hut. It is criminal to change or hold back the identity of a child, she says. Even though an adopted child has probably been stolen from the parents, it has the right to know that. She suggests the following solution for a system that is more fair:

“If you take a look at the amount of money involved in international adoption … invest that in the countries themselves and see whether the children can be taken care of there, in a good home or with family or friends. The big money should be taken out of the system. If, after a long search, there is no other solution for a child who has no parents to raise them, then adoption is an excellent answer. But only as a very last resort.”

Baby Veronica...another "Trail of Tears"?

                                                                             

 

 Woe to those who call evil good, and good evil; who put darkness for light, and light for darkness; who put bitter for sweet, and sweet for bitter.  Is. 5:20

 

Being an Oklahoman, born and raised; as well as adopted and reunited with my first family...Baby Veronica is weighing heavy on my heart.  There is yet another "Trail of Tears" being perpetuated against the innocent. 

I looked up the history of the original "Trail of Tears" and found some similarities.  Our Native American's land was removed from them due to greed. 

"In 1830, President Andrew Jackson signed the Indian Removal Act which evicted all Indians in the southeastern United States to what is now Oklahoma. At the time of this act, the Cherokee were an advanced nation having built towns and cities, having a written constitution and even printing their own newspapers in the Cherokee language.  The primary motivation was greed. The whites in Georgia, the Carolinas, Tennessee and Alabama desired the lands of the Cherokee. The United States military had the might to grant the whites their wish."
 

Veronica's "land" (her identity, family, and heritage) is being targeted in much the same way.   

Adoption's "stated" purpose is to care for children who need a home.

Veronica's father has been fighting for her since she was a baby.  If the potential adoptive parents and their attorneys truly had Veronica's "best interest" at heart, they could have done the right thing when they realized Veronica had a father and family who loved her and wanted to raise her.  A South Carolina court finally awarded custody to Veronica's father when she was two, and she has been living in Oklahoma with her family ever since.  The NICWA has released information regarding the details of this case here:  "Adoptive Couple vs. Baby Girl".

Fathers aren't aware (nor mothers) of the coercive tactics used in a billion dollar per year adoption industry whose goal it is to supply babies for those willing to pay.  Until it is too late. 

This case only proves that adoption in America is not about finding homes for children who need them. It is about supplying babies for people who want them. 

Even potential adoptive parents are speaking out.  Why would a humane society advocate for a child to be adopted, unless absolutely necessary? 

This case should open the conversation about ensuring ethical adoption law in America.  David Smolen, in his article, "The Baby Veronica Case and the Abuse of Adoption", writes: 

"Unfortunately, adoption all too often has become about the desire of adoptive parents to parent, rather than the needs of a child for a home. There is nothing wrong with wanting to parent a child, but everything wrong with taking someone else’s child to do so."

In order to ensure that adoption is reserved for children who would truly benefit, there are numerous changes that need to be made in adoption law. 

Maybe father's should have to appear before a Judge before their babies can be adopted, rather than being chased down by a "server", or their names published on a registry or publication they don't know exists. 

Mothers and fathers should both be given ample time to withdraw their signature in a voluntary relinquishment.  Wouldn't that be a reasonable way to ensure they are fully aware of their decision?   Instead, mothers are often pressured to sign away their rights in a hospital room, immediately after giving birth.

Should pregnant mothers, simply seeking help, be eyed as potential "birthmothers" when they enter the doors of a "crisis pregnancy center"? 

Is "counseling" provided by adoption "professionals" (in the business of procuring babies for paying customers) truly non-directive?

In his article, "Oklahoma Case: Adoption and the Buying and Selling of Children",  Robert Franklin, esq. writes:

"Face it, a lot of these mothers are strapped for money. The line between paying her legitimate living expenses and paying her for her child is not a bright one and is easily crossed."

At one point, the practice got so bad in Oklahoma a grand jury was convened to look into the baby market called adoption.

In 2006, a state grand jury reported adoption judges were so indifferent or grossly incompetent in overseeing expenses that birth mothers basically were allowed to sell children for cars, televisions and vacations.

In short, particularly where the adoptive couple is wealthy, there’s a pot of money there for the taking, and everyone in on the deal wants some.  Attorneys and adoption agencies are happy to facilitate the “transaction,” and adoptive parents have no reason to do anything but turn a blind eye.
It’s the buying and selling of children, particularly newborns, and it happens often in this country.
Needless to say, a father who wants to care for his child just gums up the works.  After all, if the adoption doesn’t get finalized, a lot of people don’t get paid.  So it’s in everyone’s interest, as they see it, to keep Dad out of the picture altogether."  

These practices are pure marketing (or even trickery).  Even "open adoption" is not legally enforceable.

Look at Australia and how they have reformed adoption practices.  They have even issued a national apology. 

Let's eliminate coercive "pre-birth" adoption plans altogether, and remove the marketing component from adoption.  This would better ensure children who truly need homes can find them. 

The money in adoption also creates an environment for conflict of interest (some ICPC officers are also adoption business owners).  How many in important decision-making positions are consumers of adoption?

Adoptees are not commodities or perpetual children, but adoption law treats us as such, with no identity rights, or access to our original birth certificates. 

If the Capobiancos and their attorneys have their way, not only will she lose her family, but (see "Three Destructive Mindsets of Adoptive Parents"), according to current adoption law, Veronica Brown's Original Birth Certificate will be permanently sealed.  She will be issued an "Amended Birth Certificate" listing Melanie and Matt as her biological parents. She will forever be forced to use this document as proof of her "birth". 

This is what adoptees in this country are forced to live with. It is illegal to see one's own birth certificate. We are treated as blank slates and given new identities. 

Veronica's human rights are being disregarded.  She deserves to be heard.

From an OK Supreme Court decision in 2005 regarding ICWA ~ 

"In any State court proceeding for adoption or termination of parental rights to an Indian child, . . . the Indian child's tribe shall have a right to intervene at any point in the proceeding."  It would be difficult indeed to enforce the right to intervene in the proceeding without receiving notice of it." 

Lord, we ask for your intervention and blessings upon Baby Veronica and her family.  We, as a country, have asked forgiveness for taking the land of our Native American brothers and sisters.  Please help us realize what unethical adoption laws are doing to separate and "seal" identities, families and histories. 

Please stop this "trail of tears"...

For the best overview of this case please click here:  http://www.dailykos.com/story/2013/10/03/1243613/-Adoption-Series-part-2-Veronica-Brown

Current Adoption Policy and Practice - A Comparison

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Current Adoption Policy and Practice -
a comparison between North America and Australia

Evelyn Burns Robinson

Introduction

I am often asked about current adoption policy and practice in Australia and how this differs from policy and practice in North America. Although I have never worked in a situation where adoptions were actually taking place, I have had considerable experience in post-adoption services for the last fifteen years and, in that time, I have counselled many whose lives have been affected by adoption. I have also been able to acquire some understanding of current adoption policy and practice from colleagues in the field. During my visits to North America and through my contacts with colleagues there, I have also gained some background information on current adoption practices in North America. It seems to me that there are fundamental differences between what I perceive to be happening with domestic adoptions in Australia and what I perceive to be happening with domestic adoptions in North America.
I recognise that adoption policy is, in both places, subject to state rather than federal legislation and so there are variations in policy and practice from state to state. My comments are, therefore, of a general nature only, as I appreciate that there are many local variations. I am most familiar, of course, with policy and practice in my home state of South Australia, but I am aware that most other states in Australia operate in similar ways. Adoption policy and practice in South Australia are based on the South Australian Adoption Act (1988) and have been in effect since that act was passed in 1989. Since 1989, it has been possible to appraise and monitor the outcomes of this legislation and the act was officially reviewed in 1994. At that time, submissions were invited from members of the public, as well as groups with an interest in adoption. Some minor alterations to the act were made on the basis of this review and there have been no official moves to make any alterations to the legislation since that time.
South Australia was the first state in Australia to put in place adoption legislation which seeks to protect and support the relationship between a newborn child and his or her families of origin, as well as allowing equal access to adoption information when the adopted child becomes an adult. Other states have followed with similar adoption acts.

Adoption agencies

Private adoptions are illegal in all states in Australia. All domestic adoptions are enacted by State Government departments. There are no commercially-based adoption agencies which are licensed to manage these adoptions, which means that there are no payments of any kind connected to the adoptions of these children.
In contrast, in North America, private adoption agencies are licensed to arrange domestic adoptions. Because adoption has been allowed to acquire a commercial status in North America, there are financial advantages for agencies in arranging as many adoptions as possible. Agencies in North America, therefore, have an incentive to attract customers, just as any other business does.
Many people have expressed to me that they find the fact that money and children change hands in the same transactions to be at the very least distasteful, if not, in fact, immoral.

Expectant mothers

Expectant mothers in Australia, regardless of their circumstances, are generally encouraged and supported to prepare for raising their children. After the birth, a Parenting Payment is available from the Federal Government to anyone, regardless of their gender or marital status, who is a permanent resident of Australia and who has custody of a child. This payment, which is means-tested, is a recognition by the Australian government that children are the basis of a country's future. The government, therefore, makes financial support available to parents to assist them to provide for their children. As far as I am aware, there is no corresponding payment available at a Federal Government level in North America, although I have been advised that there may be tax benefits for parents who are in paid employment.
While there is still a degree of disapproval in some quarters towards single parenthood, there is a much greater level of acceptance in Australia than there was in the past. This has resulted in a dramatic decrease in the number of adoptions in Australia over the last thirty years. Last year in the state of South Australia (which has a population of more than two million people), for example, only one Australian-born child was adopted.
The term 'birthmother' (or 'birth mother') is currently out of favour with many of the support groups in Australia and certainly would never be used, as I have heard it used in North America, to describe an expectant mother. I have even heard the term 'birthmother-to-be' used to describe a pregnant woman. This sinister use of the term 'birthmother', before the birth has even taken place, implies that the separation of mother and child is a foregone conclusion. Expectant mothers in Australia, on the other hand, are generally encouraged to concentrate on their approaching motherhood throughout their pregnancies and no decisions regarding their child's future are expected to be made until after the birth has occurred. This is an acknowledgement of the fact that it is not possible for a mother to know how she will feel about her child until after the child has been born.

Expectant fathers

I know that, in North America, fathers who are not married to the mothers of their children have a difficult time being heard. In South Australia, an unmarried mother who is considering adoption will always be asked to name the child's father and attempts will be made to include him in the decision-making process. If the father is named on the birth certificate or if a man is recognised by the court as being the father of a child, then his consent is necessary before that child can be adopted. The father will be allowed time to establish paternity. If the father wishes to raise the child, he has the right to do so. If the mother and father do not agree with regard to the child's future, the matter may be decided by the Family Court. This would happen before any consent to adoption had been completed.

Consent to adoption

Under the South Australian Adoption Act (1988), consent to adoption cannot be given until the child is at least fourteen days old. Counselling after the birth is compulsory and must be completed at least three days prior to consent being given. The mother of the child must also be given information in writing regarding the consequences of the adoption, prior to any taking of consent. After the consent has been signed there is a period of twenty-five days during which the consent may be revoked. This period can be extended by up to fourteen days, but it cannot be shortened.
In practice, the consent to adoption is sometimes not finalised until several months after the birth. While this may not be an ideal situation, it is felt to be of prime importance that children have every opportunity to be raised within their families of origin. This will prevent the long term complexities in the lives of those children and their parents, which would occur if an adoption took place. During this period the child may remain with the mother and/or father.
I have heard of cases in North America, tragically, in which adoption consents have been signed even before the birth, or very soon after the birth. I have also heard of cases where attempts to revoke the consent the day after it had been signed have failed.

Meetings with prospective adopters

In Australia there is never any contact of any kind between expectant mothers and prospective adopters. I know that there are many who agree with me that such contacts are intrusive, disempowering to the expectant mother and potentially exploitative. They may even serve to encourage an inappropriate sense of 'ownership' in the prospective adopters, which, I believe, shows a lack of respect for and understanding of the sanctity of the mother/child bond. I am aware that this shocking practice is considered by many to be unethical.
In South Australia, only after the consent to adoption has been signed and after the twenty-five day revocation period has expired will the government department involved select adopters for the child. After this decision has been made, a meeting may take place between the prospective adopters who have been selected and the mother, if the mother requests such a meeting. Prospective adopters will not have any contact at all with the child until after the revocation period has expired and they have been notified that they have been selected to adopt.
I find it hard to understand how anyone can support the practice of having prospective adopters meet with expectant mothers and try to induce them to consent to the adoption of the child they are carrying. I believe that prospective adopters are sometimes even allowed to be present at the hospital while the birth is taking place. I was appalled to hear that this happens in North America. I find such behaviour totally inappropriate and unethical. It concerns me greatly that prospective adopters who behave in this way are not thereby considered as unsuitable to adopt.

Birth certificates

In South Australia, if the adopters are willing, they can have their names added to the child's original birth certificate instead of having a new one issued. This means that, after the adoption, the names of both the parents and the adopters appear on the same document, which is the child's legal birth certificate. The mother of the child has access to the original birth certificate from the time that the adoption takes place. The father also has access if his name appears on the birth certificate.
Regardless of the type of birth certificate issued, adopted adults in South Australia have access to their original birth certificates and other documentation pertaining to their adoption, when they are eighteen years old. The original birth certificate has details of their parents, including their names and addresses at the time of the adoption. They may have access prior to the age of eighteen with the consent of their adopters. The mother of the adopted child also has access to the replacement birth certificate when the adopted child becomes an adult, at the age of eighteen years. This document has details of the child's adopted name and the names of the adopters and their address at the time of the adoption.
These documents are also available to the children of the mothers, either if the mother gives permission or after her death and to the children of an adopted adult, if the adopted adult gives permission or after their death. Similar access to adoption information is available in all states, although in some cases, the release of information can be prevented by a person involved in the adoption. Fathers also have the right to access information about their children under certain circumstances. The legislation which allows this access has been in effect in South Australia since 1989.
I know that there are some states in North America where adopted adults are allowed to access their original birth certificates but there are no states, as far as I am aware, in which parents are allowed to access the replacement birth certificates once their children are adults. I look forward to the time when equal access to adoption information, such as exists in South Australia, will be accepted as a basic human right everywhere in North America. This is an on-going issue of social justice.

The right to raise a child

There seems to be an unhealthy attitude in North America that there are some people who are 'entitled' to raise children (whether their own or someone else's) and that there are others who are not. The result of this seems to be that, rather than adoption existing to serve needy children, adoption seems to exist to a large extent to serve needy adults. In some sectors of the media in North America, the idea that certain people have a right to acquire a child, by any means at their disposal, seems to go unchallenged. Although this misguided notion does, no doubt, also have some support in areas of the Australian media, I find this attitude to be much less prevalent in Australia than it is in North America.

Removing children from families

I was very shocked to learn that, in North America, parents who are married and already have children are being persuaded to relinquish newly-born infants. The subsequent separation of such a child from a previously intact family is causing enormous losses, for the child, for the parents, for the other children in the family, for the grandparents as well as many other members of the extended family. This does not, to my knowledge, happen anywhere in Australia.
Apparently, having children while on a low income is now perceived as such a crime in some parts of North America, that this dreadful punishment has been devised. If poverty is considered to be a disadvantage to such children, then government initiatives which address the issue of poverty would be more useful to them than replacing the complications created in their lives by poverty with the complications created by adoption.
In my professional opinion as a social worker, any prospective adopters who would be willing to acquire a child in this way, from an established family, would be considered to be unsuitable candidates to be entrusted with child-rearing responsibilities. It seems that a 'supply' of such children, who already have an entire family of relatives, is being engineered to meet the 'demand' created by affluent strangers, who wish to attempt to manufacture a family through adoption. I cannot comprehend how anyone could consider such a transaction to be anything other than exploitative and socially unjust.

Adoptions of older children

While there are many in North America who are working in family preservation programmes to prevent separations of mothers and babies, I am saddened by the fact that there are still those who believe that adoption is an appropriate outcome for older children who are unable to return to live with their families. Adoption is rarely considered to be an appropriate outcome for such children in Australia.
I have heard it said in North America that adoption can provide such children with a sense of security. In fact, in my opinion, the opposite is the case. Children such as these know who they are and to whom they are related. These realities do not change, no matter where the child is living. To deny that identity and those connections by issuing the child with a false birth certificate has, in fact, the potential to create an enormous sense of insecurity. If their identity and their family connections are so dispensable, then how can a child in this situation develop any sense of reality and permanence? We all know that being part of an adoptive family does not provide protection against abuse, death or divorce. Adoption, in fact, does not guarantee permanence of any kind and is actually an attempt to create relationships where none existed previously, rather than honouring those relationships which already exist.
In Australia, children who are unable to live with their families can be provided with a safe home environment, based on an arrangement which accepts and honours the reality of their identity and their existing relationships. This, I believe, can allow them to heal and recover without involving them in the deceit and denial associated with adoption. Some of these children have already been traumatised by the abuse or neglect which they have suffered. In my opinion, it is unnecessarily cruel to add to their trauma by subjecting them to an adoption.

Conclusion

I am not, of course, suggesting that every child in Australia lives in an ideal family environment. However, it is not considered to be appropriate in Australia to try to solve the problems of poverty and abuse in families, by removing children and arranging for them to be adopted.
Adoption is not a commercial transaction in Australia and it is gradually being replaced by other, more effective means of providing homes for children in need. This suggests to me that Australians respect the advantages in life which cannot be bought, including a sense of knowing who we are and where we fit, a sense of heritage and ancestry and a respect for the intrinsic value of family membership.
I look forward to the day when children all over the world will no longer be removed from what are perceived to be dysfunctional poor families and placed in what too often turn out to be dysfunctional affluent families.

© Evelyn Robinson, MA, Dip Ed, BSW
January, 2004

This article may be reproduced for non-commercial purposes only, providing that
it is reproduced in its entirety and without alteration.

Evelyn Robinson, who is a counsellor, speaker and author of "Adoption and Loss -
The Hidden Grief", welcomes contact from interested readers.

Clova Publications
PO Box 328
Christies Beach
South Australia 5165

Tel: +61 - 8 - 8384 5805
Fax: +61 - 8 - 8384 5815

E-mail: erobinson@austarmetro.com.au

Web site: www.clovapublications.com
http://www.ccnm-mothers.ca/English/articles/APolicyandPractice.htm

Shotgun Adoption

Shotgun Adoption 
By Kathryn Joyce
This article appeared in the September 14, 2009 edition of The Nation.

Carol Jordan, a 32-year-old pharmacy technician, was living in Greenville, South Carolina, in 1999 when she became pregnant. She'd already decided against abortion, but she was struggling financially and her boyfriend was unsupportive. Looking through the Yellow Pages for help, she spotted an ad under "crisis pregnancies" for Bethany Christian Services. Within hours of calling, Jordan (who asked to be identified with a pseudonym) was invited to Bethany's local office to discuss free housing and medical care.

Bethany, it turned out, did not simply specialize in counseling pregnant women. It is the nation's largest adoption agency, with more than eighty-five offices in fifteen countries.

When Jordan arrived, a counselor began asking whether she'd considered adoption and talking about the poverty rates of single mothers. Over five counseling sessions, she convinced Jordan that adoption was a win-win situation: Jordan wouldn't "have death on her hands," her bills would be paid and the baby would go to a family of her choosing in an open adoption. She suggested Jordan move into one of Bethany's "shepherding family" homes, away from the influence of family and friends.

Crisis pregnancy centers (CPCs), the nonprofit pregnancy-testing facilities set up by antiabortion groups to dissuade women from having abortions, have become fixtures of the antiabortion landscape, buttressed by an estimated $60 million in federal funds. While there is growing awareness of how CPCs hinder abortion access, the centers have a broader agenda that is less well known: they seek not only to induce women to "choose life" but to choose adoption, either by offering adoption services themselves, as in Bethany's case, or by referring women to Christian adoption agencies. Far more than other adoption agencies, conservative Christian agencies demonstrate a pattern and history of coercing women to relinquish their children.

Bethany guided Jordan through the Medicaid application process and in April moved her in with home-schooling parents outside Myrtle Beach. There, according to Jordan, the family referred to her as one of the agency's "birth mothers"--a term adoption agencies use for relinquishing mothers that many adoption reform advocates reject--although she hadn't yet agreed to adoption. "I felt like a walking uterus for the agency," says Jordan.

Jordan was isolated in the shepherding family's house; her only social contact was with the agency, which called her a "saint" for continuing her pregnancy but asked her to consider "what's best for the baby." "They come on really prolife: look at the baby, look at its heartbeat, don't kill it. Then, once you say you won't kill it, they ask, What can you give it? You have nothing to offer, but here's a family that goes on a cruise every year."

Jordan was given scrapbooks full of letters and photos from hopeful adoptive parents hoping to stand out among the estimated 150 couples for every available baby. Today the "birthmother letters" are on Bethany's website: 500 couples who pay $14,500 to $25,500 for a domestic infant adoption, vying for mothers' attention with profuse praise of their "selflessness" and descriptions of the lifestyle they can offer.

Jordan selected a couple, and when she went into labor, they attended the birth, along with her counselor and shepherding mother. The next day, the counselor said that fully open adoptions weren't legal in South Carolina, so Jordan wouldn't receive identifying information on the adoptive parents. Jordan cried all day and didn't think she could relinquish the baby. She called her shepherding parents and asked if she could bring the baby home. They refused, chastising Jordan sharply. The counselor told the couple Jordan was having second thoughts and brought them, sobbing, into her recovery room. The counselor warned Jordan that if she persisted, she'd end up homeless and lose the baby anyway.

"My options were to leave the hospital walking, with no money," says Jordan. "Or here's a couple with Pottery Barn furniture. You sacrifice yourself, not knowing it will leave an impact on you and your child for life."

The next morning, Jordan was rushed through signing relinquishment papers by a busy, on-duty nurse serving as notary public. As soon as she'd signed, the couple left with the baby, and Jordan was taken home without being discharged. The shepherding family was celebrating and asked why Jordan wouldn't stop crying. Five days later, she used her last $50 to buy a Greyhound ticket to Greenville, where she struggled for weeks to reach a Bethany post-adoption counselor as her milk came in and she rapidly lost more than fifty pounds in her grief.

When Jordan called Bethany's statewide headquarters one night, her shepherding mother answered, responding coldly to Jordan's lament. "You're the one who spread your legs and got pregnant out of wedlock," she told Jordan. "You have no right to grieve for this baby."

Jordan isn't alone. On an adoption agency rating website, Bethany is ranked poorly by birth mothers. Its adoptive parent ratings are higher, although several adopters described the coercion they felt "our birth mother" underwent. But neither is Bethany alone; in the constellation of groups that constitute the Christian adoption industry, including CPCs, maternity homes and adoption agencies, Bethany is just one large star. And instances of coercion in adoption stretch back nearly seventy years.

Ann Fessler, author of The Girls Who Went Away, has meticulously chronicled the lives of women from the "Baby Scoop Era": the period from 1945 to 1973, when single motherhood was so stigmatized that at least 1.5 million unwed American mothers relinquished children for adoption, often after finishing pregnancies secretly in maternity homes. The coercion was frequently brutal, entailing severe isolation, shaming, withholding information about labor, disallowing mothers to see their babies and coercing relinquishment signatures while women were drugged or misled about their rights. Often, women's names were changed or abbreviated, to bolster a sense that "the person who went away to deliver the baby was someone else" and that mothers would later forget about the babies they had given up. In taking oral histories from more than a hundred Baby Scoop Era mothers, Fessler found that not only was that untrue but most mothers suffered lifelong guilt and depression.

The cultural shift that had followed World War II switched the emphasis of adoption from finding homes for needy infants to finding children for childless couples. Karen Wilson-Buterbaugh, founder of the Baby Scoop Era Research Initiative, has compiled sociological studies from the era, including Clark Vincent's speculation in his 1961 book Unmarried Mothers that "if the demand for adoptable babies continues to exceed the supply...it is quite possible that, in the near future, unwed mothers will be 'punished' by having their children taken from them right after birth"--under the guise of protecting the "best interests of the child."

The Baby Scoop Era ended with Roe v. Wade, as abortion was legalized and single motherhood gained acceptance. The resultant fall in adoption rates was drastic, from 19.2 percent of white, unmarried pregnant women in 1972 to 1.7 percent in 1995 (and lower among women of color). Coinciding with this decline was the rise of the religious right and the founding of crisis pregnancy centers.

In 1984 Leslee Unruh, founder of Abstinence Clearinghouse, established a CPC in South Dakota called the Alpha Center. The first center had opened in 1967, but in 1984 Unruh's CPC was still a relatively new idea. In 1987 the state attorney's office investigated complaints that Unruh had offered young women money to carry their pregnancies to term and then relinquish their babies for adoption.

"There were so many allegations about improper adoptions being made and how teenage girls were being pressured to give up their children," then-state attorney Tim Wilka told the Argus Leader, that the governor asked him to take the case. The Alpha Center pleaded no contest to five counts of unlicensed adoption and foster care practices; nineteen other charges were dropped, including four felonies. But where Unruh left off, many CPCs have taken up in her place.

It's logical that antiabortion organizations seeking to prevent abortions and promote traditional family structures would aggressively promote adoption, but this connection is often overlooked in the bipartisan support that adoption promotion enjoys as part of a common-ground truce. In President Obama's speech at Notre Dame, he suggested that one solution to lowering abortion rates is "making adoption more available." And in a recent online debate, Slate columnist William Saletan and Beliefnet editor Steven Waldman proposed that unmarried women be offered a nominal cash payment to choose adoption over abortion as a compromise between prochoice and prolife convictions.

Compared with pre-Roe days, today women with unplanned pregnancies have access to far more information about their alternatives. However, Fessler says, they frequently encounter CPCs that pressure them to give the child to a family with better resources. "Part of the big picture for a young woman who's pregnant," she says, "is that there are people holding out their hand, but the price of admission is giving up your child. If you decide to keep your child, it's as if you're lost in the system, whereas people fight over you if you're ready to surrender. There's an organization motivated by a cause and profit. It's a pretty high price to pay: give away your first-born, and we'll take care of you for six months."
Christian adoption agencies court pregnant women through often unenforceable promises of open adoption and the option to choose the adoptive parents. California's Lifetime Adoption Foundation even offers birth mothers college scholarships. Additionally, maternity homes have made a comeback in recent years, with one network of 1,100 CPCs and homes, Heartbeat International, identifying at least 300 homes in the United States. Some advertise almost luxurious living facilities, though others continue to "bill themselves as homes for wayward girls who need to be set straight."

Most homes are religiously affiliated, and almost all promote adoption. Many, like Christian Homes and Family Services (CHFS), reserve their beds for women planning adoption. Others keep only a fraction for women choosing to parent. Most homes seamlessly blend their advertised crisis pregnancy counseling with domestic and international adoption services.

Religious women may be particularly susceptible to CPC coercion, argues Mari Gallion, a 39-year-old Alaska mother who founded the support group SinglePregnancy.com after a CPC unsuccessfully pressured her to relinquish her child ten years ago. Gallion, who has worked with nearly 3,000 women with unplanned pregnancies, calls CPCs "adoption rings" with a multistep agenda: discovering and exploiting women's insecurities about age, finances or parenting; then hard-selling adoption, portraying parenting as a selfish, immature choice. "The women who are easier to coerce in these situations are those who subscribe to conservative Christian views," says Gallion. "They'll come in and be told that, You've done wrong, but God will forgive you if you do the right thing."

Mirah Riben, vice president of communications for the birth mother group Origins-USA, as well as author of The Stork Market: America's Multi-Billion Dollar Unregulated Adoption Industry, says that many mothers struggle for decades with the fallout of "a brainwashing process" that persuades them to choose adoption and often deny for years--or until their adoptions become closed--that they were pressured into it. "I see a lot of justification among the young mothers. If their adoption is remaining open, they need to be compliant, good birth mothers and toe the line. They can't afford to be angry, because if they are, the door will close and they won't see the kid."

Such was the case for Karen Fetrow, a Pennsylvania mother who relinquished her son in 1994 through a Bethany office outside Harrisburg. Fetrow, a formerly pro-adoption evangelical, sought out a Christian agency when she became pregnant at 24. Although Fetrow was in a committed relationship with the father, now her husband of sixteen years, Bethany told her that women who sought to parent were on their own.

After Fetrow relinquished her son, she says she received no counseling from Bethany beyond one checkup phone call. Three months later, Bethany called to notify her that her legal paperwork was en route but that she shouldn't read it or attend court for the adoption finalization. "I didn't know that the adoption wasn't final and that I had three months to change my mind," says Fetrow. "The reality was that if I had gone, I might have changed my mind--and they didn't want me to."

Although for thirteen years Fetrow couldn't look at an infant without crying, she continued to support adoption and CPCs. But when she sought counseling--a staple of Bethany's advertised services--the director of her local office said he couldn't help. When her son turned 5, she stopped receiving updates from his adoptive parents, although she'd expected they would continue until he was 18. She asked Bethany about it, and the agency stalled for three years before explaining that the adoptive parents had only agreed to five years of updates. Fetrow complained on Bethany's online forum and was banned from the site.

Kris Faasse, director of adoption services at Bethany, said that while she was unaware of Fetrow's and Jordan's particular stories, their accounts are painful for her to hear. "The fact that this happens to any mom grieves me and would not be how we wanted to handle it." She added that only 25-40 percent of women who come to Bethany choose adoption, which, she said, "is so important, because we never want a woman to feel coerced into a plan."

Shortly after Fetrow was banned from Bethany's forum, the local Bethany office attempted to host a service at her church, "painting adoption as a Christian, prolife thing." At a friend's urging, Fetrow told her pastor about her experience, and after a meeting with the Bethany director--who called Fetrow angry and bitter--the pastor refused to let Bethany address the congregation. But Fetrow's pastor seems an exception.

Enthusiasm for Christians to adopt en masse begins to seem like a demand in need of greater supply, and this is how critics of current practices describe it: as an industry that coercively separates willing biological parents from their offspring, artificially producing "orphans" for Christian parents to adopt, rather than helping birth parents care for wanted children.
In 1994 the Village Voice investigated several California CPCs in Care Net, the largest network of centers in the country, and found gross ethical violations at an affiliated adoption agency, where director Bonnie Jo Williams secured adoptions by warning pregnant women about parenthood's painfulness, pressuring them to sign papers under heavy medication and in one case detaining a woman in labor for four hours in a CPC.

There were nineteen lawsuits against CPCs between 1983 and 1996, but coercive practices persist. Joe Soll, a psychotherapist and adoption reform activist, says that CPCs "funnel people to adoption agencies who put them in maternity homes," where ambivalent mothers are subjected to moralistic and financial pressure: warned that if they don't give up their babies, they'll have to pay for their spot at the home, and given conflicted legal counsel from agency-retained lawyers.
Literature from CPCs indicates their efforts to raise adoption rates. In 2000 the Family Research Council (FRC), the political arm of Focus on the Family, commissioned a study on the dearth of adoptable babies being produced by CPCs, "The Missing Piece: Adoption Counseling in Pregnancy Resource Centers," written by the Rev. Curtis Young, former director of Care Net.

Young based the report on the market research of consultant Charles Kenny, who questioned women with unplanned pregnancies and Christian CPC counselors to identify obstacles to higher adoption rates. Young argued that mothers' likelihood to choose adoption was based on their level of maturity and selflessness, with "more mature respondents...able to feel they are nurturing not only their children, but also, the adoptive parents," and "less mature women" disregarding the baby's needs by seeking to parent. He wrote that CPCs might persuade reluctant women by casting adoption as redemption for unwed mothers' "past failures" and a triumph over "selfishness, an 'evil' within themselves." Though Young noted that some CPCs were wary of looking like "baby sellers," he nonetheless urged close alliances with adoption agencies to ensure that the path to adoption was "as seamless and streamlined as possible."

Young was speaking to a larger audience than the FRC faithful. Care Net runs 1,160 CPCs nationwide and partners with Heartbeat International to host a national CPC hot line. Kenny is tied to the cause as a "Bronze"-level benefactor of the National Council for Adoption (NCFA), the most prominent adoption lobby group in the country, in the company of other benefactors like Bethany; Texas maternity home giant Gladney; the Good Shepherd Sisters, a Catholic order serving "young women of dissolute habits"; and the Mormon adoption agency LDS Family Services.

The federally funded NCFA has a large role in spreading teachings like these through its Infant Adoption Awareness Training Program, a Department of Health and Human Services initiative it helped pass in 2000 that has promoted adoption to nearly 18,000 CPC, school, state, health and correctional workers since 2002. Although the program stipulates "nondirective counseling for pregnant women," it was developed by a heavily pro-adoption pool of experts, including Kenny, and the Guttmacher Institute reports that trainees have complained about the program's coercive nature.

In 2007 the FRC and NCFA went beyond overlapping mandates to collaborate on the publication of another pamphlet, written by Kenny, "Birthmother, Goodmother: Her Story of Heroic Redemption," which targets "potential birthmothers" before pregnancy: a seeming contradiction of abstinence promotion, unless, as DelBalzo wryly notes, the abstinence movement intends to create "more babies available for adoption."

Even as women have gained better reproductive healthcare access, adoption laws have become less favorable for birth mothers, advancing the time after birth when a mother can relinquish--in some states now within twenty-four hours--and cutting the period to revoke consent drastically or completely. Adoption organizations have published comparative lists of state laws, almost as a catalog for prospective adopters seeking states that restrict birth parent rights. Among the worst is Utah.

Jo Anne Swanson, a court-appointed adoption intermediary, has studied a number of cases in which women have been lured out of their home states to give birth and surrender their children under Utah's lax laws--which require only two witnesses for relinquishments that have occurred in hotel rooms or parks--to avoid interstate child-placement regulations. Some women who changed their minds had agencies refuse them airfare home. And one Utah couple, Steve and Carolyn Mintz, told the Salt Lake Tribune that the director of their adoption agency flew into a rage at a mother in labor who'd backed out of their adoption, and the mother and her infant ended up in a Salt Lake City homeless shelter. Many complaints have been lodged by birth fathers who sought to parent their children but were disenfranchised by Utah's complicated system of registering paternity.

Utah isn't alone in attacking birth fathers' rights. From 2000 to 2001, a Midwestern grandmother named Ann Gregory (a pseudonym) fought doggedly for her son, a military enlistee, to retain parental rights over his and his girlfriend's child. When the girlfriend became pregnant, her conservative evangelical parents brought her to a local CPC affiliated with their megachurch. The CPC was located in the same office as an adoption agency: its "sister organization" of eighteen years. The CPC called Gregory's son, who was splitting his time between home and boot camp, pressuring him to "be supportive" of his girlfriend by signing adoption papers. The agency also called Gregory and her ex-husband, quoting Scripture "about how we're all adopted children of Jesus Christ."

What followed, Gregory says, was "six weeks of pure hell," as she felt her son and his girlfriend were "brainwashed" into adoption. She researched coercive adoption and retained a lawyer for her son. When the mother delivered, the attorney had Gregory notify a hospital social worker that parental rights were being contested, so the baby wouldn't be relinquished. Two days later, as the adoption agency was en route to take custody, Gregory filed an emergency restraining order. The matter had to be settled in court, where Gregory's son refused to consent to adoption. The legal bill for two weeks came to $9,000.

Both parents went to college, and though they are no longer together, Gregory praises their cooperation in jointly raising their son, now 8. But she is shaken by what it took to prevail. "You've got to get on it before the child is born, and you'd better have $10,000 sitting around. I can't even imagine how they treat those in a worse position than us. They say they want to help people in a crisis pregnancy, but really they want to help themselves to a baby."
"A lot of those moms from the '50s and '60s were really damaged by losing their child through the maternity homes," says Gregory. "People say those kinds of things don't happen anymore. But they do. It's just not a maternity home on every corner; it's a CPC."