FacePalm Friday

This is where your hosts will list their top picks for this week’s FacePalm moment—something they learned or read about this week that caused the FacePalm to happen (you know, the expression of embarrassment, frustration, disbelief, disgust or mixed humor as depicted in our Rally FacePalm smiley).

We invite you to add your FacePalm of the week to our comments. Go ahead and add a link, tell a personal story, or share something that triggered the FacePalm on the subject of child welfare or adoption.

Your hosts’ selections this week:

International Adoption Without Homestudy

This selection stems from a common REFORM Talk “diagnosis”– prospective adoptive parent and adoptive parent entitlement. Entitlement combined with finding your own impoverished woman to adopt from is a recipe for unethical adoption. This article, Madras HC lays down conditions on adoption of Indian child  [Indlaw News 6/23/11], is about a German couple who filed a “petition… seeking exemption from procedures required to be followed in cases of inter-country adoption on the ground that norms need to be followed only while adopting abandoned children and not in cases of adoption with the consent of biological parents.” Oh yeah…they also didn’t have a homestudy. They “developed contact”  with an Indian family while visiting India and wanted to adopt the family’s fourth child (wild guess it was a young girl.)

Kudos to Justice V Ramasubramanian who denied the petition and didn’t mince any words about what this is: “Children were not properties of their parents so as to entitle the latter to have absolute dominance over the former in a country where ‘utter poverty drives a few families to sell their children’ for begging, forced labour and even prostitution.”

Minnesota Adoption Industry Lobbyists

All is not well in Minnesota. They are on the verge of a government office shutdown which would encompass the Secretary of State office that authenticates adoption dossier documents.

“If legislators and the governor can’t break their weeks-long deadlock by June 30, state government would start to shut down. That could have repercussions for nearly every branch of state government, including the Secretary of State’s office. One function of that office is authenticating certain documents for international adoptions.”

The article also exasperatingly states “Meanwhile, Olson says Minnesota’s global reputation as a mecca for international adoptions hangs in the balance. She says Minnesotans’ per-capita rate of international adoption is among the highest of the 50 states.”

One of the commenters on the website says it best.  “OMG! Will someone please verify that when I clicked on the Times website, I was instantly redirected to The Onion? As the article states: “Minnesota’s global reputation as a mecca for international adoptions hangs in the balance”. Call Mark Dayton and Republican legislators today! The two billion dollars being fought over isn’t worth the damage to our state’s reputation for importing the world’s orphans. LIVES ARE HANGING IN THE BALANCE!!! These orphans won’t remain cute forever! I smell a Pulitzer Prize for Mark Sommerhauser and the Times — in the political parody category.”

Equating Adopting with Giving Your Dog a New Friend–and Naming Your Blog About It

http://roaryneedsafriend.blogspot.com/

The dog says ” I just want a friend” and “I’m Bored.”

The final two entries this week deal with Vietnam and the bombardment of articles about the entitled prospective parents stuck in the “pipeline” from the last shutdown.

Censoring Rally’s Comments

One of the subjects of Crabbina’s Rant who masquerades as an objective writer on adoption issues  Rally’s comments that did not contain profanity or flaming on her Vietnam article this week. Rally pointed to references and articles that Vietnam has a lot of issues with regulating current adoption and adoptions from a long time and short time ago. She did approve PC comments from the adoption industry lobby members though. So now I will have to resort to a below-the-belt response: Way to  of the adoption industry (again), Andrea Poe! You never let us down in that regard!

Multiple Facepalms in the Vietnam Pipeline Families’ Articles

From this article ,characterizing the widespread trafficking in adoption in vietnam as a “bureaucratic nightmare.” It is a TRAFFICKING nightmare!

And flippantly speaking of falsified paperwork. “Zengerle argued that the 16 cases have been thoroughly investigated and that none of the birth families want to raise these children. The families also say they’re being penalized for issues out of their control. Dueling letters from the U.S. Citizens and Immigration Services are one illustration of the frustrating process. The first, dated July 16, 2008, states that Thomas qualifies as an orphan for immigration purposes; the second, dated Feb. 8, 2010, says he does not, citing “irregularities surrounding the circumstances of his abandonment and placement in the orphanage.” One of the explanations, Terry said, “is that his mother didn’t give her true name. Well, duh.”  

From this article, “State Department officials have been attempting to get those adoptions back in the pipeline, but it’s been slow. So slow that three of the original adoptive parents, and one child in the orphanage, died.” Three PAPs died of sixteen? That begs the questions of the age and/or health of these people -it has only been 3 years. How are those pipeline cases if the PAPs are DEAD!

From the Andrea Poe piece, the PAPs say ““It’s unreal. These children have been there for two years, told they have a family, that their family is coming, but we don’t and they can’t understand it. They’re losing trust in adults,” notes Beth. “They are building up serious trust issues that will haunt them for life.”

Um…who was telling these kids that they already had a family? WHY would you tell a child this when it is far from a guarantee? If they have trust issues that will haunt them, that is due to whoever told them that they have a family WHEN THEY DON’T. They are referred children at this time. Sorry, but that is the truth. The Vietnamese government is halting these cases, not the US government that hasn’t even seen these cases . You read that right. Alison Dilworth, adoptions division head at the U.S. Office of Children’s Issues says that the US has “never had a chance to even take a look at these cases.”

But no one could possibly blame the adoption agencies or PAPs themselves for letting orphans think that they are going to have homes when it is completely up in the air. It is so much more palatable and heart-string-pulling to threaten US officials, go to DC and be “angry”, and extort some decision from the US government by lobbying to withhold the appointment of the new US ambassador to Vietnam.