FacePalm Friday

Welcome to this week’s edition of 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, shock, 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 Host’s Selections:

That Sucking Sound from the Red Thread Blog

Crabbina here – and boy, I never ever thought I’d agree with something that REFORM Talk’s old pal, blogger and adoption-business-sycophantic-suck-up Andrea Poe had to say. In her blog here, she said: “The current system of international adoption is damaging children and discouraging families. Improvements within the system are well within reach, if we simply can find the motivation to reach for them. The first “step forward for orphans” is for all of us to take responsibility and deal with the issues that are preventing children from having a loving and permanent family.”

Holy cow, Andrea, you really nailed it…..except for a few pesky little points. Let’s get nitpicky, shall we?

“The current system of international adoption is damaging children and discouraging families.”

Yes, Andrea, it is, because the agencies you support have sanctioned the trafficking of children for years, from nearly every country in which they work; they pay bribes and they falsify paperwork; they hide their misdeeds behind a smokescreen of bogus faith and even more bogus promises to their naïve clients; and they continue to find new countries to plunder so they can make a buck. And that, you clueless , is what is “damaging children and discouraging families.” If you bothered to investigate the facts that a 10-year-old can find with a few handy minutes and their fingers on the Google button—facts about how many adoptions have gone deeply, horribly, terribly wrong—then how on God’s earth can you justify any of the behavior of the international adoption racket you seemingly love so well?

“Improvements within the system are well within reach, if we simply can find the motivation to reach for them.”


Yes, they are—if we can find the ethics and humanity so lacking in the adoption business, run by people whose motivation is greed instead of the best interests of vulnerable children.

“The first ‘step forward for orphans’ is for all of us to take responsibility and deal with the issues that are preventing children from having a loving and permanent family.”

Oh, yes, Andrea, it sure is. So, please, do the world a favor and step up yourself. Take responsibility for the agency you used for your adoption. Ask them the questions that must be asked. Ask them what really happened in the provinces where they plied their trade in Vietnam. Ask them about the fearsome reputation of their facilitator (who used a pseudonym so those in the know would be thrown off her scent). Ask them why they aren’t Hague accredited. Ask the where the money went. Ask them what information the State Department has on them. Go on, Andrea. Put your own money where your own mouth is. You’re the first one to demand responsibility from others, so why won’t you provide it yourself?

So what really prevents children from having a “loving and permanent family” is people like you, Andrea. People who stick their heads in the sand so deep they might as well end up in China. People who pretend that because adoption can be a wonderful miracle, all adoption should be allowed with no regulation. People who blow off their critics yet propose no solutions (like, oh, maybe taking all that money out of the mix so the middlemen don’t get rich and the orphans don’t get deprived of what is rightfully theirs) except to keep on keeping on.

I have no hope whatsoever that anyone as steeped in denial as you are will ever wake up to reality, Andrea. But in the meantime, please do the world a favor and open your eyes to the hypocrisy you so willingly and so flagrantly flaunt on your blog. Eventually, the corruption and the unethical behavior that is what is slowing down international adoption will get so bad that even professional deniers like you, your cohorts at the Both Ends Burning campaign, your inside sources at the JCICS, and the revolting excuse for human beings who run the adoption agencies you champion will have to admit what they’ve done.

Golliwogs

This UK intimidation story about Golliwogs reminded us that SOME people in this country still think it’s okay to sell these dolls and SOME of these people run an adoption agency dealing with black African children.

Think Before You Speak or How About Just Think

The Most Wonderful Gift from God. Yea, the title gets a facepalm. This sappy adoption-agency-ad-disguised-as-a-human-interest story has another one. “Born in China and loved in the USA.” Always an either-or thing with people with their head in the sand. Always trying to puff themselves up over the original family or country or culture.

Perpetual Adoption Fund

This article   should get the prize for number of facepalms per square inch.We will point out three of them:

• Setting up a Perpetual Adoption Fund (that they need to use themselves FIRST to the tune of $55,000 for a sibling group)
• Love in Three Days (swoon)””It was the second or third day when I had to tell my husband that I was having a very difficult time not telling Ruslan I loved him and hugging him like I do all my children as they go to bed at night,”
• Orphans from Ukraine ONLY have 3 choices after orphanage: Prostitution or forced labor or Russian army?Twenty percent of the possible conscripts are recruited each year into the Ukrainian Army via the draft until the army becomes completely professional-the goal of 2015 will likely not be met at the rate they are going, but way to both knock military service and twist facts at the same time.
  “Ruslan and Nastiya were orphaned a couple of years ago when their mother died, and they have no family in the Ukraine with the resources and willingness to adopt them. The Morfords already have six children, all of whom Alisa home-schools on their small Genola farm. But the family insists that Ruslan and Nastiya will have a better life with them. According to Alisa, orphans in the Ukraine have little to hope for.
  “Their future is bleak. Seventy percent of the girls in these orphanages end up in prostitution, and 60 percent of the boys end up in forced labor situations or recruited into the Russian army. Without anyone to help them with education or housing, they have no choice but to survive by choosing one of these lifestyles,” Alisa said.”