Fleecing of Orphans with Special Needs
Disturbing, Dangerous Trend in Simultaneous Adoptions of Unrelated Children With Severe Special Needs
Children with special needs HAVE special needs. They require many therapies and a lot of individual attention. Adopting a child with special needs increases this inherent need for individual attention and parenting, adding another layer of complexity to an already difficult situation. For all children, international adoption adds language and educational issues as well as the significant chance that the children have been severely neglected and mistreated in the foreign orphanage.
These special circumstances require special care, so the very best kind of child-centered placement is even more CRITICAL. Changing the address of the child is NOT enough. These children deserve better.
Yet, with dwindling international adoption numbers, the dangerous practice of adopting multiple, unrelated children is back. This absolutely ludicrous attitude – done with the blessings of adoption agencies everywhere – is a disaster in the making.
Approvals
Many families that are adopting in these circumstances would not be allowed to adopt from foster care due to the typically large family size that they already have, going into these high-risk adoptions. Most countries will not allow these large families to adopt, yet many are granting waivers to place their severely special needs children.
It is Plain and Simple–Standards are Being Lowered For The Very Children Who Are in Most Need of Higher Standards
We know that children with severe special needs are suffering in foreign orphanages. But why is there this trend of moving the children into US high risk situations? Adoption is not an emergency. Medical and psychological care and basic needs may very well be emergencies, so why isn’t that being addressed?
The Answer: Because the Adoption Industry is making money on these situations and getting praised for being humanitarian at the same time. The Adoption Industry refuses to self-police and now it is worse—adoption ministries are popping up everywhere pushing and coercing children with severe special needs on prospective parents and using religion as a hammer.
Why are ministries worse? Because they lack even the basic regulation that that agencies have. They FIND children, they ADVERTISE for children, they CONVINCE OTHERS to advertise for them in the name of Christianity, they have donation drives… YET PAPS still have to pay GOBS of money up front. THEY DO NOT check out or take ANY responsibility for quality of agencies that they pass clients to (See the recent Joshua Tree Adoption Alert post). When placements go bad AND YES THEY DO, they quietly pass kids around to other recruiting families because the knowledge that many of these high-risk placements don’t work would undermine their savior business.
What will it take for people to care about this issue? At what point do APs, PAPs, and the general public care at the passing around of high-risk, special needs kids? How many different houses would people start to care about this-if the child was passed to 2 new US homes? 3? 4? 5?
How MANY kids with SEVERE Special needs do YOU think a family can reasonably take on while properly attending to their needs? 2? 3? 4? How About 5? Are you kidding? What would you think of an organization that coerces families to take on 4 – YES 4 – unrelated children with Down Syndrome AT THE SAME TIME? How MUCH money upfront is ethical to take in these situations? 3K? 10K, 20K? Why isn’t money from six-figure grants covering the costs?
Not only is this happening, these situations are growing and the media is lapping this up and praise is being thrown around while children are being placed in risky situations.
As we have stated before, the supply of children with severe special needs will always be high, but the demand of parents will never meet this. The answer is NOT to coerce prospective parents into taking on 3 or 4 severely special needs children at once. This does a disservice to the child first and foremost. A child in a foreign orphanage that has severe special needs has MANY more issues and needs MUCH more one on one attention than children with milder special needs. If food or medical care is needed, then aid should be given locally for that child.
There is no extra parent training, no extra post-adoption monitoring, no therapeutic respite care, no tracking of these kids. And not too many parents – and certainly no regulatory agencies – seem to care. Why, they are SAVING CHILDREN! End of story, right?
But then…these kids get disrupted and the children get passed through the disruption underground. Heaven forbid if the general public found out that these placements don’t work. But the people involved still believe that passing a kid home to home is saving the child.
The ad campaigns disguised as news articles are equally disgusting. Classifying children with DS as always being happy and bringing the APs joy. That is not their purpose in life – to bring you joy.
See Zanesville couple find niche in special-needs adoptions . From the classifying adopting special needs as a “niche” to the their blog savinganangel to the journalist going along with masking the country name “to not interfere” to “”When I’m in a room with children with Down syndrome, you can feel the happiness radiating from them. Even if they’re sick, even if they’re really, really sick, they’re just so happy.” to”After we adopted Anthony, we realized that children with Down syndrome are such happy kids,” Lisa said. “They love you no matter what, no matter if you’re black or white or rich or poor or fat or skinny.” to ” she and Matthew are able to get past those and get so much joy from the children.” (I guess who cares if the child gets joy it’s all about how the kid makes YOU feel) to”but there’s so much help and support that it’s never overwhelming.” To two children with DS at once, this is not sweet sentiment, support is not available to everyone and each child is an individual who isn’t here for you.
AND the latest from Smith family eager to complete adoption process “The visits went well, she said. Phoebe was a little reserved at first, but by the end of the week, she didn’t want to go back to her caregiver. Isabella, who normally doesn’t like to play with anyone, was smiling and wanting to be held by the time they flew home.
“The day that we left, we waved goodbye to (Isabella), and she waved to us … she’d never done that before,” Lisa said. “Within the week, we were there, both girls changed. That just shows you what four to five visits can do for a child who’s been in an orphanage their whole life.”
Really? Four or Five Visits is all it takes? Love is all it takes?
We see fundraiser after fundraiser often for MORE THAN ONE child with special needs.
Some examples of fundraisers, articles, blogs:
This article identifies the agency Creative Adoptions, Inc and the country Russia. Often these articles do not name either one.
People get matched with kids from ministries and then all of a sudden they are not available .
Two at once? Hey, no problem says the “ministry”.
The stories get riskier and riskier — 14 special needs kids at home about to bring home 2 more with severe needs.
Reece’s Rainbow now is promoting FIVE kids with special needs at once. But as we are often told, they aren’t an AGENCY. Oh….ok….then that makes it just fine then.
We have a two at once case for you. It is our second most read post Hana and Immanuel Williams Yes Immanuel was deaf and unrelated to Hana who had Hepatitis and both were older kids. High Risk, unprepared parents. One dead child. One abused. These children’s characteristics include three of the top five risk factors to abuse a child : chronic conditions, condition (deafness) that interferes with learning and they were adopted. Yes, being adopted is a risk factor for abuse.
Even one special needs child placed in an unprepared home can end in the ultimate tragedy. See the 2008 murder case of Nicolai Emelyantsev . After this horrible injustice, how can MULTIPLE children with severe special needs be marketed by this same organization?
Requirement to Run Adoption Ministry
What do you think the best requirement would be for someone running an adoption ministry for placing children with special needs? Social work? Medicine? How about MARKETING! Yep – Marketing.
And the current fundraising phrase is “”Money is the only thing keeping these children hidden away and languishing.” No, that is flat-out not true. It is sick to pander using this phrase.
Known Risks For a LONG Time
This is not a new topic. In 2004, an analysis was done and is quoted in many places. See here.
In 2007, another article that is well known was written here.
One Last Quote
One of the best comments I have read on this topic was on a Mothering community forum on the topic of adopting more than one unrelated child simultaneously: “It’s not your job to save as many children as you can from life in an orphanage. More importantly, the child isn’t responsible for saving as many children as she can from a life in an orphanage–she shouldn’t have to sacrifice what’s best for her. She has no choice in the matter–but you do.”
Haven’t these children sacrificed enough?
REFORM Puzzle Piece
AMEN
So true! I adopted one child with special needs. (Who has DS and bites. She’s not always happy!) We returned home 2 months ago. I’m constantly being asked by those in “the group” when I’m going back for another one. Forget that I’m a single mom and my daughter is definitely going to be adjusting for a while. The theory seems to be that I had a smooth process so I should do it again.
Unlike this family that adopted 5 Bulgarian kids simultaneously (bringing the total number of kids to 18, 17 of whom are adopted with severe SN)… who are now going back for 3 more unrelated Bulgarian kids with severe SN, to be adopted simultaneously, of course:
http://thestarsaligned.blogspot.com/2013/05/love-multiplied-20-ipads-and-more.html?m=1
The family will have a whopping 21 kids, 20 with special needs. It’s very likely each kid will receive LESS personal attention than they currently do in their presumably grim institution.
Even Pleven has only 14-16 kids per groupa vs 21 for a de facto single mom (since a/daddy travels tons for work).
Name,
I pulled up the ‘About Us’ page on ‘Stars Aligned’ blog, and encountered this sentence:
“…I’m Colleen and I am 24 year old wife to Hubby and stay at home mom to Spider-Man, Dora, Baby Bop, and Little Man as I will try to refer to them on here because well the husband doesn’t like that I put them on the internet…”
This statement caused my Irony Meter to explode. It’s okay with Hubby to illegally photolist kids in Eastern European orphanages, including listing their medical diagnoses and family histories, as long as his OWN kids’ internet privacy is protected. Not that I disagree with his caution, but I foresee problems with any adoption that starts out with differential treatment of his biological and adoptive kids.
However, there’s been no action on the couple’s OWN Reese’s Rainbow adoption since Sept. 2012. With 4 kids under eight years old, one of them with autism, one with food allergies, perhaps that’s just as well. I honestly can’t see that they’re in any position to take on the challenge of a special needs international adoption on top of parenting their current kids right now. Just sayin’.
I’m sorry you think you know our family. We aren’t even adopting through Reece’s Rainbow anymore after Reece’s Rainbow encouraged another family to pursue the same child we were in process of adopting. That is why you haven’t seen any progress update on our Reece’s Rainbow adoption. As for our age, again, you can think you know our family and our dynamic, if you choose.
And for the sake of arguement, WHERE do I give any personal information about the child we were pursuing, because I would never intentionally do that to her.
Colleen,
Yet you’re certainly giving out personal information about illegally-photolisted kids. Their PAPs don’t have the legal standing to grant you permission to do so UNTIL their adoptions of these children have been finalized.
No, I don’t know your family dynamic. However, going by my own experiences in child care with this age group, it’s hard to imagine how you can easily add another high needs child into the mix while all your biological children are still so young. And that’s without considering all the psychological baggage involved in an older child adoption from an institution. And let’s not forget the fact that any internationally adopted child is going to be set pretty much back to ‘Go’ in his or her language development by needing to learn a new language.
Please– contact some adoptive parents who’ve successfully reared internationally-adopted children to adulthood before you decide to proceed. They can give you better information than I can about how much time and flexibility is likely to be needed. Or someone like Christie Minich, who’s adopted from disruption and has successfully parented the kids for several years.
Please. What do you have to lose by checking it out for yourself?
It was my mistake — I’d confused Coleen’s family with the Unroes, who were the ones who simultaneously and irresponsibly adopted 5 unrelated Bulgarian SN kids last year and are going back for 3 more this year (bringing total # kids to 21):
http://godsrainbowsinourlives.blogspot.com/?m=1
Coleen – The question I have for you is that given there’s TONS of peer-reviewed literature clearly demonstrating that adopting unrelated kids INDIVIDUALLY and allowing at least 12 months before adopting a second unrelated kid (or having a biological and thus unrelated baby) significantly improves the odds an adoption will succeed (kid will bond to family, family will bond to kid, etc) why are you CHOOSING to adopt a multiple unrelated kids simultaneously? Why on earth would you do something that will make it much HARDER for your adoption(s) to suceed?? Why wouldn’t you want to do the BEST for each an every precious child? I’m assuming you ate healthy food, avoided alcohol, avoided drugs that could harm a fetus, etc while pregnant (since you presumably loved and wanted the VERY best for each precious biokid), why aren’t you willing to take the same basic steps for each adopted kid? And, no, a supernatural being told you it’s be FINE isn’t a reasonable explanation of why you’re choosing to do things that are likely to harm your soon to be adopted kids when you took appropriate precautions to protect your soon to be born biokids?
(My low-blow comment is that it appears that you were pregnant at 15 and your first baby in high school at the ripe old age of 16. So the fact your that you’re adopting multiple unrelated kids simultaneously without having bothered to save up the money to do do — financing your adoption via presumably illegal lottery-style fundraiser — is equally responsible. Very much in line with the level of appropriate planning and good judgement that you’ve clearly exercised over the past decade of your life).
Wow!! For someone who knows Colleen’s life and decision making process so well, you are still incredibly mistaken. COLLEEN ISN’T ADOPTING AT ALL!!!!! She’s not in process. She was pursuing ONE child but that has been put on hold. SHE ISN’T ADOPTING MULTIPLE UNRELATED CHILDREN. She wrote a blog post about another family’s process. That’s all.
I have so many things I could say about your last statement but I refuse to low-blow and judge people based on a few facts, misinformation and assumptions. I’ll leave that to you.
No offense but, again you think you know way more than you do. We are adopting ONE child. How we fund our adoption, again, not your business, nor will in be through a site such a Reece’s Rainbow and have no intentions of hosting any kind of internet raffle. Was not pregnant at 15, nor did I have him at 16, nice try though, I was done with high school before having children! We have been married 6 years, together 11. You can be quick to judge and jump to conclusions all you’d like because as always you are just so far off, and it makes me sad not for my adoption decisions, but for your ability to judge a person based on bits and pieces on a blog. Our life remains pretty private in regards to our blog, it would be REALLY hard for you to be able to know much of anything about our family, our choices, and especially the dynamic within our home that allows us to open our home and our hearts to another special needs child.
I’m sure you’d be thrilled to know that we are approved for 2 kids 0-12 too, huh?
Carlee,
I think you’re correct that your comments on Colleen’s age when her first child was born WERE “low blows”. I can’t see any bearing it could possibly have on her ability to parent children now. IMO, it seems particularly inappropriate on a site which is supposed to be “birthmother friendly”.
Sadly, not-unreasonable outrage over these remarks may lead to Colleen refusing to consider the pertinent information you shared about what research says about successful adoption placements. Neither of us has the power to force anyone out in cyberspace to do anything they don’t wish to. The only tool we have to encourage more thoughtful actions is persuasion. Engaging in personal attacks practically eliminates the possibility that the person being so judged would seriously consider following your suggestions about anything.
I realize there’s nothing you can do about it now, since this site doesn’t have an edit function. Just please consider it for future reference, okay?
I can always edit things out if the commenter asks me to and will make a note that it was edited.