Adoptive Parent Entitlement and India UPDATED

Saving a newborn from being disposed of in a dump in a foreign country is an amazing thing.

Expecting to be able to parent that child in spite of no law allowing it is raw adoptive parent entitlement coupled with naivete. There is not a directive-Christian or otherwise- after helping a life to demand to parent that life. Following this logic and praising this kind of story dangerously promotes the idea that anyone can (and should if they are Christian) go into any country to gain guardianship of a child from a person on the streets and apply for a visa.

When international adoption is in the mix, there are two things to remember–legal adoption and obtaining of a visa. We described these two aspects last year in this post.

This case is about a relatively-healthy newborn, not a special needs, older child. Keep in mind that healthy newborns are adopted domestically in India.

Dauphin County native saves baby boy in India, can’t bring him to U.S. [The Patriot-News 1/2/11 by Nancy Eshelman] says “Rebecca went to India three years ago to resume missionary work in an orphanage in the foothills of the Himalayas where she had volunteered twice before. She wasn’t there long when a friend of a friend relayed the story of a young mother in a hospital several hours away.

The unwed mother, who had been hiding her pregnancy while staying with a sister, was planning to return to her village without her child to avoid shame and condemnation. She intended to abandon her 2-day-old baby in a dump behind the hospital.

The orphanage where Rebecca was volunteering was filled above capacity and doesn’t accept infants, but she couldn’t imagine letting the newborn die. So she stowed her possessions in a backpack and hitched a ride to the hospital.

There she fell in love with a naked 3-pound baby boy who was wrapped in a dirty blanket and unwashed since birth.

After talking with the mother, she took the child and named him Kyle. [“took” the child!]

Fast forward three years [the details would be important here, but these puff pieces love to gloss over these important legal things] and Rebecca and Kyle are living in Delhi, slogging through a legal morass. Kyle’s birth mother signed papers relinquishing custody, and after countless delays, the Indian government named Rebecca his legal guardian and gave her permission to take him to the United States for adoption.

However, she cannot under Indian law adopt Kyle in India, and he cannot enter the United States unless he has been adopted. ”

“An application for a visa that would allow Kyle to enter the United States was denied in July. An attorney working for the Morlocks appealed, and the family is awaiting an answer, which could come this month. Meanwhile, an attorney also has filed a Petition for Humanitarian Parole, a measure that allows an illegal alien to enter the country due to a compelling emergency.

The family also is working with a Harrisburg attorney to clear the way for adoption in Dauphin County should Rebecca and Kyle find their way home.

That attorney, Mark Silliker, describes the situation as “a bureaucratic nightmare.”

“This is not what America is about,” Silliker said. ” Actually, this “process” she has gotten herself into is not remotely similar to the legal mechanism of India adoption or international adoption to the US.

“Cindy Morlock said Congressman Tim Holden’s office has been helping her family, and Sen. Robert Casey Jr.’s office also is involved.

While the elected officials can’t make things happen, Cindy Morlock said they can keep attention focused on the issue.

She said a letter-writing campaign to the Obama White House brought no response, and she received no reply to a letter she sent to Secretary of State Hillary Clinton.

“I was really kind of disillusioned,” she said. “I expected at least a form letter.”

Meanwhile, the Morlocks in Millersburg and the Morlocks in India keep in touch via Blackberry and Skype.

When Kyle saw his grandmother on Skype one morning recently, his first question was, “Where’s Pop-pop?”

The electronic visits are both a godsend and times of sadness. The Morlocks ache to hold their daughter and only grandchild.

“I haven’t hugged my daughter in over three years,” Cindy Morlock said.”

Adoptive Parent has No Income

“Although they considered a trip to India to visit, the couple decided their funds are better spent on attorneys and support of their daughter and grandson.

Because Rebecca traveled to India on a tourist visa, she is not allowed to work. She is supported by family, friends and members of several churches.

She and Kyle live in an apartment that her mother describes as “the size of my living room.” They have a hotplate and microwave, but no oven, and Rebecca does their laundry in a bucket.

Cindy, who teaches consumer science, and her husband, a retired music teacher, send packages with clothing and other items. Each time she mails a box, the postage costs about $100, she said.

While both “completely support,” their daughter’s efforts, “the day-to-day is difficult,” Cindy Morlock said, batting back tears.

Rebecca, who will turn 32 this month, has been a parent’s delight. She graduated from Millersburg Area High School as valedictorian and from Messiah College in 2001. She’s done missionary work in Mexico and spent a summer with Campus Crusade for Christ.

Before going to India, she had been living in Ocean City, N.J., and was active in New Covenant Church in nearby Somers Point, which also aids in her support. The family, Cindy said, is convinced that “God has directed her path to make a difference is in this child’s life.” ”

2012

From International adoption battle: Dauphin County woman can’t bring her son home from India [WHPTV 1/19/12 by Ewa Rowan], “Four years ago, Rebecca Morlock traveled from Millersburg, Dauphin County to India to resume missionary work. She wasn’t there long when she came face to face with a poor, unwed and new mother, who was going to abandon her son.

For Rebecca, the timing was perfect. “Of course when you’re in the moment and you’re given the choice to choose life or death for an infant, you say yes so that’s how I got Kyle, his birth mother gave him directly to me,” commented Morlock.” [The timing was “perfect”? For what? To exploit this situation for yourself?]

““We’ve been working with the embassy in New Delhi, which has been really sort of disappointing because they haven’t been very helpful to us at all,” added Morlock. [The US Embassy is NOT an adoption agency-they need to be given legal papers in order to issue the visa. It is NOT their job to get you those legal papers!]

In October, Rebecca adopted Kyle in Dauphin County Court via skype. Last Thursday, she was finally allowed to file paperwork for his visa.  [What???? How do you adopt a child in the US in this manner???via Skype???]

The unanswered question now is, how long will that process take?

“So now we’ve had to go full circle, and actually get him adopted here and now that’s he’s legally her son, the Indian government recognizes that and they have to issue him his visa to come here,” stated her immigration attorney, Anser Ahmad.

Rebecca hopes they move quicker than they have been so she can get back to her family and Kyle can finally meet the rest of his.

If you would like to help Rebecca get home quicker, you can do so by calling or writing your congressman or senator and ask them to do what they can to help her.”

REFORM Puzzle Piece

India is a Hague Adoption Convention country. This case shows that Hague is a joke. Where is the adoption authority, CARA, in this case? Someone can adopt a child living in India via Skype in a US Court?

Update: “After more than four years of fighting governments and red tape, a Dauphin County woman will finally be allowed to return to the United States.

Millersburg woman to return to U.S. after 4-year adoption fight
[ABC 27 2/9/12 by Dave Marcheskie]

Update 2: Another story that asks for funding for Becky. This story indicates that she has not arrived in the US in the past month as last month stories implied would happen.

“Four-year-old Kyle Morlock may not be alive today were it not for the intercession of a compassionate nurse, a network of Christian missionaries, and above all, the courage of a young woman who had come to India prepared to do whatever God asked of her.

Kyle’s biological mother hailed from a remote Indian village hundreds of miles from the hospital where he was born. She was pregnant out-of-wedlock, and her family wanted no part of the shame that comes with that status. They told her to leave until the pregnancy was over, and to come back without the baby. The country’s trash dumpsters were a common fate for such children.

The young mother chose to go to the city of Kalimpong, where she gave birth to a three-and-a-half pound baby boy at the local hospital. Not far away, an American missionary was about to get a phone call that would change her life. A nurse at the hospital wanted to save the little boy, and when she contacted some Christian missionaries, they gave her a name: Becky Morlock.

The nurse was not looking for an institution to put the baby in. [Here is where the corruption begins. The nurse decides to not follow the rules. Note that this part of the story is in complete conflict with the 2011 story that said the the birthmother was going to dump the child in a dumpster and Becky swept in like a superhero. This story seems more plausible-a nurse decided to decide the fate of the child and contacted missionaries.] Few of India’s crowded children’s homes had the staff or the facilities to care for a newborn. [Yet there is a waiting list a mile long for domestic adoptions of newborns!]She knew there was a good chance that this baby, most likely born so tiny due to inadequate prenatal care, would not survive such conditions. She was looking, instead, for a mother. [Oh, so now she is an adoption agent?] She wanted to know: would Becky take this child as her own?

“As soon as I got the call, I just had this peace come over me that this was why God brought me to India and this was what I was supposed to do,” Becky told LifeSiteNews.com in an interview.

The New Jersey native had come to India with the intention of working at a children’s home in the foothills of the Himalayas, and perhaps assisting unwed mothers. She arrived with a special package that she thought was destined for an Indian mother who would cross her path. The package contained baby supplies which, she says, God told her to buy in a dream.

At the time, she never imagined the baby carrier and clothing she brought with her from the United States would be the items she needed herself.

“You just don’t go to another country and expect to be given a baby,” she laughs.

While she didn’t expect such a dramatic request, Becky says she had a sense all along that God was asking something more from her than just her work at the children’s home. She didn’t know what it was, but she told friends that she was praying for God to prepare her for something, and to open doors.

Becky had been in India only a month when she got the phone call that answered her prayers. [So she was looking to parent a child after all!] Her response to the nurse in Kalimpong was unfaltering. Yes, she would take him.

She made the drive early the next morning, so early a friend had to pick her up because the taxis were not running yet. Once there, she was greeted by the sight of a third-world hospital.

“The maternity ward was a mess,” she recalls. “Overcrowded. Women practically going into labor on mats on the wooden floor. Blood all over the place. Really dirty.”

Amidst the squalor was a young Indian woman attempting to feed warmed cow’s milk on a spoon to her newborn. The baby was naked, unbathed, and wrapped in dirty blankets when Becky took him into her arms. It was love at first sight. [Hmmm…I thought she was dumping him in the back dumpster?This story is quite different, isn’t it?You didn’t bring her a clean blanket and clothing?In the previous paragraph you went on and on about the baby supplies that you brought…oh…those were for YOUR use….]

“From the first moment I held Kyle in my arms, this sense of peace and love came over me and I just knew, ‘this is my son,’” she says.

The two women sat and talked for a few moments, prayed together, then walked outside. The Indian woman arranged with Becky to sign the adoption papers at a later date, said goodbye, and pulled away in a taxi as Becky watched, clutching her newborn son. Tears were streaming down her face.

“I was thinking about the fact that I had just become a mother, and I was thinking about her and what it must be like for her to just walk away like that, and how she must be feeling,” she remembers.

That was 2008. Finally, four years later, Becky and Kyle will be coming home to the United States next week. They have spent the intervening time in a tiny one bedroom apartment in Delhi, dependent on the financial support of Becky’s church because she has been legally unable to work. Her full time job, besides being Kyle’s mother, has been fighting for the right to bring him into the U.S.

Because their story was no “cookie cutter” adoption case that Indian courts and U.S. immigration usually deal with, it was, in a nutshell, a bureaucratic nightmare.[Cue the ]

She recalls one immigration representative telling her during a video conference: “All the documents are there, it’s just not in the order that we usually see, so we don’t know what to do with that.” [That “order” is quite important when it comes to coercion! That is NOT “bureaucracy”!]

“It seems like if they haven’t seen a situation like this, they just deny it right away. They don’t really know how to think outside the box,” Becky says. [uh, no…it is called an illegal adoption that doesn’t qualify the child as an orphan by US definition.]

It took eight months just to find competent [are you sure that is the correct adjective?] Indian lawyers willing to take their case, and two years to obtain legal guardianship. Kyle had turned three before a verdict was issued, and according to U.S. Immigration, he could not have a Visa until he had lived in India under Becky’s legal guardianship for another year.

Meanwhile, Becky has been forced to navigate the challenges of being a single mother in a third world country. Getting by in a tiny apartment in Delhi was “really daunting” for the new mother, who says she’s not too keen on cities to begin with – much less one where modern conveniences are few and far between.

Safety concerns kept them trapped inside much of the time, where they have no washer, dishwasher, or oven, and unreliable electricity sometimes left them without heat in the winter.

Today, their saga is almost over: U.S. Immigration has issued Kyle a Visa, and they are readying to fly home. While Becky says she’s eager to return home to loved ones and familiar surroundings, she says she nonetheless treasured all the one-on-one time with her son.

She wants any family who is considering adoption or who has begun the process to know that “it’s really hard but really, really worth it.”[THAT is the advice? Do things out of order and out of Hague compliance and in the end you get what you want?]

“God’s heart is just totally for adoption,” she said. “If anyone is thinking about it or in the middle of it and feeling discouraged or frustrated, just be encouraged because it totally is worth it and God does make a way where there is seemingly no way.” [Sorry, I don’t think God had anything to do with this.]

Becky’s church, New Covenant Community in New Jersey, continues to maintain the fund that has supported Becky and Kyle for the past four years. Tax-deductible contributions will go towards travel, legal fees, and other final expenses. “

‘You don’t go to a country and expect to be given a baby’: missionary returns from India a mom
[Life Site News 3/10/12 by Christine Dhanagom]

Update 3: “In one of the first cases of its kind, an American woman has been allowed to adopt an Indian child through video-conferencing, after the mother and child deposed before a US district court from Delhi. The adoption did not involve the Central Adoption Resource Authority (CARA) either, in itself a precedent. On Friday, 31-year-old Rebecca Morlock flew home with Kyle, the boy from Kalimpong who was handed over to her as a newborn four years ago.”

“Going through the Supreme Court, a Delhi district court, the US embassy and a US district court, Rebecca managed to bridge the adoption and immigration laws in the two countries. Once the Delhi court granted her guardianship rights in 2009, in record nine months,[Note how this contrasts with the puff pieces written  by US journalists crying about bureaucracy!]  the US court approved the adoption.”

“Rebecca’s quest began in January 2008, when an unwed mother in a village near Kalimpong in West Bengal was desperate to give up her two-day-old baby, fearing ostracism. Word came to Rebecca, who had volunteered to teach at children’s homes there since 2007. “I knew instantly that I would do whatever it took to make him my son legally,” she recalls. “I loved him with all my heart rightaway and was determined to give him the best possible life.” [Except you had no job and did not even bother to check what the legal adoption and immigration procedures were.]

“Finding little help in Kolkata, she came to Delhi and contacted her embassy, which sent her to advocate Gaurang Kanth. The legal team first got the guardianship proceedings transferred from a Kalimpong court to Delhi by a Supreme Court order. In 2009, district judge Gurdeep Kumar granted Rebecca the certificate of guardianship, but with several conditions, as laid down by the Supreme Court for such cases. She was also directed to set up a fixed deposit for Kyle so that he could fly back if she failed to finalize the adoption within two years. There was one hitch, though-while Indian laws mandated that she take Kyle to the US for adoption, the US immigration insisted she adopt Kyle in Delhi before taking him home.

Rebecca then got a rare allowance from the US, with authorities giving her clearance to finalize the adoption via video-conferencing. Kyle’s passport was issued last year after consultations between the local and US authorities, including a US state judge. By end of 2011, US immigration approved a visa for Kyle and earlier this month, the US court permitted her to return home with the boy.

When TOI met her hours before her departure for the US, Rebecca was ecstatic. “Every step of this journey has been challenging and it has been new territory. Our case has set a precedent in both countries. It is my hope that through this, people will have courage and hope, and the legal guidelines to rescue more babies in a similar manner.”

US woman adopts Indian boy via video-conferencing
[Times of India 3/24/12 by Abhinav Garg and Smriti Singh]

From 4 Years Later: Missionary Finally Returns With Adopted Son [Christian Post 4/1/12 by Napp Nazworth], in addition to Congressman Tom Holder (D-Pa.), Rebecca received help from CCAI member Sen. Robert Casey (D-Pa.) and Sen. Pat Toomey (R-Pa.).

Update 4: More sordid details come to light.

The birthmother is Nepali! The way guardianship was attained? She “found a lawyer in the hills to draw up an affidavit of surrender,  sending an emissary to get the birth mother’s signature to make  Morlock the baby’s legal caretaker.”

“He was  just two days old when his birth mother surrendered him as she was discharged from a hospital in the foothills of the Himalayas

Missionary mom returns home with unexpected ‘gift’

[Washington Post 6/13/12 by Adriana Janovich]

Update 5: The puff pieces continue…the story retold again without the truth.

“In one of the poorest places on earth, Rebecca Morlock found the greatest treasure: Her son, Kyle.

One month after Morlock, known as Becky, moved to India in December 2007, after two previous trips where she had volunteered in an understaffed orphanage, she was asked to make a life-or-death decision. Not for herself, but for a newborn boy whose biological mother, due to societal and cultural pressures, was unable to keep him. [Oh please…]

 

“I got a phone call from someone who knew the situation,” Morlock said, referring to the unwed mother and the great shame that would fall upon her and her family if she were to raise the child herself. “It was a nurse from the hospital, and she asked, ‘Will you come and take a baby?’”

 

In the foothills of the Himalayas, where the average annual household income is between $1,000 and $3,000 and crushing poverty is a fact of life, Morlock – a former Ocean City resident who is looking to move back to town – accepted the challenge of being a single mother in a Third World country.

 

“I had peace about it,” she said of her decision. “The nurse said to me, ‘You’re the one who chooses life or death for this child.’ His birth mother loved and cared for him so much she gave him to me. So, of course I chose life.” [The baby was alive-this was not a life and death choice. Stop trying to make this about abortion. Abortion was not a part of what happened here.]

 

Over the course of a two-hour conversation on a rainy Thursday morning last month, while Kyle converted a 64-count Crayola box into a makeshift garage for the small metal cars with which he played, Morlock recounted her four-and-a-half-year ordeal to adopt the boy.

 

Something more

 

Morlock, 33, grew up in Millersburg, Pa., and vacationed in Ocean City as a child. After graduating from Messiah College in Grantham, Pa., with a degree in youth ministry, she moved to Ocean City in 2001. Here, she worked a variety of odd jobs – waiting tables at the Varsity Inn, making specialty drinks at Ocean City Coffee Company – to support herself while volunteering as youth group leader at New Covenant Community Church in Somers Point and with Christian Surfers in Ocean City.

 

In 2004, she traveled to India for the first time, working one-on-one with orphan children between the ages of 2 and 18 who, she said, “had lots of feelings of rejection.” The parents of these abandoned children were addicts, or abusive, or simply too poor to care for their offspring, she said.

 

In 2005, Morlock returned to India, and in 2007, she moved there with the support of her church.

 

“It really affected my heart,” she said of the two volunteer stints that led her to move permanently to India. “I wanted to invest in those kids. I wanted to be there and spend time with the children and be a blessing to the children however I could.”

 

One month after making the move to a country where Morlock, a southpaw, suffered what she called “culture shock” over such practices as not being able to use her dominant hand at the table because the left hand in India is considered unclean, she found herself with a much weightier responsibility: The total care of a helpless human being.

 

Suddenly, a parent

 

Kyle was born on Jan. 13, 2008, in a hospital that Morlock described as “disgusting,” recalling it lacked basic amenities such as sheets and food for the patients, many of whom were laboring on blood-soaked wooden floors. When Morlock met Kyle’s biological mother, she was horrified to find the woman and her sister were trying to dribble unpasteurized cow’s milk from a spoon into the newborn’s mouth.

 

Still bleeding, a rag tied around her waist and her sister assisting her, the mother and her infant were discharged from the hospital.

 

“We walked out together,” Morlock said. “She handed me the baby outside the hospital and drove away. She didn’t look back.” [Wow, you left out about how you”found a lawyer in the hills to draw up an affidavit of   surrender, sending an emissary to get the birth  mother’s signature to make Morlock the baby’s legal  caretaker.”And also that she isn’t Indian, but Nepali.]

 

It had been 48 hours since Kyle’s birth, 24 hours since Morlock had said “yes” to raising him as her own. She was 29 and, overnight, a mother.

 

Holding the rag-wrapped bundle in her arms, she was overcome with emotion.

 

“I’m sobbing,” she said. “It hit me all at once. I just became a mother. I was burdened for her, feeling everything she was feeling, the shame and then the release from shame.”

 

Once she pulled herself together, Morlock turned her attention to her son.

 

“I realized that he was very light,” she said. “He’s wrapped up in these rags because it’s cold in the Himalayas in the winter. I remembered the nurse had told me he weighed one kilogram. I wasn’t so good with metric conversion then, but I remembered I had bought a block of butter at the market that weighed 1 kilogram.”

 

Kyle weighed 3.5 pounds at birth, his size testimony to his biological mother’s need to conceal her pregnancy. His lungs were fully developed, a sign he was full term at birth, and he has since hit developmental milestones at the appropriate age, Morlock said.

 

The battle begins

 

The realization she was caring for an infant in a place with unreliable electricity, no washing machine or disposable diapers was immediate.

 

“It was really hard to raise an infant in a Third World country,” Morlock said. “There were lots of challenges being a single woman with a small baby in a Third World country. When I would take him to get his shots, I would buy my own needles from the pharmacy because in India, it’s common to re-use needles. The nurses there would look at me like I was crazy for bringing my own needles with me.”

 

With the support of her family, friends and church, all of whom shipped much-needed baby supplies to India and gave her advice during shockingly expensive phone calls home, Morlock turned first to the task of establishing guardianship over Kyle, and then to the more arduous task of adopting Kyle.

 

It took her eight months to find an Indian lawyer who would help her.

 

“This is just not done in India,” she said she was told repeatedly.[Because that is not the legal process of international adoption!]

 

All adoptions in India are handled by India’s central government adoption agency. But Morlock’s case was different because Kyle had been given directly to her by his biological mother and not surrendered to an agency for placement.

 

“When I discovered it was going to take months and not weeks (to adopt the child), I packed up our things and moved to Delhi,” Morlock said.

 

Her lawyers allowed her and Kyle to live in an apartment in their office building while she waged her campaign to bring Kyle home to the United States. Court sessions often took up four days a week for months on end. When Kyle was 18 months old, she established legal guardianship over him.

 

When Kyle was 3, he had to challenge the Indian passport agency, which Morlock called “corrupt,” for an Indian passport. Finally, on Oct. 19, 2011, three months before Kyle turned 4, Morlock – accompanied by her Indian lawyers and Kyle in India – finalized the adoption via video conferencing with her family, her American lawyers and a Pennsylvania judge in the States. [Again the author does not explain that this is completely outside any normal process and that politicians made this happen.]

 

“It’s the most horrible Catch 22,” Morlock said. “After establishing guardianship in India, you have to take the child to the U.S. to finalize the adoption. But the U.S. says, finalize the adoption, then we’ll let you come home.”

 

The solution was to do both at the same time via video conferencing.

 

Coming home

 

Once the adoption was finalized, Morlock still needed to obtain a visa for Kyle, which had been denied repeatedly throughout the two years since she had gained guardianship. She eventually filed for a humanitarian parole visa for Kyle. This, too, didn’t come easy. Morlock battled the U.S. Embassy to complete the process that would allow her to bring Kyle home.

 

“Finally, in March (2012), they gave us a visa for Kyle,” she said. “We said goodbye to everyone we loved and got on the plane.”

 

Four years and four months of exhaustive work ended when Morlock finally introduced her son to her family in central Pennsylvania. The adoption, she said, made history.

 

“It’s overwhelming to be gone 4.5 years,” Morlock said.

 

Once she’s processed everything that has happened to her, she said she plans to move to Ocean City and raise Kyle in the town she so desperately wanted to live in when she was growing up.

 

“I always wanted to live here,” Morlock said. “I begged my parents to move here.”[Are you 13 or 33?]

 

Her purpose in sharing Kyle’s story is simple, she said.

 

“My heart’s desire is to encourage people that even in the most dire circumstances, hope can still be found.”

After 4 years, Ocean City woman brings adopted son home from India

[Shore News Today 8/9/12 by Cindy Nevitt]