Fixing the Commentary on the International Adoption Mess

Full of facepalms and wrong information, I feel obligated to correct it. Bonus highlight from adoptive dad comment at the end. The changes are in red text. Fixing the International Adoption Mess  [Global Post 5/20/12 by Kelly Ensslin]

Fixing the international adoption mess Fixing Americans’ Attitudes on Entitlement to Foreign Children

Commentary: Bureaucracy keeps kids and parents separated for years has nothing to do with the fiasco that began the Bac Lieu 16. An adoption attorney explains what needs to be done, who made money from many PAPs, defends her practice.

RALEIGH, North Carolina — Nate is now four years old. He is doing better after four months in his new adopted home in Indianapolis, but he has a long way to go to turn the corner after three years of living in a squalid Vietnamese orphanage.

It’s possible that he’ll eventually thrive like a kid who had a family from the start, but the deck is stacked against him. You can never compare a child who was born in a foreign country with another set of genetics, culture and language with a phantom biological child born in the US and always living with his biological family. This is because he lost those critical developmental years to an orphanage. It’s tragic because he was approved for put on hold for possible US parents for adoption all the way back in 2008 instead of being reunified or offered for domestic adoption , but diplomatsic inertia decided that this was a good political issue to get involved with since it was “for the children” and an adoptive parent’s blind faith in bureaucracy their agency robbed him of a prompt placement with a his biological or domestic family.

International adoption is at a crossroads horrendously corrupt and no one cares. A powerful negative stigma due to the corruption now occasionally is reported about envelopes the issue, in part because of media coverage that lurches from controversy to controversy adoption reformers, without focusing on the powerful positive impact adoption has on children’s lives. The system is in shambles, and we’ve seen a 50 percent drop in successful international adoptiveons placements that no one ever checks on postplacement so you can’t comment on how successful that they are over the last five years.

Confronted with these facts, you’ll hear a range of different excuses, but most of those who are too stupid to listen to adoption reformers only cloud the issue with emotional fluff like this commentary piece that the media published. There is simply no good reason that the international adoption system should escape scrutiny and repair. It was built with the best of intentions of agencies making money and is largely not governed especially by the voluntary Hague Convention on Inter-Country Adoption because 71 percent of FY2011 adoptions were not done under this process . Why are diplomats propping up The Hague as the final answer on international adoption, even as the numbers of adoptions continue to fall? [Good question. Hague sucks.]

No story exposes the problems with international adoption agencies racing into new provinces in a time when they fully knew women were being killed for their children as clearly as the one involving “The Bac Lieu 16” children of Vietnam. These children each arrived at an orphanage in rural Vietnam, a poor province disconnected from the central government, in 2008. The children, all infants, slept on wooden slats in cribs without mattresses. Many developed tooth decay and skin ailments from unsanitary conditions and malnourishment. Water was scarce, as was human contact and nurturing love. [It is called poverty.] But a glimmer of hope as new agencies emerged in this area since other provinces were closing and they had to make some extra bucks before Vietnam closed completely to adoption, when these babies were matched for adoption with American families instead of having anyone advocate for reunification with their poor parents.

What should have been the beginning of a positive new chapter money flow in their the adoption agency’s lives instead became a mess of broken promises complaining PAPs, red tape lack of business and bureaucracy greasing the wheels gone wrong.

Around the time the Bac Lieu children were matched with the adoptive families, the United States was subjecting adoptions from Vietnam to increased scrutiny for very good reason. You should read the information at Schuster Institute. Many of the allegations of fraud were unsubstantiated yet women still died so middleman could obtain their kids. Ultimately, the allegations became so loud that Vietnam chose to end its international adoption agreement with the US. Yes, killing women for their children tends to do that.

In response, the US, UNICEF, and other countries began to encourage Vietnam to join The Hague like any sane, compassionate human might do, which was better than characterized as the cure for all that ailed the Vietnamese adoption system. Before reform and implementation began, the US and Vietnam both adoption agencies promised families in process that their cases would be completed; these so-called “pipeline” cases included the Bac Lieu 16.

Bac Lieu provincial officials were busy trying to set up a system and  trying to reunify and find domestic placements for the children so they moved slowly in fulfilling foreign PAP desires as that was not as important as addressing the children’s needs, and in some cases not at all, in preparing the paperwork for the pipeline cases to move forward. Meanwhile, the US seized did their job in questioning on small irregularities in the documentation since paperwork fraud is the hallmark of trafficking through international adoption— for example, one child’s birth date was off by two days (in other words the paperwork did not match the child. Can you imagine if you tried to present false paperwork to get a US drivers license? The government would not be pleased with that either.) — as evidence of continued fraud in the Vietnamese system, despite the fact that birth parents had already provided DNA evidence proving paternity in that case, and many others. [The head of FTIA went to the village in search of the parents to get DNA from what other articles have stated.]

Before the Bac Lieu cases were finalized, Vietnam announced that it would join The Hague, and passed new laws changing the way international adoptions would be handled throughout the country. Almost immediately, Vietnam, without explanation or justification, said the then-pending Bac Lieu 16 adoptions could not be completed. No country has any obligation to fulfill the desire of foreign PAPs in this type of situation. The children’s needs are paramount, not the PAP’s needs. In the same diplomatic note, however, Vietnam also said these cases could begin anew when the new laws took effect in January 2011. The US then also issued denials could not process the immigration for the cases because Step One, finalization of the adoption HAD NOT OCCURRED (otherwise known as the adoption was not completed), and based the denials entirely on Vietnam’s denial. The children had already grown from infants to toddlers as what normally happens as time goes by. the bureaucratic dance continued. The children’s cases would continue to wait for new paperwork to be completed, similar to the paperwork that had already taken years to prepare now proceed under the new system to first reunify, then place domestically before being offered for international adoption.

As Senator Richard Lugar (R-IN), an ardent advocate for orphans who recently lost his bid for reelection in an embarrassing shellacking at the polls, said in a letter to the State Department at the time, the US had broken its promise to the American families and consigned the Bac Lieu kids to “diplomatic oblivion.” Lugar joined Senators Marco Rubio (R-FL) and Mary Landrieu (D-LA) in placing a hold using a Quid Pro Quo on the Obama Administration’s nominee for ambassador to Vietnam until the children’s cases became a priority for the Department of State. Eventually, the Department of State caved to the coercive pressure and prioritized these cases and in July 2011, an agreement was reached to move the Bac Lieu cases forward and the hold was released.

In January 2012, thanks to the relentless efforts politicking of the families, 11 of the 16 children from Bac Lieu had their adoptions finalized and came home to their waiting adoptive American families. Five of the Bac Lieu kids were no longer considered eligible for international adoption as the new system placed their needs above the desires of the prospective adoptive parents. Three of those were approved for domestic adoption in Vietnam and two (thankfully) are reportedly going to be reclaimed by birth parents. This shows that almost one third of the Bac Lieu adoption-agency-identified children really should have had a different outcome than international adoption from the beginning.

In February 2012, on the same day Vietnam became a full member of The Hague convention, the US announced that it will not partner with Vietnam under The Hague, because the US does not believe Vietnam has yet become fully Hague-compliant. [They probably haven’t.] Today, Vietnam remains closed to US adoptions. Unfortunately, similar corruption stories have played out in other countries as well, including Nepal, Cambodia and Ethiopia. As a result, far too many children are being trafficked for adoption. Remember that only 2 million children worldwide live in orphanages with most of those not qualifying for international adoption. Solutions for poverty must be formed.consigned to diplomatic oblivion, and are languishing in orphanages around the world.

Why must this be? [Because there are greedy adoption agencies.]

Asked another way, the question is: Why do people have to hire me, an international adoption attorney, to help them navigate an enormously complex, time-consuming and expensive system? [Because you keep advertising yourself under the guise of media articles?]And why is the bureaucracy of both countries, Vietnam and the United States, put up with all the corruption from adoption agencies? dysfunctional to the point that children like Nate are deprived of a loving new family during critical, early developmental years”?

I wish I could put myself out of business and go back to doing corporate litigation. I also wish that other avenues for promoting orphan welfare made international adoption unnecessary, but this is not realistic in a world where, by some estimates, more than 100 2 million orphans are living in orphanages with most having poor biological families.

We need to break the stigma and negative media cycle around adoption up the corrupt adoption agencies and their rubberstamped Hague approvals by a private agency, in part by telling more corruption stories of how adoption can be the most powerful transformative force in a poor, neglected child’s life. If we do that, we can create space for a discussion about how to create a system that is both safe and efficient at getting kids into families. There are a range of changes to consider:

1. Words matter. The definition of orphan needs to be made consistent globally stop being lied about. At both the national and international level, far too much time and energy is spent arguing about what constitutes an orphan trying to secure new PAP clients and far too little time is spent trying to find solutions that serve these children. Orphans rarely have access to occupy a very complex place at the intersection of child welfare, immigration and diplomacy, and the needs of these children must be better defined and dealt with more directly.

2. Proper channels. The U.S. is the only country in the world that houses its central authority for adoption issues at its foreign ministry rather than its health ministry has a private organization approve Hague agencies with a lobbyist on the Board of Directors. Child welfare should never be an issue that gets caught up in politics and international diplomacy money-making schemes, and we need to figure out why US embassies rubberstamp visas.whether agencies overseeing immigration or health are better suited to the task.

3. Update international regulations. The Hague convention on adoption, which was written in the early-1990s, needs to be updated to incorporate real protective clauses and ban bad agencies for the 21st-century, with a focus on using technology to increase the amount and quality of data about individual orphans, which can help streamline the approval system without sacrificing safeguards for children. The Hague convention also needs to be given teeth, so compliance to promote the best interests of children is required and not voluntary.

The U.S. has always had their hand in obtaining foreign children for their citizens,been ahead of the pack on child welfare, but this is a case where a misguided belief in the sanctity of treaties and bureaucracy has taken focus away from what’s really best for children. We need to reinvigorate our leadership on adoption and we need to demand accountability. There are millions of orphans like Nate, and countless prospective adoptive parents, that are holding on to hope that we can do better than the status quo.

Bonus highlight from one of the Bac Lieu dads: “And I am sorry, but I don’t see the world through the prism of race that you do. I will not raise my child to be white or asian, but as someone who doesn’t judge on the basis of skin tone or cultural heritage. He will not judget [sic] others in that fashion and will not allow others to define him like that.”   Good luck with that. Clearly you have never bothered to speak to adult transracial adoptees or read anything that they have had to say.

For our previous coverage of the Bac Lieu 16, see Stopping the Spin on Bac Lieu 16

REFORM Puzzle Piece