Senator Landrieu Says Vietnam to Reopen After Some “Final Details” Get Worked Out
The 
-in-chief has been busy this week. One day she is spokeswoman for a Texas Sheriff and the next day she is in a mad dash to open up the cash flow SOMEWHERE… and that somewhere is Vietnam.Things have not been so bright for the Industry in the past few weeks. Besides the Russian Ban and the Max Shatto case, agency after agency is shutting down completely or shutting off their Ethiopia programs. Gasp, even Ghana is now considering implementing the Hague Convention. Even their pet project STUCK did not receive a favorable review this week. The industry needed some type of 
to come to the rescue…
US Senator Hopeful Vietnam Adoptions to Restart [ABC News 2/21/13 by Chris Brummit/Associated Press] says “Vietnam and the United States are close to an agreement allowing Americans to adopt Vietnamese children again, five years after a ban was imposed amid allegations of baby-selling and babies offered without parents’ consent, a visiting U.S. senator said.
Vietnam was a popular destination for prospective adoptive parents before Washington imposed the ban in 2008 following a U.S. investigation.
Senators and adoption lobby groups have been urging Vietnam to pass stronger laws and better monitor the process so that adoptions can resume. A leading advocate, Sen. Mary Landrieu, said Vietnam now has safeguards in place to resume adoptions, including a central authority overseeing the process.
“The government of Vietnam seems to be willing to restart, and there are just some final details to be worked out with the government of the United States,” the Democrat from Louisiana told reporters late Wednesday in Hanoi, Vietnam’s capital. “We hope that it will be in the near future.”
Demand for inter-country adoptions has risen in recent years, especially by prospective parents in the United States. For singles wanting a child, or couples unable or unwilling to conceive, the idea of adopting a foreign baby from an orphanage in a poor country is attractive. But programs in several developing countries like Haiti and Guatemala have been beset by scandals and allegations of baby-selling.
A U.N.-commissioned report into adoptions in Vietnam in 2009 said the demand from prospective parents, most of them in the United States, had essentially created a supply of young babies. Cash payments by adoption agencies to orphanages led them to seek out children for adoption abroad, often without proper checks into their background or their family circumstances.
“The availability of children who are adoptable abroad corresponds more to the existence of foreign prospective adopters than to the actual needs of abandoned and orphaned children,” the report said.
Landrieu, the mother of two adopted children and the wife of a man adopted from overseas, said “there was no perfect system,” but that the urgent need of children living in institutions needed to be considered.
“There is always going to be a possibility of something going wrong, but just because one or two or three or a handful of cases is not handled right, it doesn’t mean that you shouldn’t have an opportunity for kids to have families,” said Landrieu, who was among a group of four U.S. senators visiting Vietnam. [Handful?]
Vietnamese government spokesman Luong Thanh Nghi said that “Vietnamese law has had clear regulations on the process and procedures on Vietnamese children adopted by foreign families.”
Asked whether an agreement with the United States was close, he said that “the two sides were continuing to consider.”
In September last year, officials from Ireland and Vietnam signed an agreement to restart adoptions, which were halted in 2009.
Partly as a result of fears over baby-selling scandals, the number of international adoptions has fallen to its lowest point in 15 years. Globally, the number of orphans being adopted by foreign parents dropped from a high of 45,000 in 2004 to an estimated 25,000 last year, according to annual statistics compiled by Peter Selman, an expert on international adoptions at Britain’s Newcastle University.”
REFORM Puzzle Pieces
I personally spoke to Mary Landrieu’s aide Kathleen Strottman during our Vietnam adoption horror show. They agreed that something needed to be done or it would show they were soft on corruption and child trafficking….guess what they did? Nothing that I ever saw. Nothing. They knew all about babies being harvested from villages for IA, fake documentation and money flying. Shame on her.
While looking for reviews of ‘STUCK’, I found this by serendipity:
http://aplacecalledsimplicity.blogspot.com/2011/09/jaja.html
The PAPs have since edited the blog post about the DIY child harvesting and deleted most of the critical comments. But if you keep on reading, you’ll find a few comments which survived the purge explaining what happened. Basically, the PAPs fell in love with a little girl in Uganda whom they were convinced that God ordained be theirs, and pre-emptively renamed her “Sarah Jane”.
However, the biological mother and her extended family did NOT want to surrender her, so the PAPs went to them to beg them to give them their daughter, showing them photos of their other children and home to sway their minds. The PAPs seemed dumbfounded by the idea that anyone could see anything amiss in their actions– and many of the remaining commentors expressed disappointment that such a touching, heartwarming blog post was taken down.
From skimming the rest of the blog, I can’t see that they’ve adopted Sarah Jane as of yet, though there last post on the subject was that they wouldn’t cease the campaign, because God “knit them together”. The PAPs, though they seem like loving, well-intentioned people, are unwaveringly convinced that they know God’s Will, and that anyone or anything which thwarts them is an example of Satan’s machinations.
The following was forwarded to me with permission to post it and it backs up what Name was saying above:
According to this report, Senator Mary Landrieu is pushing hard for adoptions from Vietnam to reopen: http://abcnews.go.com/International/wireStory/us-senator-hopeful-vietnam-adoptions-start-18553674.
Feel free to disagree, but over the years of watching Mary lobby hard for adoptions to continue in corrupt countries while downplaying enormous ethical lapses, I have come to believe she is more concerned is about protecting and aiding the adoption lobby rather than the legitimate orphans who need a family.
“There is always going to be a possibility of something going wrong, but just because one or two or three or a handful of cases is not handled right, it doesn’t mean that you shouldn’t have an opportunity for kids to have families,” said Landrieu, who was among a group of four U.S. senators visiting Vietnam.
Sure, things go wrong in every business, but there should be far less “possibility of something going wrong” if the adoption business is tightly regulated and strict controls in place to ensure ethical placement. There are children’s lives at stake.
But this is the killer: “…or two or three or a handful of cases is not handled right…” Come on, Mary, stop the lying. There were not “two or three or a handful” of botched cases in VN. There were HUNDREDS if not more. Orphanage employees and provincial officials went to prison after being convicted of trafficking. Known traffickers and problem facilitators were hired by adoption agencies who lied about it to PAPs. VN shut down twice because of these issues, the second time in large part because VN refused to uphold its own terms of its own MOU with the US (most notably having to do with the disclosure of the fee structure which VN refused to do).
This would be an ideal time for Mary to say, “You know what, there have been really awful situations with IA that never should have happened, and I know they need to stop. In order for countries to reopen, we need to overhaul the process, keep costs down, ban agencies with a history of corruption, make every bit of paperwork more transparent (especially the fees), and not give any visas to any families whose paperwork is not spotless and verifiable.”
But that would mean she’d have to backpedal on her avoidance or dismissal of unethical practices. And it would mean she’d have to disassociate herself from the adoption lobby whose heads are stuck so deep in the ground they could open up a mine instead of confronting the problems they themselves have created.
As a result, Mary has thrown herself behind the likes of Craig Juntenen. I’ve heard him speak and he is the epitome of the APs/adoption lobby who believe that orphaned children need families (they do) so all IA is good (it isn’t) and all means justify his ends (they never will).
His documentary Stuck was released today and he’s on a cross-country tour promoting it. He has had gone on the record about the decrease in adoption statistics, mentioning red tape only: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/craig-juntunen/courage-in-the-adoption-w_b_1464366.html. He claimed, “Alarmed, and frankly offended, by these largely unsubstantiated claims, Vietnam decided to shut down adoptions to the U.S., stalling cases that were already in motion and extending the adoption process for the LeRoys and others.”
That is a bald-faced lie about what happened in VN. These claims were not unsubstantiated. You can read posting after posting about them in the archives here.
A few sentences later he said, “What is more concerning is that we’ve seen similar situations play out with other countries, including Cambodia and Ethiopia.” And then: “Ultimately, we have to strike a balance of maintaining safeguards, but also ensuring that we’re moving forward expeditiously.”
What safeguards does he propose? None. What safeguards does Mary propose? Being Hague-accredited? What does that stop? Do you know who wrote most of the Hague regulations? Adoption agencies.
Had agencies put their feet down, better supervised their in-country facilitators, demanded that country fees be reasonable, overseen the transparency of the pay-outs instead of turning a blind eye to those who pocketed the billions of dollars in cold hard cash (why are orphanages so dire if all that money was supposed to go to them???), and refused to work with corrupt officials, would VN and other countries be closed? I should think not.
I wrote the above posting to the A-Parents-Vietnam Yahoo group. I’ve been on it since early 2001, and have seen Vietnam shut down twice. I also wrote it before Name posted what he/she did about Mary and Kathleen – and it backs up what I posted. It is disgusting behavior for elected officials to say one thing to parents most in need of their aid, and then the complete opposite to the public. Disgusting but not surprising.
Thank you again. I appreciate you sharing your knowledge with my readers!