Special FacePalm:The International Adoption Cliff: Do Child Human Rights Matter?

Professor Elizabeth Bartholet has a new “research” paper that apparently will also be a chapter in an upcoming book to be published by Cambridge Scholars Publishing. You can download the paper for free at this link. I think  this is all the evidence you need to NEVER send a loved one to Harvard. Shame on the publisher and this Social Science Research Network for publishing this rant disguised as an academic paper.  She says that the documentation for her claims can be found in “various of the articles cited”  at http://www.law.harvard.edu/faculty/bartholet/pubs.php I don’t know whether to laugh or cry at the laziness.

Under the graph of the rate of decline of international adoptions to the US, she exclaims “It represents the destruction of tens of thousands of children’s lives , as a matter of deliberate government and NGO policy. Even the peak 2004 numbers represent the unnecessary destruction of children’s lives since with adoption-friendly regulation facilitating the placement of unparented children abroad we could easily have hundreds of thousands of international adoptions.” No hyperbole there! She is quite the mouthpiece for the adoption industry!

She goes on: “I want to say more about why I characterize the International Adoption Cliff as a devastating child human rights tragedy, deliberately caused.”

Then “We know from the social science that international adoption works really well for kids.” You know from the “social science”? Ever listened to adult international adoptees? What do you have to say for all of the Korean adoptees who have returned to Korea?

Her claim on number of children in institutions : “Today there are some 8-12 million growing up in institutions — too many for any to have an accurate count.”

“Current regulation requires that most children be held in damaging institutions for 2-5 yrs or more before they can be placed in adoptive families. If we had regulation that facilitated rather than obstructed adoptive placement, regulation that encouraged prospective parents to step forward to parent, we could easily have many millions more eager prospective parents than we do.” What regulation in what country demands that children are “held in damaging institutions for 2-5 years”? Don’t let the sparkly words distract you. The answer is  none.

It’s like a second grader wrote this part: “International adoption magically transforms the lives of those placed from destitution to A-OK. Compared to other social programs I am aware of this is a truly unusually successful program. It does this at essentially no cost to governments, no real cost.”

 

Evil! “It is this deliberate quality of the policy that makes the Cliff not just a tragedy but an evil.”

Lies and Blaming UNICEF “The policy-makers responsible include first and foremost NGOs that describe themselves as the official friends of children – organizations like UNICEF and Save the Children. They target any country sending significant numbers of children into international adoptive homes, and call for “reforms” which result in cutting down or shutting down such adoption. While UNICEF claims that it is not entirely against international adoption, this seems a public relations position. UNICEF never advocates for such adoption as even a partial solution for the unparented children of the world.” Aaah! The UNICEF is evil playbook!

She insults The African Child Policy Forum by putting quote marks around it as if it is not a real and serious group. “This helps explain the recent “African Child Policy Forum,” where the many African nations represented reacted against the recent increase in international adoptions out of Africa by condemning such adoptions, announcing that they could take care of their children, and that they would make international adoption a “last, last resort.””

How dare The African Child Policy Forum have  this vision:   “Our vision is that every child in Africa will be able to lead a healthy life and contribute to the emergence of a peaceful, democratic and prosperous continent that can overcome marginalization in a globalised world.” White Professor Bartholet knows best, you know.

 She shows how  she is here: “Many claim, however, that the Cliff is motivated by good reasons, and that it represents the vindication rather than the violation of child human rights. They say that we need to keep kids in their country of origin for their own sake, to protect their heritage rights, to protect them against the adoption abuses and corruption that steal them from their parents and from the land where they belong.
I can’t take these claims seriously. “   She goes on to compare children in orphanages to people locked behind the Iron Curtain!

From there she goes on an incoherent rant  about human rights and somehow claims that UN CRC is being violated when corruption shuts down international adoption.