Preventing Un-Adoption Tragedies Updated

“In September 2013 Reuters shocked the world by exposing the dangerous practice of re-homing adopted children. The five-part series called “The Child Exchange” described adoptive parents giving the adopted children that they were unable to handle to total strangers found online. Many of the children were from Russia and were described as presenting a danger to their adoptive families and, in some cases, were given to unsavory people and pedophiles.

Dan Rather’s recent two-hour AXS-TV report, “Unwanted Children: the Shameful Side of International Adoption” featured children adopted from India and Ethiopia who were abandoned by adopters, some after just three months, some after seven years. Some had been adopted by a couple who had been lauded for adopting 28 children, many from Ethiopia. They reportedly abused some and abandoned eight.

Rather also interviewed single mother and best-selling author Joyce Maynard. She sees herself now as having been foster mother to the two Ethiopian girls she adopted and promised to love and care for forever.

There are multiple reasons for disrupted international adoptions, primarily from Russia and Ethiopia. First, many adopt internationally because they feel unprepared to deal with the special needs of children coming from foster care.

Orphanages provide bios of children that are often incomplete, inaccurate, and downplay problems. The descriptions are accompanied by photos and the prospective adopters begin to feel love for the child and talk about bringing “their child” home. Adoption agencies say that adopters hear what they want to hear. Adopters say that because of misrepresentations they get “more than they signed up for” and are prepared to deal with.

False expectations certainly seem to have been a major part of the problem for Torry Ann Hansen who sent her 7-year-old Russian adopted son on an airplane alone back to Russia. After having the child in her home just 9 months, the single mother said:

“I was lied to and misled by the Russian Orphanage workers and director regarding his mental stability and other issues. …

“After giving my best to this child, I am sorry to say that for the safety of my family, friends, and myself, I no longer wish to parent this child.”

The reality is that children adopted from institutional care have special needs as a result of being denied a one-on-one caretaker. The older the child, the more difficulty he or she will have forming attachments. They are described as displaying jealousy, odd eating habits, including food hoarding, and some have reportedly hurt animals, started fires and been sexually inappropriate.

Shame or Sympathy?

Following the Reuters and Dan Rather exposés, Lisa Belkin, author and former NY Times correspondent, reported on re-homing from a different perspective. Belkin focused on one mother who adopted two children from Russia. “Giving Away Anatoly” describes years of difficulties she experienced with them and how she placed one and then the other outside the home.

Belkin also wrote about Cyndi Peck who runs the Second Chance Adoption program of Wasatch International Adoptions of Utah. Peck, who sees many disrupted adoptions and unwanted adopted children, some of whom are sent to the Ranch for Kids in Minnesota, says re-homing has been “the dirty little secret of the adoption world for far too long.” Her mission is:

“To make the process open, nonjudgmental and safe, rather than confused, shameful and marginally regulated, as it has been for decades….To shame the parents and push it underground when it happens is no help to these families, or these children….all the parents who give up these children are not monsters.”

Dan Rather called re-homing deplorable. Peck advocates making re-homing acceptable and regulating it. She has created a niche business called Second Chance Adoptions, a service which screens those willing to take children from failed adoptions for a fee of $2000. “These adoptions are much less expensive than an international adoption, and for [some] families … the costs are returned to you in IRS tax credits.”

Screening second adopters, as Peck does, might well provide a greater safety net than either do-it-yourself re-placements or leaving children who are unwanted with adopters who become so overwhelmed they resort to drastic methods of control and abusive punishments, as has happened to many children adopted from Ethiopia and Russia. Incomprehensible abuses of IA children have included beating, caging, burning, starving, and being left outside in the cold. Nineteen cases of such abuse of Russian adopted children led to their deaths and often resulted in the conviction of their adopters for manslaughter.

Other unwanted IA children have been sent to boarding schools, mental health facilities, or to prison based on their adoptive parents’ reports. Some wind up in homeless shelters or living on the streets. One Long Island, NY couple who put their two Russian adopted children in mental facilities has petitioned the court to vacate the adoption. To avert any possibility of the children being placed with others if the petition to vacate fails, Judge Edward W. McCarty III wrote::

“Such re-homing or any other descriptive phrase to classify this trade is unmistakably human trafficking in children, even absent any financial element.”

All of this, despite Belkin reporting that experts say children with fetal alcohol syndrome and attachment disorder can be helped, but it takes financial and emotional reserves that not all parents have.

Better Alternatives

Blogs, forums and comments on articles about re-homing reflect adopters who agree with Peck that adopters who give up on the children they committed to care for be understood, not demonized. Others consider re-homing a form of abuse and consider people who reject the children they longed for despicable. Critics point out the trauma inflicted on the rejected children as well as the other children in these families.

Great consideration needs to be given as to whether reducing the stigma of giving up on adopted children would not inadvertently result in encouraging more terminations, turning adoption into a trial and give-back program as if children come with warranties. In addition to the harm done to the rejected children, the accumulated and publicized terminations, abandonments, abuse, and deaths have put restrictions on Ethiopian adoptions, closed adoptions from Russia, and irrevocably harmed American relations with Russia.

For all these reasons, the most important consideration is not how to respond after-the-fact to those who terminate adoptions but to prevent these tragedies. Peck and others recognize that one of the reasons second placements are successful is that the prospective adopters are fully aware of, and understand the ramifications of, accurate background information. Thus one way to greatly reduce terminated adoptions would be to stop permitting adoptions from orphanages with a track record of providing dishonest and incomplete background information for the children they are offering for adoption. Removing children from their homeland and culture based on false pretenses does not help them or their families and fewer IAs might result in more placements for domestic foster children who cannot be reunified with their original families.

The other factor that seems to increase the success of second placements is placing these special needs children in families in which they are the youngest child. Ethical adoptions arranged in the best interest of children, and not for the fees generated or to meet a demand, would incorporate these limitations on IA.

If adoption agencies were regulated and controlled social service agencies, not businesses with bottom lines — with or without non-profit tax status — these procedures that improve outcomes in second placements would be implemented in first placements reducing a great deal of failure, heartache for the families, and rejection for the children.”

Preventing Un-Adoption Tragedies[Huffington Post 1/3/15 by Mirah Riben]

REFORM Puzzle Piece

 

Update:“Years after Guatemala halted adoptions to America, reverberations of the legacy of corrupt adoption scandals continue as the new go-to adoption hot spot nation of Ethiopia follows suit.

On January 8th, the Guatemalan prosecutors’ office for human trafficking found sufficient evidence to try Nancy Susan Bailey, an American, with taking children and illegally placing them for adoption for fees as high as $40,000. A 2010 report by Guatemala’s International Commission Against Impunity uncovered 3,342 “irregular” adoptions, primarily to U.S. couples.

The commission described networks of child-trafficking in the country for the purpose of illegal adoptions.

Bailey founded and was the executive director of the orphanage, Semilas de Amor (aka, Seeds of Love) in 1996, a year after adopting her Guatemalan-born infant “daughter,” Gabriela (Gaby) Maria. She has two older sons.

Bailey was arrested in El Salvador and turned over to Guatemalan authorities by Interpol this past December.

Also, on January 8th, James Harding, 55, of Atlanta, Georgia, the former head of International Adoption Guides, Inc. (IAG), a U.S. adoption agency, pleaded guilty in federal court to fraud and bribery charges in conjunction with arranging “phony adoptions” from Ethiopia.

Harding is charged with defrauding the U.S. government by submitting falsified adoption papers in order to illegally obtain U.S. visas for Ethiopian children. He admitted to bribing two Ethiopian officials who helped with the scheme which in 2008 and 2009 submitted fake documents to the State Department regarding the eligibility of Ethiopian children for adoption by Americans. Harding falsified adoption contracts signed by orphanage officials who were not authorized to give the children up for adoption because, in some cases, the children had never lived in the orphanage.

Harding is the second of four IAG staff members to admit guilt to these charges. Alisa Bivens, IAG program director in the U.S, pled guilty and is currently awaiting sentencing. Jury selection is scheduled for January 14th for IAG executive director, Mary Mooney.

Those who profit from adoption financially and those who obtain the children they seek, insist that incidents such as these are the exception to the rule. Yet, there have been documented cases of adoption corruption, kidnapping, and child trafficking for adoption involving adoptions from Cambodia, China, Ethiopia, Guatemala, Haiti, India, Romania, Russia, Samoa, and Vietnam. In other words, most every nation that Americans adopt from has been embroiled in scandal.

Why?

Adoption breeds corruption for several reasons.

Demand for children to adopt keeps prices high, creating a fertile breeding ground for all sorts of illegal activity. The tens of thousands of U.S. dollars per child that Americans are willing to pay are being directed at nations in the midst of – or in the aftermath – of war, extreme poverty, political unrest, or natural disasters. Combine that with very loose regulations and an almost complete lack of oversight and you have a powder keg for deception, child-stealing, and every transgression imaginable in order to obtain children to meet the demand.

As if infertile and same-sex couples seeking to adopt doesn’t create enough demand, adoption entrepreneurs intentionally over-report the number of orphans allegedly “languishing” in orphanages to tug at the heartstrings of liberals and religious zealots in order to increase profits. Even adoption businesses with non-profit tax status still have overhead, including salaries for directors and other employees.

“It’s not really true that there are large numbers of infants with no homes who either will be in institutions or who need intercountry adoption,” notes Alexandria Yuster, a senior adviser on child protection with UNICEF.

The fact is, nearly 90% of the estimated 143 million children in orphanages worldwide are not orphans at all, but rather have at least one living parent. Additionally, the children who “languish” are older, sibling group and those with disabilities, not unlike those who “languish” in American foster care while younger children and those believed to be healthier are sought.

Another major problem that the Hague Convention on International adoptions does not address is “finders’ fees” paid by foreign orphanages. These fees are enough to incentivize criminals to kidnap children and claim that they were found abandoned. Often, the children who wind up adopted through U.S. agencies are passed through multiple hands in a process known as “child laundering” making it impossible for even the most reputable American adoption agency to ensure the origins of the child involved in any international adoption. The line between legal, ethical adoptions and criminal activity is blurry at best.

Oreskovic and Maskew note that:

“We cannot responsibly conclude that a child must be adopted internationally before we know how the child got to the orphanage, where his or her parents are, and whether the cause of the family separation is permanent and cannot be remedied in a less radical manner than moving the child from its original family and culture to another.”

The final contributory factor is silence. Do-gooders, believing that they are “rescuing” orphaned or “unwanted” children, and those desperate to adopt, turn a blind eye to obvious red flags like those reported in “The Lie We Love,” by E.J. Graff, and in books like The Child Catchers: Rescue, Trafficking, and the New Gospel of Adoption, by Kathryn Joyce.

Finding Fernanda, by Erin Siegal McIntyre, describes how prospective adopters knowingly ignore obvious signs of wrong-doing, like being shown the same child’s photo with different names or two totally different photos with the same name and description. McIntryeMcIntyre further describes how online adoption support forums caution prospective adopters to hold their tongues lest they are black-balled from all agencies and would thus never obtain a child.

The documentary, Wo Ai Ni (I Love You) Mommy, shows an American in a hotel room in China counting out cash for bribes as she gets ready to adopt a child. She admits that it looks bad, but it is “how things are done.”

Silence pervades the adoption industry. Adam Pertman, former executive director of the Evan B. Donaldson Adoption Institute, in his book,Adoption Nation, asks:

“Why aren’t adoption professionals screaming bloody murder” distancing themselves from” their unethical colleagues?

“. . .The American Academy of Adoption Attorneys as well as individual lawyers, should be holding press conferences and passing resolutions and demanding disbarment hearings, for example, when colleagues engage in egregious behavior.”

The adoption industry has fewer ethical guidelines than guide real estate transactions and no incentive to police itself. Adoption is thus a free-for-all marketplace full of unscrupulous baby brokers. Those who pay top dollar for children are often victims of scams and rip-offs. Some sue. Some have won wrongful adoption suits. No such recourse however is available to the victimized mothers whose children are commodified. The U.S. State Department has, in fact, ignored an order by the Guatemalans government to return a kidnapped child, nor have they even complied with requests for DNA testing that would confirm or deny the allegations.

There is no outcry however because the public believes that the end — a more affluent life — justifies the means by which adopted children are acquired.

The world is aware, however, that multiple countries have stopped permitting their children to be adopted by Americans as a result of terminated adoptions, children sent back to their countries of origin by themselves on airplanes, “re-homing,” abuse, and adopted children murdered by their adoptive parents, as well as corruption and child trafficking. America is known as the “Wild West” in terms of adoption, attracting Europeans and Scandinavians to adopt from the U.S., and giving us a black eye.”

Adoption Criminality and Corruption[Huffington Post 1/14/15 by Mirah Riben]

Update 2:“Is it shocking that a “social worker will make sure that your entire home is baby-proofed before you bring [an adopted] baby home”? Alison Caporimo thinks so.

Caporimo, who is fond of lists and has written them about staying safe while dating online, retro diners, and “17 Badass Ways Women Can Rock a Suit” now brings her Jill-of-all-trades approach to “17 Shocking Things Everyone Should Know About Adoption” — providing a slanted and overly simplistic view of a very complex, multi-faceted issue.

The senior lifestyle editor and craft book author, whose bio says that she is “in love with style, design, and all things handmade,” views adoption, as many do, through the lens of those seeking children. It is this perception of adoption that leads to the distortion of careful vetting of adoptive parents and adoptive homes in an effort to ensure the safety of children as having “an element of mistrust” that does not exist for those who are able to birth children naturally.

We cannot pre-screen parents who birth their children. Society does, however, judge those who are perceived as too young, or without sufficient material means to be unfit and encourages them to relinquish their children to those who are more mature or wealthier. We also report and remove children born into their families who are thought to be mistreated.

Also shocking to Caporimo is Thailand and Mongolia’s restricting single parent adoptions, while reformers in the U.S. are shocked that it is allowable here. Caporimo’s lens of entitlement also sees it as shocking that Korea screens out severely or morbidly obese applicants as a health risk, in an effort to protect children from being adopted and orphaned yet again.

She also labels it shocking that Korean expectant mothers are now given seven days to consider their situations before relinquishing their children, their consents must be verified, the birth registered, and the consent to adopt may be revoked within six months. These ethical reforms were fought for by adults adopted from Korea and by birth mothers and organizations such as ASK (Adoptee Solidarity with Korea) andKoRoot in order to reduce exploitation.

When we put the best interests of children first, as opposed to seeing adoption as a process of procuring children to meet a demand, there are many far more truly horrific aspects of adoption omitted from Caporimo’s fluff piece, such as:

1. Reprehensible practices that put children in danger physically, and destroy them emotionally, have been revealed in reports on re-homing by Reuters and Dan Rather regarding terminated adoptions.

2. It is sad and shameful that, despite prospective adopters being matched and becoming emotionally attached to photos of children often years before the adoption can be finalized, as Caporimo points out, that this time is not used to honestly obtain and evaluate the child’s health and behavior and educate prospective parents on what to expect in terms of emotional or physical challenges. Mandating such programs would greatly reduce terminated adoptions by ill-prepared adopters who find themselves in over their heads. With adoption operating as a business, however, no such services are provided by those who profit from “sealing the deal.”

3. It is disgraceful that anyone would think they can divorce themselves of the responsibility of adoption.

It is unthinkable that 19 Russian children have been murdered by American adopters, in addition to untold other adopted children surviving unspeakable abuse. This and the number of Russian adopted children, abandoned and rehomed, is why Russia closed adoptions to America, not a political ploy as claimed by Craig Juntunen of Both Ends Burning, a pro-adoption organization that opposes UNICEF’s position that Inter-country adoption include “a range of care options only for children who cannot be placed in a stable family setting in their country of origin.”

4. It is alarming and unacceptable that international adoption is ripe with corruption which too often involves the kidnapping and trafficking of children. It is such concerns that caused Guatemala, once one of the largest sources for American adopters, to cease adoptions to America. More recently the Republic of the Congo put a freeze on exit visas for children being adopted to foreign countries as a result of concerns for the well-being of the children being adopted internationally. Additionally, Belarus, Brazil, Ethiopia, Honduras, Peru, Romania and Vietnam have at least temporarily halted adoptions of children to the United States “because of serious concerns about corruption and kidnapping.”

5. None of that concerns Caporimo, however, who writes about what occurred in Haitifollowing the destructive 2010 earthquake without a word of reference to the scandals that involved missionaries who rushed in and grabbed up children who were not in fact orphans leading to arrests, albeit charges dropped, for kidnapping.

6. It is heinous that: “...babies in many countries are being systematically bought, coerced, and stolen away from their birth families.”

It is appalling that mothers who cannot read English are made to believe that the adoption papers they are signing are instead to allow their children to come to America for an education, after which they will return, E.J. Graff reports:

“From Australia to Spain, Ireland to America … young mothers say they were ‘coerced’, ‘manipulated’, and ‘duped’ into handing over their babies for adoption.”

7. It is despicable that in infant adoption within the U.S. expectant mothers are matched and often get enmeshed during their pregnancies with those seeking to adopt which creates feelings of obligation. Furthermore, prospective adopters are allowed into the delivery room, a process which disallows the birthing mom time to make decisions based on the reality of an existing child.

It is unethical that in domestic infant adoption mothers are often promised open adoption and not told that such promises cannot be enforced if the adopters change their mind or intentionally misrepresent their intentions. It is also a conflict of interest that adopters pay for their own attorney and also the attorney who represents the mother who is relinquishing.

8. It is disgraceful that fathers have their parental rights taken from them without their knowledge and despite their ability and willingness to provide a safe caring home for their children.

9. It is alarming and unjust that adult adopted citizens in all states in the U.S. are issued falsified birth certificates that indicate they are born to their adoptive parents — with no indication that the certificates are amended. Adopted citizens are denied access to their original and accurate birth certificate in thirty-one states and have partial or restricted access in eight other states.

In keeping with her one-sided view of adoption, Caporimo ignores the violation of adoptees’ civil and 14th amendment rights to equal treatment under the law regarding access to their own birth certificates. www.adopteerightscoalition.com/

Instead, she raises concern about LGBTs not being allowed to adopt in Kenya and some U.S. states. Prospective adopters living in states that disallow them to adopt have the option of establishing residence in any of the 48 states that do accommodate them. Adoptees, however, cannot change the state they were born in.

10. It is beyond shocking that there are more than 100,000 children in U.S. foster care who cannot be reunified with families and thus could be adopted while federal tax credits, intended for special needs children, are instead provided to those who adopt from overseas.

Adoption is a long and difficult path to navigate, especially for those who have already endured years of infertility and medical procedures. But the needs of those adopting should never over-ride the best interests of the children adoption was intended to serve, even as they grow into adults. We need to keep our collective priorities and concerns on adoptees and ensure our shock is well-deserved and properly focused on ending the truly horrendous aspects of adoption.”

10 Really Shocking Facts of Child Adoption[Huffington Post 2/17/15 by Mirah Riben]