FacePalm Friday
Welcome to this week’s edition of FacePalm Friday.
This is where your hosts will list their top picks for this week’s FacePalm moment—something they learned or read about this week that caused the FacePalm to happen (you know, the expression of embarrassment, frustration, disbelief, shock, disgust or mixed humor as depicted in our Rally FacePalm smiley).
We invite you to add your FacePalm of the week to our comments. Go ahead and add a link, tell a personal story, or share something that triggered the FacePalm on the subject of child welfare or adoption.
Your Host’s Selections:
(1) Widespread Promotion of Both Ends Burning Stuck Movie
Agencies are spreading the news about their special showings of this movie. The movie features a Bac Lieu Vietnam child; a child from Ethiopia and two from Haiti. Which 3 countries have recently had some of the most corrupt behaviors (I am being kind when I say corrupt)? Let’s see, Vietnam…where women were documented being killed for their children during this STUCK time….Ethiopia, where children are harvested from intact families in poor villages during this STUCK time and Haiti (where the BEBster adopted from)…Earthquake…Silsby…craptastic Humanitarian Parole…nah, nothing unethical or corrupt to see here…move along…
If you think this is a great movie that promotes ethical adoption and should be promoted, just cut to the chase and pucker up and 
of the adoption industry.
(2) Creepy Valentine
http://bachmann.house.gov/press-release/bachmann-meets-russian-ambassador-discusses-adoption-ban
Representative Bachmann met with Russian Ambassador to the United States, Sergey Kislyak on Valentine’s Day.
One month she is condemning the ban and the next month she is acting 
. I am sure her fabulous words of wisdom and “love” 
really changed his mind. NOT!
(3)Contender for Biggest FP Book of the Year
I know it is only February, but it will be hard to top this “almost” book. I say almost because no publisher in their right mind would publish this so they are fundraising to get this published and scarily it almost is funded.
See here [Times Union Standard 2/13/13 by Janae Francis]
Name of the Book: The Family Troll
I am not kidding. Who do you think the “troll” in the story is?Yep, the adoptee.
Now they did not specify if the adoptee is the Big Troll 
; The Devil Troll 
or the My Little Pony Troll 
. This someday-PAP couple that wrote the book did want to share that in their Its REALLY All about Me and My Infertility story : “”But they also admit the story, about a troll who magically transforms a couple, making them a family, also is a bit backward.
“He’s not a human,” Tyler said.
“He’s not a pet, either.” [His name is Narg. Their Kickstarter page says ” He is an adopted troll that blesses a young couples lives by helping them forget their worries and stress of not being able to have a baby of their own and just live happy!”]
This following part is supposed to make an adopted child feel good: “”The story has a double purpose,” Jill said. “They do end up having a child, and they end up keeping the troll, too.” How Special! They keep the Troll Adoptee! SO at least the troll is not the Forever Alone Fuck Yeah Troll (seriously that is what this smiley is called) 
So the Troll has THAT going for him.
I will leave you with the ending quote of this story: “The magic has to do with becoming distracted about the problem they face with conceiving, Tyler said.
As in the story, the couple hopes to get pregnant but are also looking into adoption.
But for now, they admit that their dogs — Teddy and Poppin — have become their babies.” 
The single most inaccurate Russian adoption “facts” I’ve ever read:
http://www.themoscowtimes.com/opinion/article/10-russian-myths-about-us-adoptions/475238.html
Tons of folks raising tons of money for unadoptable kids (who are Russian) brought to you by a fan of reeces rainbow:
http://fortytoforever.com/2013-campaign/
Carlee,
That reminds me– have you seen this?
http://tracieloux.wordpress.com/2013/02/02/why-i-gave-a-boatload-of-money-to-adoption-guest-post-part-1/
I think we need a counter-campaign, called ‘Why I won’t be funding your adoption’. It can include reasons like:
“Because there are approximately 100,000 waiting American children, available to be adopted from foster care, no ‘fundraising’ required.”
” Because I don’t choose to give money to complete strangers whom I know nothing about but what they say on their blog”
“Because I don’t believe that it’s ‘God’s Will’ for you to adopt a specific child whose picture you saw on an ‘adoption ministry’ website; I think it’s your susceptibility to peer pressure and the power of suggestion.”
“Because I don’t think it’s “caring for widows and orphans” to adopt the child of a loving mother who can’t provide for it, rather than fundraising the money to allow HER to parent the child she loves.”
I had others, but I can’t remember all of them right now. Also, I think it’s better to avoid the overtly snarky ones. You can ridicule people, or you can reach out to them in an attempt to persuade them; but you can’t usually accomplish both goals at once.
No, I had not seen that jaw dropping post (or the comments). You really cannot save these folks from themselves — and they’re (sadly, almost inevitably) the well-intentioned, “divinely-inspired” APs who are *shocked* when the child they adopted from an institution displays *institutional* behaviors:
http://justonemore4us.blogspot.com/2013/02/have-you.html?m=0
I would also add to the “we do not support your adoption because”:
… I choose to support fellowship training *local* doctors to perform the kinds of surgeries that will enable *local* families to domestically adopt a kid with SN (or better still, to *raise* their own SN kid.
… I choose to support *local* programs that help *local* parents raise their SN kid themselves, eg $12 “haberman feeder” bottle (so babies with clefts don’t starve http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Haberman_Feeder), PT/OT for kids with CP, etc.
(A dear friend is a prof at a college in England that happens to have a highly-regarded kids teaching hospital; she’s the one that told me about the fellowships for foreign doctors — specifically, to train already-qualified foreign doctors to do the sorts of specialised surgeries that allow a family to raise their SN kid, eg repair hearts for kids with DS, surgery to increase range of motion for kids with arthro, amputate legs at knee for a kid born w/o lower leg bones as an infant (so the child can be fitted with prostheses – and learn to walk using them! – when they’re about a year old, like at home, etc. I’d never heard of anything like it and thought it was the coolest thing. Apparently little stuff like getting prostheses makes a HUGE difference in many developing countries – a cognitively normal and *ambulatory* kid gets to go to public school, whereas a cognitively normal **non**-ambulatory kid does not).
Carlee,
That’s great! I wonder why it’s so hard to find information about ways to help special needs kids in developing countries that AREN’T adoption on the internet? Any attempt to search gives you a flood of results promoting international adoption, however.
I’ve noticed that a lot of organisations that do help SN kids that aren’t related to adoption are actually English ones. For example, there is a UK Down Syndrome organisation that seems to be doing wonderful work in Russia – apparently in Moscow, the number of parents keeping their DS syndrome children has increased signfiicantly thanks to education. Actually, I think they have been mentioned on this blog:
http://en.downsideup.org/down.php
I have also observed the same thing. I believe we have a link on our home page to the organization you mention.
Astrin – Have you seen this post, in which Reece’s Rainbow adoptive mother and Evangelical Christian Adeye Salem (who recently brought home 2 unrelated high-needs, special needs kids from Bulgaria, bringing her total adopted, unrelated SN kids to 6, but who is counting?) horrified that Churches in general do not have “Orphan Ministeries”, since the Lord has clearly (in her mind) told folks to go save orphans:
http://www.nogreaterjoymom.com/2013/02/rise-up-church.html
Hmmmm, the church I got married in does not have an “orphan ministry”, per se, but has a number of programs that are aimed at keeping families together (“day care” two nighs a week – one for adults with disabilites – mostly Alzeimbers and dementia – and the other for high needs SN kids and foster children of congregants, i.e. folks who cannot easily leave their loved one with a teen babysitter), free workshops to help people improve job skills/resumes, etc.
Carlee,
I see from the replies to Adeye’s call that Focus on the Family, home of Dare-to-Discipinarian James C. Dobson, has taken up the cause of “adoption ministry”. Given their childraising philosophy, this is a frightening thing.
I really think that to some extent the Evangelical Adoption movement is an attempt to practice “militant fecundity” as a weapon in the culture war. “We’ll adopt them and raise them to be True Christians™, THEN we’ll have the voting power to install a Godly Government on this nation!”
I tried to find out what happened to the adoptees who resisted this religious indoctrination, but I haven’t been able to even find any admissions that this ever happened.
So… these PAPs expect that their adoptive child will serve THEM, to relieve their stress so that they can have a child “of their own”? That brings the “It’s all about me” factor to a whole new level!
Back when I was in college, we were told that when parents expected their kids to fulfill their emotional needs, they were more likely to wind up abusing their children. I really hope this couple NEVER gets a child. Let ’em stick to dogs instead– there’s only so much you can do to psychologically screw up a dog.
This struck me from the Moscow Times article. Dima was an EAC placement. EAC is a horribly corrupt agency. This corruption wasn’t just on the Russian end, like the author claims. This was bolstered by EAC. The Harrisons used an expensive agency to get a “healthy” child. Those EAC fees trickled to Russia and this was the result?
“Most of the corruption in foreign adoptions is on the Russian side. There were many examples of Russian orphanages that falsified medical records and concealed illnesses to better “sell” children to U.S. parents, who had paid more than $50,000 to adopt.
In a bizarre twist, the case of Dima Yakovlev, in whose honor Russia’s anti-Magnitsky act was named, was neck-deep in Russian corruption. Once the Russian orphanage realized that U.S. parents were interested in adopting Dima, it denied members of his immediate family the right to adopt him. One of Dima’s grandmothers said the orphanage forged her signature to make it look as if she had refused the right to adopt Dima. His other grandmother said she was threatened by orphanage officials that if she tried to adopt Dima, she would lose her custodial rights to Dima’s sister, whom the grandmother had already adopted several years earlier.
Have you been following the Emily Svenningsen case at all?
She was adopted from China by a super rich family, and the husband died shortly after. The wife sent her away to school when she was 10 or 11, and she was soon after adopted by a couple who worked at the school. The original adoptive mother tried to prevent her from inheriting the vast majority of her first adoptive father’s money, and the new family didn’t know for years that she had an inheritance at all. When they found out, they sued and recently won.
I keep meaning to not respond to the *^&*% Reece’s Rainbow PAPs/APs post on their blogs, but yet another one got to me.
This took pics of th e Russian-born boy she adopted in Russia last year and included them in a “letter” to Russia:
http://teamparkerblog.wordpress.com/2013/02/18/dear-russia/
My response is:
http://poundpuplegacy.org/russian_federation
Plus the facts Elizabeth Case has added to the Dima Yakovlev/Chase Harrison case — I didn’t think that case could get any sadder, but I was very, very wrong. That little boy had a family that loved him, wanted to raise him and was apparently capable of doing so (in that they were/are raising his biosister). There’s an excellent chance that Dima would be alive and happily living with his extended biofamily in Russia had $50K in adoption fees not clouded the minds of certain Russian officials/orphanage workers.
Carlee,
Um, the Team Parker blog has taken down today’s post. Also, I can’t identify your post on the PPL site from the URL you gave. There are a lot of posts and comments, but they aren’t identified by name or date posted– you have to click on the link to discover that it was put up weeks ago.
ReformTalk and PoundPupLegacy aren’t the most user-friendly sites to navigate that I’ve seen. Just sayin’.
Carlee:
I went to the blog post, but it was taken down already. I checked out the photos of the children they had adopted – seem like healthy & happy children.
I agree with you about the Dima Yakolev case. That stunned me. At the same time, I have heard, over the years, of similar situations in Russia. Namely the biological family being paid off to NOT contest the adoption.
Yet another “ministry” illegally photolisting Ukrainian kids:
http://gracehavenhome.com/?page_id=73
This foster/ PAP is fighting the system to get her foster care placement legally freed for adoption on her own timeline, and has collected $9,000 from strangers to do it.
http://smalltownjoy.blogspot.com/2013/02/miscellany-monday-blessed.html
Kristy,
Wait– why does she need to fundraise to adopt from foster care? And HOW can fundraising possibly change when the biological family’s rights are severed? Unless she’s collecting money for bribes to DSS workers and the court system, in which case the vagueness of her writing style makes sense….
I think she is fundraising to pay their lawyer, and the amount changes depending on how complicated the case is. I believe in some states foster parents have some standing in court after they’ve had a child a certain length of time.