Karma's a B*tch!

Do you remember Jade? She was adopted in Korea by a Dutch diplomat, and then they disrupted the adoption after having two biological children.  Time Magazine reported about it in 2007 under the headline, Can an Adopted Child Be Returned?:

Every child is a gift, as the saying goes. But in a case that has stoked outrage on two continents, a Dutch diplomat posted in Hong Kong has been accused of returning his eight-year-old adopted daughter like an unwanted Christmas necktie. The story, which first appeared in the South China Morning Post on Dec. 9, began seven years ago, when Dutch vice consul Raymond Poeteray and his wife, Meta, adopted then-four-months-old Jade in South Korea. The couple, who also have two biological children, brought Jade with them to Indonesia and then to Hong Kong in 2004, although Poeteray never applied for Dutch nationality for the child — a curious oversight, given that he worked in a consulate. Then, last year, the Poeterays put Jade in the care of Hong Kong's Social Welfare Department, saying they could no longer care for her because of the girl's emotional remoteness. [FYI, Jade was later adopted by another family.]

Well, according to Russian  paper RIA Novosti, Poeteray has been arrested -- for spying for Russia:

Police in the Netherlands arrested a 60-year old employee of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs who is suspected of taking bribes and transferring classified information to Russian spies, local media reported on Monday.

According to De Telegraaf, the arrested officer is "Raymond P.," who the media have tentatively identified as Raymond Poeteray. He had been vice-consul of the Netherlands in Hong Kong since 2008. He was arrested on March 24 and was sentenced to 14 days of arrest on March 30.

The consequence believes that Poeteray passed confidential information to Andreas and Heidrun Anschlag, an Austrian couple that was arrested in October 2011 on suspicion of spying for Russia for seven years.

According to German media, German police were able to unmask the Anschlags using information of a detainee in the U.S., Anna Chapman.

Puteray is also suspected of illegal weapons possession and money laundering.

That Karma, she's a b*tch!

Top 25 Adoption Bloggers: Please Vote!

Last year (wow, has it really been a whole year?!), I was honored to be voted onto the Top 25 Adoption Blogs list by Moms at Circle of Moms. Well, now it's time for the 2012 contest.  Take a look at the list, and please vote for those you find worthy! 

Here's what I said last year after the contest ended:

And I also want to say that if you EVER see me in another contest like this, just SHOOT ME! This ridiculous thing was ridiculously stressful for me. I like it better when I DON'T know how many votes I have and CAN'T compare my standing to anyone else's. Then it's completely out of my hands and I can just go with the flow.

 

But here I go again!  I suppose it's what they say about the pain of labor (not something I can speak to personally!) -- after it's over, and you see your little Top 25 badgey thingie, you forget the pain. . . .

I hope that your voting will include my blog, and I also hope it will include blogs by birth mothers (like Cassi at Adoption Truth & Claudia at Musings of the Lame) and adoptees (like Amanda of the Declassified Adoptee) since those voices are so desperately needed in the adoption blogosphere.  Please also consider adoptive parents who are keeping it real, talking about the hard issues in adoption, not just the rainbows-and-unicorns narrative so popular out there.  May I suggest votes for Mama C & the Boys,  Production, Not Reproduction,  Write Mind Open Heart,  Welcome to My Brain, Our Little Tongginator, American Family and Whatever Things Are True.  And in the comments, feel free to make campaign speeches for other blogs on the list!

You can vote for your favorites once a day, through April 21. Thanks!

The Failure of an Adoptive Family

The Motherlode blog of the New York Times reacts to Joyce Maynard's announcement of the disruption of her adoption of two children from Ethiopia:

In 2010, Joyce Maynard wrote an article for More magazine announcing her adoption of two girls from Ethiopia. I read it (it’s no longer available online), and although Ms. Maynard and I had never met, I wrote her, congratulating her — and adding, as a parent a little over a year into the adoption of a child (as opposed to a baby) myself, some words of caution. Ms. Maynard had declared herself “happy, happy, happy.” I wrote knowing that even when “happy” didn’t feel like the applicable adjective for our changed family, happiness still appeared in unexpected ways.

Adopting a child — a small, confused person with an identity and a sense of herself as a part of a family or a community that isn’t yours — isn’t simple. No matter how good the intentions are on all sides to become a family, it doesn’t always work — and “doesn’t always” is more often than you think.

Some experts estimate that as many as one in five adoptions of children over the age of 6 end in disruption, for complex reasons. A newly adopted child is apart from everything she’s ever known. She’s without any firm touchstone from her past, and her future is nothing but a promise — a promise of “forever” and “family” from someone who’s taken her from a life she never truly realized was anything but forever itself.

This is a truly difficult dynamic to surf. And the adult in the bargain is usually on completely unfamiliar ground as well, with the obvious difference being that adults sign up for the ride — and are far more responsible for an outcome they might never have realized was so uncertain. I know that I couldn’t really apprehend what had been taken from our daughter until she became our daughter. As convinced as I was that I understood what we were both getting into, I really had no understanding of how hard it would be for us to come from our different places and fall in love. There were moments when I thought it would never happen.

For Ms. Maynard, and for those two young girls from Ethiopia, it didn’t.

Reactions?

"The greatest, happiest ending"

I found a surprise in this article in People Magazine about Mariska Hargitay's adoptions -- a recognition that it is "the greatest, happiest ending" when a prospective birth mother decides to parent instead of place:

After a couple of failed attempts to connect with a birth mother, Hargitay says, they found someone not far from New York City. After Hargitay and Hermann met the woman, finalized the adoption plan, were present in the delivery room, named the newborn and parented her for two days, the birth mother changed her mind.

“It was nothing short of devastating,” Hargitay explains. “But … it was probably the greatest, happiest ending. I mean, it was so painful for us, but it was deeply joyful and deeply right for her.”

How refreshing!

The Importance of Post-Adoption Support

A reminder of the need for post-adoption support (an issue equally important on this side of the pond) from the Guardian, in light of calls in England for adoptions to speed up:

My son Sam is cheerful and chatty but finds any change so difficult that he'd rather his toes poked out of his school shoes than wear a new pair. His friend Jake adores cycling and acting but thinks of himself as bad, deliberately breaking school rules to try to get the punishment he feels he deserves. In another family, Eddie's a bright boy who loves making models but his mum can't leave the room without him following her. He's 15. His sister Lucy's a real outdoor girl but at 13 has only just stopped wetting her bed at night. Sam, Jake, Eddie and Lucy are very different but they have one thing in common. They are all adopted.

The government has published plans to speed up the process of adoption and get more children adopted from care. The education secretary, Michael Gove, says what children need most is "stability, certainty, security, love". As an adoptive parent I welcome the focus on adoption and agree that adopted children do need a loving and secure family in which to thrive, as do all children, but those like Lucy, Eddie, Jake and Sam need more than that. The drive for speedier adoptions worries me because it implies that adoption solves everything for a child. Sadly, life is not that simple.

* * *

Martin Narey, former head of the children's charity Barnardo's, produced a report on adoption last July and was appointed ministerial adviser on adoption. His report mentioned adoption support only briefly, and said that offering it to all parents was "unnecessary" and "self-indulgent". As an adopter I was dismayed to think that someone at the heart of the government's adoption policy did not seem to understand the vital role of adoption support.

* * *

As an adopter I want the government to widen the focus of its adoption drive and take responsibility for ongoing and adequate support for all children who cannot live with their birth parents. With good support, the drive to improve these vulnerable children's life chances could succeed. Without it, the government is failing the very children it claims to be trying to help.

As the article points out, adoptive parenting is not the same as ordinary parenting: "Adoptive parents and kinship carers are ordinary people, but parenting a traumatised child is not like ordinary parenting. . . . Jonathan Pearce, chief executive of Adoption UK, says: 'Adopters need to learn how to parent their children therapeutically, and they need support and training to do this.'"

Sold into Slavery, then Sold Again into Adoption

At Women's News Network, a report of a meeting at the U.N. on human trafficking; here's a snippet about Rani Hong, who was sold into slavery and then to an international adoption agency:

Two women who were personal victims of human trafficking, Rani Hong and Somaly Mam, added their personal experiences and voices to the discussions.

Hong grew up in a poor large South Indian family suffering with a father who had become very sick. When one of the leaders of her village offered her family a way to ‘take care’ of Rani with an opportunity for her to get also get an education she was allowed to leave. But the family had been tricked as they unknowingly allowed their child to be sold into slavery at the age of 7-years-old. Once with her trafficker, Rani was beaten daily, kept from eating and traumatized severely. At the age of eight she was sold again she was sold again to an international adoption agency and was adopted by American (U.S.) parents who were unaware at the time she had been trafficked, she told Oprah Winfrey in a December 2010 TV interview.

21 years later Rani went back to India and found her birth mother, providing a pivotal and insightful moment in her life.

Korean Adoptee Unexpectedly Finds Birth Family

Interesting story -- because her file said she was abandoned, Chae Haile figured she wouldn't find birth family when she went back to Korea.  Turns out the information was a lie:

She grew up in South Dakota, raised by a single mom who went through a divorce while Chae was in transit from South Korea. Chae didn't consider tracking down her birth family until 2001, when she first asked her adoptive mom for details about her past. That led her to Lutheran Social Services in Minneapolis. The agency had a copy of the photo, providing the first clue in her search for her birth parents. Chae also received forms that had traveled with her from Korea. The "Adoptive Child Study Summary" from October 6, 1977, claimed Chae had been left on the steps of the Bukboo Police Station in Seoul with a note pinned to her chest explaining her mother couldn't keep her.

But those clues led her no further. "I thought, Well, there's little chance of finding my family," Chae recalls. "I had become comfortable with that." Nine years later, she heard about a charity that sends adopted children back to Korea to find their families, and suddenly Chae and Greg found themselves in the orphanage where her trip had begun.

The orphanage director revealed that the story on the adoption forms had been a lie. There was no note pinned to Chae's chest. The orphanage just figured the story would make the child more adoptable.

Middle-aged and businesslike, the director recited details without emotion, as she said she does for the 150 or so adoptees who make this journey each year. "You were born the fifth child. You had four older sisters," she said, reading glasses on the tip of her nose. She explained that Chae's mother chose to give her up. "Her condition was not good enough to take care of all children." So she asked the doctor who delivered Chae to put the baby up for adoption.

"We are trying to search for your birth family," the orphanage director continued. They even had a current number for Chae's mother and had been leaving messages, but hadn't heard back.

Chae stared at the paperwork and photos. It was overwhelming. Tears wouldn't come until later.

Read the whole story, as Chae builds a relationship with her sisters and mother, and the father who never knew about her.

Anti-Adoption Activists Defy Popular Opinion

From the Chicago Tribune:

"Anti-adoption" sounds ludicrous. Who could oppose placing an unwanted child into a loving home?

An entire movement, it turns out--fighting with a primal passion to expose what activists insist is adoption's darker side: The lifelong trauma of women coerced into surrendering babies. Adoptees denied their heritage. And, they say, a billion-dollar industry that focuses more on money than youngsters' welfare.

Some leave careers to write letters, track legislation, research articles and books. They work in anti-adoption non-profits. They educate "vulnerable mothers" and provide baby supplies and financial resources.

The activists insist a mother should first be helped to keep her child. In cases in which that is impossible (say, the woman is incapacitated), a family member or other caring adult should have guardianship. The child should be aware of that relationship. Money should not be exchanged.

Adoption supporters say that logic is flawed.

* * *

"I've been in children's welfare a long time and I've never seen this level of volatility in other issues. Feelings run very high," said Madelyn Freundlich, attorney and author of the book "The Impact of Adoption on Members of the Triad" (Child Welfare League of America), the triad being mother, baby and adoptive couple.

Anti-adoption groups confront a public puzzled by their cause. Some 94 percent of adults polled either held "very favorable" or "somewhat favorable" opinions of adoption in a 2002 national survey by the Evan B. Donaldson Adoption Institute, a non-profit focusing on adoption policy and practices.

Not to mention facing a public and media willing to accept simplistic and unhelpful labels like "anti-adoption" for any critique of adoption as it's currently practiced. . . .

Contested Adoptions Can Take Years to Resolve

The Salt Lake Tribune reports about the length of time it takes to resolve contested adoptions in that state:

Four years ago, as it returned a young boy to his biological father, the Utah Supreme Court expressed alarm that contested adoptions were taking so long to resolve and urged that such cases be put on a fast track.

In that particular case, the child was 18 months old when his mother placed him for adoption and the father sought to intervene, a legal battle that ended in the dad’s favor nearly three years later.

"We anticipate that, in the future, every effort will be made to avoid delay in cases like this," the court said, asking that the boy be reunited with his father with "all due haste" while paying "special attention" to the child’s needs.

"This transition may be hardest for him, and his needs must come first," the justices said in the 2007 decision.

But there is no indication that the time it takes for contested adoptions to work through Utah’s court system has improved, leaving some observers to repeat calls for an expedited process like that used in child welfare cases to reach quicker final decisions and lessen psychological trauma when a placement is disrupted.

Robert Manzanares, for example, began a custody bid for his daughter more than a month before her birth in 2008, filing first in Colorado and then here in Utah. The case wound its way from a lower court to the Utah Supreme Court over 2½ years. Utah’s high court then took 15 months to issue a decision — in Manzanares’ favor — sending the case back to trial court for more debate over who has the right to raise the child. Last week, a Utah judge agreed to dismiss the case so the girl’s custody can be decided in Colorado; those proceedings will likely continue for at least several more months.

Manzanares’ daughter is now 4 years old.

Because of the difficulty in challenging an adoption, coupled with the fact that birth parents often lack the resources to mount such a challenge, means that the number of contested adoptions is small.  The article notes: "According to court data, there have been just 16 contested adoption cases in 3rd District Court, the state’s largest, since 2005. That count may not include paternity actions filed by unwed biological fathers."

And how long does it take to resolve contested adoptions? Again, the article says, "On average it took judges in 3rd District Court 535 days to resolve the contested cases between 2005 and 2011."

I've posted before that delay benefits the parent in possession, which the article also confirms: "But there is no question that the more time that passes, the more uncomfortable the prospect of disrupting a placement becomes for nearly all those involved — a situation that would seem to benefit prospective adoptive parents."

My cynical lawyering mind tells me that adoptive parents try to delay -- or at least, do little to speed up the process.  But one lawyer quoted in the article disagrees: "'My experience generally is that adoptive couples want resolution and don’t generally seek to specifically drag things out,' Hardy said. 'They may recognized that is to their advantage, but they won’t take steps to specifically drag things out. In my experience, it is generally the system that drags it out, not one party or another that does so.'"  But of course, it might be unethical to admit that a lawyer participated in delaying tactics, so I wouldn't exactly expect to see such an admission by a practicing lawyer!

Another point the article makes is that Utah judges WILL remove a child from adoptive parents, even if there has been many years' delay:

The prospect that a judge’s own heart strings may be pulled is a liability of protracted cases, one that may lead to "ends-mean thinking" where emotions influence decisions, Smith said. The Utah Supreme Court distanced itself from emotional decision making in its 2007 decision, noting in its opinion that: "Once an unmarried biological father has established standing to contest, and does in fact contest, an adoption, the level of bonding between child and anyone other than the biological parents becomes legally irrelevant."

* * *

David McConkie, an adoption attorney who now works for LDS Church Family Services, has handled cases where children were removed from adoptive families.

"The hardest cases the courts ever deal with are cases when they’ve got a baby being raised in a home and they’ve got to remove that child from a home," he said. "But judges will follow the law, and they will apply the law and say if the father’s rights were violated under the statutes of whatever state you’re in, they’ll remove those children from that home. It happens more than you think."

That is not the case, however, in all states.  In many states, courts may invalidate the adoption, but then hold a hearing to decide whether it is in the best interest of the child to be returned to the birth family or to remain with the adoptive family.    And the longer the child has been with the adoptive family, the more likely the court will rule that the child should remain with the adoptive family.

Consider, for example, In re J.M.P., a Louisiana case.  There, the Louisiana Supreme Court ruled that the birth mother had timely revoked her consent;  that should mean that the child be returned to her, right?  Nope, the court remanded to the trial court for a hearing on the best interest of the child.  The supreme court instructed the trial court to consider the psychological bonding between the child and adoptive parents -- and by the time the best interest hearing was held after this appeal, the child had been with those adoptive parents for over two years.  What are the chances that the child was returned to the birth mother, do you suppose?! (There's no reported case after that hearing, so I don't know for a fact what happened, but I can guess!).

In Lemley v. Barr, the birth mother's consent was invalid because she was not 18 at the time she signed the papers.  Immediately after she signed, her parents went to the lawyer and said they wanted the child back.  The lawyer refused, and refused to tell them where the child was.  When the birth mother asked the lawyer again days later, the lawyer again refused.  When the birth mother filed suit in Ohio, the lawyer, under orders from the adoptive parents, refused to tell the court where the child was or who the adoptive parents were.  Two years and two months later, the Ohio Supreme Court ruled that the birth mother's consent was invalid, and the lawyer had to reveal the names and location of the adoptive parents.  While all this was being litigated, the adoptive parents filed for adotion in a West Virginia court.  As soon as the names and location of the adoptive parents were revealed, the birth mother filed in West Virginia for the return of the child, based on the Ohio court's decree.  The West Virginia trial court refused to accept it.  After an additional 2 years and three months passed, the West Virginia Supreme Court finally ruled that the courts must accept the Ohio Supreme Court's decree -- BUT, the court remanded to a West Virginia trial court to hold a hearing on whether a change of custody was in the best interest of the child, who was now 5 years old.  Here's what the court said:

Certainly in the case before us we do not have an instance of kidnapping, violence, or flight from the jurisdiction of the court.  Indeed, the Barrs [adoptive parents] used all possible legal strategems to avoid an unfavorable ruling in the Ohio courts, but at no time did they resort to self-help by fleeing or by refusing to follow a lawful court order.  And, although Miss Lemley [birth mother] was young, frightened, and inexperienced, she did sign papers on two occasions consenting to an adoption, and she accepted money for the payment of her medical expenses.  Nonetheless, Miss Lemley has equity on her side too; she did not sleep upon her rights.  she tried to regain possession of Ryan immediately and it is difficult for us to tell her now that she cannot have Ryan because it is "too late."  Yet, as we have already indicated, the only entirely innocent party in these proceedings is the child, Ryan Barr.

The record before us is devoid of detailed evidence concerning what is now in the best interests of Ryan Barr. But we do know from the facts of record that Ryan is a five-year-old child who has spent almost his entire life with an adoptive mother, father and siblings in Huntington, West Virginia.  If we now transfer custody to Miss Lemley, who counsel informs us has married, he will be taken to another place and brought up by people who are complete strangers to him.  Although we cannot say that this is not in his best interests, we can at least say that there is some question in our mind whether such action is appropriate.

No idea what happened after this (if anyone knows, I'd love the info -- I've been looking online for years for an update with no luck), but there really couldn't have been a much clearer direction to the trial court to find that it was in the best interest of the child to remain with the adoptive parents. . . .

So, I say again, delay is in the best interests of the parents in possession in a contested adoption, and that's usually the adoptive parents.  Yes, a court might simply return the child to the birth family upon finding that the adoption was illegal.  But a court might also engage in that "ends-means thinking" and decide that, regardless of the illegality of the adoption, we'll do just about anything to keep from taking those kids away from "the only parents they've ever known."

Difficulties in Reforming Soviet-Era Orphanages

The Moscow Times reports on barriers to reforming Soviet-era orphanages:

Twenty years after the collapse of the Soviet Union, about 371,700 children are growing up in state institutions, according to figures that the Russian government presented to the United Nations in 2011.

Russia’s orphan population is as large as that of some of its provincial cities. And along with other former communist countries, it has one of the highest rates in the world.

Only 30 percent of these “orphans” have no parents. Many fall into the system when their parents, often fighting a losing battle with alcohol or drugs, are denied their parental rights or give up their child.

Almost half in this “orphan city” have disabilities or special needs, and their parents are encouraged to send them to an institution.

In 2006, then-President Vladimir Putin ordered officials to cut the number of children living in institutions, delivering a speech that evoked unease about population decline and foreigners adopting Russian children.

As Putin prepares to return to the presidency, the birth rate has started to creep up, but the number of children in institutions remains stubbornly high.

Critics argue that Putin’s order ran aground because special interests are stifling reform.

* * *

“I think that [the system] is very profitable for bureaucrats,” said Maria Ostrovskaya, director of the St. Petersburg-based children’s charity Perspektivy, which supports children and adults with disabilities.

Money flows into repairing and decorating buildings, but children’s quality of life has hardly changed in the 15 years she has worked in the sector.

“If you go into an institution today, you will not see leaking ceilings, torn linoleum and broken beds,” Ostrovskaya said. “Everything will be very nice: nice bed linens, repaired accommodations.”

But children cannot play outside, and the system is not designed around their needs, she said.

* * *

Russia’s Soviet-era orphanages may have been patched up since the crisis years of the early 1990s, but they continue to stunt children’s development.

“The physical conditions are so much better; there is no way to compare it with ’90s,” said Svyatoslav Dovbyna, a pediatric neurologist and co-founder of St. Petersburg Early Intervention Institute, which supports disabled children living at home. “Now you can see the flat-screen TVs, the carpets that the corporate donors have paid for. But the psychological environment has not really changed.”

Does Open Adoption Allow Adoption for Muslims?

I've posted before about interpretations of Islam that restrict adoption. At the Daily Beast, a report about an organization looking at a reinterpretation of the ban:

Two years ago, a 13-year-old Somali boy named Abdi was reportedly recruited to be a suicide bomber when he was an orphan. Last year, a Pakistani political leader, Jahanara Watto, penned a brutally honest piece in an English daily observing that most suicide bombers are orphans under age 17. Both stories followed a story in a London-based pan-Arab daily that quoted an Iraqi interior minister as saying al Qaeda was targeting orphans as future bombers.

These headlines underscore a troubling reality in our global Muslim community: we have abandoned our most vulnerable children—because of an antiquated, shortsighted, and regressive stricture that makes adoption illegal. There are a lot of excuses that are used to sanction a ban on adoption: that children shouldn’t lose their biological lineage and that, after hitting puberty, children would be taboo to their adopted parents. In Islam, there is a concept of maharam, or a relative with whom sexual intercourse would be considered incest. That includes parents, grandparents, uncles, aunts, nieces, nephews, children; "in-law maharam" is an accepted concept to cover parents in-law, children in-law, and stepchildren. Alas, mainstream Islamic interpretation hasn't included adopted children. Thus, the logic goes, it means a father could marry his adopted daughter.

This week, Islamic society moved into the 21st century with a slick little brochure by a New York-based advocacy group of Muslim women scholars called the Women’s Islamic Initiative in Spirituality and Equality, an effort of the American Society for Muslim Advancement's Muslim Women's Shura Council, organized to reexamine interpretations of Islamic law that directly affect women. A shura is a committee of scholars, alas, traditionally men. The headline on the pamphlet: “Adoption Is Supported by the Qur’an.” These women offer a new interpretation of the Islamic ruling, blessing "open adoptions," where adopted children know their biological family but are legally adopted.

Orphan finds his way home using Google Earth

What a story!

Beyond the novelty of ne'erseen shipwrecks and rooftop sunbathers, the venerable bird's-eye map of the world has emerged, for one man at least, as a beacon, guiding him home after 25 years.

Saroo Brierley was 5-years-old, living in a slum in India when he and his brother were sent to beg for money at the train station. He fell asleep on a train and woke-up ten hours and some 900 miles later in the town of Kolkata on the other side of the country. For a month he wandered the streets, 5-years-old, trying to find his way home.

Eventually he was declared an orphan and adopted by Australians. He spent the next 25 years growing up in Tasmania, more than 8,000 miles away.

All the while he remembered his home, scattered images.

Ten years ago he began the search. City by city, comparing maps to the images in his memory. In the end, it was Google Earth that brought him home. Thousands of hours scouring images, and there was the train station from his childhood. The place it all began some quarter-century before.

He booked a ticket and returned to India, walked the streets, asked of anyone who would listen, and on a narrow roadway in a place buried in childhood memories, he knocked on a door that had been closed nearly all his life. His mother answered.

Russian Duma to Debate U.S.-Russia Adoption

From RiaNovosti:

An adoption deal between Russia and the United States drafted in the wake of a series of tragic episodes involving Russian children and their adoptive American families was submitted to the State Duma for ratification on Friday, a lower house spokesman said.

The need for such an agreement became particularly acute two years ago when a U.S. mother sent her a seven-year-old adopted Russian son back to Moscow on a plane with a note saying she did not want him anymore.

* * *

Russian children’s rights ombudsman Pavel Astakhov earlier said he hoped the agreement would be ratified this spring.

Gender Imbalance in China

From China Daily, a look at improving ratios that are still terribly unbalanced, with not a single mention of the role of the one child policy in that imbalance:

The notoriously problematic gap between the number of boys and girls born in China has reduced for three consecutive years, the first sustained alleviation in the gender ratio in 30 years, said a report in Thursday's People's Daily newspaper.
But the figure is still higher than a warning limit and the country faces an arduous task to redress its gender imbalance, according to the flagship newspaper of the Communist Party of China.

Census data released by the National Bureau of Statistics showed that in 2011, China's gender ratio stood at 117.78 newborn boys for every 100 baby girls, a continuous decline from 119.45 in 2009 and 117.94 in 2010.

This result indicates that government measures, including crackdowns on illegal prenatal gender tests and selective abortions, are proving effective, Zhang Jian, a public communication official of the National Population and Family Planning Commission (NPFPC), told the newspaper.

A natural gender ratio at birth should be somewhere between 103 and 107 boys to every 100 girls. Due to the higher mortality rate of boys, the ratio will balance off by the time each generation reaches an age to have their own children.

However, since ultrasound inspections have enabled fetal gender testing in China in the 1980s, the country's gender ratio for newborn babies has hovered at a high level, and reached 120.56 in 2008.

* * *

And the serious gender imbalance is not only a population problem, but also a grave social problem, Zhang noted.

* * *

Experts have also proposed enhanced efforts to promote equal opportunities and the social status of females as a fundamental solution to the problem.

The preference for boys in Chinese society became conventional in China's era of under-development, when boys were favored as stronger laborers.

The problem lingers in modern China, though. Even in some of the country's affluent coastal areas, gender ratio figures are climbing, the article noted.

Excepting improvement in education levels of girls and women, females are still left behind their male counterparts in job opportunities, career positions and salary, said Yang Juhua, a demographic professor with Renmin University of China.

Mother Reunited With Stolen Child She Was Told Had Died

A reuniun in the Spanish stolen babies debacle:

Manuela Polo is one of hundreds of women who were told their babies died shortly after birth when in fact they were taken and given to childless couples in a stolen baby scandal dating back to the Franco era that has only recently come to light.

The 79-year old from Galicia never fully believed that her seventh child had died shortly after she gave birth in a hospital in La Coruna and after a long search and a DNA test she finally met her daughter last week.

Mrs Polo was told that she had a baby boy and held him only briefly before he was whisked away by doctors who later said he had died. Her husband was shown a tiny coffin meant to contain the corpse.

But the baby, a girl, had been sold to a couple unable to have children of their own. The child was brought up in Valencia with the name Maria Jesus Cebrian, who began the search for her birth mother 12 years ago.

* * *

It is only the second time campaigners have been able to prove that a baby said to have died at birth was stolen and sold in a network in which doctors, nuns, priests and even undertakers were complicit.
More than 1,000 families have registered with campaign groups and are demanding Spain's attorney general's office to launch a full investigation into a widespread scandal stretching over 40 years. Campaign groups suspect there could be as many as 300,000 cases of baby snatching.

Single mothers, those who already had several children, and mothers of twins were targeted on the basis that they did not deserve or need their babies. It began as a policy during the time of dictator General Francisco Franco and is thought to have continued into the early 1990s.

New Directions For the Family Tree

At NPR's , a panel discussion about nontraditional families, including an adoptive mother in an open adoption, a gay adoptive father in a transracial, closed adoption, and a mother via donor insemination.  You can read the transcript and/or listen to the story here. Here's a snippet:

LYDEN: So, everybody, moms and dad - let's start with you, Carrie. Your daughter was adopted through what's called an open adoption. You have a relationship with the birth mom. And you wrote in your blog that having an open adoption is complicated. There's so much beauty in allowing an adopted child to know and love a birth family, but with that knowledge comes the burden of truth. And we wondered, what is that burden of truth?

GOLDMAN: The burden of truth is - I look at it this way. Most adopted children harbor a fantasy about their other family, and in their minds it's just this perfect alternative to the family they're in. And, when you're in a closed adoption, the fantasy might just live. When you're in an open adoption, you know the conditions that the birth family lives in.

And, in Katie's situation, her birth family's life is very difficult at times. And we have to balance how much to reveal to her so that we're honest with how much to keep back from her because she's just a little girl and I don't want her to feel anxious or stressed when she learns that her birth family is struggling.

LYDEN: Jay Rapp, you and your partner, Gene, have two daughters. You guys are gay. Both these girls are adopted. How much have you told them about the birth families?

RAPP: We've been honest from the very beginning. My oldest daughter, who's eight, she actually has pictures of her birth mother and her half-siblings. She has two sisters and a brother. And our younger daughter, who is four, actually doesn't have any of those things, so we know very little about her family. And, of course, these are both closed adoptions.

But we've tried to be very honest from the beginning when we talk about our family. And really, although this may sound cliche, really conveying that they came from a very loving family who, of course, would have wanted to keep them were circumstances different, but for a variety of reasons, were unable and, as a result, wanted to provide them with what might be a better life.

A Look Inside China

Forty-one awesome photos from around China, published in the Atlantic.  A must-see for China adoptive parents who want to know about modern China, not just the historical empress-in-silk-qipao version.  Yes, some of the photos are focused on the bizarre, rather than the truly typical, but news photos in the U.S. are, too!  There are some important slice-of-life photos, too.

Child Poverty: Adoption is NOT the Solution

At Huffington Post, by Dr. Jane Aronson, often called the "Orphan Doctor:"

I was with some colleagues today discussing the plight of the children of the world. Sometimes, I think that if I just keep talking, something will come of it. I'm optimistic and hopeful even though the statistics are ugly, alarming and outrageous.

Tony Lake, head of UNICEF, wrote a beautiful piece for Lancet in 2011 in which he referred to the loss of developmental potential for children in the modern world as an "outrage." The research and scholarship on this subject is outstanding as researchers continue to reveal the complex issues of early childhood development in poor children all over the world. When you factor in the long term effects of malnutrition, lack of pre-natal care and stimulation, abuse, neglect, gender inequity, early marriage, child trafficking, child labor, child conscription and institutionalization, it is a fair estimate that half the world's children are living a marginalized life.

* * *

And when the question is how do we care for 153 million orphans, the solution is not adoption. Rather, it's about about strategic and thoughtful work to build communities and provide access to medical care and education for children from the moment they are born... to support women so that they can be educated and grow the economic strength of their communities.

It's about preventing poverty and providing hope. There are many models of community-based care and creative tools to help children and families grow and be successful but investment in social work infrastructure and community worker training programs are essential to any model. Midwives, vaccinators, community workers and case managers are the wave of the future.

forced adoptions for unwed mothers around the globe

From Dan Rather at Yahoo News, an article focusing on birth mothers forced or coerced to relinquish babies in Spain, Ireland, Australia, Canada and the U.S.:

Most women describe giving birth to a child as a life changing experience – in a word – “challenging”, “joyous”, “miraculous.” But generations of young, unwed women describe their experience of giving birth to a child as a nightmare – and decades later their suffering has yet to end.

From Australia to Spain, Ireland to America, and as recent as 1987, young mothers say they were “coerced”, “manipulated”, and “duped” into handing over their babies for adoption. These women say sometimes their parents forged consent documents, but more often they say these forced adoptions were coordinated by the people their families trusted most...priests, nuns, social workers, nurses or doctors. 

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Two weeks ago, a prominent Canadian law firm announced that it would file a class-action lawsuit against Quebec's Catholic Church accusing the Church of kidnapping, fraud and coercion to force unwed mothers to give up their children for adoption.

Attorney Tony Merchant represents several hundred women who claim that when they were in maternity homes in the 1950s and 1960s, social workers, nurses, doctors, and even men and women in the employ of the Catholic Church cooperated with government officials to force or, even coerce, young women to sign away their rights to keep their child never knowing they even had a choice.

Merchant was quoted in the Montreal Gazette as saying, "The beliefs the Catholic Church (in Quebec) had about premarital sex and the judgmental approach the church had, made it particularly aggressive in pressuring women into putting their children up for adoption."

In Spain, an 80-year-old nun, Sister Maria Gómez, became the first person accused of baby snatching in a scandal over the trafficking of 1,500 newborns in Spanish hospitals over four decades until the 1980s. The babies were either stolen, sold or given away by adoption.

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We have interviewed numerous women in the U.S. who told us that they were sent to maternity homes, denied contact with their families and friends, forced to endure labor with purposely painful procedures and return home without their babies. Single, American mothers were also denied financial support and told that their children would be better off without them.

In some cases, they too were told that their babies had died. Many signed away their rights while drugged and exhausted after childbirth. Others were threatened with substantial medical bills if they didn't surrender or were manipulated through humiliation. According to Fessler [author of The Girls Who Went Away], these seemingly unethical practices were used against as many as 1.5 million mothers in the United States.

White Adoptive Parents: Keeping Your Children of Color Safe in a Racist World

At Land of a Gazillion Adoptees, Keum Mee asks important questions about the training, knowledge and competence of white transracially adopting parents to teach their children of color what they need to know:

If you have been listening to the news at all lately, you have probably heard the tragic story of Trayvon Martin‘s death. Since adoption is the place my mind is most of the time, I just keep thinking, “How many transracial adoptive parents know that this story is relevant to their own families?” In his Washington Post blog article, opinion writer, Johnathan Capehart, recalls “the list of the 'don’ts'" he received from his mother about how to behave in public when a young Capehart was about to transfer to a predominantly white school. As a black woman in America, Capehart’s mother knew through lived experience the challenges her son would face as a black man in a white world. So when I hear the accounts of adoption professionals like Melanie Chung-Sherman about the lack of attention to race in adoption placement, I worry that our kids of color are not in line to receive valuable skills and information they need to survive as a non-white person in a predominantly white society from their white parents. What if some white parents of kids of color adhere to a our-world-is-colorblind philosophy? What kind of lived experience will they share with their children? What will happen to their children when they leave the protective umbrella of their parents’ white privilege?

So how about you?  What are you doing to help your children grow up SAFE in a world that will make assumptions about them, solely based on their appearance? 

I have to admit, I hate asking this question -- what should the potential VICTIM do to avoid danger?  It's so victim-blaming, like telling girls they're to blame for their own rapes because they wore a short skirt or a see-through blouse.  I absolutely CRINGED when Geraldo Rivera said the solution was for boys of color not to wear hoodies.  REALLY?!  Isn't the solution to END RACISM?! Yes. But. In the meantime, I need to keep my children safe, even when I'm not there to clothe them in my white privilege.  So what do we do?

1. Read. Listen. Learn. I don't have the "lived experience" to know the kinds of racisms my children will face.  So in the absence of that lived experience, I need to listen to people of color, read what they write, and ACCEPT WHAT THEY SAY. No denials allowed.  I can't say, "That doesn't really happen, you misunderstood, you overreacted, that wasn't really racist."

2.  Talk. Teach.  It's imporant to talk to our children about race and racism.  Talk explicitly about these things.  And it's not enough to talk about it as an historical event.  Martin Luther King and Rosa Parks are all well and good, but you can't act like they cured racism in the 1960s, and it's never been seen again.

3.  Recognize stereotypes. Be specific. Do you know the stereotypes associated with your child's race or ethnicity?  Do you know that Asians are thought of as sneaky and untrustworthy? as perpetually foreign?  Do you know that Asian women are considered submissive and sexually exotic?  Do you know that hispanics are thought of as shiftless and lazy?  Do you know that African-American women are seen as sexually available, and African-American men as violent criminals? Do you know how these stereotypes are often manifested? If you don't know, how can you prepare your children to recognize and respond to the stereotypes when they are manifested?  It's not pleasant to put yourself into the minds of people who think this way, but it's necessary to help your children.

4. Lessons.  My children can't absorb lessons about how to respond to the specific racisms they'll face simply by seeing how I face them -- because I won't be facing them.  That means explicit lessons are needed.  We talk about specific situations:  ching-chong speech, assumptions they know karate, the pulled-eyes gesture.  We brainstorm responses.  We role-play situations.  They learn, they feel empowered, they handle the situations when faced with them.

5.  Role models. Since our children can't learn from OUR lived experiences, make sure there are people in their lives who have lived the experiences they will likely face.

So what are you doing to keep your child of color safe in this not-colorblind world? What have I left off the list?