Is the U.S. State Department Anti-Adoption?

The Christian Post asks, and answers yes, citing the usual suspects:

In 2004, Americans adopted 22,991 orphans from other countries. That number has steadily declined to only 9,319 in 2011, according to State Department records. This decline is happening due to a set of complicated factors based partly upon different views regarding what is best for an orphaned child.

The Christian Post spoke to several international adoption experts to understand why the decline is taking place, and why adoptive parents have recently run into difficulties with the State Department when trying to bring their children home.

* * *

"It's an enormous collapse of a really valid service to children. It didn't just happen by accident. There's a reason that this all happened," Tom DiFilipo, president and CEO of Joint Council on International Children's Services, said in a Jan. 19 interview with The Christian Post.

Which is a priority: a child's need for a loving family or a child's race and ethnicity? How one answers this question drives some of the disputes over inter-country adoptions, according to Jedd Medefind, president of Christian Alliance for Orphans and former head of the Office of Faith-Based and Community Initiatives in the George W. Bush administration, in a Feb. 2 interview with The Christian Post.

"Both internationally, as well as domestically in the U.S., there have been fierce debates over which is more important, a child's ethnic background, or their need for a family," Medefind said.

As usual, we're seeing the U.N., UNICEF, and the State Department being scape-goated for following the Hague Convention.  And it's more than halfway through the article before it concedes that adoption corruption and sending country's internal politics might have something to do with the decline, too!

What Might Have Been

An adoptee piece published in the New York Times yesterday; another blogger describes it as a feel-good piece for adoptive parents, because the adoptee expresses her gratitude at being adopted.  I find it rather sad, not because of the adoptee's happiness -- adoptees are entitled to feel however they feel about their adoptions without anyone telling them otherwise -- but because it illustrates so many things adoptive parents should do differently:

FOUR years ago, when I was 24, my mother handed me a case file on myself. I had long known that I was adopted as an infant and that my birth mother had died in a car accident several years after I was born. But this case file was new to me.

Growing up, I had internalized my parents’ matter-of-fact approach to the subject, and by the time I was in elementary school, being adopted hardly seemed worth mentioning. Even so, when a classmate and I came across a book called “Why Was I Adopted?” one day during reading time, I said to him happily, “I’m adopted!”

“No you’re not,” he replied. “You’re lying.”

“I really am,” I said, bursting into tears.

I told the teacher’s aide, and within minutes I was already over it, but the aide apparently saw the chance for a teachable moment.

“Do you know why you were adopted?” she asked.

I told her it was because when I was a baby, my biological mother didn’t want to take care of me anymore.

“Didn’t want to, or couldn’t?” she asked pointedly.

I was taken aback, then said I guessed it was because she couldn’t, though the distinction hardly seemed important.

Who cared if she could or couldn’t, didn’t want to or simply didn’t care? I was a bubbly, smart child who insisted on wearing only dresses to school and who commanded the room during Christmas parties by standing on a folding chair and belting out carols. I was delightful. As far as I was concerned, if this mysterious woman didn’t want me, it was her loss.

Wow.  I'm glad this child didn't internalize a sense of rejection because she believed her birth mother didn't want her.  But many adopted children who receive this message do deal with that feeling of rejection.  How amazing that she was in elementary school before anyone drew a distinction for her between someone who can't parent and someone who doesn't want to parent.  It's especially sad when we learn later that the file her adoptive parents had about her birth mother would have allowed them quite truthfully to opine about her birth mother's inability to parent and her love for her child.

A couple of years later I came home from school and my parents looked worried. “We thought this might happen,” they said. “But we didn’t think it would happen this soon.”

My mind immediately leapt to divorce, since that was the only thing I could imagine warranting such seriousness. Instead, they sat me down and told me that my half sister had called and left a message. They had mentioned before that she existed, but for the first time they told me more.       

I give the adoptive parents kudos for at least letting their daughter know she had a biological half-sibling.  But how sad that they would convey that the contact was somehow worrisome.  They were apparently quite capable of talking about adoption in a matter-of-fact manner with her daughter, too bad they couldn't do the same about birth family contact.

She and I had the same mother, they explained, and she was interested in meeting me. She was only 18 and had just had a baby.

I don’t remember the conversation very clearly, but I gathered they felt the timing was a little suspect. They were concerned she might be after money. They said the decision to talk to her was up to me, and I told them no, I didn’t want to. It was hard to ignore their expressions of relief.

ARGHHHH!  Why convey their suspicions, and then ask if she wants contact?  Don't you think she's smart enough to figure out what YOU wanted after that?  Do you think the answer you got was what SHE wanted?  And given your obvious relief, is it any surprise that it was years later before she expressed any interest in her biological family again?

It wasn’t until several years after I had graduated from college that I thought more about the biological relatives I never knew. Out of the blue, my half sister had contacted me via Facebook, introducing herself, and I wrote back, which led one winter day to my going to visit her and her daughter in the sleepy Vermont town where she grew up and still lived with her paternal grandmother.

* * *

The next summer my half sister invited me to a family reunion where I would meet my grandmother and several aunts and uncles. Over an outdoor picnic lunch, with pained smiles, they told me a little about my birth mother.

* * *

It was dark when I returned home that night. I was staying with my parents, and after months of living in close quarters tensions among us were high.

“How was it?” my mother asked in a wobbly voice.

“Fine. I had a good time.”

“Do you consider them your family?” she asked.

I told her I did. “Of course, you’re my family, too,” I added, though it should have gone without saying.

Why ask the question?  They are, OF COURSE, her family -- her biological family.  By asking the question, you're asking her to choose between them and you.  Why?  Can't she have both?  A touch more matter-of-factness was called for, it seems to me.

The next day I was reading a book in the living room when she sat down next to me and handed me the file.       
“I think it’s time to give you this,” she said. I flipped through it awkwardly without reading anything. Only now do I realize how strange it was that she would hand over such an overwhelming collection of information without a word about what I might find.

No kidding!  And wasn't the timing awfully suspicious, too?  Sounds like mom was hanging onto the file to "play it" at exactly the right time -- a time when she fears the biological family might be threatening her position as "only family."  This is when she finds it appropriate to share negative information about birth mom.  Nice.

It would be months before I had the courage to read any of it. One night I gave in to curiosity and opened the folders with a boyfriend. I was entranced as I turned over page after page. But I completely lost it when I came across a letter my mother had written to me when I was 2.

Composed in a shaky, barely legible cursive more typical of an elderly person than a young woman, the letter was a page long, on notebook paper. Near the beginning she wrote, “The reason why you are adopted is because of the risk of poverty.” And she concluded with: “Jaime I share the pain and love you but not with the mistaken message and I try to do my best also.”

CLEARLY there were strong emotions she was trying to convey, but much of the letter made no sense, and it infuriated me.

“What is this?” I cried, wiping away tears. “She tried to write me a letter and this is the best that she could do?”

* * *

In a strange way, the file has changed my perception of my own behavior. A social worker observed that while my birth mother was pregnant with me and living in a group home, her ability to communicate “was somewhat difficult to follow at times and made it hard for certain residents to take her seriously.”

Well, I thought. When I’m nervous, I tend to ramble in a nonlinear way, or make people laugh with my unintentionally blunt responses. I had accepted these quirks as part of who I am; now I twisted the mannerisms into insidious character flaws — signs of some impending unraveling.

And this is what happens when you throw the file at your daughter without helping her deal with what's inside, without having explained all along why her birth mother couldn't parent her.  You leave her to believe she's going to have the same issues. You haven't helped her understand. Parenting FAIL.

A part of me hates the file and wishes it never existed. But some bits I treasure, and I read them over as a mental salve when the rest of it leaves me feeling depressed. Not only does it help me understand my parents’ attitude toward my biological family, it reminds me of how truly lucky I am: how my life could have been different had my adoptive parents not endured years of uncertainty and stressful battles in trying to legally make me their child.

Sounds like the file had exactly the effect adoptive mom wanted it to have, to reinforce a negative impression of birth family, to make the adoptive parents the heroes of the drama. Wouldn't it have been nice if the adoptive parents could have subordinated their feelings to their child's feelings? Helped her cope with negative information about her birth mother? Helped her see it in context?  Isn't that the job of parents?  If they had done so, and their daughter had reached exactly the same point she's at now -- grateful to be adopted rather than raised by her biological family -- I'd say good for them!  But when they've told her what to think over and over again? Not such a success, it seems to me.
Helping your child understand what might have been, if she had been raised with her birth parents, is to deal frankly with how it would have been different without making judgements about better or worse.  It's about showing how birth parents are human, fully three-dimensional, making both good and bad choices, like every other person.  It's helping the child develop positive identity, by seeing how the good in them comes from the good in their birth family, and how they have the capacity to make different choices. The "what might have been" that I would hope for this adoptee is a fully integrated life, not needing to choose between birth family and adoptive family, with an understanding and appreciation of what life has brought, both good and bad.  

The painful new realities of international adoption

That's the headline from the Globe & Mail (Canada) about the changing face of international adoption, and focusing a lot on adoption agencies going broke and going out of business:

The heyday of international adoption appears to be over.

“Intercountry adoption is changing continually. It’s not static. But there are more restrictions in place now,” says Cathy Murphy, the acting executive director of the well-regarded non-profit Ottawa agency, the Children’s Bridge.

The result is higher fees, fewer adoptions, longer waiting times, older kids.

Citizenship and Immigration Canada reports that in 2010, there were 1,968 international adoptions, down from 2,130 in 2009, and peak of 2,180 in 2003.

The downward trend is more stark in the United States, says Elizabeth Bartholet, a professor at Harvard Law School and faculty director of its child advocacy program. From an all-time high of 22,991 in 2004, international adoptions fell to 9,320 in 2011.

“In seven years it’s fallen off by more than half. So that’s a pretty stunning falling-off-the-cliff phenomenon. It definitely has affected agencies in Canada, the U.S. and elsewhere that help facilitate international adoption. It’s just drying up.”

There are about two dozen agencies in Canada, and shutting down can mean hundreds of families left in the cold. A Vancouver agency, Hope Adoption Services, closed in January, also for financial reasons. An Ontario agency, Imagine, shuttered in 2009 after its founder and general manager were charged with breach of trust and fraud. It all leaves prospective parents with a feeling that their access is shrinking.“The agency pool is getting smaller and smaller,” Ms. Beeman says.

The paper also offers a snapshot of international adoption in Canada  and a by-the-numbers infographic on international adoption.

Should White Parents Foster African-American Child Over Birth Parents' Objections?

From the Grio, a case out of Virginia raising the question of the role of biological parents' wishes in making placement decisions; we've talked about it in terms of religion, but what about race?

A white couple who say they have been denied the right to continue fostering a black child have vowed to fight authorities to overturn the decision.

For five months, foster parents Ben and Sarah FitzPatrick, gave the child a loving home but on Monday were told the baby could be taken away as early as Friday. A pair of Norfolk social workers visited their home and said because their foster baby is black, the child would be better off with African-American foster parents.

* * *

A Norfolk City Council official says that his workers do not make race-based placement decisions, but they do consider "the will of the biological parents."

* * *

A subsequent report by NewsChannel 3 says Norfolk allows biological parents who have lost custody of their child to ask for foster parents of a specific race and the investigation alleges this practice is highly unusual and it might even be illegal.

In the televised interview Norfolk's Human Services director Stephen Hawks said, "we do have to consider the will of the biological parents as one of the factors in making a decision on the appropriate placement of the child." He adds, "It's not the only factor, but that is one factor in determining the appropriate placement for a child."

Oscar-Nominated Short Film Addresses Adoption Trafficking

The MovieMaker website interviews the director of Raju, a student film that's been nominated for an Academy Award:

The Oscar-nominated short film Raju is something of an enigma. A German student film shot, not in a crew member’s backyard, but in India, the film’s small budget meant that, for director/co-writer Max Zähle, paying the cast wasn’t an option—but he snagged two A-list German actors, Wotan Wilke Möhring and Julia Richter, to star all the same. And, of course, it’s a student film that’s been nominated for an Oscar… and that’s not something that happens all too often.

In Raju, Möhring and Richter star as a German couple who travel to India to adopt a child, only to become entangled in the illegal adoption epidemic—where children are stolen from their parents and sold to couples through phony adoption agencies—that plagues the country. Zähle took the time to chat with MovieMaker about how he managed to snag A-list talent for his student film, the challenges of filming in India and his feelings on Raju‘s unexpected (but certainly most welcome) Oscar nomination.

* * *

MM: How did you learn about the issue of illegal adoption that serves as the centerpiece of Raju? And what about that issue made you want to make a film about it?

MZ: I was researching [topics for my] film and found out about a situation where children get stolen out of the country. The [foster parents adopting them] want to do something good, but it’s bad, it’s illegal. So I started to research, and I found out about this global, massive, child-trafficking illegal adoption problem, and it really touched me. How far is a couple willing to go to get a child? On the other hand, who has the right to have a child? Those were the questions that really interested me as a filmmaker, finding out how far a person would go, what the moral order of a person is if they want to have a child [so badly].

MM: And if they knew where the child had come from, would they do the right thing in returning it to its real parents? I thought was one of the most interesting parts of Raju, how the wife didn’t want to give the child up, but the husband did.

MZ:That was actually the whole drama. Because even the woman, she’s not a bad person. It’s heartbreaking, because she doesn’t want to do anything bad, but they just want the child so badly that it gives them this moral dilemma.

The Rescue Meme

Yes, I know it's talking about adopting an animal.  I'm all for that.  And I also don't  care when adoption is used to talk about things that are not like adoption -- highways, stars, zoo animals, liberals . . . .  But a friend sent the photo to me, and it reminded me of how much I dislike the rescue meme, which I've written about before. 

I thought you might like to watch this trailer for a new documentary about saving orphans, believe it or not, called Rescued:


Oh, and the trailer is quite frank about one thing -- the rescue isn't just saving a life, it's "collecting lost little ones" to save their souls.  What else could adoption be about, huh?

Why Jeremy Lin Matters

Lots being written these days about Jeremy Lin, basketball player, and the fact that he's Asian-American and one of the few Asians in the NBA.  Angry Asian Man has a blog roundup of Linsanity posts;  Racialicious warns that a great deal of Linsanity is about race.  I'm watching a news show right now, where they're talking about a televised image of Jeremy Lin's head emerging from a fortune cookie as a racist image. So clearly there are a lot of layers to Linsanity, including this post by an Asian mom about what Jeremy Lin means to her 3.5-year-old son, and what he would have meant to her as a young girl facing racism in America:

Jeremy Lin is riding a well-deserved wave of goodwill and adulation. After being undrafted and waived by not one, but two, NBA teams last year, the 23-year-old point guard for the New York Knicks has become the sport's latest sensation.

And Asian-Americans are loving it.

Each time Lin shows off his skills on the basketball court or does an on-air interview where — surprise! — he has no accent, he helps Asian-Americans get one step closer to being accepted as "real" Americans.

Like millions of other viewers last week, my family was glued to the TV watching the Knicks defeat the Los Angeles Lakers. Like most Americans, my 31/2 - year-old son Kyle had never seen an Asian-American basketball player in the NBA. Pointing at Lin, he shouted, "That's me! He looks like me!"

What a difference a few decades make.

"Following the Plan" Might be Harder Than it Seems

Rhea Perlman visits Children's Court in Los Angeles, and writes about what she saw there at Huffington Post.  Read the whole thing, but I wanted to share this part, since it's a perspective we rarely hear, one sympathetic to biological parents in dependency proceedings who "just need to follow the plan" to regain custody of their children:

I was invited back to visit Judge Marguerite Downing in her chambers. Judge Downing is a confident, down to earth woman, with years of experience as a lawyer for juveniles and a judge. She seems quite astute at sizing up the people who come before her. She told me that she thought that many of the families she sees have problems that come and go. Most have other family members who could step in to care for the children when they are taken from their homes, and that this would be the best situation for these kids. The problem is that very often the regulations for fostering a child are too tough to be met by the family... for example, a house that doesn't have the required amount of space. So the kids end up in foster homes with unfamiliar people, separated from their siblings and away from relatives who know them. Often parents are mandated to take classes they can't afford and have no way of getting to.

Even visitation can be tough... for example, in a hearing I watched, the Dept of Children's Services recommended that the father and the mother be allowed to have unsupervised visits with their children at separate times, in a neutral setting, for three hours a week each. This particular mother didn't drive. Her husband was her ride. Their 4 children were not living together. They were placed with different families in neighborhoods far from where the parents lived. The judge questioned how it would be possible to continue trying to parent the children with these restrictions. She ruled that the parents could visit together in a neutral setting for 6 hours a week, for now. Another hearing was scheduled in 6 months time.

We often hear about biological families that don't "follow the plan" set out for them by courts and Children's Services to regain custody of their children, as if that failure is just another in a long list of personal failures that mean these parents shouldn't be allowed to parent.  Not often do we hear about some of the practical difficulties  in following the plan.
Since Perlman actively promotes adoption, I think most people will see the title of her article, A Child Can't Be Raised by a System... or a Court, as a plea for more and faster adoption from foster care.  It might well be that, but it also suggests that the system, including courts, is no more able to allow children to be raised by their parents, either.

Name-Calling: "You Dangerous Adopted Boy!"

I've always rememembered a story my 6th grade Math teacher told about some people slinging insults at each other, and one emerged victorious by calling the other, "You hypotenuse!"  Yes, the winning insult was "You longest side of a right triangle!"  But it really does sound awful, doesn't it?

Well, we've always known kids will sling insults about adoption, telling someone they're adopted when they're not as a way to say you're weird, or you don't fit in, or you don't belong.

But grown-ups?  "He's an adopted boy" as an insult?  A talking-head psychologist on Fox News thought that was the way to put down political opponent, David Brooks Brock:

This is an adopted boy who needs to plumb the depths of his psyche. He was adopted. Many adopted children are tremendously well-adjusted, but for some reason, this man feels he’s unloved and unlovable, shunted to the side, and that’s the antidote he feels: unlimited power.

And this isn't the worst of it, the same guy tags this "adopted boy" as "dangerous."  Sigh.

I know what you're thinking, this is just liberal Malinda dissing Fox News again, this didn't really happen, right?!  Wrong.  Listen for yourself:


P.S. Dawn Davenport at Creating a Family is calling for a write-in campaign asking for an apology.  You can get all the details, including addresses and a sample letter at this link.

In the Matter of Mothers

From the Atlantic, a piece mostly about surrogacy and egg donation, entitled Do Mothers Matter?, also relevant to adoption, despite a quasi-disclaimer:

Do mothers matter? Having no mother was -- at least until recently -- widely agreed to be a tragedy. Psychiatric case studies, Disney movies, and well-known spirituals such as "Sometimes I Feel Like a Motherless Child" have testified to the importance of mothers and the pain of mother loss. But such views have not meant that every child has lived in a society that affirms the importance of the child's bond with his or her mother. Children have been denied their mothers because of class biases (see, poor); racial and ethnic biases (Indian, Aborigine); as part of severe civil conflict (Argentina, Dirty War); amid widespread, institutionalized human rights abuses (slavery); or because their mothers were rightly or wrongly perceived to be unfit (see: history of adoption, good, bad, and ugly).

Yet even as the broad history of helping ourselves to other people's children continues to be probed and largely condemned (except in the case of adoption, where most reasonable people agree that such an institution must exist in order to find loving homes for children in need of them), a newer and notably deliberate form of mother loss has sprung up, one that receives relatively little debate and is often presented as benign or even good, without question. I am referring, of course, to the practices of surrogacy and egg donation.

* * *

Based on a representative sample, in "My Daddy's Name is Donor" we reported that most sperm donor-conceived persons strongly object to anonymous donation of sperm. Nearly half feel troubled by the role of money in their conception. Most want to know about their biological father's family, and they wonder if that family would want to know about them. Compared to their peers raised by biological parents, sperm donor-conceived persons are more likely to struggle with delinquency, addiction, and depression.

Clearly, at least some of these kids are not really all right. It seems entirely plausible that at least some conceived never to know their mothers might share the feelings of the sample in our study. For decades we have debated whether fathers matter. Must we now debate whether mothers matter, too?

Happy Love Day!

Happy LOVE day!  That's what Zoe wrote on the Valentine's Day card she made for me.  It was a lovely day, and I hope yours was, too. In addition to Zoe's card, Maya gifted me with a poem far nicer than last year's "Roses are red, violets are blue, you're a terrible mother and I HATE you (long story)."  Obviously inspired by the children's book Love You Forever (a book I can't read to my kids without tearing up), this year Maya said, "I love you forever, I like you for always, as long as I'm living, my Mommy you'll be!"

I think most people think of Valentine's Day as a romantic holiday, but I consider it a celebration of love of all kinds (probably because my life is sans romance these days!). So I thought I'd round up some previous posts about love.  If you have nothing better to do this Valentine's Day, I'm sorry, but I hope you'll enjoy!

The nature and quality of love in adoptive families

 What's Love Got To Do With It?

Will I love my adopted child like I love my bio child?

Love is NOT Colorblind

I Love My Hair!

Not Always Love at First Sight

Gitchi Gotcha Goo Means I Love You?

Love, Abandonment Style

Blog Love (as true today as when I wrote it years ago!)

Kristin Chenoweth & Rosie O'Donnell Talk Adoption

The website describes it as:

Kristin Chenoweth Opens Up About Her Adoption

At first, actress Kristin Chenoweth was scared to talk about being adopted, but she explains why she's not afraid anymore. Plus, Kristin and Rosie share an emotional moment when they contemplate what it would be like for Kristin to meet her birth mother and for Rosie's children to meet their birth mothers.

What do you think?

New Study: Adoptees & Suicide Risk

A new study suggests that both nature and nurture work together to increase risk of suicide in adoptees:

A new study from Karolinska Institutet and Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, USA, shows that adopted children from a biological family with experience of suicide were more likely to themselves attempt suicide if their adoptive mother had also been treated for a psychiatric disorder. The results, which are presented in the scientific periodical The American Journal of Psychiatry, suggest that the genes can be affected by environmental factors, according to the researchers.
It is known from previous research that a family that has already suffered a suicide is at risk of a recurrence. Suicide appears to be more likely in those who are exposed to suicidal behaviour in the family as a child or teenager than as a young adult. Suicidal behaviour is also slightly more likely in adults if, as children, their mother - rather than their father - had attempted suicide. To ascertain whether this increased risk is genetically or environmentally determined researchers at Karolinska Institutet and Johns Hopkins studied early-adopted children with an enhanced family-related suicide risk but, as adoptees, no exposure to a suicidal act by a biological parent.
Their results show that the likelihood of an adopted child attempting suicide later in life was unaffected if there was only one biological parent who had committed or attempted suicide or if the adoptive parent had been receiving psychiatric treatment before the child turned 18; however, there was a four-fold risk if a biological parent displayed suicidal behaviour and the adoptive mother had been in psychiatric care.

"We see this as a sign of hereditary-environment interaction, whereby the biological or genetic inheritance can be influenced by environmental factors in early childhood," says investigator Professor Bo Runeson at the Department of Clinical Neuroscience, Karolinska Institutet. "Identifying and treating psychiatric disorders in parents is one possible way to prevent a predisposition for suicidal behaviour being passed down to the next generation."

Religion & Adoption/Foster Placements

As I've mentioned before, past adoption practices required matching of adoptive parents and children on all kinds of factors from socioeconomic background to hair color and texture to religion.  We've also discussed in the context of international adoption whether maintaining a child's culture meant also maintaining a child's religion.  And then a few months ago I posted about a proposed statute in New Jersey to require foster and adoption placements to be in homes that would “maintain a child’s religious upbringing,” because of concerns about children being “put in a home where the parents practiced a religion other than that of the child.” From what I can tell, the bill died in committee, but has been reintroduced this legislative term.

With that background, I thought folks might find this article in the Jerusalem Times interesting:

The Haifa Family Court officially declared a five-year-old girl ready for adoption on Sunday, while criticizing social workers for taking years to file for the adoption order.

The child, “Baby P.,” is the daughter of a single mother of no stated religion, and a Muslim Israeli Arab father. For the past four years, the child has lived with a haredi (ultra- Orthodox) foster family, which has since expressed a wish to formally adopt her.

* * *

In her ruling, Judge Esperanza Alon slammed a decision by social workers to place “Baby P.” for such a long time with a foster family whose religious and cultural backgrounds, she said, were very different from the child’s own. Alon said “Baby P.’s” identity and fate remained under question for many very significant years.

“Under the Adoption Law, social workers are supposed to place minors with foster families with the same or similar lifestyles and religion as their biological families,” Alon said. “It was not right that she should have grown up in a haredi family, when the gaps between the community into which she was born and the one in which she grew up have such significant differences.”

Comments?

Search for Identity & Adopted Teen's Death

A tragic story of a teen runaway found dead, cause of death unknown but suspicious (found in a suitcase in an abandoned lot), sharing because of the adoption elements:

Josh, whose 17th birthday came and went while he was missing, was an adopted child whose search for identity may have led to the shallow grave where his remains were discovered.

"He was a kind and compassionate soul, but on the other hand, he didn't understand the consequences for his actions," said Jan Churchwell, his adoptive mother.

She and her husband, Bob, took in the boy after he was removed from his mother's home. The Churchwells raised him in a house full of children, some their own, others foster kids.

* * *

Josh was the biological son of Luis Rivera and Tammy Fernandez. Adams County Human Services took him out of the home when he was 3 years old for reasons Fernandez would not discuss.

"He was my little Bucky Beaver; when he smiled he showed all his teeth," said Fernandez, 47.

A couple that took Josh and two of his siblings decided to keep his brother and sister but found him difficult. They asked Adams County to find another home.

At that point, the Churchwells, who had provided emergency foster care for Adams and Kit Carson counties, opened their home to Josh.

* * *

Jan Churchwell recalled stopping short outside a room in her home when she heard the boy chattering inside. The then-fourth-grader was standing alone in front of a mirror.

"I am not a Churchwell," he said to his reflection. "I am a Rivera, I want my real family."

She spoke with him, and it was clear he believed the rest of Fernandez's seven children remained with their mother, that he was the only one separated from the family.

"It was terrible because I hadn't realized for all those years that he was internalizing that loss. That explained why he was so angry," she said.

[His adoptive parents facilitated a reunion with his birth mother and siblings, none of whom remained with his birth mother.] 

* * *

As he grew, Josh took up wrestling, following in the footsteps of Isaiah, one of the Churchwells' older children. And he played drums and tuba, earning spots on the Burlington middle and high school bands.

He was fascinated with his Hispanic heritage and spent time in Burlington's Mexican-American community.

He attended quinceañera balls — coming-out parties for girls when they turn 15. He ate at the homes of Hispanic friends, where he learned to tell authentic Mexican dishes from more pedestrian fare made to American tastes.

But as his circle of friends widened, he fell in with some troubled teens. [Criminal acts led him to Juvenile detention, and he ran away from an alternative school].

* * *

The system failed Josh twice, the Churchwells believe — first when social services separated him from all of his siblings and again when his disappearance was treated as an escape.

Russia Suspending Adoptions to the U.S.?

Several different media outlets are reporting this, as if it's NEW news, but I'd already heard that this request was in the works since January 18, and blogged about it 10 days ago.  So I don't know if it qualifies as new-news.There's also lots of contradictions in the reporting. Maybe it's worthwhile to try to clear up some of that. . . .

All seem to agree as to the reason is "an 'incessant string of crimes' allegedly committed by American adoptive parents." Some are saying that adoptions are suspended until the U.S. and Russia "sign an accord."  But of course, we know there was a bilateral agreement between the U.S. and Russia about adoptions in July 2011, after the Artyom incident.  Maybe it's the nature of the agreement -- some of the reports say adoptions are to be suspended until there's an agreement that "allows Russian monitors to visit the homes of adopted children."

The Russia News Agency.seems to be reporting it differently:

Moscow will suspend the adoption of Russian children by U.S. citizens until the Russian-U.S. adoption deal comes into force, Foreign Ministry said on Saturday.

The move comes after series of incidents involving the mistreatment of adopted Russian children in the United States.

“Regarding the incessant series of crimes in the United States against adopted Russian children, Russian Foreign Ministry rules that the adoption procedures for the U.S. citizens should be suspended until the Russian-U.S. adoption deal, signed on July 13, 2011, comes into force,” the ministry said in a statement.

Russia and the United States signed a bilateral adoption agreement in July which states several important points, including psychological testing of the adoptive parents as well as obliges adoptive parents to work with only accredited adoption agencies.

If it's just a suspension until prospective adoptive parents have satisfied the psychological testing requirement, it doesn't seem like such a big deal.  If it's until the U.S. agrees to let Russian monitors into adoptive parents homes?  That could be a deal breaker, since the U.S. wouldn't agree to it in the July 2011 bilateral agreement, as the State Department background briefing about the agreement made clear.

Probably too early to tell what will ultimately come of it. Maybe it's as this article reports -- just a political tool in the domestic elections in Russia to gin up anti-American sentiment, and after those elections (in March, I believe) the issue will go away. Who knows.

Bio Children Challenge Father's Adoption of His Adult Girlfriend

A new twist to the already twisted case of John Goodman's adoption of his 42-year-old girlfriend -- his teen children are challenging the adoption:

The outraged kids of International Polo Club Palm Beach tycoon John Goodman are demanding that a judge throw out their dad's move to adopt his 42-year-old girlfriend, accusing him of intentionally duping the court.

Goodman, 48, is accused of drunk driving and vehicular manslaughter in the death of 23-year-old Scott Wilson in February 2010.

In a stunning move last fall, Goodman adopted his girlfriend Heather Laruso Hutchins, 42, entitling her to up to a third of his biological children's trust fund, worth $300million.

Harriet and John Jr - who are in their teens - are now fighting the adoption, charging their father with intentionally committing fraud and making a mockery of the adoption process.

The Palm Beach Post reported that a motion was filed in Miami-Dade court on behalf of the children’s guardian, Jeffrey Goddess, arguing that they and their mother had no idea the adoption had taken place until two months after it was finalised.

The motion reads: The motion continues, 'If Mr. Goodman would like to protect her and take care of her financially, the obvious solution would be to marry her - not to make her his child.'

Their attorney, Joseph Rebak told the paper: 'I have never seen anything like this in my 31, 32 years practicing law. Obviously we think it's wrong and we are hoping to have it set aside.'

But longtime adoption lawyer Charlotte Danciu told CBS 12 that she’s 'not sure these children will actually have the standing to challenge the adoption.'

In all the centuries of parents embarrassing their teenage children, Goodman might well win the grand prize with this little trick. I certainly don't blame the kids for being upset -- it's pretty outrageous behavior on the part of a parent. But it's also an interesting legal point -- can biological or previously adopted children challenge the legality of a subsequent adoption? 

Of course, the children would have no grounds to complain if Daddy had another biological child, right? Adding another child to the mix would, in fact, reduce the potential inheritance of previous children or reduce their share of a trust created for all children of the parent, regardless of whether the child was added to the mix via adoption or birth. So no right to complain that Daddy adopted Heather, right?

Umm, maybe; maybe not.  A will or trust listing the beneficiaries as "children of X" would only go to the legal children of X.  Beneficiaries couldn't complain about the fact that Daddy had more legal children, thus diluting the share of existing children in a pot of money. But beneficiaries can certainly tangle over who is actually a legal child of X; that might include a challenge to biological paternity or a challenge to the legality of an adoption.  (This is one of the reasons international adoptive parents are encouraged to "re-adopt" in the U.S., to make sure that a later legal challenge to the adoption proceedings in another country -- either upon divorce of the adoptive parents, when one is trying to duck child support obligations, or upon probate, when other beneficiaries might seek to lop off some beneficiaries to increase their share of the pie -- will have less chance of success.)

So, yes, I think Goodman's previous children can legally challenge the new adoption, though whether they can challenge NOW will depend on the terms of the trust, and in particular how the trust payouts are structured.  If it were simply a will, I'd say they couldn't challenge it until Daddy died and the will was in probate.

Of course, this would all be irrelevant if a will or the trust listed named individuals as beneficiaries -- leaving his money to Heather wouldn't give the kids grounds to complain, or at least not complain on the grounds that her adoption wasn't legally effective to make her his child.  But doing it that way wouldn't meet his apparant objective of adding her to a trust that he thinks insulates his assets from any judgement in that wrongful death lawsuit.

Oh, and I should mention that I'm not a trust or probate attorney, I know nothing about the actual facts of the case other than what I've read in the newspaper, and this is not legal advice!  There, CYA done!

Ah, what a tangled web we weave. . . .

Early Childhood Adversity & Toxic Stress

Here's a report from the American Academy of Pediatrics that adoptive parents might find relevant to their children's early years: Early Childhood Adversity, Toxic Stress, and the Role of the Pediatrician: Translating Developmental Science Into Lifelong Health.

A good summary of the theoretical basis for the report:

The accompanying technical report represents an ecobiodevelopmental(EBD) framework for understanding the promotionof health and prevention of disease across the life span that builds on advances in neuroscience, molecular biology, genomics, and the social sciences. Together, these diverse fields provide a remarkably convergent perspective on the inextricable interactions among the personal experiences (eg,family and social relationships), environmental influences (eg, exposures to toxic chemicals and inappropriate electronic media), and genetic predispositions that affect learning, behavior and health across the life span. Applying this EBD framework to the challenges posed by significant childhood adversity reveals the powerful role that toxic stress can play in disrupting the architecture of the developing brain, thereby influencing behavioral, educational, economic and health outcomes decades and generations later.

The report is not adoption-specific, but seems highly relevant, especially to post-institutionalized children.

China: Banning Names That Identify Orphans

Hmmm, I thought China had done this a couple of years ago, but China Daily reports a new rule that bans names that identify a child as an orphan:

China plans to forbid orphanages from giving children names that may prove discriminatory against them later in life.

Names to be banned would include those with a political connotation and those that reflect the place or nature in which the child becomes orphaned or abandoned, said an official from the Ministry of Civil Affairs this week.

"We don't want children who grow up in orphanages to carry labels that imply they are different from those who have parents," said Chen Lunan, children's welfare deputy director at the department of social welfare and charity promotion.

He added that the ministry is amending regulations on the management of child welfare institutions to ensure that only the 100 most common Chinese surnames are used for naming children. The new rules are expected to come into effect later this year, he said.

"I think she's adopted. . ."

We met an adorable African-American 2-year-old named Lila last night at a restaurant -- she was quite talkative and shared her name and age happily.  She was there with her white parents. 

My kids noticed her immediately, and Zoe said, "I think she's adopted."  I agreed that that was likely, but I asked why she thought so.  Of course, it was the mismatch between parents and child.  So I said, "I bet people look at us and think you're adopted for the same reason."

Zoe was insistent that that wasn't true -- people probably just think she has a Chinese dad or maybe a grandparent who is Asian!  "Why, then," I ask, "are you so sure Lila is adopted?  Maybe she has an African-American grandparent."  That provoked eye-rolling and the mom-is-an-idiot voice:  "I just KNOW!"  Oooo-kay. Hard to argue with that one.

Infants as Orphanage Loss Leaders

We're all familiar with the retail concept of the loss leader, right?  If you've ever been led into a store by that advertisement of that incredibly attractive and low-priced widget you've always wanted and then find yourself buying tons of other stuff, you know what a loss leader is.

I was reminded of the loss leader when I read this quote from an orphanage director in Ethiopia in an article in Christianity Today (that just happens to be where the article is -- I'm not trying to draw any inference that Christianity is behind this!):

At the Kidane Mehret Children's Home in Addis Ababa, Sister Lutgarda Camilleri said . . .[t]he new government rules have resulted in Kidane Mehret receiving fewer infants, which means less attention from would-be parents across the globe since infants are much more easily placed. And that means less support for the majority of aging orphans who won't be adopted. "When we had babies, people came here and when they came, they would sponsor these older children," Camilleri said.

So those who have been commenting on this post, to say that adoption often leads adoptive parents to care about others in the country -- are you sympathetic to the sister's lament?  Is this how you envisioned it working?  Is it a wholly positive good that international adoption works this way?

I confess I'm troubled by the quote, though I know as a practical matter that the sister is right in how it works -- once adoptive parents adopt from a country, they have a motivation to help that they didn't have before. But it strikes me as a bizarrely utilitarian argument when made from the sending country's end -- an orphan becomes a tool, a sacrificial lamb, to create that motivation that will help others. 

And it's easy to see how that would create strong incentives to offer to internationally adopting parents the most "attractive" orphans for in-country adoption -- as young as possible, healthy -- to stimulate interest and support in the children who would have the most difficulty finding adoptive families in country. 

And another incentive is created -- to procure those "attractive" orphans whatever the cost, despite the overflow of truly orphaned and needy children already in the system. That answers that familiar argument that coercion and purchase and kidnapping isn't necessary in a country like Ethiopia where there are already 5 million "orphans" in institutional care (Case in point here: "[W]hen I read that some people are “concerned” about the rate of adoption among children from Africa because people are “trafficking” in adoption, I am truly amazed. Does anyone really think that people are stealing babies and children to sell them for adoption? Are there not enough babies and children already orphaned by AIDS and other diseases in Africa?")

Reactions?

Understanding In-Country Opposition to Intercountry Adoption

Thought-provoking and reflective piece at the Mennonite Weekly Review:

It’s been just more than two years since a magnitude-7 earthquake struck Haiti, killing approximately 250,000 people, leaving thousands of children orphaned, overwhelming a nation already in crisis. Kristen Howerton, who has adopted from Haiti and was in the country when the earthquake struck, wrote a great, heartbreaking post on “Rage Against the Mini Van” about the state of adoption in Haiti two years later [she was responding to a CBS News report I posted here]. Thousands of children are languishing in orphanages, not because no one is willing to adopt them, but because of administrative red tape.
Some of those barriers to adoption exist because Haiti (like many other countries) doesn’t particularly want to give up their children. And honestly, can we blame them? Sure, it’s easy for us to look in from the outside and lambast Haiti for not throwing the escape hatch wide open. Those kids need families, and they need families now. The stories are heartbreaking, the images haunting. The current state of affairs is unconscionable.
On the other hand, I can understand why some people in struggling nations aren’t big fans of international adoption. From their standpoint, wealthy outsiders pluck vulnerable children from the poorest of the poor — people so desperate that they are willing to give up their babies, grandbabies, nieces or nephews — and absorb them so thoroughly into a new life and culture that in all likelihood the child will never look back. Adoption may help one child, may bless one family, but it doesn’t do much to address the systemic problems that created and continue to feed the orphan crisis. It doesn’t do much to bless the ones who are left behind, the ones who now need it most.

The author proposes that more families should consider that maybe "that fabled 'red thread' is God’s way of pulling you toward a country, not a child."

Israel: Weighing Adopted Persons Rights v. Birth Parents Rights

This article in the Jerusalem Post synopsizes a thoughtful opinion from a family court judge, weighing the adopted person's right to know his birth parents with the birth mother's right to privacy:

The Tel Aviv Family Court said on Sunday that a 41-year-old man adopted as a baby should have the right to know the identity of his biological mother.

In 2010, “P.,” who was adopted at the age of five months, turned to the Family Court for help after both his biological parents refused to consent to P. knowing their full names and identities.

While by law the state cannot disclose a biological mother’s identity to an adopted child, unless she agrees, Judge Esther Zitnitski Rakover said she would order the Welfare Ministry to contact P.’s mother and attempt to clarify “her moral obligation to meet with [P.] and help him close this chapter of his life.” 

* * *
“If you aren’t adopted, then you won’t be able to understand it,” P. told the court. “To live as an adopted child is in some ways to live in some sort of degraded way for your whole life... You have parents and you have brothers and they don’t know about you, and you have to live with that every single day.”

Judge Zitnitski Rakover said that the case involved two substantial conflicts of interest: the basic human right of an adopted person to know his roots and his biological parents; and the biological parents’ right to preserve their privacy.

The court had to find the right balance between these two opposing interests, the judge said.

“In weighing between the biological parents’ right to privacy, and the child’s basic right to determine his roots, it seems to me that the child’s right is more worthy of special exceptions,” Rakover said.

The judge described the right of an adopted person to know the identity of his biological parents as “part of a basic need inherent in human nature, so a person can build his own independent identity.”

Laos: Adoption Trafficking Investigation

Here's a news report about a retired official investigated for selling babies into international adoption:

Laos is investigating a retired justice ministry official for allegedly selling adopted babies to Americans, Canadians and Australians for thousands of dollars each, a report said.
The official is accused of seeking out unwanted babies in poor, rural areas, obtaining adoption papers and selling the infants, all aged between one and two years, on to foreigners for up to $5,000 each, according to Radio Free Asia.
He has been taken in for questioning and the adoption process for children thought to be caught up in the scam has been suspended pending the results of the investigation, RFA reported.
Mike Pryor, press officer at the US Embassy in Laos, told AFP that Laos "suspended foreign adoptions on January 9" but did not offer any specific reason for the move.

"Adopting a child for sale... is a crime related to human trafficking, no question about it," a government official told RFA.

The justice ministry is probing how the scam worked, including whether the birth parents sold their infants, which can constitute a human trafficking offence punishable by a three-to-five-year jail term, the official said.

It was not clear how many children were involved in the alleged adoption ring.

Laos is not a Hague Convention country. The number of children adopted from Laos to the U.S. is small:  6 in 2011, 7 in 2010, 8 in 2009. It would be interesting to know when this retired justice ministry official started working in adoptions -- there was a rather large jump in adoptions in 2009 -- the previous year there were 3, and then it jumped to 8. Though the numbers are small, that jump seems significant.

Another interesting quote from the article that caught my eye:

Laos is listed as Tier 2 -- out of three -- in the US State Department's 2011 anti human trafficking report. . . . The US however said the government had 'never administratively or criminally punished any public official for complicity in trafficking in persons.'

This incident, even if proven true, shouldn't be a ding against Laos in the 2012 anti-human-trafficking report, since our State Department doesn't consider buying babies for illegal adoption to be human trafficking.  Sheesh.

Madonna, Child Saver

Madonna was interviewed by Anderson Cooper on Thursday; in case you missed it she explains why she adopted. 

Montana Ranch Last Stop for Adopted Kids

I posted before about this ranch in Montana where adopted teens with FASD and/or RAD are sent.  Here's another story, some interesting quotes from the kids:

Alec Cole, a precocious 13-year-old with striking eyes and an olive complexion, recently arrived at Sterkel's ranch for his second stint. Born in Belarus, Cole spent the first three years of his life in an orphanage, where abuse and neglect compounded the effects of FASD, which can affect impulse control, intelligence and, in Cole's case, physical characteristics like height.

When a Florida couple adopted Cole, they assumed he would assimilate into their family with liberal doses of love and affection, but the damage had been done before Cole ever had a chance, and his ability to trust adults has been undermined.

Over time, his behavior grew increasingly aggressive and unpredictable, and the family reached a tipping point when assaults and threats of violence against his parents and adoptive sister became commonplace.

"I kicked, fought, cursed, yelled and did all kinds of wrong things to my parents," Cole said, reciting the litany of reasons his adoptive family had for sending him to live with Sterkel, and for spending what amounts to a college education in the course of his therapy.

He has made progress at the Ranch for Kids, but not without frequent setbacks. During one violent outburst, he attempted to attack a staff member with a 2-by-4. Still, after living on the ranch for two years and following a visit from his family, Cole went home to Florida for a yearlong trial period. His violent meltdowns reemerged and the family determined he was not fit to live with them; he returned to live with Sterkel last month.

"I'm not saying I don't appreciate my other set of parents, but it's hard being given away," he said.

* * *

Some of the children spend several weeks or months with Sterkel before returning to their families, and the outcomes are sometimes positive. Others, like Cole, require years of respite care just to develop basic life skills.

Others still leave the ranch only when they reach the age of 18 and their adoptive families no longer bear legal responsibility. Those young adults often enroll in the federal Job Corps training program, Sterkel said, but without a structured "next-phase" environment, their futures are grim.

"We have well-meaning families who adopt these children and believe that love and affection is all it takes," Sterkel said. "They expect challenges. They expect malnutrition and lack of love, but they do not expect a child who has permanent brain damage, who cannot bond. We can correct their behaviors, but we can't put their souls back in their body."

Having navigated the murky waters of an international adoption, Sterkel says most families she encounters are patient and committed to their adopted children; however, some simply surrender their children to the ranch's charges.

* * *

Zhenya Wood, 16, gave up on school before coming to Montana, but a winter digging ditches and performing manual labor alongside Davidson has changed his outlook.

"I'm not much of a ditch digger or a rancher, so I'd like to give school another chance," he said.

A victim of FASD, Wood lived in a Russian orphanage from the age of 3 until 7, when a Pennsylvania couple adopted him. "I don't have a lot of happy memories," he said, recalling the orphanage as "dark and unclean, with bad food."

Wood's mother died three years ago and his father sent him to Sterkel after the teenager's behavior became uncontrollable. "We were just holding on after my mom died, and I realize that my dad doesn't deserve all the crap I've given him," he said. "But these teenage years are tough."

Wood says he believes his father can sense a change in him during their weekly phone conversations, and his goal is to return home.

"I sure hope so. I've forgotten what he looks like," he said.

Chinese New Year, Chinese School Edition

As the Mistress of Ceremonies reminded us at the beginning of Chinese School's New Year celebration, Chinese New Year lasts 15 days!  So despite our various celebrations to date, today we had one more!  That's pretty much the entire student body of Chinese School, singing Gong Xi, Gong Xi, a traditional Chinese New Year song.

Zoe's class presented traditional New Year greetings, and Maya's class presented traditional New Year customs.

For the last few weeks, Zoe and Maya have been going to Chinese School early to learn traditional Chinese folk dance.  Today was the first performance, and they did a very cute umbrella dance.

Believe it or not, that last shot of the two girls together was the last part of the actual dance, not posed! But I couldn't resist the opportunity for posed shots after the dance, of course!

After performing, it was time for fun and games for the kids.  That means Chinese yo-yos and calligraphy.

Finally, each child received a lucky red envelope from her teacher, after responding (in Chinese, of course!) to a traditional Chinese New Year greeting!

Still No Adoptions from Vietnam to U.S.

The State Department has announced that,  despite Vietnam's ratification of the Hague Convention on Intercountry Adoption, the U.S. will not yet approve adoptions from Vietnam:

The United States has determined that it will not resume intercountry adoptions in Vietnam on February 1, 2012, when the Hague Convention on Protection of Children and Co-operation in Respect of Intercountry Adoption will enter into force there.

Despite Vietnam's initiatives to strengthen its child welfare system and ensure the integrity of its domestic and international adoption process, it does not yet have a fully Hague compliant process in place. We continue to caution adoption service providers and prospective adoptive parents that, to ensure that adoptions from Vietnam will be compliant with the Convention, important steps must still take place before intercountry adoptions between the United States and Vietnam resume. Adoption Service Providers should not initiate or claim to initiate, adoption programs in Vietnam until they receive notification from the Department of State that it has resumed adoptions in Vietnam.

Twins, Adopted Separately, Reunited

Two girls adopted from Indonesia to Sweden discover they are twins:

Non-identical twins Emilie Falk and Lin Backman - strangers until last year - were separated nearly 29 years ago when they were separately put up for adoption in Indonesia.
According to a DNA test the pair had done two months after reuniting in January last year, there is a 99.98 per cent chance of them being sisters.

A complex string of events led up to that revelation.

Both women were adopted from an orphanage in Semarang in northern Indonesia by Swedish couples, but there was no mention in either of their documents of the fact that they had a twin.

When Ms Backman's parents left the orphanage with her all those years ago, the taxi driver had turned around and asked them: "What about the other one, the sister?" and they jotted the girls' Indonesian names down on a piece of paper.

The name helped Ms Backman's parents track down the Falks back in Sweden, and the two families got together a few times when the girls were babies to compare notes.

"They went through the adoption papers, but they didn't think we were very similar and there was a lot in the papers that didn't add up ... And there were no DNA tests back then," said Ms Falk.
Among the discrepancies were different names for the girls' fathers. And although the records showed they had the same mother, the families eventually decided that this too was an error.

The two couples in the end wrote off the idea and eventually lost touch.

Although their parents had told them the story as children, both Ms Falk and Ms Backman later forgot about it. Growing up, neither was interested in information about their biological background, so they never asked.

"But when I got married two years ago I started thinking about family and my adoption, and when I asked my mother she told me this story again, and I decided to look for Lin," said Ms Falk.

She had a name and began searching through a network for Indonesian children adopted by Swedish families, and found Ms Backman on Facebook.

"I am born on March 18, 1983 in Semarang and my biological mother's name is Maryati Rajiman," Falk said she wrote, and quickly received the reply: "Wow, that's my mother's name as well! And that's my birthday!"

Wealthy Man Adopts His Adult Girlfriend

Well, isn't this a special use of adoption?!  A polo tycoon has adopted his girlfriend so that he can hide his assets from the family of the man he killed in a drunk driving incident:

When a man wants to spend the rest of his life with a woman, he often extends an offer to her to become part of his family.

But International Polo Club Palm Beach founder John Goodman, 48, did so in a very unorthodox way.

The multimillionaire trust-fund heir adopted his 42-year-old girlfriend Heather Laruso Hutchins last fall, after being accused of drunk driving in a 2010 accident that left 23-year-old Scott Wilson dead.

Goodman is being sued by Wilson’s parents for wrongful death. According to police reports, Goodman ran a stop sign on February 10, 2010 in Wellington, Florida and smashed into Wilson, sending his car into a canal.
 

Scott Wilson, a 23-year-old graduate of the University of Central Florida, was killed in 2010

Circuit Judge Glenn Kelly had previously ruled that the trust funds set up for his two biological children were off-limits in the lawsuit, according to the Palm Beach Post.

Court papers show that Goodman adopted Ms Hutchins in October of last year, CBS12.com reported.

‘My reaction was that it was both awful and brilliant,’ Belray Beach adoption attorney Charlotte Danciu told CBS12.com.

The adoption papers state that Hutchins, now a legal child of Goodman, is immediately entitled to at least a third of his trust.
* * *
Judge Kelley wrote that the events are taking the court ‘into a legal twilight zone.’

Ms Danciu agreed. ‘Unless you intend to create the parent-child relationship, you are violating the letter of the law,’ she told CBS12.com.

Courts usually disallow the use of adult adoption in this way.  Like lawyer Danciu said, without intending to create a parent-child relationship, it really isn't an adoption.  That's the grounds for denying adult adoption in cases involving gay couples looking to legalize their relationship in a world that denies them marriage.

So is it incest for Goodman to have sex with his newly-adopted daughter?  According to this gossip site, the Florida incest statute does not mention sex with adopted relatives, only relatives of "lineal consanguity," which means blood relationship.

But Florida's statute is really in the minority;  a majority of states say it's incest when there's sex between ancestors or descendants by blood or adoption. That's what the Texas Penal Code says.  So I guess my advice to the Goodman pater and fille is to research the laws of all states they visit, and refrain from sex in most of them.  Sigh. That's not legal advice I ever thought I'd offer to anyone.

Adopting Out the Children of Illegal Immigrants III

ABCNews has done a piece on the Missouri case I blogged about here and here and here, where a mother who was in the U.S. illegally was stripped of her parental rights while in jail for immigration violations so that her son could be adopted by an American couple, and tries, also to put it in a broader context of immigration:

A tug-of-war over a five-year-old boy is at the center of a national debate over parental rights and immigration, and a sign of what critics say is a growing trend in which immigrants are being deemed unfit parents because they crossed the border illegally.
* * *

According to a report from the Applied Research Center, "Shattered Families," as of the summer of 2011 an estimated 5,100 children in 22 states were in foster care after their parents were either detained or deported. Immigration attorneys and children's welfare advocates say a small but troubling number, like Jamison, have been put up for adoption to American families after their birth parents were stripped of their parental rights.

* * *

Bail Romero's "lifestyle, that of smuggling herself into a country illegally and committing crimes in this country is not a lifestyle that can provide stability for a child," Circuit Court Judge David C. Dally wrote in his 2008 decision terminating her parental rights. "A child cannot be educated in this way, always in hiding or on the run."

Dally's judgment had held no mention of Seth Moser's own criminal background. According to court records, Moser, as a teenager, served almost a year in jail after pleading guilty to a felony count involving possession of stolen property. According to Bail Romero's court filings, Moser also has admitted to drug use.

* * *

The Mosers argue that it is better for Carlos to stay with them, not in Guatemala with his mother after her impending deportation.

"In terms of best interest, I mean, that almost goes without saying," the Mosers' attorney, Joseph Hensley, told the court in 2008, according to a brief filed by Bail Romero's attorneys. "[This] child is an American citizen. The mother is a Guatemalan citizen, and she will be returning to Guatemala. ... I think the best interest standard always weighs very, very, heavily in favor of my clients."

Bail Romero says she's thankful to the Mosers for taking care of her son, "but, as Carlitos' mother, I need him to be with me," she said, "because I'm his real mother."

Willful Blindness: Avoiding the Truth of Corruption

At Rh Reality Check, a review of Erin Siegal's book, Finding Fernanda, about corruption, trafficking and child adoption in Guatemalan adoption (there have been lots of reviews of the book out there, and I haven't posted about every one, but this one seems to be a value-added because the review's author is quite knowledgeable about Guatemalan adoption, too):

However, when Alvarado and many other women’s stories of child abduction for adoption went ‘public’ it seemed everyone in the intercountry adoption community was rooting against 'the truth.' It was unthinkable that some of the beautiful children who had been adopted from Guatemala came to their adoptive families from sinister pathways. ‘Orphan’ adoption is viewed by most as an honorable act and to suggest that children are not truly orphans (and may be trafficking victims) is more than impolite to most people. Unfortunately the historical context and story of Guatemala is far too complicated for such fantasized notions about ‘orphans’ to always be true and when interrogates the facts, a grotesque reality unfolds.

Siegal pulls together many of the facts in her book, often allowing them to speak for themselves. The villain, an executive director of a notoriously bad adoption agency in Florida, gives the reader some insight into the inner workings of a ‘Christian’ woman who uses faith to manipulate her clients as needed. Then, there is the more subtle manipulation of the US Government, ranging from the US Department of State to the many Senators and Congressmen who demand that their constituent’s adoptions be completed—regardless of fears of fraud, coercion, and abduction of children for adoption.

* * *

Then there are the hopeful families who pay outrageous sums to adoption agencies, sometimes ranging upwards to $50,000 USD. How is it really possible that these families honestly believe that such a sum is anything other than the fuel that fed the fires of graft and greed in Guatemala? This is a nation where the average worker makes $2 daily and extreme poverty is almost an understatement.

Doesn't paint a very positive image of international adoptive parents, huh?  Not that I question the veracity; unfortunately, we've all had experience with adoptive parents who don't want to know the truth about adoption corruption.

Adoption as a Political Tool in Russia

At Foreign Policy Blog, a post about how international adoption plays as a political tool in Russian domestic politics:

On January 18, Russia’s Ombudsman for children, Pavel Astakhov, and Foreign Minister, Sergey Lavrov, stated that they would seek an official moratorium on adoption of Russian children by American families. Cooperation on adoption between the two countries has seen its ups and downs following the pattern of U.S. -Russia relations, but the public discourse on international adoption has also served as a tool of Russian domestic policy to strengthen control over Russians and to spread anti-American attitudes. As a result, the discourse is rarely focused on creating constructive policies that can address problems persisting in the international adoption process.

The announcement is very likely to revive public discourse on the abuse of adopted Russian children in the United States. The timing is not coincidental as a new wave of blameful declamations is preceding the upcoming presidential election in Russia. Once again Russian authorities seek to use old tools and practices in strengthening national unity by pitting ‘us’ – Russians against ‘them’- foreigners via offensive adoption rhetoric.

* * *

[M]edia-promoted public discourse on international adoption serves as a very effective pre-election tool that conveniently diverts attention from the existing everyday problems. It serves to create an ‘outside enemy,’ while seeking to bolster unity among Russian people and to position Vladimir Putin as a strong leader of the ‘us’ versus ‘them’ community.