God Bless McClatchy Newspapers!

Disclaimer: Although I try to keep myself out of my blogs about media coverage of adoption, my interest is rooted in extensive knowledge of the social phenomenon so it is hard to withhold examples from my experience. I find that this is one of those occasions when I cannot take the reporter out of the story.

Those of us who have lamented inadequate, even misleading, coverage of adoption by the nation’s news media are beside ourselves with joy at the rash of recently published insightful articles.

We are no longer prophets wailing in the wilderness.

John Rosemond, a psychologist, and McClatchy columnist exposes “attachment” disorders for what they are – a malady designed to tap the bank accounts of well-heeled adoptive parents rather than an attempt to actually do something to benefit adopted children. In fact, there are some who have sought to extend this kind of “help” to adopted adults as well.

Read his column here: http://www.pittsburghlive.com/x/pittsburghtrib/lifestyles/family/s_641589.html

The science is sloppy but effectively preys on people who are already insecure and unprepared for reality. Whenever I read about some of the bizarre therapies that are employed to help adoptees bond with their adoptive families – including a birthing simulation that has resulted in at least one child dying from the procedure – I am appalled not only by the ignorance of some parents but also what might be termed criminal exploitation of these folks by so-called professionals. And I fail to understand how any state board could license someone to practice this kind of voodoo!

Rosemond calls a spade a spade and he acknowledges that health care, including mental health care is an entrepreneurial exercise in which members of the “helping” professions can exploit the reverence we assign to anyone in health care by leading us down a primrose path under the guise of helping us.

Kudos to Rosemond for speaking out. There will be no shortage of practitioners who will vilify him for this. And Kudos to McClatchy for publishing his viewpoint. There are triad members who could benefit from counseling to resolve anger issues and to put the experience in perspective. Regardless of how an adoption situation came about, at some point, those injured by it need to pick themselves up and move on. The kind of psuedo-scientific approach that Rosemond decries is not a positive contribution to the situation.

This kind of professional malpractice occurs because those party to adoption are particularly vulnerable. Whether you are (1) a mother who was shamed, coerced or tricked into surrendering a child to adoption, or who truly made a decision in what seemed to be the child’s best interests, or (2) an adoptive parent frustrated by an inability to reproduce the old-fashioned way or (3) an adoptee with perfectly logical but unanswered questions about your origins – you represent a gold mine to an unscrupulous practitioner.

Decades after surrendering a child to adoption, most women deal daily with regret, shame, and deep sadness. They grieve the loss of their child. Regardless of how uncomfortable it makes us to think about it, a family cannot be created through adoption until another family is destroyed by it. Sometimes, that may be in the best interests of the child. But, in most instances, the child can never know with any certainty that this is the case because the facts of their adoption are hidden.

Couples who have love to give and want a child truly suffer from infertility. For anyone who longs to hold their own child in their harms and provide love and care and watch that child grow into an independent person, not being able to conceive is a terrible disappointment. The overwhelming majority of these couples, understandably, come to adoption as a last resort. A fact that is not lost on a reasonably intelligent adoptee, even when they know that their adoptive parents love them. Adult adoptees can deal with this reality. Teen adoptees may anguish over it.

It is also true that adolescence is fraught with angst. I doubt that even one percent of American children passes through adolescence without conflict with their custodial parents regardless of their biological connection. It is a right of passage in a society that keeps us children long after our bodies have reached adulthood, wracked by the attendant hormonal changes. Regardless of what Dr. Phil says about our brains not reaching maturity until after age 21, you could make a case that young adults are deprived of life experiences that bring wisdom, that consequential experience is what helps them to mature. Mistakes always provide us with more experience that wise choices. As much as we wish to protect the ones we love from the consequences of their own actions, to do so does not necessarily benefit the people we love.

In the case of adoptees, the law views them as perpetual children without the requisite skills to manage their own affairs. Even after they become adults, sealed records means they are denied the opportunity to examine or question decisions made on their behalf when they were infants in most states.

Because society repeatedly inflicts sadness, disappointment and shame on members of the triad over the course of years, it’s probable that this group, as a whole, has a slightly higher percentage of fragile or troubled individuals. But quackery is not going to cure their ills. So I question the contention that wrapping a tween so tightly in a blanket that she chokes to death on her own vomit is going to produce a healthy parent-child relationship.

Many psychological disorders grow out of fear. Children fear not being loved and being different from their peers. Discovering they were adopted when they are old enough to understand what it is gives rise to those fears. Children who always know they were adopted, even before they know what that means, are far less to suddenly wonder if they are loved or why the were rejected by their family or origin.

Let’s take the case of a Korean-born adoptee, call her Mae*, who endured the taunts of schoolyard bullies because she looked different from her siblings and everyone else at the small elementary school had reason to feel she was not accepted. Unfortunately, this was reinforced at home where the decision to adopt her was not supported by both parents. Kids are not stupid! They read body language and make comparisons and they know the score. Kim grew up angry and looked for love in all the wrong places. She was not psychotic! But being deprived of love turned her into an even more rebellious teen than she might have been otherwise.

Anger is an issue that frequently comes to the fore in triad members. If you are a triad member, how many women do you know who 30 or 40 years afterward are still angry with themselves if no one else that they were talked into signing away their parental rights. While I know a good many women who are happily reunited with their offspring, a number of women of my acquaintance who found the child they surrendered are worse off because of what they found.

Adoptees who were the victims of bad placements – we only know about the ones who speak out – often harbor misplaced anger. My friend, Lee*, was date raped and persuaded that she should surrender the child to adoption in a state several hundred miles from her home to avoid any further connection with the troubled young man who raped her. It was certainly the best course of action for her and her family. She grieved the loss of her daughter and longed to find her. She had no way of knowing that her child had been placed with a couple whose marriage was falling apart because of the wife’s alcoholism. After she finally drove her husband away, the adoptive mother tried to keep the adoptee from going away to college. The adoptee found her natural mother by the most bizarre coincidence when she was 18. Probably because there was no counseling offered to either of them, the adoptee went from joy at finding acceptance with her natural mother to complete estrangement resulting from her anger at being “given away.” She is now pursuing her masters in social work (and that’s a whole other blog).

How about men who never knew they had fathered a child until it was too late? Some of them have fought successfully to reclaim their biological offspring and, in the process everyone touched by the situation has been wounded. Was it love that kept the adoptive parents from giving the child back to his /her parents? And what was it that tempted the adoption agency and the court to make this life-changing decision for the adoptee without dotting all the “eyes” and crossing all the tees?” When this writer was placed for adoption in 1952 no one even bothered to notify the putative father. He was a possible complication that could be avoided. Anyone even marginally affected by adoption sees the folly of that approach.

The parties to adoption need to be protected from profiteers both before and after adoption takes place. Attachment disorder therapists are just one more group that stands in line to profit from human frailties exaggerated by adoption.

* Names changed to protect my friends and colleagues.

Tired of warm, fuzzy coverage?

Recently several eye-opening articles have breathed fresh air in media coverage of adoption among them is an article in The Nation entitled “Shotgun Adoption” by Kathryn Joyce, which appeared on September 14.

Articles like this one mark a distinct departure from the typical coverage of adoption and they do not appear with any frequency. According to the magazine “Research support was provided by the Puffin Foundation Investigative Fund at The Nation Institute.” Those who have long lamented the media’s superficial coverage of adoption issues were gratified by the coverage but the question remains, why should a private charity be needed to underwrite journalistic enterprise.

Read the story at: http://www.thenation.com/doc/20090914/joyce.

The typical media treatment of adoption is more likely to be a saccharine story of an adult adoptee locating his/her family of origin. Not that these stories are not touching; and they do serve to make a case for adoption reformers’ contention that women who surrender a child to adoption were never promised confidentiality and most did not want it. A typical story of this ilk can be found at http://www.northlandpress.com/CLreunited9109.html full of reportorial errors and lacking balance because a general assignment reporter does not do his homework.

Writing in The Nation, Joyce masterfully employs narrative as she describes a 32-year-old pharmacy technician, pregnant and unmarried who sought support from Bethany Christian Services, a faith-based organization that has found adoption to be such a profitable undertaking that it is the nation’s largest adoption agency. Masquerading as concerned Christians seeking to support young women who must make difficult decisions, Crisis pregnancy centers (CPCs) prey on women at a desperate time coercing them into choosing adoption.

CPCs offer of free housing and medical care is, to pregnant women willing to sign away their children. Bethany christian Services is not the only CPC to emply techniques akin to those of abusive spouses, namely to isolate the pregnant woman from friends and family. Bethany placed this young woman in the home of a “shepherding family” whose job it is to reinforce her decision to place the child for adoption, a decision that allows Bethany to profit.

CPCs that have sprung up around the country in the aftermath of Roe v. Wade are, today, funded largely by $60 million in federal abstinence and marriage-promotion funds, a legacy of the Bush administration’s payback to right-wing Christian groups who supported his election. Despite the fact that a number states have rejected this funding because of the strings that come with it and despite campaign promises to stop federal efforts to impose a religious agenda on Americans financed by their own tax dollars, the trend continues.

Joyce writes: “The National Abortion Federation estimates that as many as 4,000 CPCs operate in the United States, often using deceptive tactics like posing as abortion providers and showing women graphic antiabortion films. While there is growing awareness of how CPCs hinder abortion access, the centers have a broader agenda that is less well known: they seek not only to induce women to “choose life” but to choose adoption, either by offering adoption services themselves, as in Bethany’s case, or by referring women to Christian adoption agencies. Far more than other adoption agencies, conservative Christian agencies demonstrate a pattern and history of coercing women to relinquish their children.”

Bethany promised this young women that her medical bills would be paid but never mentioned that they were not planning on shelling out the money. They helped her to apply for Medicaid to make those payments. Guess what? She could have applied to Medicare without the agency’s assistance and without surrendering her child.

A child that is still an abstract concept is very different than one that is a reality. This mother’s maternal instincts kicked in after she gave birth. She had second thoughts, intensified no doubt by the fact that South Carolina is not one of the 17 states that recognize open adoption in its statutes. When she wavered Bethany swept in to the recovery room coerce her into going through with the adoption. And they rushed her through signing relinquishment papers, scooped up the child and took the mother out of the hospital before she was even discharged.

Once Bethany had the child, the mother was discarded. Joyce recounts that after weeks of trying to reach a Bethany post-adoption counselor she finally reached the woman who had “shepherded” her into surrendering her child only to be brusquely dismissed.

Lest the reader think this is an isolated case, Bethany is ranked poorly by birth mothers on a website that rates agencies: www.adoptionagencyratings.com. Since the article appeared in The Nation, the website has gone offline but the information can still be found cashed. Not only did mothers who surrendered a child give it a thumbs down but several adoptive parent observed that these (birth) mothers were subjected to coercion.

This is not a new phenomenon. Anyone who has been paying attention can tell you that instances of coercion in adoption stretch back to approximately the same time period that records were sealed in many states – the late 1930s and early 1940s. Adoption historians refer to the period from the end of World War II to the early 1970s as the “baby scoop” era. For more information about this period of adoption practice in the USA, see Ann Fessler’s, The Girls Who Went Away: The Hidden History of Women Who Surrendered Children for Adoption in the Decades Before Roe v. Wade.

“… Single motherhood was so stigmatized that at least 1.5 million unwed American mothers relinquished children for adoption, often after finishing pregnancies secretly in maternity homes. The coercion was frequently brutal, entailing severe isolation, shaming, withholding information about labor, disallowing mothers to see their babies and coercing relinquishment signatures while women were drugged or misled about their rights. Often, women’s names were changed or abbreviated, to bolster a sense that ‘the person who went away to deliver the baby was someone else’ and that mothers would later forget about the babies they had given up. In taking oral histories from more than a hundred Baby Scoop Era mothers, Fessler found that not only was that untrue but most mothers suffered lifelong guilt and depression.” [Quoting from Joyce's article]

When Maryland reform activists first began to lobby the state legislature for adult adoptee access to their own records (a matter of course before January 1947 when records were retroactively sealed) an experienced social worker testifying before the judiciary committee reminded the legislators that adoption was about “finding a home for a child who needs one, not about finding a child for a couple who wants one.”

In reality, adoption has not been practiced according to that standard in the USA since the late 1930s. Roe v. Wade might have signaled a kinder, gentler industry since unmarried pregnant women might have gained more power in the process except that, at about the same time, birth control became widely available and single motherhood gained social acceptance. The result was a shortage of healthy white babies available for adoption, the commodity that fueled a profitable and largely unregulated industry.

Why is it then that it has taken 30 years for the mainstream media to recognize that there is a story here? Or that it is potentially as big a story as Enron, Blackwater or the Downing Street memo? Child trafficking is, after all, a momentous social issue. Why is it that adoption is distorted by being used to describe the purchase of a Cabbage Patch doll or euated with rescuing a pet from the animal shelter? The issue is far more complex and the media has done a substandard job, in the main, of covering this aspect of life in America.

The Nation, the Puffin Foundation and Kathryn Joyce have done a stellar job of putting adoption in perspective.

Speak up for Open Records!

Go to Change.org and show your support for adult adoptees who want access to their own identity by singing this petition.

http://www.change.org/actions/view/restore_adult_adoptee_access_to_original_birth_certificates

Being anti adoption is not a bad thing

In July 2009, an article in the Washington Post posited that since the number of adoptions from foster care have declined, that city’s child welfare agency is not doing an adequate job of caring for foster children within their jurisdiction.

Read the article here: http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/07/19/AR2009071901430.html?sub=AR

D.C. Adoptions Drop Sharply, Causing Dismay

City Agency Is Not Doing Enough For Foster Children, Critics Say

This is fair, on the face of it, only if you equate adoption with success. And, clearly some observers do. At best, this is a gross oversimplification. The first responsibility of child welfare agencies is to make minor children safe and the second is to make a good faith effort to heal families so that these minor children do not become wards of the state.

Unfortunately, there are sound fiscal reasons for assuming that adoption = success:

1. Adoptive parents become financially responsible for the children they adopt, in most instances, completely relieving the jurisdiction of the financial burden. While children are in foster care, foster parents are reimbursed for providing for the child’s material needs and child welfare agencies devote a tremendous amount of time and resources to collecting support from natural parents to underwrite these payments.

2. For some years now, the federal government has paid a subsidy (or bounty) to state agencies that successfully place foster children in permanent adoptive homes. (See 105-89, at http://frwebgate.access.gpo.gov/cgi-bin/getdoc.cgi?dbname=105_cong_public_laws&docid=f:publ89.105.pdf.)

The Adoption and Safe Families Act (ASFA) of 1997 requires states to improve their efforts to provide children with permanent families.* The law requires states to ensure foster children have a permanency plan within a year. It also mandates termination of parental rights for (1) children who have been in foster care for 15 of the most recent 22 months, or (2) whose parents have killed or seriously injured another child in the family. No one would argue with the later qualifier and most would think the former is reasonable. But surely there are exceptions. If adequate programs do not exist to heal dysfunctional families then the child welfare system that has failed.

What bothers most adoption reform advocates is that ASFA provides financial incentives for states to increase the number of adoptions from foster care by providing payments of up to $4,000 per adoption or $6,000 per special needs adoption when states exceed the previous years’ total. It is this part of ASFA that concerns me. As with almost any action government takes, there are unintended consequences.

The National Coalition for Child Protection Reform states:

“The federal law that effectively abolished the reasonable efforts requirement, the so-called Adoption and Safe Families Act (ASFA), also requires states to seek termination of parental rights for many children in foster care for 15 of the most recent 22 months. Yet in many jurisdictions it can take at least 12 months for a judge to decide if the initial placement was justified in the first place.

“Thus, while some children in foster care do indeed need to be adopted, ASFA encourages the indiscriminate adoption of children without regard to whether they could have remained safely in their own, loving homes.

“And this influx of new termination cases comes despite increasing evidence that the system can’t cope with the thousands of children legally free for adoption right now.” (http://www.nccpr.org/newissues/14.html)

Instead of removing the foster children who have languished in foster care for an extended period of time, ASFA’s bounty system has, in some instances, resulted in the removal from families of origin, younger, more adoptable children, in some instances before every effort to keep the family together has been tried. Family preservation clearly offers NO financial incentive.

Quoting again from NCCPR: “As adoptions level off, the pressure to increase them again – and cash in on the bounties – is likely to have another pernicious effect. It is likely to prompt agencies to target the children most in demand by prospective adoptive parents: healthy infants from poor families. Agencies will rationalize that the parents really are “unfit” even as they continue to turn their child welfare systems into the ultimate middle-class entitlement: Step right up, and take a poor person’s child for your very own.”

See the following media reports that document this phenomena:

The Pittsburgh Post-Gazette series, “When The Bough Breaks,” available online at http://www.post-gazette.com/newslinks/1999boughbreaks.asp

Lexington Herald-Leader, April 16, 2006, “Report: State unjustly terminates parental rights for federal money.”

Daily News of Los Angeles, December 8, 2003, “Government Bonuses Accelerate Adoptions.”

There are also some positive reasons why the situation in Washington, DC is changing. A colleague who is a social worker in DC in addition to being a triad member shared this with me: “good news… is that they are really trying harder, as I understand it, not to remove children from the home. They are trying to give more services on a higher level than was occurring in the past, with the hope that they will not have to take the children into care. Of course there has to be the available therapists, rehab programs, etc. to work with the clients….Those numbers may reflect this emphasis which has been escalated for quite a while.”

Although, she said that there are parents who cannot shake off substance abuse despite their good intentions but other parents when faced with an ultimatum, that the children will be removed, “will do anything they need to do to keep them.” Isn’t that the most positive outcome for such situations?

Of course, some readers will classify this as anti-adoption rhetoric. Indeed, when the Post article appeared last month, some adoption attorneys accused child welfare officials of being anti-adoption because from the “parental” point of view, there was a financial incentive to NOT adopt their foster son or daughter thus ending the government subsidy. And that prompted a thoughtful commentary from a number of adoption reform bloggers including this one: blog.amyadoptee.com/2009/07/23/define-antiadoption.aspx.

Whatever you think of adoption, keep in mind that it should be about finding a home for a child who needs one rather than about finding a child for a family that wants one. When those two situations coincide, adoption is a wonderful option. But when an existing family is torn apart needlessly in order to create an adoptive family, it’s cruel. When you read the dry statistics about parental terminations and adoptions, note that the number of parental terminations is substantially higher than the number of children adopted. If this trend continues, it only exacerbates the number of children who will grow up with no permanent home and, moreover, with proof in their minds that no one wants them. We must take care as a society that we don’t replace one bad outcome with a worse outcome in our efforts to do good.

Note:

* Between 1997 and 2000 adoptions of foster children increased from 31,030 to 51,000 but they leveled off at about 50,000 per year since according to 1997 to 2003: U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, Adoptions of Children with Public Child Welfare Agency Involvement By State FY 1995-FY 2003, available online at http://www.acf.hhs.gov/programs/cb/stats_research/afcars/ adoptchild03b.htm, 2004 to 2007: U.S. Dept. of Health and Human Services, Trends in Foster Care and Adoption, chart available online at http://www.acf.hhs.gov/programs/cb/stats_research/afcars/trends.htm)

It must be hard to love an adopted child

Bonnie Miller Rubin, who I have been told is an adoptive mom, writes in the Chicago Tribune expressing how adoption advocates are offended by a tagline promoting a new Warner Bros. movie, Orphan.

Read the article here:
http://www.chicagotribune.com/news/nationworld/chi-talk-adoption-moviemay30,0,663858.story

”Particularly offensive, say advocates, is the tagline in the trailer: ‘It must be hard to love an adopted child as much as your own.’” Adoptive parents are worried about how their children may react to seeing this trailer in theaters.

It’s hard for me, as an adoptee, to see how people get so up in arms about the suggestion that somehow adoptees are, possibly, not so lovable. After all, if we ask questions about how we came to be adopted, we are shushed and sometimes called “ungrateful” for our privileged status because we even ask such questions. And I have to wonder why Rubin does not cite the reaction of anyone who is adopted in her article. My initial reaction to that omission as a journalist, much less as an adoptee, is that her reporting is incomplete. It’s not like there aren’t millions of adoptees over the age of 21 that she could have asked to comment.

Movies are a make-believe media. The newspaper is not. And yet, adoption most often makes its way into the news or op-ed pages of the newspaper when adoption is a factor, contributing or not, to some drama. Or it is presented as a warm, fuzzy story about creating a happy family without being counterbalanced by the fact that one family had to be torn apart to create another. Other warm, fuzzy stories tell of adoptees and families of origin who search successfully but rarely hint of the resistance searchers face, and never tell that search was necessary only because the truth is not available to most adoptees and never to the family of origin in sealed records states.

I have to believe that most of us grow up with loving adoptive families who accept us as we are and do not try to make us over in our adoptive parents’ image. But I know of situations where that is not true. So do we all. Just like the “thousand stories in the Naked City” there are thousands of adoption stories, some of which are horror stories.

The orphan in popular culture has been an object of pity and ridicule long before movies were invented. In praise of such stories, they usually feature the adoptee perspective. The classic children’s fairy tale “The Ugly Duckling,” tells the story of a swan, who somehow comes to be hatched along with a clutch of ducks only to be teased unmercifully by his siblings as ugly and awkward until adulthood transforms him into a beautiful swan. My friend and colleague, Dennis, wrote his doctoral thesis on this subject. Not surprisingly, he grew up in foster care after a failed adoption.

But the angst felt by persons who are transported into alien cultures by way of adoption is grist for the screenwriter’s mill. My favorite was the Star Trek character Worf, a Klingon orphaned by war and rescued by the Federation equivalent of a GI, who, with his wife, reared Worf as his own child. I’m sure that some future Star Trek will explore the development of an Intergalactic treaty that forbids the adoption of alien offspring outside their native culture. I often wonder if the writer who developed that story line was a transracial adoptee. I prefer Worf to the Ugly Duckling because Worf has post adoption issues that make him more believable as an adoptee in my experience.

Humans as a species have very ambiguous feelings about adoption. I like to start with Jesus of Nazareth who was adopted by his mother’s husband, Joseph, and raised as his son but with full knowledge of his ancestry. Indeed, without knowledge of his paternity, Jesus would probably not have followed the path in life that led him to be crucified. I have always found it puzzling that the Roman Catholic Church has been so insistent on keeping secret the true origins of a child adopted through its social service arm. But, of course, the children for whom they arrange adoption were not born to virgins. I guess that makes a big difference.

None of the church-sponsored adoption agencies escape censure on this point, not even Jewish Social Services even though it has an example of Moses, whose Egyptian adoptive mother did not hide from him the fact that he was a Hebrew child and, if Cecile B. DeMille can be believed, she followed him out of Egypt.

Society has generally regarded adopted children as some kind of second-class child substitute. If a Royal couple adopted a child, he or she would not inherit the throne. If you apply for admission to a prestigious genealogical group such as DAR, you must be related by blood to your Revolutionary War ancestor, no matter who reared you. We are indeed separate and unequal.

While I give credit to adoptive parents for pointing out how wrong it is to have a movie slap us in the face with evidence of how society regards us, I would rather they all worked alongside us to change how we are regarded legally. I would rather they insisted on enforceable open adoption. Adoptive parents are not legally bound to have our names changed when we are adopted so we could be allowed to retain our own identities, or at least given a choice when we are older.

Write a letter to the editor

That’s what I did today. My goal is to do something, however small, to foster a better understanding of adoption and, thus, hasten reform, everyday! Today it was writing a letter to the editor, well two letters, actually.

The first was a comment on an article that appeared in Traverse City Record-Eagle in Northern Michigan, a state with a troubled history of adoption secrecy. The article, which you can read here: http://www.record-eagle.com/northernliving/local_story_136221807.html detailed the story of an adoptee whose enterprise resulted in her being reunited with her family of origin was headlined: Northern People: Daughter tracks down mother.

A headline like that makes me see red before I read another word. But the story was well done by reporter Vanessa McCray vmccray@record-eagle.com. I loved the story. It was balanced and fair and, for readers who know adoption from the inside, it was nuanced.

But I hated the headline. It makes adoptees that want to know their history seem predatory; we are not. We just want equal treatment under the law, to be able to know or origins, something anyone not adopted takes for granted.

The reporter did such a good job with the story that I guessed the page editor wrote the headline. I jotted a quick letter to the editor which concluded “Thanks for covering the story, but please remember we are not hunters tracking prey.”

I got a response almost immediately from the Record-Eagle saying they regretted that they could not use my letter because I was not located in Michigan. And that may well be their policy but, when a newspaper puts up a website which, by definition, is available to the world, they should probably either say they are not interested in what people outside Michigan think or accommodate those reactions on the website, at least.

Providence Journal (Rhode Island) takes the latter approach and invites reader’s comments, posts them quickly on their website and/or in the print version of the newspaper. You only have to register. And you can decline the things they are offering free or for sale.

Today they published an editorial that has rapidly been passed around the adoption reform community. And for once, we were all thrilled with the content. The newspaper endorsed open records legislation. You can read their editorial here: http://www.projo.com/opinion/editorials/content/ED_adopt20_05-20-09_8CED503_v43.3d9b1af.html. If you haven’t, do. You’ll love it!

I wrote a reaction and it appeared online within minutes.

Thank you, thank you, thank you.

You probably cannot imagine how refreshing it is to read media that “get it!” So often triad members seeking equality under the law lament that the media just doesn’t get it – they don’t understand. But you clearly do. And I thank you from the bottom of my heart.

I’m a 56-year-old adoptee who has been working (for perilously close to 30 years) to change the status quo with regard to adoption law and practice in the USA. I am now six years into reunion with my family, which has afforded me access to health information that would have been more beneficial when I was in my twenties. When young adoptees search they only want the truth of their origins. For many of us, that would be more than enough. But as we grow older, we do understand the importance of genetic history with regard to our health, and that can only be achieved by developing some sort of relationship with our family of origin.

Yet governments have tried to substitute programs under which they will find out what we need to know on our behalf. Hogwash! Hearsay is not admissible in court, it’s not a satisfactory standard for reporting news and it is totally unequal to the task of giving individuals a sense of self denied when the facts are hidden.

I hope that this bill is passed soon and speedily signed into law. Thank you for your very important support.

I heard from colleagues in Rhode Island a short time later. In fact, my letters are what have connected me with many soldiers in the adoption reform “army” over the years. I could suggest that they recognize my brilliance but I know it’s just that they appreciate being validated. Sometimes the struggle seems lonely although there are thousands of folks out there who believe as I do that equal access is the only right course of action even if the law has yet to recognize it universally. If we ever to achieve honesty and accountability we must have access.

On the news pages, the media can and should play an important role in presenting the facts and allowing readers to draw their own conclusions. On the op-ed pages they are entitled to their opinion about adoption secrecy. When they come down on our side, we should at least say thank you!

Follow the Money

“Follow the money” is an injunction to investigative reporters looking for the real story behind the events; it’s too bad that the media so seldom take that to heart when reporting on adoption.

Here is an example of reporting that does take adoption finance into account:

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/story/2008/10/08/ST2008100803864.html

Petula Dvorak of the Washington post explores a somewhat controversial aspect of adoption, subsidies paid to parents who adopt from foster care which, not surprisingly, receive little oversight.

The federal Adoption Assistance and Child Welfare Act of 1980 is another example of well-intentioned legislation that, along with safe-haven laws and sealed records, have been passed into law with the intent of making adoption more attractive, safer or to address non-existent problems in ways that benefit the industry.

AACW, enacted to keep foster children from languishing in a government system, pays state child welfare agencies a bonus for moving children from foster care to permanent adoptive homes. It also provides a source of income to the adoptive families. On the face if it, this sounds like a positive program. But, as adoption reform activists suggest, money is often at the heart of ill-advised practices.

If you have ever known a child who is in foster care, then think about the cause of his/her situation. Here are two examples:

Dennis, now a university professor, was a mixed-race child who was adopted by a couple in New York state. But his adoptive father died prematurely, and the adoptive mother returned him to the agency because she said having a child with a darker skin than her own might adversely affect her chances of remarriage.

April’s mother, who wrestled with drugs, alcohol and sexual excesses, gave birth to four children by four different fathers. April found refuge at the home of her next-door neighbor until the neighbors moved. The situation at home continued to deteriorate until social services removed April and her siblings from her mother’s care. They were parceled out to relatives and foster families. April’s former neighbors stepped up to the plate and offered to make a home for her. Now a physician’s assistant, April was lucky placed with the people who had become her surrogate family and remain with them until after graduation from her post-secondary training. Her older sister, repeating the life her mother lived, now has four children, both white and mixed race, who are in and out of her custody but for whom she collects welfare benefits.

While we have a societal obligation to protect and provide for our most vulnerable members, most will acknowledge that the foster care system produces mixed results at best. Foster children often suffer the effects of physical or emotional abuse by their natural parents or other relatives. Consequently, the financial incentive to move these children into permanent homes with loving parents sounds like the solution.

However, implementing these programs is problematic. Take the situation that prompted Dvorak’s reporting. Law enforcement found the bodies of two children adopted from foster care in Renee Bowman’s freezer. Southern Maryland resident, Bowman, adopted three girls from the District of Columbia. When one of these girls escaped abuse by scrambling out a window, the subsequent investigation found the bodies of one child who starved to death and another who died in a fall.

Bowman continued to receive $2,400 a month under the program because child welfare officials had no way of knowing two of her children were dead. There was no effective oversight. One report even suggests that social workers investigated, and although they did not see the two dead children, concluded that everything was in order.

The $800 per child monthly payment was roughly twice the national average subsidy of $444 because the girls qualified as “special needs” children.

There are thousands of children in foster care and subsidized adoption. Officials maintain that situations like this are the exception rather than the rule. But, without oversight, we don’t really know. And we should.

Secrecy vs. Need to Know

Here’s a blog — Raw Fisher – by Washington Post columnist Marc Fisher that I recommend enthusiastically.

http://voices.washingtonpost.com/rawfisher/

The gruesome event that prompts his blog is one about two children adopted from foster care in Maryland who were found recently in a freezer after a third child in the care of the Renee Bowman escaped by jumping out of a window in their home.

As soon as this hit the news wires, public officials were quick to proclaim that chid protective services were in no way to blame for the death of the children they had placed in Bowman’s care.

Advocates of reform both of adoption practices and child welfare protective services beg to differ. And this story comes on the heels of a story in Illinois were a member of the Illinois Adoption Advisory Council and her 26-year-old son were arrested after two foster children formerly in her care came forward with charges of sexual abuse over a period of several years http://www.chicagotribune.com/news/local/chicago/chi-rosemont-molest-both-28aug28,0,5051216.story. As in the Maryland case, it wasn’t the first red flag. And, similarly social workers had investigated and found nothing.

Now we learn that Maryland’s social services agency got a complaint accusing Bowman of child neglect last January, sent a caseworker to the house and concluded that everything was fine — “clean and appropriately furnished,” though with a funky smell that was attributed to mildew. (From Raw Fisher, 10/5/08)

Fisher maintains that the process of monitoring foster care and child welfare concerns, long shrouded in secrecy, is a mistake that has resulted in these situations that now claim public attention.

He writes in part:

In the reflexively privacy-obsessed world of adoptions, it is somehow an imposition if the public wants to know where the state’s wards end up, who is collecting the stipends taxpayers shell out to encourage adoption and how all that money is being spent. We know best, social workers say.

But anytime public money is involved, it’s the public’s job to demand oversight and accountability, and the only road to that goal is transparency.

Unfortunately, if the past is any indicator, public interest will fade fast – because the media will lose interest and move on – and child welfare officials have no stomach for reform.

I am one of those in the adoption reform movement who believes that sunshine is the answer. I still believe that the media could bring about positive reform if they would continue to keep the abuse made possible by the system before the public. But I despair of this happening. If the media could not keep the abuses of our financial system in front of Americans during the several years that lead up to this current crisis when it directly affects the purses of every American, then there’s little hope they will maintain a consistent focus on the needs of children, a large number of whom are poor and disadvantaged. The media surely believes that the average American is simply not interested. I hope they are wrong.

Do your part to encourage this tye of reporting by visiting http://newstrust.net/stories/27138?expand=true and reviewing the column that prompted this blog.

“Safe-havens” are not safe

If you are not familiar with safe-haven laws, you should read this article:

http://www.chicagotribune.com/news/nationworld/chi-safe-haven_satsep27,0,2178084.story

The reporter does a good job of explaining the unintended consequences of a legislative “solution” to a complex societal problem. Adoption reformers have opposed these laws from the beginning, which explains Adoption Beat’s interest. Kudos to the Associated Press for picking it up.

To learn more about safe-havens, visit this blog post:

http://73adoptee.blogspot.com/2008/09/safe-haven-laws-destroy-adoptee.html

Stressful pregnancies affect the unborn

http://www.cnn.com/video/#/video/health/2008/09/26/hfh.fortin.pregnancy.stress.cnn

 

Stress and pregnancy

Stress may play a role in a child’s future, as passed from mother to baby during pregnancy. Judy Fortin reports. • Health News – Medicine, Diet, Fitness and Parenting from CNN.com.

When I read the post and watched the video, I immediately emailed it to my OYGYN who is semi-retired. I’m sure he will have some cogent comments.

Joan Wheeler sent this link to GRC_Update@yahoogroups.com, a forum that regularly posts items of interest to the adoption reform community. Although adoption is not mentioned in the story, it’s not hard to connect the dots.

In Israel, medical researchers followed women who were pregnant during the Six Days War and the children born to them and found a higher incidence of psychological disorders in the children. Researchers have long debated the cause of an observed phenomenon that adoptees seek psychological treatment more often than the general population and some maintain that they are disproportionately represented in prisons and/or mental institutions. If future research bears out the findings of this study, it would seem that we can advance a hypothesis about why.

Women who were pressured to surrender a child to adoption — and we all know someone who had that experience — passed the attendant stress along to their unborn children. There’s no way to prevent that, only ways to try to reduce the mother’s stress.  If the circumstances are such that no efforts are made to alleviate stress, but rather to ratchet it up to achieve the desired result, the mother signing away parental rights, what sort of future problems are adoption professionals creating when they engage in “persuading” unwed mothers to give up their children?

I’d really like to see the media take a look at that.