Kidnapped in Guatemala, 'adopted' in America

Lorraine

Guatemala Mother Searched for 5 Years for Adopted Girl the head reads at Huff Po. It ought to read: Guatemala Mother Searched for 5 Years for Kidnapped Daughter and found her alive and adopted in America, because that is the whole story. We have written about the terrible corruption involved in Guatemalan adoptions several times before, but this one is different in that this is the first time the Guatemalan government has ordered a child returned to her mother, Lodya Rodriguez Morales. 

The girl was two at the time of the abduction, she spent a year under a different name in an adoption mill before she was adopted by an American couple, Timothy and Jennifer Monahan of Liberty, Missouri, a suburb of Kansas City.

Mamalita: An adoption book I can't love, a story that isn't for everyone

Three generations, three blondes

How thoroughly adoptive parents are quick to push aside the thoughts that the children they adopt have other families was brought home last week when an adoptive mother sent me her memoir. At her blog, she wrote that she thought the primary opinion of the general public towards adoption was turning negative, based partly on the article in which First Mother Forum is mentioned as part of the new "anti-adoption" movement. I left a comment; she emailed and sent me her book about adopting from Guatemala, a country with one of the most troubled histories regarding the trafficking of children. I was interested, but immediately on edge because no adoption story coming out of Guatemala is going to be easy for me to stomach. I know too much.

Mamalita, the book, by Jessica O' Dwyer arrives: Cute native girl on the cover with native dress. Okay.

Guatemalan Army Stole Kids for Adoption

Over the weekend CNN reported "Guatemalan Army Stole Kids for Adoption," a story that cannot go unnoticed here at Birth Mother/First Mother Forum because apparently the corruption in Guatemalan adoption is much worse than reported earlier:

"The Guatemalan army stole at least 333 children and sold them for adoption in other countries during the Central American nation's 36-year civil war, a government report has concluded. Many of those children ended up in the United States, as well as Sweden, Italy and France, said the report's author and lead investigator.

"In some cases, the report stated, the parents were killed so the children could be taken and given to government-sponsored agencies to be adopted abroad. In other instances, the children were abducted without physical harm to the parents."

The number of corrupt adoptions--333--involving stolen children in the government report came from examining a mere 672 adoptions between between 1977-89, the time of peak adoptions from that country. Those numbers mean that roughly half of all adoptions examined during that period involved stolen children sold through state-run agencies. So the 333 number has got to be the mere tip of the iceberg. During the country's protracted civil war, about 45,000 people disappeared from 1960 to 1996, about 5,000 of which were children.

The story also noted that Guatemala has the world's highest per capita rate of adoption and was one of the leading providers of adoptive children for the United States: "Nearly one in 100 babies born in Guatemala end up with adoptive parents in the United States, according to the U.S. consulate in Guatemala. As we reported earlier on E. J. Graff's piece in Foreign Policy, many, if not nearly all, adoptions from poor nations are suspect.

Guatemalan adoptions can cost up to $30,000, providing a large financial incentive in a country where the World Bank says about 75 percent of the people live below the poverty level. The report concludes that the lawyers and notaries who were the middlemen for this human trafficking (yes, it is human trafficking) were the driving force for the babies stolen from their parents. Many induced the women to give up their babies, or simply paid soldiers for product, i.e., a baby--because they knew they had a place to market the kid.

While those who push international adoption decry when this kind of baby-selling is called trafficking--they want it only to refer to the sex market--they are kidding themselves. Taking children for filthy lucre is trafficking in human flesh, period. They just don't want to see themselves as baby sellers, promoters of baby selling, or human traffickers, but that is what they are.

Okay, we have known this has gone on for a long time. We've written about corruption in international adoption several times before, including here and here. But you know what is the most amazing thing about this sickening report?

How little attention it has gotten in the United States. Where most of those stolen babies have ended up.

My husband says it was on the AOL story board on Saturday, but only for a couple of hours. A Googgle search seems to indicate that the news reports on what should scare of bejeesus out of all adoptive parents who have children from abroad were scant. CNN, Reuters, UPI wrote brief stories, but the report has largely disappeared from the public consciousness here in America--everyone is more interested in what will happen to foul-mouthed Serena Williams after her bad behavior at the U.S. Open this weekend.

Why? Call me crazy, but it's because we here in the country where these kids are sold into DO NOT WANT TO HEAR THEY MAY HAVE A STOLEN CHILD. I guess I wouldn't either, but how long is the world going to be deaf to what is happening? I still know people who are looking into international adoption.

Are the folks at the Holt International Agency doing a review of the Guatemalan adoptions they processed? Is international adopter and promoter Elizabeth Bartholet rethinking her position that all international adoptions are good ones because children are not raised in poverty, but in countries where people are wealthy enough to buy somebody else's baby? Are there going to be more conferences promoting international adoption such as the one at New York University earlier this year?

Guatemala has suspended all adoptions, but here's what you get at the Christian World Adoption website:

Guatemala Adoption

CWA is hopeful and optimistic that one day the precious children of Guatemala will again have a chance to unite with a forever family through international adoption. Due to the continuing issues with Hague Treaty requirements, Guatemala adoption is not possible at this time, and there is no way to know when it might be possible. We continue to monitor the situation, and we continue to pray for the waiting children.

Can these people be stopped? Do they never learn? We are, quite simply, sick at heart. Real forever families are waiting all over the world to be reunited with their stolen children. We grieve for the mothers.--lorraine
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The Heart to Heart retreat over the weekend in Boston was a wonderful, enriching experience. I want to thank everyone who was there for making it so. Report coming soon.

At the hospital: The innate need to know who you are, the desire to return 'home'

Lorraine

At the hospital a certain night nurse and I bond over this story: Her husband was a foster child, never adopted so that the parents did not lose the cash payment from the state for him and his sister.* The father wanted to adopt him when the father was dying, but the man said: too late. He was told for years that his his mother had died, but intrepid wife (and my new friend) somehow did not believe the story. She knew her husband needed to have some information to close up the gap in his heart.

Through major sleuthing, and sending flowers to the people whom she knew had the information, my friend was able to learn the mother's name. Now she applied to every single state for the

Abuse in International Adoption, Part 2 with new commentary

NEW BLOG LATER TODAY (Tuesday, 2/24/08) FROM JANE, ABOUT HER GRANDDAUGHTER'S VISIT....

I'm not putting this up as a new post, but I did want some to see some of the comments at the Reality Check site regarding E.J. Graff's piece, "The Lie We Love":

Why is it so hard to believe that the women in these countries are any different. I am sure that many of them would like to keep their children but recognize the fact that the best future for their children may in fact lie somewhere else.

Yes, many of the women would like to keep their children...but the idea presented here is that a middle-class life is always better than being raised in one's own culture with one's own kind. And:

I am the mother of 2 Beautiful children adopted from Guatemala, I want YOU to imagine trying to work for $60 or $80 a MONTH while supporting yourself, a child and pay for daycare for said child. This is the "salary" the Birth Mothers of my children made. I know for a fact (after speaking to her personally) that my son's Birth Mother loved him with all of her heart and in that same heart she knew that she was not able to care for him). That is an unbelievable act of selflessness in my opinion. But it seems unselfish and an act of love only if it is someone in the States doing the same thing????

Boy, doesn't that sound like the load of crap that we birth mothers were fed when we gave up our children--how they will have better life with two parents...who can give them what we could not? Doesn't that sound like the same argument that was pounded into our heads, we survivors of the Baby Dump Era? And:

My daughter will not end up in the dumps of Guatemala City. Do some more research--that's where the infants are now being found, often dead or dying since Guatemalan adoptions have halted to be "fixed".

and

During the year long process, much of our money went to care for our daughter since there are no government programs to do this. Our daughter was not "stolen". We met her birth mother and have continued contact. She chose adoption because she had lost 4 children in 4 years due to the fact that she could not feed them or provide needed medical care. She could not bear to watch this happen again. We would love to be able to help her financialy, but cannot for two reasons. One, she fears that she would be killed if anyone knew that she had any money, and two, it is not allowed as it would look like we were "paying her for her child". Yes, our daughter did have one living parent--a desperate parent with nowhere to turn. Her choices were adoption, or abandonment. She made the only choice a loving mother could make.
Why are the women in other countries not allowed the same freedom to make a choice for themselves and their child? When family members, friends and well meaning individuals convince a woman here at home to give her child away, is she not being unfairly coerced? Why the double standard? Does money not change hands in a domestic adoption?

I dunno. But being incredibly poor with someone standing there waving money and seeming to be salvation does not seem to offer "freedom to make a choice." Most of the comments at the site are from angry adopters who feel maligned. E.J. answered some of their accusations. Here is a section of her response:

The DNA tests have been shown to have been fraudulent at times, with false "birth mothers" coming forward in the interviews, for pay. For instance, the doctor who signed Ana Escobar's child's test, Dr. Aida Gutierrez, has been shown to have falsified other tests; see this AP story: http://www.iht.com/articles/ap/2008/11/23/news/LT-FEA-Guatemala-Adoptions-Dilemma.php. Dr. Gutierrez certified hundreds of adoptions and is now under criminal investigation.
The documentation in Guatemala was so in-depth that no other Western country would adopt from there--Canada, England, Germany, the Netherlands, and other major adopting countries closed their doors to those adoptions. A number of international and local human rights groups were standing up for the impoverished birth families in Guatemala: the UN Special Rapporteur on the sale of children, Casa Alianza, the Roman Catholic Archbishop's Office, the Myrna Mack Survivors Foundation, and others. -E.J. Graff

All this makes it so abundantly clear how much of an uphill battle we face in changing attitudes about international adoption. I am sure that the people I know believe with all their heart that they were doing a good deed by adopting from overseas, though thankfully, they I did not hear them express it that way: they merely said that they wanted to have a child and could not conceive. And it was too hard/complicated/lengthy to adopt from America.

At least they were honest about their reasons. As for the academic who adopted from Guatemala a decade ago, our friendship waned as she proceeded. I do not doubt that these people love their children; I just don't want to be faced with them day after day. For whenever I see them, my mind always strays to...the adoption. Save for one couple I see quite often, the adoption is always the elephant in the room. How do others feel about having friends who are adoptive parents? I can't be the only reader who is confronted with this so often. --lorraine

Now here's the rest of the post about "The Lie We Love" from Foreign Policy, Nov/Dec, 2008:

EJ.Graff, the investigative reporter of The Lie We Love that we began writing about yesterday goes on to note that delayed conception in developed countries has led to the uptick in the demand for babies--but that in the United States the drive to adopt overseas is also motivated by a fear of birth mothers--not only our change of hearts, but the specter that we might return someday....That idea was certainly at the heart of the arguments over the last several months I had with with friends who have little to no empathy for the women who bear the children, i.e., their natural mothers. They really would rather have us just drop dead. Oh no, they would say, we don't need to have you dead, we just don't want you to ever reappear. Same difference.

Witness that awful book I mentioned in an earlier post, The Brotherhood of Joseph, the woeful tale of delayed conception, normal infertility, failed fertility intervention, and eventually, of course, adoption...from Siberia. I can still see the face of the father of the author looking at me across a dinner table and saying: You are our worst nightmare after I told him I was a birth mother whole daughter had lived with my husband and I for lengthy periods of time. I did that, I admit, because I wanted to jolt him with a shot of reality. I wanted to let him know that adoption is not that simple. I wanted him to know that his grandchildren (now there are two) have other mothers, other pasts, other lives.

Why is my life surrounded by adopters?

But I digress. Back to Graff on the abuses in international adoption: She notes that women in poor countries have far fewer protections than their U.S. counterparts [that would be us, and we know how much pressure many/most of us had to relinquish our children], and that these huge imbalances are neatly overlooked by people mad to have a baby at any cost. The would-be adopters only see and hear what they want to; the other day on the ABC reality show, "The Bachelor," one of the women stated that she not only wanted to have children, she wanted to adopt. In her mind, apparently there are children going begging on every Third World corner. Not so, says Graff:

In reality, there are very few young, healthy orphans available for adoption around the world. Orphans are rarely healthy babies; healthy babies are rarely orphaned. “It’s not really true,” says Alexandra Yuster, a senior advisor on child protection with UNICEF, “that there are large numbers of infants with no homes who either will be in institutions or who need intercountry adoption.”

That assertion runs counter to the story line that has long been marketed to Americans and other Westerners, who have been trained by images of destitution in developing countries and the seemingly endless flow of daughters from China to believe that millions of orphaned babies around the world desperately need homes. UNICEF itself is partly responsible for this erroneous assumption. The organization’s statistics on orphans and institutionalized children are widely quoted to justify the need for international adoption. In 2006, UNICEF reported an estimated 132 million orphans in sub-Saharan Africa, Asia, Latin America, and the Caribbean. But the organization’s definition of “orphan” includes children who have lost just one parent, either to desertion or death. Just 10 percent of the total—13 million children—have lost both parents, and most of these live with extended family. They are also older: By UNICEF’s own estimate, 95 percent of orphans are older than 5. In other words, UNICEF’s “millions of orphans” are not healthy babies doomed to institutional misery unless Westerners adopt and save them. Rather, they are mostly older children living with extended families who need financial support.

Ah, if only Angelina and Madonna had decided to give financial support to the families, maybe this adoption craze would not be so systemic in the land.

The country that has had the greatest abuses is Guatemala--and I personally know two single mothers who adopted from there--both professional women, one a highly respected feminist academic. In 2006 and 2007 Guatamala was the No. 2 exporter of children to the United States, Graff points out. "Incredibly, in 2006, American parents adopted one of every 110 Guatemalan children born," she writes. "In 2007, nearly 9 out of 10 children adopted were less than a year old; almost half were younger than 6 months old. 'Guatemala is a perfect case study of how international adoption has become a demand-driven business,' says Kelley McCreery Bunkers, a former consultant with UNICEF Guatemala. The country’s adoption process was “an industry developed to meet the needs of adoptive families in developed countries, specifically the United States.' " Graff continues:

Because the vast majority of the country’s institutionalized children are not healthy, adoptable babies, almost none has been adopted abroad. In the fall of 2007, a survey conducted by the Guatemalan government, UNICEF, and the international child welfare and adoption agency Holt International Children’s Services found approximately 5,600 children and adolescents in Guatemalan institutions. More than 4,600 of these children were age 4 or older. Fewer than 400 were under a year old. And yet in 2006, more than 270 Guatemalan babies, all younger than 12 months, were being sent to the United States each month. These adopted children were simply not coming from the country’s institutions. Last year, 98 percent of U.S. adoptions from Guatemala were “relinquishments”: Babies who had never seen the inside of an institution were signed over directly to a private attorney who approved the international adoption—for a very considerable fee—without any review by a judge or social service agency.

So, where had some of these adopted babies come from? Consider the case of Ana Escobar, a young Guatemalan woman who in March 2007 reported to police that armed men had locked her in a closet in her family’s shoe store and stolen her infant. After a 14-month search, Escobar found her daughter in pre-adoption foster care, just weeks before the girl was to be adopted by a couple from Indiana. DNA testing showed the toddler to be Escobar’s child. In a similar case from 2006, Raquel Par, another Guatemalan woman, reported being drugged while waiting for a bus in Guatemala City, waking to find her year-old baby missing. Three months later, Par learned her daughter had been adopted by an American couple.

On Jan. 1, 2008, Guatemala closed its doors to American adoptions so that the government could reform the broken process. Britain, Canada, France, Germany, the Netherlands, and Spain all stopped accepting adoptions from the country several years earlier, citing trafficking concerns. But more than 2,280 American adoptions from the country are still being processed, albeit with additional safeguards. Stolen babies have already been found in that queue; Guatemalan authorities expect more.

Guatemala’s example is extreme; it is widely considered to have the world’s most notorious record of corruption in foreign adoption. But the same troubling trends have emerged, on smaller scales, in more than a dozen other countries, including Albania, Cambodia, Ethiopia, Liberia, Peru, and Vietnam. The pattern suggests that the supply of adoptable babies rises to meet foreign demand—and disappears when Western cash is no longer available. For instance, in December 2001, the U.S. immigration service stopped processing adoption visas from Cambodia, citing clear evidence that children were being acquired illicitly, often against their parents’ wishes. That year, Westerners adopted more than 700 Cambodian children; of the 400 adopted by Americans, more than half were less than 12 months old. But in 2005, a study of Cambodia’s orphanage population, commissioned by the U.S. Agency for International Development, found only a total of 132 children who were less than a year old—fewer babies than Westerners had been adopting every three months a few years before.

And that's what we have been saying here. Bribery, kidnapping, corrupt attorneys and hospital and government officials combined with illiteracy and poverty lead to hundreds--thousands--of babies suddenly being "available" to be adopted. As Graff writes:

In August 2008, the U.S. State Department released a warning that birth certificates issued by Tu Du Hospital in Ho Chi Minh City—which in 2007 had reported 200 births a day, and an average of three abandoned babies per 100 births—were “unreliable.” Most of the hospital’s “abandoned” babies were sent to the city’s Tam Binh orphanage, from which many Westerners have adopted. (Tu Du Hospital is where Angelina Jolie’s Vietnamese-born son was reportedly abandoned one month after his birth; he was at Tam Binh when she adopted him.) According to Linh Song, executive director of Ethica, an American nonprofit devoted to promoting ethical adoption, a provincial hospital’s chief obstetrician told her in 2007 “that he provided 10 ethnic minority infants to [an] orphanage [for adoption] in return for an incubator.”

...Most of the Westerners involved with foreign adoption agencies—like business people importing foreign sneakers—can plausibly deny knowledge of unethical or unseemly practices overseas. They don’t have to know. Willful ignorance allowed Lauryn Galindo, a former hula dancer from the United States, to collect more than $9 million in adoption fees over several years for Cambodian infants and toddlers. Between 1997 and 2001, Americans adopted 1,230 children from Cambodia; Galindo said she was involved in 800 of the adoptions. (Galindo reportedly delivered Angelina Jolie’s Cambodian child to her movie set in Africa.) But in a two-year probe beginning in 2002, U.S. investigators alleged that Galindo paid Cambodian child finders to purchase, defraud, coerce, or steal children from their families, and conspired to create false identity documents for the children. Galindo later served federal prison time on charges of visa fraud and money laundering, but not trafficking. “You can get away with buying babies around the world as a United States citizen,” says Richard Cross, a senior special agent with U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement who investigated Galindo. “It’s not a crime.”

So that means that two out of three of the Brangelina's adopted kids were acquired through suspect means. Now I believe that National Enquirer story about the mother of one of the kids. And maybe now with her and Brad having their own kids, she won't opt for more adoptions, but continue humanitarian efforts to help poor families worldwide. I want to like her, I really do. But serial adoption is not the way.

ROCKING THE CRADLE

Buying a child abroad is something most prospective parents want no part of. So, how can it be prevented? As international adoption has grown in the past decade, the ad hoc approach of closing some corrupt countries to adoption and shifting parents’ hopes (and money) to the next destination has failed. The agencies that profit from adoption appear to willfully ignore how their own payments and fees are causing both the corruption and the closures.

Some countries that send children overseas for adoption have kept the process lawful and transparent from nearly the beginning and their model is instructive. Thailand, for instance, has a central government authority that counsels birth mothers and offers some families social and economic support so that poverty is never a reason to give up a child. Other countries, such as Paraguay and Romania, reformed their processes after sharp surges in shady adoptions in the 1990s. But those reforms were essentially to stop international adoptions almost entirely. In 1994, Paraguay sent 483 children to the United States; last year, the country sent none.

For a more comprehensive solution, the best hope may be the Hague Convention on Intercountry Adoption, an international agreement designed to prevent child trafficking for adoption. On April 1, 2008, the United States formally entered the agreement, which has 75 other signatories. In states that send children overseas and are party to the convention, such as Albania, Bulgaria, Colombia, and the Philippines, Hague-compatible reforms have included a central government authority overseeing child welfare, efforts to place needy children with extended families and local communities first, and limits on the number of foreign adoption agencies authorized to work in the country. The result, according to experts, has been a sharp decline in baby buying, fraud, coercion, and kidnapping for adoption.

In adopting countries, the convention requires a central authority—in the United States’ case, the State Department—to oversee international adoption. The State Department empowers two nonprofit organizations to certify adoption agencies; if shady practices, fraud, financial improprieties, or links with trafficking come to light, accreditation can be revoked. Already, the rules appear to be having some effect: Several U.S. agencies long dogged by rumors of bad practices have been denied accreditation; some have shut their doors. But no international treaty is perfect, and the Hague Convention is no exception. Many of the countries sending their children to the West, including Ethiopia, Russia, South Korea, Ukraine, and Vietnam, have yet to join the agreement.

Perhaps most important, more effective regulations would strictly limit the amount of money that changes hands. Per-child fees could be outlawed. Payments could be capped to cover only legitimate costs such as medical care, food, and clothing for the children. And crucially, fees must be kept proportionate with the local economies. “Unless you control the money, you won’t control the corruption,” says Thomas DiFilipo, president of the Joint Council on International Children’s Services, which represents more than 200 international adoption organizations. “If we have the greatest laws and the greatest regulations but are still sending $20,000 anywhere—well, you can bypass any system with enough cash.”

Improved regulations will protect not only the children being adopted and their birth families, but also the consumers: hopeful parents. Adopting a child—like giving birth—is an emotional experience; it can be made wrenching by the abhorrent realization that a child believed to be an orphan simply isn’t. One American who adopted a little girl from Cambodia in 2002 wept as she spoke at an adoption ethics conference in October 2007 about such a discovery. “I was told she was an orphan,” she said. “One year after she came home, and she could speak English well enough, she told me about her mommy and daddy and her brothers and her sisters.”

Unless we recognize that behind the altruistic veneer, international adoption has become an industry—one that is often highly lucrative and sometimes corrupt—many more adoption stories will have unhappy endings. Unless adoption agencies are held to account, more young children will be wrongfully taken from their families. And unless those desperate to become parents demand reform, they will continue—wittingly or not—to pay for wrongdoing. “Credulous Westerners eager to believe that they are saving children are easily fooled into accepting laundered children,” writes David Smolin, a law professor and advocate for international adoption reform. “For there is no fool like the one who wants to be fooled.”

This is absolutely the best piece of journalism I have ever read on international adoption. Though I have quoted directly most of the piece here, I urge everyone to go to the site at Foreign Policy or Reality Check, where E.J. Graff has her own blog. At Foreign Policy, there are links to other papers of similar interest.

But how do our readers here feel? I'm relieved this is coming to light aat last, but since I'm surrounded by so many who have adopted from overseas (Romania, China, Guatemala, Siberia) it's obvious that the word has not been spread wide enough. Yet do I have the nerve to send this to a man I know whose girlfriend is hoping to adopt from China, and if not there, Nepal, which so far has not allowed any out-of-country adoptions? He is already the divorced father of a Chinese teenager. I don't know. Every parent I know who has adopted from overseas seems to live in a cocoon of self-induced ignorance. Whenever we mothers from FirstMotherForum see a child that is clearly not white Anglo, we look up to see who the parent is. And if the genetic makeup is from the same race, we silently saw: Yeah! Maybe the kid is not adopted!

I asked E.J. (We've never met but I'm beginning to think of her as a friend) how she became interested in this subject. She emailed that a family friend was in line to adopt from Cambodia in 2001. When the shutdown came*, and the corruption info came out, her friend was sickened to think she'd come so close to paying someone to steal her a child. Graff then became interested in the topic and began researching, hearing more and more heartbreaking info, until she could finally interest an editor in the story. Last night (2/21/08) I caught Graff on another subject--teenage sexual harassment on the job--on NOW on PBS. Do many of us remember when the slimy manager of the coffee shop where we worked in high school put his hands on us inappropriately? I do. One such guy drove me home after work and when I wasn't interested in a quickie, fired me the next day. I'd say I was lucky. And did I ever tell my parents? Of course not. Now I worry about my granddaughter.

Both of them. The one I know and the one I don't. Very soon, we'll hear from Jane about her granddaughter's (the daughter of her adopted daughter) visit over the long holiday weekend. There are some good stories, after all. --lorraine

Refusing to help kids here while trolling for kids abroad

Children in Nogales, AZ facility

About 40,000 accompanied minors and young children with their mothers from Guatemala, El Salvador, and Honduras have crossed our southern borders illegally since October. Another 12,000 have come from Mexico. These children and their mothers, hoping to escape the violence and poverty back home, have been herded into warehouse-like accommodations awaiting reviews by governments officials. They are confronted by angry mobs, demanding they leave immediately.

One might think that the self-styled child savers, those eager to bring poor children from poor countries to the U.S. for adoption, would be bending over backwards to help these would-be immigrants. One would be wrong.

UN finds irregularities in Guatemalan adoptions--no surprise there

Lorraine

People who want a child--someone else's child--will stop at nothing to get one, apparently, even when the illegal practices are brought to light. The Associated Press is reporting that a United Nations anti-corruption commission has found irregularities in Guatemala's adoption program despite government efforts to prevent fraudulent adoptions.
The International Commission Against Impunity in Guatemala reports numerous cases of Guatemalan children handed over to foreigners

Dark Ages Adoption Spewing over at Huffington Post

While the adoptasphere is abuzz with reaction to ABC's Find My Family--some of this is bound to reach the ears of legislators, so right on, I say!--over at The Huffington Post, nasty business is afoot in the form on a noxious column by an assistant professor of psychology, no less at Cornell Medical School. It's yet another frothing at the mouth of an adoptive parent, one Ms. Peggy Drexler.

Ms. Drexler sounds like a clone of that other professor of adoption fairy tales, Elizabeth Bartholet of Harvard. (And people wonder why adoption reform, or birth mothers, does not get more support from the feminist community, or which I am most certainly a member. Ah, my dear, this is why. Feminists form a large group of adopters. But I digress.

"Adopting a New Attitude" could have been written in the darkest Dark Ages of adoption, anytime from the Forties onward. What was wrong with the piece? Let me count the ways:

1) To show that adoption is not, "second best," Ms. Drexler quotes another adoptive mother: a quick witted, vivacious forty-seven year old, "totally present," blond, fair-skinned, green-eyed woman who looks like she was a high school cheerleader. She is now an adoptive single mother by choice to three beautiful brown skinned boys she adopted from Guatemala ages four, four and a half, and seven.

Hmm. I guess both Drexler and the extremely cool blond, fair-skinned, green-eyed (so far, she is describing me) could have been a cheerleader (I didn't make the team) woman has three children from Guatemala. I guess Drexler has not read the stories about mothers who were killed in order to take their children to be sold to unscrupulous adoption brokers in Guatemala, or otherwise she might have chosen another blond, fair-skinned, green-eyed adopter. Or not come upon the story about the prospective adoptive mother who noticed that something was amiss with the papers the adoption lawyer in Guatemala presented her and called off the adoption. Now, that's a woman after my own heart. But I digress.

Yet what is going on here is that Ms. Drexler is making a saint of a woman who very likely has stolen children as the focal point of her story about how adoption is not Second Choice, which is the title of a very good memoir by adoptee Robert Andersen, M.D., that comes with blurbs from no less than Betty Jean Lifton, Joyce Maquire Pavao, and Annette Baran, good folks all, two of them adopted themselves.

2) I could hardly contain myself when I saw the "expert" she brought in to give gravitas to her piece: Mike McMahon, the director of the Gladney Center for Adoption. That's right, Drexler attempts to prove her point about how great adoption is and how we should "adopt a new attitude" about it by the director of the agency that has been a main proponent of sealed records and only reluctantly, when its business was going south because they were not doing open adoptions, did the agency change its tune, and yes, today, young maidens, you can have a open adoption at this nefarious agency. This is like asking the head of Goldman Sachs what's good about giving millions of dollars in bonuses to top performers with the government's bailout money. Really, Arianna, where is your critical ability? Not evident here.

Let's not forget that Gladney of Fort Worth is one of the leading adoption agencies in the country! It's where rich folk and movie stars have gone to get their American babies for generations! (Though today, they have a lucrative international market. From their website: The Gladney Center for Adoption is one of the oldest [Ed: 120  years!] and largest maternity homes and adoption agencies in the United States, placing more than 28,000 children in permanent homes and assisting more than 37,000 birth mothers. In addition to placing children born in the United States, Gladney's intercountry program is committed to finding permanent homes for children in other countries. Adoption opportunities are available in several countries around the world including Eastern European, Asian, African and Latin American countries.

Our guy Mike was recently nominated for an Angels in Adoption by Sen. Kay Bailey Hutchinson, whose child a few years ago came from...you got it, Gladney. Even the name kinda creeps me out--Gladney, it sounds sinister, but maybe that's just me. Rumor has it that Troy Dunn of The Locator, who is kind of a Bat Man for birth mothers, will not take on searches emanting from Gladney adoptions because they are so hard, so closed are those records at this infamous adoption bazaar. So, Mike, whose livelihood depends on a thriving adoption market, is the "expert" Ms. Drexler uses to show that adoption is so peachy-keen: "To the people who persist in assuming that adopted kids are somehow flawed," she writes, continuing, "Sure, adopted kids are over-represented in counseling," [McMahon] tells me. "But they are also over-represented at the orthodontist, the dermatologist, all those things, because we [adoptive parents] want to give them everything we can."

So adopted people are not over-represented among the troubled in our population, though numerous studies show that to be the case, even more likely to think about suicide as adolescents--only because their parents are such good parents they pay more attention and get their kids more therapy? Wait one moment--even adoptive parents, those without blinkers on--have done some of these studies. Seems that Ms. Drexler is probably too busy being her daughter's "true mom," as she puts it, to bother with petty details like that. I'm not going to argue about her comment thus makes me an "untrue" mother, because that kind of niggling is what adoptive parents are always doing--nearly passing out, it seems, when they hear the word "real" in front of a reference to we who carried them and gave birth to our children.  (Understand, please, I am not saying that adopted people come into the world with problems, but that adoption itself is the problem that manifests can lead to feelings of rejection that may cause psychological problems. As one psychiatrist said in court one day when I was there to testify for opening someone's birth records--and he was an adoptive father himself: Adoption is always painful.)

3) Back to Drexler. Her column ends with the same old chestnut about how the writer is not threatened by her daughter's curiosity about "her adoption status," because she, Ms. Drexler, knows that to be a "bona fide mother" you have to be there for every 2 a.m. bad dream, go to the soiree at school and hear your child sing, and listen to their complaints about who was not nice to them. Though she doesn't come out and actually say it that we who gave birth were no more than birth canals [which is how I have seen us referred to at RainbowKids], that is what she is implying. As well as, by omission, ignoring the pervasive influence of DNA. Wait til her daughter is a teenager. I hope Drexler checks back in with us again.

4) The frosting on the cake? The biographical note states that Ms. Drexler collected her "data" and "patterns" for her book, Raising Boys Without Men,  How Maverick Moms are Creating the Next Generation of Exceptional Men, a finalist for the Lambda Literary Award and a finalist for a "Better Life Award." (Feminism at work, again.) She is currently at work on a book about fathers and daughters. Sounds like it is permissible in her world to have a father if you are a girl, not so good if you are a boy--but then on this issue, I am so old school. Comments are still being posted over at the Huffington Post, so please add your two or four cents. (I am there, just incognito for a change.) Drexler and the her editor need to read them. This is one of my favorites: 

I worked with a professor at Stanford on a project with adoptive parents. We asked them to assign a reason for why the kid did well or failed a test. This is called attribution theory. Briefly, the results were: If they did well, it was because they, the adoptive parents, helped them study. If they did poorly it was because of genes! 

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Now I seriously have to get ready for tomorrow, Thanksgiving Day. Prepare that pie crust and cool it over night in the fridge! [I do make good crust, substituting a half cup of regular flour with Wondra.Which does wonders for flakiness.] Make that cranberry-lime-orange chutney! Make the pumpkin praline and pecan pie in the morning! Whip that cream with bourbon!
We are dining with friends, and those are my assignments. Ah, really, sometimes I wish I had a food blog. Since it would be nice to have a couple of adoption-free days, things might be quiet at the blog for a few days. Have a good day, y'all, and to those who are dreading it, remember, it's only one day.

What about those babies in....any-poor-nation?

The previous post dealt with the prevailing attitude towards adopting in America today--that there must be a lot babies who need adopting--when they aren't. Continuing that theme of What About Children Who Need adopting, today's post talks about going overseas to adopt:

In the quest to rescue children from deplorable conditions in another country, the number of children adopted from South Korea ballooned to more than 100,000. The exodus of babies began after the Korean War with the mixed-race babies left behind by GIs, but the flow of children didn’t stop when most of those children were settled in America. Exporting children to America became a cash cow for the country, and only lately has this become a national embarrassment.

NOW HOLT HAS ADOPTEE TOURISM 
Today, Holt International Children’s Services, the same agency that facilitated a great many—if not most—of the Korean adoptions, now advertises a side business of guided trips back to Korea for adult adoptees, who may be in search of their parents. If they are lucky enough to find them, now a language and cultural barrier separates parent and child.

Corruption in International Adoption? Highly Over-rated.

Rev. Mark H. Diebel of East Greenbush, NY, attended the 2009 Adoption Policy Conference on International Adoption, The United States, and the Reality of the Hague System, presented by the Center for Adoption Policy, The Child Advocacy Program of Harvard Law School, and The Justice Action Center at New York Law School on March 6 at the New York Law School. We met Mark a year ago when we were in Albany to lobby for open records; he’s a cool guy and an Episcopalian minister. An adoptee, he found his mother in Hawaii, and connected with a large family.

We asked him to share his impressions and thoughts about the conference. The keynote speaker was Elizabeth Bartholet, Harvard adopter of two from Peru and adoption-corruption enabler and author of Family Bonds, about the glories and rewards of international adoption. She told me when we appeared on PBS together the day Anna Schmidt was returned to her rightful parents from the DeBoers that her children were meant for her. In the introduction to Family Bonds, she reveals her underlying thesis that would lead to a Brave New World of adoption:

“It would be liberating for women and for their children if we were to enable birth parents to think more positively about giving their children to those who cannot bear children but who want to provide the nurturing piece of parenting.”

Why doesn’t she just come out and write: Hey, we’re rich, we want kids, let us have yours! She is a completely heartless on what it is like to relinquish your own flesh and blood.

So…without further ado, here are Mark’s impressions of the Conference:

What is the impact to International Adoptions of America's signing on to the Hague Convention?

William Bistransky, Chief of the Adoption Unity, Office of Children's Issues, Department of State; Anna Mary Coburn (DOS) attorney-advisor, Miki Stebbing (DOS); Richard Klarberg (Council on Accrediation); USCIS -- immigration services people explained details, answered questions from the audience, many of whom seemed to be adoption agencies and adopting moms, law students...representatives from Ethica, PEAR, NY Statewide Adoption Reform and one embassy representative from Kyrgyzstan.

Who was not on the panel? Not one international adoptee.

Things overheard during the meeting: an adoptive mom's thirty-something daughter is getting married. "Things do settle down," she said to the gathered adoptive parents. I thought, "Do adoptees have problems?"

Someone on a panel asked quite seriously, "Is poverty a reason to separate a child from their family?" Silence. The subject changed. I had the feeling that children from poor countries and their families had better be watching for well-meaning rescuers. This is another potential pool of ungrateful adoptees.

One howler from Dr. Bartholet was the statement that "heritage is over-rated." This was said in respect of the millions of children who are left to languish in appalling conditions because some people think that it would be better for them to remain in those conditions "with their heritage" than be "set-free" for international adoption. A response came from Karen Moline (member of PEAR) who called her out. "This sounds racist," says Moline, especially as she herself considered her adopted child who was from Vietnam.

Dr. B replied that she has been involved in civil rights in America all her life, and figures that one just has to take comments like this for standing up and saying challenging things...second, that her two adopted "children" were from Peru and wants them to think well of their heritage. She is concerned that the heritage argument is used to manipulate international adoption and reduce its attractiveness (my word.) (I think her "children" are in their twenties.) —True, they must be by now because the are pasts toddler stage when her book was published in 1993--FMF.

Corruption is important. A woman in the audiences talks about corruption in a Guatemalan adoption that she is directly involved with. Another woman trying to adopt from Guatemala tells the story that "her child" came with what turned out to be falsified DNA records. Apparently, doctors were colluding to falsify these records. The adoption faltered, the child remains in Guatemala. She wondered what could still be done to get the child to America. Someone I don't know, who runs an adoption agency that is involved with Guatemalan adoption, stood up shortly afterwards and complained that the Hague shut-down adoptions from Guatemala. Was it the Hague (Convention) that shut it down? Or was it the corruption? Her point was the corruption is minor, exceptional; and that adoptions from Guatemala should continue. (See Firstmother’s previous posts on the corruption in international adoption.)

I asked, can the Hague Convention provide a foundation for opening a new discussion in America for opening records? The reply came from Dr. B, who said how encouraged she is to see that records are getting opened across the country. Apart from that, not one word from the panel, but there were a few words of support from the audience. Someone said to me after, "what world is she from?"

The conference had good parts. There was food and refreshment; registration was free. There was opportunity to ask questions. The panels were informed about certain things, especially if you wanted to adopt a child internationally. A professor of social work from Virginia Commonwealth University complained that the conference design lacked any real engagement with adoption fraud, and no social workers who conduct home studies. Who designed this? How can one get international adoptees involved with policy discussions like this?

My final story is a personal one. After the conference I spoke to Dr. Bartholet. My adoptive uncle taught at Harvard Law and I wondered if she knew him. Yes, for many years. And she explained something I didn't know about how he got there. Then, she said, "I'm sorry about his death." I hadn't heard. When I told my wife that I had the "adoptee experience", she replied, "my family is screwed-up too. It's not just adoptee's." I said, "but I bet no one is looking to tell me."

How did I feel about the conference?

How did I feel? Hey I'm an adoptee. I'm still figuring it out. Am still getting over the fact there were no adoptees speaking at all. I thought...I should stand up and say thank you for all your hard work. But I am not grateful.

The passion exhibited on the panelist's part was all pro-adoption, about getting children to America. Very little self-criticism. No deconstruction going on, which was all strange since that is very "in-school" these days. Old school human rights talk...fifty years old. I did say to the group..."You all sound like my parents fifty years ago." I am too indirect perhaps?

[Self: Keep a low profile. Don't draw fire more than need be to survive.]

Was it a up or down for the overall conference?

Definite down in that it did fail to come to grips with the larger picture. Furthermore no discussion of things like family formation; gay/lesbian adoption; surrogacy.

For those interested, the conference was videotaped, and will posted on the NY Law School web site sometime in the next few months.

____________________

New Post on adoptamania in the media coming Tuesday evening. --lorraine

Doubly Damned by Adoption turns Victim into a Fighter

Janette Barcenas has been doubly damned by adoption, first when she was taken from her mother in Guatemala and brought to the United States and then when she lost her son to the American adoption system. Her loses have turned her into a fighter for adoption reform.

Janette contacted me several years ago. I’m not sure how she got my name – perhaps through Concerned United Birthparents. We met at a hole-in-the wall pizza place near my home.

Over pepperoni pizza and soda, Janette told me that she had given up her son through PLAN (Plan Loving Adoptions Now) a McMinnville, Oregon based adoption agency which has since shut its doors. (According to PLAN, it ceased operations because the bulk of its business was foreign adoptions and fewer foreign children were available due to the unwillingness of other countries to let their children leave, stricter immigration laws, and concerns by humanitarian organizations.)

Cultivating a Culture of Adoption

Jane

“Adoption is the natural result of our redemption.” I came across these words when I Googled “Culture of Adoption” looking for follow-up materials to my article “Does Adoption Run in Families?. The words came from an article by Carolyn Curtis, “Cultivating a Culture of Adoption”* in the Presbyterian Church in America’s web magazine.

When adoptive parents meet the birth mother

Lorraine

"Untying a Birth Mother's Hands" yesterday in the Modern Love column in The New York Times was inadvertently a stealth argument against international adoption because it adeptly portrays the anguish and pain of a woman who surrendered her child because of poverty and shame. 

The writer/adoptive mother, Elizabeth Foy Larsen, and her family--who ups and visits Guatemala so that their daughter can visit her natural mother--clearly has the wherewithal to prevent at least that single adoption. The amount of money spent merely getting everyone down there and in a decent hotel--adoptive mother, adoptive father, their two biological children, the two adoptive grandmothers--(unless they used frequent flyer miles, of course) would have undoubtedly lifted the natural mother from the crushing poverty that kept her powerless to keep her daughter. The girl's birth mother, after all, "scrambles to find jobs that pay a living wage" while her replacement family lives in a four-bedroom with remodeled bathrooms. I'm guessing but there's probably lots of marble there.

Good news: Foreign Adoptions Decline

by Lorraine Dusky

The good news is that "Foreign Adoptions Drop Sharply" according to an Associated Press story that shows the continuing decline as some countries clamped down on foreign adoptions and other battled with allegations of fraud. The number of adoptions is down to its 1999 level. China is no longer in the top spot for adoptions, having given that to Guatemala, where fraud and child snatching appear to be rampant.

And then a few days later we had the story about the California couple who were trying to adopt from Guatemala when they saw that some paperwork had to be fake. A doctor's signed statement attested that DNA samples of the mother and baby had been taken on a day that the Jennifer Hemsley, the prospective adoptive mother, knew the baby was with her. To her credit, Mrs. Hemsley reported the discrepancy to the authorities, and thus was not able to bring the child to America. But how many other cases have there been when the adopters saw the irregularity but said nothing?

We first mothers have mixed feelings about foreign adoptions, and we will be posting our thoughts over the next week. But what I think we are all in sync with is that when we see a child that is from a different culture than the parents, we internally gulp. We think about a woman somewhere without a child. We wonder what were the horrible circumstances that led to her having to give up a child today. We wonder how the child feels about looking different from everybody around them. We wonder if their parents are really dead, if the child was really abandoned, if she really had been languishing in an orphanage. We wonder if the country made any effort to have her adopted in her native land.

And we wonder if the child was stolen.

The buyer's market in babies has led to all kinds of deceptions to get babies to feed the demand. There have been enough reported cases of kidnapping that we know there are many many more. Mirah Riben has documented this in her book, Stork Market. Yet we know there are children--older children, children with problems, teenagers in foster care--who desperately need homes here in America, and yet go begging for parents. But people don't want to take in those children. Most want healthy infants without strings, aka a first mother. Or they don't want an African-American child, which is why so many of ours were sent to Canada to be adopted. Maybe Obama's ascendancy to the presidency will have some impact on that, and that would be a good thing.

A recent book, The Brotherhood of Joseph, details the trials and tribulations of adopting from Russia, and though reading made me angry page after page, I had to see where it led. I certainly did not end up liking the writer, Brooks Hansen, but at least he was honest about his feelings.

Hansen is in love with all things Russian, exp. Prokofiev and he manages to work that into the little speech he gives to the judge about why the wanted to adopt from Russia, because he feels a special connection yadda yadda yadda....and I quote from the book here:

"There was some discussion of the birth mother as well, more than I was comfortable with. Katya [one of the emissaries they hired] kept taking notes but I tuned out a little, not because I was afraid of what I might hear or because I didn't want to humanize her too much [Oh really, it certainly seems that it the point] --or just that [meaning what, just that? Sounds like you don't want to humanize her but can't bring your pompous self-righteous soul to admit that you can't stand to humanize her because that would make you aware that somewhere out there is a mother without a child, that your child didn't come via The Stork]--but the whole conversation struck me as being a little too conjectural. Apparently they hadn't been able to track her down, so she was either out of the region or still 'indigent.' They'd used that same word back in July, but what did that mean? No address? Elizabeth and I had already discussed this. No address for a thirty-year-old would have meant something, but twenty-two? That could just mean you're sleeping on your friend's couch, in which case half of the 20-year-olds I've know were indigent."

He goes on at some length throughout the book about his love of all things Russian...and how they will let the child be aware of that (actually the kid is from Siberia).."his native land is a place we care about deeply and if he wants our help in finding it, [my ital] we will be there for him with full and open hearts as we intend to be there for him in all things. [Except possibly knowing his roots any more specifically than generally which is why you settled on Russia/Siberia anyway, your love of Prokofiev notwithstanding.] It was that birth mother problem, wasn't it?

Yet. Some of these children would be, one assumes, languishing all their lives in an institution, and I don't imagine that poor countries have very nice institutions. So I have mixed feelings about foreign adoptions. The two people I know--both older men--who spent most of their childhoods in institutions here in America ended up less than emotionally healthy. One is a recluse poet, the other someone who ranted and raved at me when he learned I had written a memoir about the pain of giving up a child.

I personally know so many adopted kids from elsewhere I sometimes feel like I'm trapped in a New Yorker cartoon, a figure with black thoughts over my head as I see the foreign faces coming at me like rain. Three Chinese teenage girls in Sag Harbor alone, or four, if you count the one whose parents are only friends of friends. A professional acquaintance who adopted from Guatemala. That's only a partial list. If I include the friends of friends, such as my real but tenuous connection to Mr. Hanson, it grows way longer.

What I do know is that because of the demand, babies are stolen from their mothers, mothers are coerced into giving up their babies, fraud is built into the system. And the commodity is human flesh.

My husband got a 2009 calendar put out by The Onion. One of the photographs depicts Chinese babies in swings coming down an assembly line. An American couple stands nearby, looking over the goods, presumably to pick out one to take home.

It's a screwed-up world.

--Happy Thanksgiving, y'all. --lorraine

Foreign Adoptions Aren't Plunging Fast Enough

Jane

“’The era of the boom time for international adoption, I think, has passed us by’” Adam Pertman, Executive Director of the Evan B. Donaldson Adoption Institute, told National Public Radio reporters Jennifer Ludden and Marosa Penaloza. To which First Mother Forum says: Good by and good riddence.

Since its peak in 2004, the number of foreign adoptions has plummeted from nearly 23,000 to less than 10,000 in 2010. Considering the known corruption in international adoption--and the 115,000 American children in foster care waiting to be placed--that figure is still obscenely high.

How the media encouarges separation of mother and child

The cover story of New York magazine last week was titled: "Is She Just too Old for This?" and showed a freakish and obviously photo-shopped picture of a very pregnant woman in her, hmmm...late sixties. The story eventually went on to say that old motherhood is great and as long as it's possible, go for it, if that is what you want. There are a lot of bothersome issues about having kids at an age that they will be taking care of senile parents while they are in college or right after, but that's not what caught my attention. Here's one issue that did:

"Among women over 40, birth rates have increased. Among women ages 45 to 49, they've risen 17 percent....Women over 45 who want to carry their own babies most often use donor eggs...."

Korean adoptees are returning to their native land

After the separation: the persistence of roots

Stories about adoptees from other countries often talk of corruption in the system, of mothers being scammed into giving up their babies, of the angst of individuals raised in a culture not their own. But they seldom actually mention the grief of the birth mothers--or how the adopted individual might process it.

But a single sentence in a New York Times Magazine piece did it for me: "My life in the United States, no matter how good it was...never made up for my omma's grief."

An immigrant fights for her son, illegally adopted

Encarnacion

Just when we were getting over the tug-of-war over Grayson Wyrembek (once called Grayson Vaughn) another case of what amounts to illegal adoption pops up. Illegal is the operative word here, as the mother of the child in question, Carlos, Encarnacion Bail Romero, was swooped up in a raid at a poultry processing plant in Carthage, Missouri in a Bush-era raid in May, 2007.