Red Tape Holds Haitian Families Together

Adoption agencies, church leaders, and an assortment of do-gooders are decrying the “red tape” that prevents them from bringing Haitian orphans to the U.S. and other affluent countries. In response, Homeland Security Janet Napolitano announced a “humanitarian parole” policy to expedite adoptions from Haiti. The first of 900 children “whom the Haitian government had already identified as orphans, and whom adoption agencies had matched with couples in the United States” arrived in the United States January 19, only a week after the devastating earthquake. These 53 children are being screened for medical conditions and will be placed in their adoptive homes.(NY Times 1/19/10)

The adoptee rights organization, Bastard Nation, meanwhile, has faxed a statement to the State Department calling for a halt in these evacuations until thorough investigations are conducted. We at FMF support BN’s effort and urge others to do so as well. Excerpts from the statement follow this post.

Prior to the January 12 earthquake, there were an estimated 380,000 orphans in Haiti living in about 200 legitimate orphanages and group homes, according to the U. N. Children’s Fund. The earthquake undoubtedly created many more orphans. Bringing orphaned children to the US is the “moral and human thing to do” asserted Mary Ross Agosta spokesperson for the Catholic Archdiocese of Miami which is urging the US Government to create a “Pierre Pan” program similar to the “Pedro Pan” program which brought over 14,000 Cuban children to the US between 1960 and 1962. A similar program, Operation Babylift airlifted over 3,300 children from South Vietnam as it fell to the North Vietnamese army in 1975.

But what’s red tape really? In it grandest form, it prevents despots from trampling on the rights of the less powerful. Red tape assures that those accused of crimes have a fair trial. If lawmakers hadn’t shredded red tape, banks would not have failed while their CEOs received multi-million dollar bonuses.

Red tape in the adoption business protects children and families. Susan Soon-Keum Cox, Vice-President of Holt International Children’s Services based in Eugene, Oregon, warns that “It’s incredibly important in times like this to take every precaution that an ethical, professional, compassionate process takes place. There may be children that appear to be orphans, but we need to make sure there are no other family members or neighbors willing and happy to take that child into their family. We can’t rush in and assume that they’d be better off somewhere else.” (Oregonian 1-20-10)

When bureaucrats cut red tape to enable zealots, the results are not pretty. According to E. Wayne Carp (Family Matters, 1998), in the mid-nineteen century, the founder of the Children’s Aid Society, Charles Loring Brace, moved hundreds of children from New York to rural areas where they were often forced to work as unpaid laborers in order to save the children from “neglectful or abusive or Catholic parents” (Italic ours). Georgia Tann spirited hundreds of children from poor families in the 1930s to the 1950s to meet the needs of wealthy would-be parents wrote Barbara Bisantz Raymond in The Baby Thief  (2007). Government officials allowed Brace and Tann to circumvent child protection laws and operate under a cloak of secrecy. Pedro Pan and Operation Babylift also separated children needlessly from their families, covering up illegal and unconscionable actions by destroying or falsifying records.

The fact that 380,000 children--out of a total Haitian population of ten million--were in orphanages is the result of misguided policies by organizations set up to help poor Haitian children. Establishing orphanages is relatively simple and provides immediate help to poor families struggling to feed their children. However, the orphanages soon become crowded as indigent people send their children to them. To alleviate the crowding, agencies then make the children available for adoption and they are sent off to other countries, as is almost certainly the case of two Haitian children we wrote about last week. Both had mothers in Haiti. A young girl adopted at age nine, was wondering if her mother had survived the earthquake; the boy adopted at age two, may not remember he had a mother before he came to this country. We ask: Why were these children adopted at all?

The people who adopt these children are, for the most part, kind and generous people who truly want to help a needy child. While adoption may help a particular child, it should never be seen as a solution for child poverty. Far better would be the establishment of schools and economic development programs to end poverty. We encourage our readers wishing to help Haitian children to donate to established relief agencies such as Portland-based Mercy Corps, Doctors Without Borders, or the Red Cross which will help children stay with their families in Haiti.


Excerpts From the Bastard Nation statement:

“We urge US State Department and other US authorities in Haiti to (1) remove private special interests and those with conflicts of interest, such as adoption agencies and ministries, from the child welfare decision-making process and (2) halt the evacuation of children and their placement for adoption in the US.

We also urge the State Department to suspend pending adoptions. Haitian paperwork is lost or destroyed. Rock Cadet, the judge most responsible and knowledgeable about pipeline cases, died in the quake. Though the US Embassy survived, US paperwork is probably unavailable for some time, if it still exists. Without proof of Haitian court or Embassy status, any adoption removal from the country, without thorough background investigation and due process, is illegal and not in the best interest of the child.

Needless to say, no new adoptions should be processed.

In the post-quake chaos, children need protection from predatory snatchers. Bastard Nation, therefore, supports the expedited removal of Haitian children, orphans or otherwise, to credible and documented parents or family members in the US for temporary or permanent placement depending on the circumstances. These children must not be assumed adoptable and scooped up for fast-track adoption. They should be a top priority. We urge the State Department or other government or credible private and disinterested agencies to assist Haitians in the US to locate child kin and bring them to the US.

We understand why people want to open their arms and hearts to the children of the Haitian earthquake, but adoption is not emergency or humanitarian aid or a solution to Haiti’s ongoing problems. The immediate rescue effort in Haiti should focus on emergency services, individual and family care and family reunification, not family, community, and cultural destruction and the strip-mining of children.”

When Disaster Strikes, Adoption Is Sure to Follow

The pictures coming from Haiti are devastating, and you know there will be children in need of homes, and before you know it adoption agencies and relief organizations will be setting up conduits to spirit children to the United States. Already Catholic Charities is in the act, according to the Miami Herald:

In a move mirroring Operation Pedro Pan in the 1960s, Catholic Charities and other South Florida immigrant rights organizations are planning an ambitious effort to airlift possibly thousands of Haitian children left orphaned in the aftermath of Tuesday's horrific earthquake.

``We will use the model we used 40 years ago with Pedro Pan to bring these orphans to the United States to give them a lifeline, a bright and hopeful future,'' Catholic Charities Legal Services executive director Randolph McGrorty said at a news conference in the offices of Rep. Mario Diaz-Balart.

``Given the enormity of what happened in Haiti, a priority is to bring these orphaned children to the United States,'' he said.

Archdiocese of Miami officials and other local organizations have already identified a temporary shelter in Broward County to house the children, McGrorty said.

And the comments left at the Herald say the same thing: adopt, adopt, adopt--how can I/we get a child. I do not mean to disparage many who are commenting there because truly they want to open their hearts and homes to children in need. Haiti is an incredibly beautiful country, verdant and vibrant; but poor, incredibly poor. I spent a week there in the mid Seventies and was struck by the friendliness of the Haitians, their colorful art, side by side with tin shacks, rundown bicycles, the lack of a country-wide sewer system.

We understand that for some children there will be no alternative but to find them homes in other countries, and the adoption diaspora will continue, but with a difference. Pedro Pan was clearly motivated by the Catholic Church to get the children out of the clutches of the anti-religion Communism of Castro's Cuba. Haitians are Christians--Catholics in fact, with a smattering, or more than a smattering of native voo-doo thrown  in; a large percentage are now evangelical Christians. But most of the children brought to this country will have families there, huge extended families that could care for them and let them grow up as they were born--if only there were aid enough. But here is how the story will end:

By the time it ended 22 months later, the unique exodus of children -- ages 5 to 17 -- had brought 14,048 unaccompanied Cuban minors to America, with the secret help of the U.S. government, which funded the effort and supplied the visa waivers, and the Catholic church, which promised to care for the children.The late Monsignor Bryan O. Walsh, a Miami priest, was considered the father of the [Pan Pedro] effort. As the children filtered into Miami and their numbers swelled, many went to live with relatives and family friends, but others were sent to Miami-Dade group homes and camps called Florida City, Kendall and Matecumbe. They were then relocated across the country to archdioceses in places like Nebraska, Washington and Indiana.

There, they went to live in orphanages, foster homes and schools until their parents could find a way out of Cuba. Sometimes the separation was brief; sometimes it lasted years.

And we know because of all that has happened before, the separations that for many the separations that lasted for years became a lifetime. I do not have an answer, I do not have close ties with anyone in government who I might talk to and suggest that wholesale adoptions should not be considered first, but last.

Yet I am sad. Why is the whole sale adoption of children, the reassigning of cultures, the first reaction? Why not a concerted effort to keep the children with their extended families?
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In the meantime, nut job TV evangelist Pat Robertson is blaming the earthquake and resultant disaster on the Haitians "pact with the devil." Truly the man is evil himself.  For more on the situation in Haiti, see Daily Bastardette's excellent blog on the matter.

Jane here: In a few months, Vietnam Babylift will celebrate the 35th anniversary of Operation Babylift where over 3,500 infants and children were taken from orphanages and their families to the US during the panic created when South Vietnam fell to the North Vietnamese. President Ford counted this as one of his proudest achievements. Others are critical, noting that many of the children were not were orphans. Sadly too, one of the planes crashed, killing over 100 children. The poignant PBS documentary Daughter From Danang chronicles one woman's journey back to her family in Vietnam. According to her mother, women were frightened by the Holt International Adoption Agency to give up their children. They were told the Americans would return with their children.