Stuth Granddaughter Returned Home

A piece of good news today: Following up on a recent post...

The granddaughter of the AnnMarie and Dout Stuth, who was removed from their house for reasons that remain fuzzy--some social worker decided they were too controlling regarding the girl's mother, their daughter--is back home with them. In an amazing video, the little girl runs into their arms and tells them she missed them. Watch and weep for joy.

The mother of the child's problems haven't been made clear, but it seems like a drug problem, as the child was not in prime health when she was living with her. That's when the little girl was turned over to a foster care, and placed with a woman who eventually wanted to adopt her, and for a while, social workers were pushing that resolution--while the grand parents were fighting to get her back.

Anyway, the girl has been returned to her grandparents home, and according to station KING in Seattle: "Investigators also found misinformation was presented to the court about the Stuths by a social worker and a court appointed child advocate, which helped lead to the separation. After fighting the system for nearly two years, this complete turnaround is unreal to them."

The court-appointed child advocate...that is the guardian ad litum that was so helpful in the DeBoer case. It seems that their pervasive attitude is: Oh, the child has been with the foster/adoptive wannabe for so long, she will be upset if she is returned to her biological family, what can she know of them? But in this case at least, the judge saw through the fog.

To add to our glee over this turn of events, a new report released Wednesday says time and again, Washington state unfairly puts children in foster care instead of with their relatives. The Office of the Family and Children's Ombudsman report identifies the number one issue is that the child welfare system needs to do a better job of following the law when it comes to placing children with relatives.

The Director Ombudsman Mary Meinig writes “… the system needs to better support and maintain placement of dependent children with relatives.”

Meinig also says in the report: “Sometimes, the agency has removed children from long term (2 or more years) placements without sufficient cause. This has been devastating to relatives and children alike and many of these decisions have appeared arbitrary and capricious.”

Amen is all we have to add. Maybe now the social workers will not be so eager to take kids away form stable, blood-related homes.

Although in the story about the Deboers in the last post I blasted the biased way the media treated the story, this is one case with the media saw through the injustice of taking a child from a good home where she was kin. The whole report can be read at this link.

Gotta go now, but later today I will track down the letters (and add it to this post) that appeared after my story of the DeBoers ran. The magazine got more than 75 letters on it, which was a deluge for any particular story in the magazine. Adoptive parents were mad. To put it mildly. It's freezing here on Long Island but I'm about to do battle with the cold--but the sun is shining.--lorraine

Yet another baby snatching. Not yet.

A case in Seattle has the smell of old fish: grandparents of a three year-old girl--who raised her for over nine months--are fighting to get her back and support the girl's mother (their daughter, now 18) in her attempt to gain custody. The little girl was removed from the grandparents' home and returned to her their daughter, her mother, whom they had been supporting, when she was nine-months old, but things unravelled at that point.

The story is a complicated mess, but the video here gives the unsettling details.

Here's a graph from the story that will make your temperature rise: Later this month a judge is expected to rule on the fate of the little girl. The young mother is fighting to get her back, and the grandparents support that goal. State social workers have pushed to have her adopted by the foster mother, saying the little girl is very bonded to her now.

And there's this:

A few weeks ago, an assistant attorney general sent a settlement offer to the young biological mom. It stated if she voluntarily gave up her parental rights and allowed the foster mother to adopt the child, she and the grandparents could visit the little girl four times a year and get two pictures of her in the mail every year.

The biological mother would not agree to those conditions and instead is at the trial, fighting to keep her child.

The court proceeding continues Wednesday.

So if the natural mother gives up rights to the kid, she and the grandparents can visit her four times a year. Whoopie! Plus the bonus of two pictures a year. I am speechless. I am sick.

Does this remind anybody of the DeBoer case, sixteen years ago? Where the Michigan child-stealers (that would be the Deboers) who took Anna/renamed Jessica from Iowa and were never able to finalize the adoption, who then used the "possession is ownership" BS to hang unto her as long as possible? If you were around then, you saw the endless videos of a crying little girl as social workers took her from the grasping clutches of her adoptive mother. I always wondered how adoptees felt when they saw that video clip. Anybody like to let me know?

I was tapped as the pro-natural-parents (the Schmidts) advocate on the McNeal-Lerher Report on PBS on the day of the exchange, and faced down a phalanx of pro-adoption, pro-DeBoer attorneys and a real witch of an adoptive mother, Elizabeth Bartholet, who had a kid of her own but had recently adopted two boys from Peru and just written a book (Family Bonds) about how difficult (sob, sob) it had been. Bartholet is a feminist law professor at Harvard Law, and told me point-blank that any research that shows adoptees have adjustment issues, and attendant problems, is "garbage--junk research." Since more such research continues to surface, academic adopters no longer call it "garbage." However, they still don't want to delve deeply into it, as I saw at the Pittsburgh conference on kinship in 2007.

When I read the other day that Jan DeBoer, long divorced from his wife, hopes that "Jessica" (note to Jan: her name is Anna, has been Anna for 16 years) hopes she contacts him--in a story highly sympathetic to poor Mr. DeBoer who lost his apartment in a fire, I wanted to barf. Is she supposed to thank you for keeping her from her natural parents for two years while you illegally fought every ruling to return her? That wasn't about her, or what was right, it was about the determination to have a baby at all costs. You and your ex-wife ought to rot in the seventh level of hell.

Has nothing changed in all that time? Well, yes. The good news is that this time a state legislator is on the side of the grandparents, Doug and AnneMarie Stuth, and the public sympathy appears to be with them. There may be a ruling on Wednesday.

As for the DeBoers, the ironic twist in this is that that former friend Aston, who berated me for finding my daughter, is the son of the late guardian ad litum for Jessica/Anna in the court case in Michigan, where both Aston and I are from. Not surprisingly, his father argued that the child should not be removed from the DeBoer home and returned to her natural parents. Although Aston and I have never talked about that weird connection (I was writing about the issue at the time) , I can only assume that he inherited his father's lack of understanding and compassion on this issue, his support of the adoptive family never being "disturbed" by a pesky natural parent, and his narrow-minded response when we finally spoke, in an effort to patch things up. His first words were that I ought to warn people that this was not an issue open for discussion.

Anyway, here's how I opened one of my stories: (from On The Issues, The Progressive Woman's Magazine (1994). This was about the biased media coverage. It's embedded in a an Adobe document and difficult to find but if there is a outcry for it, I'll post it.
I started the story with these quotes:

"This amounts to a legal
kidnaping.,.. they are
ready to break up a
family because a late arriving
birth father
has the correct genes. "
Newsday, 12/9/91.
"It's the same as
if you said to any parents: I want your two-year-
old. Give her to me." The New York
Times, 12/27/92.
"'It's an outrage to take a child away after
two years of bonding with her parents,' said. ..a
lawyer. 'It's a travesty of justice.' The
Detroit News, 4/21/93.