What about children who need adopting?

Lorraine at her desk 

While we have been discussing the great damage done by people like Catelynn and Tyler for their continuing advocacy of adoption as shills for Bethany Christian Services, I thought it might be useful to post an overview of adoption attitudes and practices in America. Surely some readers who find themselves here read our posts and say--What about all those children who need to be adopted? 

As I was writing Hole in My Heart, my upcoming memoir, I realized that some readers would have that very thought, and so I include a section under the rubric of "Facts and Commentary" to answer them. It will be posted over the next week in three sections. Part I is today below. 

As for Catelynn and Tyler, it appears that they will meet with the adoptive parents of their first child, Theresa and Brandon Davis, in a segment of Monday's show of "Teen Mom OG" (10 p.m. EST/9 CST). Of course it's edited, but it will be interesting to see the interaction of the four parents of daughter Carly. As for how deeply Catelynn is involved in pushing adoption, I just picked this up from Catelynn's Twitter feed online: Hi, I'm Catelynn from Teen Mom. My goal is 2 be an advocate 4 adoption. Contact us on website 4 speaking engagements & join our fan page!

Encouraging intercountry adoptions with hard cash

When half the faculty at Harvard and Boston College Law Schools endorse a bill that encourages poor countries to take children from their mothers and send them to the United States for adoption, you'd think something was amiss. We are talking about a bill  that offers financial incentives to poor countries to facilitate intercountry adoptions.

The learned academics in Boston did not do their homework. They signed a petition endorsing Sen. Mary Landrieu's Children in Families First (CHIFF) bill at the urging of two colleagues:  Prof. Elizabeth Bartholet, an adoptive mother of two from Peru and director of Harvard's Child Advocacy Program, and her former student and professor at Boston College, Paulo Barrozo.

Senate bill encourages more international adoption

Sen. Mary Landrieu

Foreign adoptions have plummeted from just over 23,000 in 2004 to just under 9,000 in 2012, as foreign countries and the U. S. State Department have responded to wide-spread corruption. Gathering its forces, the adoption industry has turned to its long-time champion, adoptive mom and wife of an adoptee Louisiana Senator Mary Landrieu. She introduced the deceptively-named Children in Families First Act of 2013 (CHIFF) "to strengthen intercountry adoption...and ensure it becomes a viable and fully developed option for providing families for children in need."* Among other provisions, the bill (S. 1530) would condition child welfare assistance to foreign countries on whether they allowed Americans to adopt children from these countries.

Grief and doubt after an international adoptee's death: Max Shatto in Texas

Max Shatto on the equipment that may have killed him.

Earlier his year the death of a Russian child who died only months after being adopted by Laura and Alan Shatto of Texas was news, as it appeared to be yet another death-by-American-adoption story. The biological mother of the boy was found in Russia and she was pleading for the return of the dead boy's brother, then two, also adopted by the same couple. Thousands of protesters marched through the streets of Moscow is support of a ban on adoptions by Americans, a ban that took place shortly before Max died. It was unclear at the time whether the boy had been harmed by the couple or died of accidental causes, as he was found to have bruises and scratches on his body, a possible sign of abuse that the Shattos vehemently denied.

According to The New York Times today, a lengthy investigation by police, prosecutors and medical examiners have concluded that the boy, Max, who came to the Shattos with a known heart defect--died of an accidental injuries,

Does everyone have a basic need to know the truth of their origins?

Wading into the unknown--photo by ken robbins

Can an individual who doesn't instinctively understand about the need for everyone to know his or her true and original identity be made to change his mind?

I don't know. After a conversation I had the other night it seems unlikely--unlikely at least that a non-adopted person can move the heart and mind of anyone who knows an adoptee who professes no need to know, and is, for all the world to see, a well adjusted, successful, happy individual. But I cannot help think this: Since curiosity is the sign of intelligent life, how can an otherwise intelligent person not be interested in the story of his own life?

The Child Catchers exposes the stench of international adoption--and domestic adoption too

Kathryn Joyce

Journalist Kathryn Joyce takes on domestic infant adoption and international adoption in her new book, The Child Catchers, forcefully demonstrating its unsavory realities, including how it exploits vulnerable mothers. While the general public may believe adoption is a win-win solution that saves children, builds families, and allows poor biological mothers to get on with their lives, Joyce portrays it as the billion dollar industry it is, fueled by money, religious fervor, the high demand for children, and misguided altruism. She backs up her claims with scrupulous research--visits to foreign orphanages and adoption facilities, interviews with adoption practitioners, narratives of adoptees and first parents, statistical data, marketing materials, and media reports.

Shotgun Adoptions via Crises Pregnancy Centers

Ever wonder about those "crisis pregnancy centers?" Wonder if they are actually helping women at a time when they need it...or are they just funneling pregnant teens and women into the adoption mill business? Wonder no longer.

The centers are set up as non-profit pregnancy-testing facilities...but they are really antiabortion baby mills. And they get $60 million in federal abstinence and marriage-promotion funds, which right off the bat makes me crazy.

The Nation has a lengthy piece by Kathryn Joyce, "Shotgun Adoption," in the September 14 2009 issue (on line now) exposing the "crisis pregnancy centers" or CPCs, for what they are: baby mills for adoption agencies, particularly the Bethany Christian Service agencies, which have sprouted like mushrooms all over the country--4,000 and counting. And Bethany, the nation's largest adoption agency, is incidentally a mainstay of the despicable National Council for Adoption (NCFA), a lobbying organization for adoption agencies which for years has fought every battle in every state to deny adopted people their original birth records. Make no mistake, NCFA cares not one whit about the adopted individual, their only focus is the business of adoption, and the demands of adopters to have babies furnished under sealed-records statutes. But I digress.

The illustration accompanying the article shows a woman waving from a window with money falling down and a stork taking away a big bundle of babies. Perfect.

According to writer Joyce, the centers give you all kinds of help while you are pregnant and ready and willing to give up your child, but do nothing for you if you change your mind and--god forbid, decide to raise your own child. As long as you are willing to procreate and pass on the baby, you will be taken in by a "shepherding family," whose job it is apparently to make sure that you are fully indoctrinated into giving up your baby not only for the good of the baby, but yourself. One woman, who uses the pseudonym Jordan, tells of being assured she could have an open adoption, but as soon as the birth was over, was informed that "fully open adoptions weren't legal in South Carolina," so the new mother would not receive information about the adoptive parents.

So what about this is "open?" Only "open" from the adopters' side of the fence, as they were in the delivery room.

She asked if she could bring the baby home to the "shepherding family" (who had called her a "saint" before for not choosing abortion), and they refused, "chastising her sharply." She had gone back on her unspoken agreement to supply a baby (let's call it a pre-paid-for baby) to Bethany Christian Services agency.

After learning there could be no real open adoption, she spent the day crying. The Bethany counselor warned her that if she kept her baby, she'd end up homeless and lose her baby anyway. The woman also brought the sobbing prospective adopters (who were also in the delivery room) into her hospital room. They might not get her baby. They might go home childless. When I read about prospective adopters in the delivery room, I squirm; when I read about them actually cutting the umbilical cord, and this is celebrated as a significant symbolic act, I am repulsed. Prospective adopters should not be in the delivery room. Ever. That's like taking delivery on a pre-paid kid.

Which is apparently how the Bethany counselor looked upon Jordan's baby: pre-paid. "My options were to leave the hospital walking, with no money," says Jordan. "Or here's a couple with Pottery Barn furniture. You sacrifice yourself, not knowing it will leave an impact on your and your child for life." Jordan signed the relinquishment papers, and the "shepherding family" was celebrating and wondering why she wouldn't stop crying.

We're not. We know. We've been there, done that, and here we are, all these decades later, writing reams about the pain and sorrow and endless grief and life-changing moment (for the worse) it was when we signed those relinquishment papers. Without question, the worst day of my life.

"Shotgun Adoption" also notes that unaware pregnant girls and women are often shepherded right to states where the laws favor quick relinquishment, such as South Dakota and Utah. "'There were so many allegations about improper adoptions being made and how teenage girls were being pressured to give up their children,' then-state attorney Tim Wilka told the Argus Leader, that the governor asked him to take the case. The Alpha Center [a pregnancy-crises center] pleased no contest to five counts of unlicensed adoption and foster care practices; nineteen other charges were dropped, including four felonies."

Utah is also particularly hot to trot to get those babies out of the mother's clutches. Only two witnesses are required for relinquishments that have occurred in hotel rooms or parks, and having the baby in the state and relinquishing there avoids interstate child-placement regulations. We have written here before about the Church of the Latter Day Saints rah-rah adoption practices, and were not surprised. Utah also makes it difficult for a father to retain custody of his child, and if a woman falls in with a CPC associated with the Mormon megachurch, she--and the father--find themselves under incredible pressure to sign the relinquishment papers and hand over their the baby. It's all so sick sick sick.

Read the story in its entirety. Our friends, Mirah Riben, author of The Stork Market, is quoted, along with Ann Fessler, author of The Girls Who Went Away, and Karen-Wilson Buterbaugh, founder of the Baby Scoop Era Research Initiative. The piece demonstrates what we have been saying all along: that market pressures have created a huge demand for babies, and that many babies that might be kept in the family are given up for adoption to genetic strangers, to the lifelong detriment of both mother and child.

"A lot of those moms from the '50s and '60s were really damaged by losing their child through the maternity homes," says a Midwestern grandmother who fought doggedly for her son to get his child from the clutches of a Utah adoption mill. "People say those kinds of things don't happen anymore. But they do. It's just not a maternity home on every corner; it's a CPC."

Though I am a birth mother from 1966, the height of the Baby Scoop Era, I did not stay in a maternity home. But against a background of shame and no resources, I gave my daughter up to strangers.

And neither of us ever got over the psychic damage. --lorraine
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We are aware that adoptive parents find their way to our site to learn about the other side of adoption, and many of them are shocked and horrified at what we have to say. We do not mince words, or hide our feelings. That is the point of Birth Mother/First Mother Forum. Other adoptive parents, who are more open and real about what adoption is, join in the conversation. As this is an open blog, all readers are welcome, but all should understand this is first and foremost a place for first mothers to feel free to talk about their experiences and feelings.