Daughter sues to undo her adoption

Melanie Gilmore and Zella Price

Melanie Diane Gilmore filed a petition in a St. Louis court seeing to undo her adoption and restore the parental rights of her natural mother, Zella Jackson Price. To FMF's knowledge, this is a first of a kind lawsuit. If successful, it would make legal history. It would put another nail in the still popular myth that a child can be seamlessly transferred from one set of parents to another.

Gilmore was born prematurely 50 years ago, on November 25, 1965 in St. Louis. The circumstances of her adoption are murky. Price says a nurse told her that her daughter had died but she was not allow to see her daughter's body nor given a death certificate. Gilmore began searching for her natural mother soon after her adoptive mother died when she was 20. She had her original birth certificate with her
mother's name but was told her mother had died. Gilmore's adult children began searching for Price when they were planning their mother's 50th birthday party. They found her

Justin Harris--and another sad story of an adoption that shouldn't have been

The Harris family at Christmas

Sad and horrific stories--like what happened Selma 50 years ago--can effect change. And perhaps the latest re-homing scandal will dampen the enthusiasm for the Christian push to spread god's word by multiplying the faithful, however that is done--by birth or adoption.

We refer to the god-awful mess swirling around the Rep. Justin Harris of Arkansas. In 2013 he and his wife Marsha rehomed two sisters aged three and six they had adopted from the Arkansas Department of Human Services (DHS), placing them with Stacey and Eric Francis--a former employee of their Christian pre-kindergarten, Growing God's Kingdom.

Utah agency places cast-off international adoptees

The more I read about international adoption, the more I become convinced that it does far more harm than good. The twin desires of Americans to have children and help those in need have created a huge and profitable industry, rife with corruption. It destroys families and diverts dollars which could otherwise help poor children to stay in their own countries. It allows Americans to ignore the over 100,000 American children in foster care who would benefit from being adopted.

And it turns out that many of the children who do come to the U.S., about 10,000 in the past year, are worse off. Contrary to what Americans expect, these children are often nothing like Dondi, the dream child adopted from Italy as a five-year-old after World War II by a U.S. soldier. Dondi, of course, was only a character in the comic strip of the same name which ran from 1955 to 1986. No, real foreign adoptees may suffer from RAD, PTSD, ODD, or whatever label  shrinks put on a child who is a holy terror.