PTSD--Everyone else can have it, but not birth first natural mothers

Lorraine

I love that the 13 people got out of the cave in Thailand. I love that they are all right, basically. But now on TV they are talking about how they boys will have PTSD. However first mothers are supposed to give up our children and not even talk about, yet it is a lifelong arrow to the heart that bleeds and bleeds....

Personally, if I tell someone my story in a single sentence, they immediately understand the pain involved, and that it must be a lifelong tragedy. It's just not supposed to be talked about because it is still shameful, no matter that there are "proud birth mothers," or that we have supposedly progressed as a open society. It is still understood as a terrible blot on the trajectory of one's life, no matter how the agency-speak gobbledygook tries to obfuscate and diminish the pain of losing a child to adoption.

How adoption narratives encourage eternal separation of mother and child

Lorraine

Why do some reunions fail? Or never get started? So much has to do with how the adoptive parents have cleared the cobwebs away from the warm fuzzy feelings about adoption, and dealt with the idea of reunion as a positive that might occur someday. Others in the last two decades have participated in open adoptions, which began to be popularized slowly in the 1980s. My own daughter gave up a child in 1986, but even I could not convince her to have an open adoption. I believe it was because she was not strong enough to deal with the idea that by knowing who the parents were, she would still feel obligated to be involved. My daughter had a lot of physical and psychological issues due to her epilepsy, and I know she thought about suicide a great deal, so when she talked about her reasons later, I could understand. I'm getting off the track here because I wanted to dissect a piece about adoption that was forwarded to me today.

Canada to pay millions to victims of forced adoption in 'scoop' era

Lorraine

When will the awful news about international adoption stop? "Canada Agrees to Pay Millions in Lawsuit Over Forced Adoptions" read the headline in the New York Times yesterday. Indigenous children ripped from their parents and villages and sent to strange people as far away as New Zealand and Europe.

As we've heard in other adoptions of scale, the nonnative families the children ended up ranged from loving to abusive--but largely failed to educate them about their culture. What was told to the adoptee about their backgrounds--or why they ended up in a strange land--was left up to the families. You can imagine how that went.

Any little kid--many of them appear not to have been taken from their parents at birth, but when they were four or five--is going to wonder: What am I doing here? Where is my real family? My mother? My father? My sister? What are these people saying? Why is the food so strange? What did I do? Why why why? 

'De-facto parents': Another way to steal children?

Would-be parent Kelly Gunn

What makes a parent? How does money play into who ends up with legal rights when a couple separate?

The legal issues surrounding gay couples where one has a child or adopts one continue to be litigated one case at a time.  As with any couple who separate, the child becomes the battle ground, as is the case of Abush, a seven-year old Ethiopian boy.

He was adopted in 2011 by Circe Hamilton, She and Kelly Gunn, a successful business woman, began a relationship in 2004 and moved in together in 2007. They began talking about adoption that year and attended an event for would-be adoptive parents. Jane Aronson was one of the speakers. She is a pediatrician and adoptive mother who calls herself "the orphan doctor" and is a comrade-at-arms with intercountry adoption advocate and Harvard law professor Elizabeth Bartholet.*

What makes a mother?

Unwilling mother Sherri Shepherd

As if we didn't already know, the whole "assisted reproduction" business is a mess, both from a legal and a moral standpoint. The latest escapades are those of Sherri Shepherd who lost her fight not to be a mother and Nick Loeb who is fighting to be a father.

Shepherd, a former co-host on The View, entered into an agreement with her then husband Lamar Sally and Jessica Bartholomew to have Bartholomew carry a child created through Sally's sperm and a donated egg. By the time the baby boy, Lamar Sally, Jr., was born eight months ago, Shepherd had filed for divorce, disclaiming responsibility for the child and refusing to pay support, leaving Bartholomew whose name was on the birth certificate on the hook for thousands of dollars in medical bills. "Not so fast" said a Pennsylvania court. "A deal is a deal. You signed on the dotted line and you're a legal mother, like it or not. Pay up!"

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.

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!

Should a natural mother be able to visit a child after adoption?

Where is my baby? 

"Working on a show: Should a birth mother retain visitation rights to a child she chose to place for adoption?"  That's the question over at Dr. Phil's Facebook page...and as I write there are hundreds of comments and nearly 500 shares.

The responses are all over the place, but a good number of them reveal the anger and ownership feelings of many adoptive parents, and even adoptees, to wit:

"No. You chose to put a child up for adoption and you have no rights after you sign that page."

How did the Romanian adoptees fare? Better than those left behind.

From a Romanian charity, see below

How did the Romanian children who were adopted by wealthier families in the West compare to those who were raised in institutions?

One of the complicated issues of international adoption is whether are children are better off being adopted into a foreign culture, thousands of miles from their original habitat, or left to grow up in institutions in their native country--if homes cannot be found for them there. Most often the institutions that would-be adoptive parents visit are gruesome hell holes; yet we do know that in a great many cases, the operators of these institutions keep them that way exactly to extract as much money as possible from horrified people of good will. Even when given the money to fix up the orphanage, the operators leave them as is to extract more money from visitors. And we know from reports from other countries, such as China and Nepal and Guatemala, that children are stolen to keep those institutions full of "orphans" to be sold to Americans.

It's a never ending cycle. That children were unconscionably warehoused in Romania during the Ceausescu (pronounced Chow-chess-cu) years, as we wrote about in the previous post, is without question, and surely, unless sold to be a slave or to be used sexually, it is better to grow up in relative comfort far away from home than be left to flounder in an institution.

Good news: Intercountry adoption down again

Jane

This just in from the Associated Press:  "The number of foreign children adopted by U.S. parents plunged to the lowest level since 1992...Figures released Friday by the U. S. State Department for 2013 fiscal year showed 7,094 adoptions from abroad, down from 8,668 in 2012 and down about 69 percent from the high of 22,884 in 2004. The number has dropped every year since then."

What's the cause of this decline? AP lists several: Russia has stopped foreign adoptions. Ethiopian authorities have been trying to place more abandoned children with relatives or foster families. Other reasons come to mind: More South Korean women are keeping their babies, thanks to the efforts of Korean-born adoptee Jane Jeong Trenka and her supporters who have lobbied the

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.

If LDS Family Services ends adoption, it won't be soon enough

Lorraine

UPDATE BELOW
As we described yet another LDS Family Services adoption scam yesterday, one designed to cut out the natural father, it is merely one more in a long link of such fraudulent adoptions that the state laws were designed, if not to condone, to promote. In Utah the laws make it difficult--if not impossible--for a father to raise his child if the mother chooses adoption. It is apparent that social workers, LDS (Latter-Day Saints) Family Services, an organization with dozens of adoption agencies world wide, but most particularly in Utah, the seat of the Mormon religion, are not interested in ethical adoptions, but speedy ones instead.

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.

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.

Joyce Maynard's adoption "disruption"

Lorraine

Joyce Maynard’s writing—and thus her, because her writing is her—has always irritated me, perhaps irrationally. She was too famous for celebrating the banal. But when the news that she disrupted her adoption of two sisters from Ethiopia became public the other day, my reaction was not to rub my hands gleefully and think Aha! The great comeuppance for that navel gazer! Instead I hoped that her celebrity and this public admission about a disrupted adoption would help stem what often seems like the wholesale exportation of children from one part of the world to another by do-gooders of all political and religious stripes simply because they have more money.

Far too many of them think that they are doing something noble by taking these poor children from the over-crowded orphanage where they find them. People in my large social net have adopted from Guatemala, China, India, Nepal, Romania, and Russia. In truth, I am not close to many of them. And it is undoubtedly true that in many cases, they are saving a child from an uncertain and perilous future and giving them a home in which to flourish.

Corruption in Foreign Adoptions: China, Again

Jane

Once again, corruption in baby snatching in China is in the news: Chinese police rescued 81 children from a major child trafficking ring operating throughout eastern China. The rescued children, mostly girls, were from ten days to four months old. Another raid earlier this month resulted in eight children being rescued. Unless the children were

Demand for babies leads to adoption abuses

It is the rare adoptive parent who, after adopting from overseas, can wrap her mind around the idea that "her" baby might have been stolen, sold or bartered to fill the huge demand for adoptable infants in wealthy nations, of which she herself was a part. 

International Adoption Advocates Fight Back against decline in adoptions

Pacific Harbor Seals

Mother Pacific harbor seals leave newborn pups on the beach when they go into the sea to fish. Believing the pups have been abandoned, humans take them to aquariums or try to raise them themselves, often unsuccessfully. Mother seals returning to the beach to nurse search futilely for their babies.

I think of these seals when I read about international adoption. Thankfully, it has declined from a high of 22,884 in 2004 to 11,059 in 2010. Wide-scale corruption or other abuses has caused Ethiopia to join Cambodia, Guatemala, Nepal and Russia, in closing their borders while adoptions from China, the biggest supplier of babies, have been reduced.

Learning Your Origins -- or not

Jane

When adoptee Wendy Johnson researched her origins, she learned her biological grandmother was either a heroic World War II spy or an unknown Filipino woman. Johnson, now 53, of Albany, Oregon, was told she was adopted when, at the age of eight, she asked her father why she had yellowish brown skin when everyone else in the family had white skin.

Finding the Families of The Lost Children of Nepal

Lorraine

Since I put the blog about Little Princes up on Friday, we have learned that
police have rescued 20 children from Mukti Nepal, a Maharajgunj-based orphanage, and arrested its operator after finding the children living in squalor and without enough food. The children range from five to fifteen. Six boys and 14 girls were kept in one room.  It seems clear that the orphanage was the dumping ground of one of the child traffickers in Nepal, and the deplorable conditions are often shown to Westerners as a sham to get money to "take care of the children." Instead, the cash goes into the traffickers' pockets and he looks for other Westerners to keep the money flowing. The following book review of Little Princes: One Man's Promise to Bring Home the Lost Children of Nepal explains how child trafficking operates in Nepal.