May the Richest Parents Win--The DeBoer Case

by Lorraine Dusky

This amounts to a legal
kidnapping.,.. 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.

Last spring and summer the media bombarded the public with stories about the heart-breaking story of two worthy, attractive people in Ann Arbor, Michigan, Roberta and Jan DeBoer, who were being unjustly forced to return to her natural parents the little girl they had raised since she was less than a week old.

"Robby," as the press liked to familiarly call her, was unable to bear children due to an illness contracted— horrors—on their honeymoon. We were all primed to pity the poor childless couple who only wanted to raise "their" little girl in peace and not be bothered by a less than-telegenic father, who didn't even know the child was his until after she was born, and an unmarried woman who changed her mind about relinquishing her daughter after she fell under the influence of a cult-like group of fanatics.

What the media didn't tell about the story formed public opinion for the DeBoers and against the girl's parents, Cara and Dan Schmidt, who were effectively painted as low-lifes for wanting their daughter back. Dan Schmidt, it was endlessly pointed out, is, of all things, a trucker (i.e., lower class). The clear implication was that this alone was reason enough to not let him have a child he so clearly wanted.

Initially omitted (and always buried) in the news reports was that Cara Schmidt began asking for her child back within four weeks of giving birth. Also glossed over (or not mentioned at all) was that Cara Schmidt missed Iowa's three week deadline for changing her mind about the adoption by merely five days. If this had happened in another state, such as California where a woman has six months before the decision to relinquish her child is final, Jessica would have been immediately returned.

Also not mentioned: that Cara Schmidt had signed the relinquishment papers 40 hours after the child was born, at the time believing that the attorney for the DeBoers was her attorney. Once Dan Schmidt learned that he was the girl's father, he joined Cara in the fight to get their daughter back, all within a month of the girl's birth. The DeBoers were in defiance of the Iowa Supreme Court when they began their battle in the Michigan courts. When the Schmidts went to Michigan and asked for the sheriff to help them get their daughter back, they were refused and told if they acted alone they could be arrested. You practically have to be a private eye to ferret out this information.

The second of People magazine's heart-strumming cover stories on the case devoted 16.7 column inches to interviews with the DeBoers and 5.5 inches of quotes by psychological experts and others who supported them. In contrast, the Schmidt's side of the story got only 5 inches, and expert backup, 2.3 inches.

The New Yorker gave the DeBoers a major boost in an error-ridden piece by Lucinda Franks, who recently adopted an infant and who is married to the 74-year-old Manhattan District Attorney, Robert Morgenthau. Although she herself is an adoptive mother—and thus a writer with a personal bias—this was not revealed. (Before we go any further, understand that I am a mother who once relinquished a child for adoption. More on that later.)

The Schmidts' attorney in Iowa, Jackie Miller, says that when she called Franks they had a five-minute conversation and Franks obviously did not want to talk to her; another attorney who was present at the time of Franks' interview with the Schmidts, Pam Lewis, says Franks ignored what actually happened in the Iowa courts and instead used Roberta DeBoer's misleading fabrications in quotes to tell the story she wanted.

This technique—stacking the quotes—was used aggressively throughout the months the story captured the nation's attention. But while the print stories were biased, they could hardly compare in emotional scope to seeing a hysterical, sobbing Roberta DeBoer interviewed on television by reporters who never asked follow-up questions, never doubted the DeBoers' version of events. The hard questions were seldom—if ever—asked: Why didn't you give her back in the first place? You had her for less than three weeks at the time. "Why did you fight the court order to have a blood test for five months? If your concern was for the child, why did you defy the first Iowa court order to return her? Even if you don't like the father, doesn't Cara Schmidt have some sort of moral claim to raise her daughter? Yes, you're in pain now, but didn't you set this up yourself? Six separate court decisions were against you, and the only one that was in your favor was quickly overturned.

DeBoer supporters and attorneys (who often turned out to be adoptive parents themselves) managed to plant in the media the concept that since they had kept Jessica for so long—in defiance of court orders, remember—they were now entitled to keep her because the transition would be difficult for her. This concept was called "children's rights." Elizabeth Bartholet, a Harvard law professor who has become a custody expert (partly through the difficult time she had adopting two children as a single woman), managed to instill the idea into the public consciousness that because Jessica was being returned to her natural parents, she was being treated as "property." No one said anything about yes, indeed, property, as in "possession is nine-tenths of the law."

Except for a few instances, only in the letters to the editor from adoptees, did you learn that being raised by genetic strangers, i.e., being adopted outside the family, is not quite the same—regardless of income—as being raised in a home where your real parents were also what the media had now reduced to "blood parents." An expert with those views, Marshall Schechter, M.D., co-author of Being Adopted: The Lifelong Search for Self as well as other writings on adoption, was interviewed at length by Isobel Wilkerson, the New York Times reporter who covered the Jessica case. Yet he was never quoted in the Times.

What is going on here? We are in the midst of an adoption frenzy in America that has turned into a class war. One one side, we have middle- class baby boomers who delayed having children and are now unable to conceive; on the other, we have generally lower-class girls and women, the disposable suppliers of the commodity so desired: healthy, white infants, who are increasingly hard to come by. And with independent adoption being relatively unrestricted in 34 states, an army of adoption attorneys has grown up, an army designed to serve their clients, the ones who pay the bills: the adoptive parents.

The result is that adoption today is not a service for infants who need homes— there are plenty of those, but they are not the healthy, white infants that are prized—but has instead become a service industry for couples who want to adopt. The competition is fierce: estimates as to how many couples there are for each healthy, white infant range from 23-to-one to 40-to-one. And just like always, money talks. Money can put you at the head of the line.

And while we think it is awful—and unlawful—if a woman "sells" her baby to the highest bidder, we only nod in wonderment when we hear about attorneys' fees and related costs that can go as high as $75,000 for actually acquiring a baby. Is this not buying a baby?

Feminists, academia, the press and the attorneys themselves come largely from the same group of people wanting to adopt, or their parents, and almost always promote adoption as an absolute social good. They argue for laws that would get the babies out of the hands of the poor wretches who have them as quickly as possible, and fight them in court when necessary. We have more to offer your babies, the implication always is, as if a nice home and a middle- or upperclass life was on a comparable scale with growing up with people you look like, whose traits you have inherited, whose predispositions and talents have been passed on to you.

In truth, we are not far from the chilling premise of Margaret Atwood's The Handmaid's Tale, where fertile women bear children for infertile upper-class wives. In Gilead, the futuristic society Atwood created, the emphasis is on the difficulty in getting a baby, not on what relinquishing one means to the women who have the babies or to the children themselves.

It is the same in the U.S. today. Scant attention is given to what it means to be uprooted from the long line of a specific heritage that is the birthright of each one of us, and informs us how and where we fit into the cycle of life. Nor to a 20-year movement of adult adoptees and natural mothers that would allow adopted individuals the right to know their true histories, spanning back generations, or who their natural parents are while growing up. The attitude among most adoptive parents seems to be, don't think about that until you have to.

While open adoptions are becoming more common, they are still the exception, not the norm. Instead adoption attorneys press for what they see as their client's best interests: a uniform state law that would permit a woman to sign away her child—irrevocably—only five days after birth, with no recourse or time to see if she could find a way to raise her child.

Five days. Less time than she is allowed by law to be absent from work. Five days. A woman's hormones are still bouncing up and down in that time, and all the time of the pregnancy cannot tell a woman what it means to actually give birth to a living, breathing child who comes out of your body and who will one day look like you and the father. Five days. Hardly enough time to figure out a plan of action for a woman and her baby.

I relinquished my daughter 27 years ago, and for years I believed that it was probably the best for her and me. She had a mother and a father, as well as the kind of middle-class life I would have had a difficult if not impossible time giving her. By breaking laws, we were reunited 12 years ago. True, she has good adoptive parents, but she has seen her share of the awful kinds of problems adoptees are prone to. Low self-esteem is only the beginning. Once, I quietly accepted my conflicted feelings whenever I watched films of animals that showed a mother refusing to leave her dead or wounded offspring. I would tell myself that human life was different, more complicated. But I have come to know that, in some fundamental way, it may always be wrong for a woman to relinquish a child for adoption by strangers. Yes, of course, it is sad to be infertile when it is children you want, but that does not entitle anyone to someone else's
child.*

Lorraine Dusky is writing a book on gender bias and the legal system, Still Unequal: The Shameful Truth about Women and Justice in America for Crown Publishing. She is the author of Birthmark, a memoir about surrendering her daughter for adoption.

From On the Issues, The Progressive Women's Magazine, Winter, 1994. I will post the letters that were published in the next issue in a later blog.

Teleah Achane will stay with daddy

 Terry Achane and his nearly 2-year-old daughter, Teleah

Now that Jared and Kristi Frei of Utah have withdrawn their appeal to fight the father of the daughter they have been raising, and she will stay with her father, Terry Achane, the question some have raised is how will the two-year fare? After all, she is now living with "a stranger"--her real father.

She's going to be just fine with her real daddy and undoubtedly, his extended family.

Some of you will remember "Baby Jessica" who from 1991-93 was caught in a similar legal battle between a couple in Ann Arbor, Michigan, Robert and Jan DeBoer, and her natural parents, Cara and Dan Schmidt, who ultimately prevailed and got their daughter back. Jessica, as the media

Have Christy and Jason Vaughn No Morals?

Lorraine

Christy and Jason Vaughn have gotten truly hysterical as the days dwindle down to the actual, physical transfer of Grayson, who will be three years old on the 29th of October. Transfer is set for the next day. According to some sources, Jason Vaughn went on WHAS radio calling the boy's father, Benjamin Wyrembek, a criminal. Christy has reported somewhere that the kid is biting his fingernails. (You think he might be picking up on some of their anxiety? You think?) On their Keeping Grayson Home Face Book page, they are asking for donations and have set up a PayPal account--either to pay their lawyers or to continue to file petitions to keep this boy from the father who wants to take him home to Ohio.

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.

Barbara Walters was no fan of adoption refom

Lorraine

While the media is rightfully pouring ink and airtime out over the death of trailblazer Barbara Walters at 93, I'm reading about her and looking for somewhat different references than the general public: her relationship to adoption. Walters adopted a daughter, Jacqueline, in 1968, two years after I gave up my daughter for adoption.

By 1976 Walters was hosting a show that would be the prequel to The View. Called Not for Women Only, she presided over a panel of experts, with knowledgeable audience members sitting at round tables close to the front to be easily be interviewed. One day the topic was the adoption-reform movement, specifically adoptees searching for their natural mothers. Florence Fisher, the adoptee sparkplug who had ignited this tinder keg like no one before her, and I were present as those "knowledgeable" people on the subject. I'd already gone public as a woman who had relinquished a child by then, and had appeared on the Today show and in the Op-ed pages of the New York Times. Knowing the blowback I had received by coming out as one of "those women," I was expecting hostility. I have no clue who the supposed experts on the panel were--certainly there was no one espousing our point of view, most likely it was adoption lawyers and agency owners and social workers--and eventually Florence and I and a few others were able to speak. 

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

Transition Time in Contested Adoptions: Just Another Excuse for Delay

Tuesday, FMF was excited to report that Benjamin Wyrembek, the natural father of “Grayson Vaughn” --the name given to a three year old boy by his would-be adopters, Jason and Christy Vaughn--would soon gain custody of him. Unfortunately there’s been another setback in the chain of events which has kept the boy and his father apart for almost three years.

After a closed hearing in an Indiana trial court where it had been expected that Grayson would be turned over to his father, both sides released a joint statement agreeing to "resolve this matter in a way that meets the child’s best interest," and avoid further comment to the media.

Birth Mothers Attacked as Usual...or, Maybe I Need New Friends

I seem to be attracting fireballs lately--mainly because a) I'm writing about my daughter and telling people, so that brings up the whole idea that I found her, not the other way around; and b) I live in a world where adoptions are plentiful--everybody knows at least three people who have adopted and so far, so good. The kids are generally doing fine and so...the elephant in the room is the specter of the birth mother coming back.

That would be me.

So after just having had that horrible eruption with my close friend and neighbor, Yvonne, I got gob-smacked the other night by childless successful corporate attorney, also a friend. Call him Aston. He is godfather to one Chinese adoptee, who lives down the street from us, she's now fifteen; friend to another women who also has a Chinese girl, now fourteen; and one of his very best friends has a white son...from Gladney in Texas, one of the agencies that supports the National Council for Adoption.

Anyway, those are only the adoptions we know about that Aston is close to. God knows what started it, but he went on a long nasty harangue about how any birth mother coming back is always interfering, always upsetting this nice family, and after the parents have "invested" so much, both financially and emotionally, this WOMAN HAS NO RIGHT TO DO THAT!!!!

After I tried to make a case for the agony of not knowing, and gave him a brief history of sealed adoptions (Kansas and Alaska didn't count because they weren't big enough states) he came up with this question: What part of the pie chart of a birth mother who searches can be ascribed to self-interest? ....

Tell me, how do you answer that?

My husband Tony was there throughout and took Aston on as much as I did because that question left me speechless. The "discussion" might have taken place in a courtroom. Aston didn't know (why would he?) there was any research about birth mothers. Or the great mystery in the life of an adoptee. I did have him leave with both a copy of The Adoption Triangle and the Donaldson adoptee report. He's never had kids, when he and he wife wanted to adopt, his mother talked them out of it.

Damn, I can't even write about this without crying. All I know is that birth others are really seen as the pariahs by the elite class of adopters who have never been in the position of being poor, or feeling they had no options. Yvonne is one, Aston is another. Aston's wife, who did want to adopt quite badly, it came out, mostly said nothing but she at least got it that birth mothers would feel ...what is the word? Aston and I ended up using agony to refer to the pain birth mothers feel.

Here is what I emailed him the next day:

What I never got around to saying during your prosecutorial attack--the pie chart question seemed only designed to make birth mothers look bad and in doing so denigrate me--was that adoptees often want to be found because it indicates that their mothers do think about them, want to know them, want to know what happened, that the baby wasn't just dropped off and the woman/teenager went on with her life as if the child was a mere temporary inconvenience.

I'm just one person but I have had stacks of letters over the years thanking me for what I do from adopted people; what they want is for their mothers to find them. Adoption is painful, and keeping everything locked up--no matter who does the searching--does not make it less so. Only in the minds of people who have never walked the walk. Since you have such strong opinions that I'm in the wrong in such a major way, I hope you will take the time to read some of the material, including the birth mother survey that is at the site I sent yesterday. (you don't need to read it all, you can find the relevant sections from the TOC.

Unless you walked in my shoes, I don't think you can understand the depth of feeling that goes toward one's one flesh and blood. As someone one said, we can be casual about our own parents, but our kids always have us by the balls.

lorraine

In a message dated 09/07/08 10:10:49 Eastern Daylight Time, nccar@mindspring.com writes:

Lorraine,

I have given the following young lady your email and asked her to contact you, as her adoption was handled in New York. Please if you can pass her along to anyone who might be of assistance to her. She contacted me through the Care2 network.

Hello Ms. Roberta,

Thank you for responding to my inquiry. The main dilemma that I have been encountering is that I was born in Miami FL, but taken away from my mothers arms (when she moved up to NYC I might have been 1 yrs old) and put into foster care in Bronx, NY and that eventually led into an adoption by a family that was not well receiving of me as the adoptee. I somehow remembered from the time I was 4 1/2 yrs old that the foster care agency was located on 349 East 149th Street; Bronx, NY 10451 because of the building structure and the CitiBank logo on there; however, nobody knew the name of the agency that was once in the basement area of CitiBank back in 1984-1990's. I was told by CitiBank reps that that organization left during the 90's. This is the only detail I could recall of that has made me continue asking people if there's a way to get the agency's name during 1984. I even wrote Governor Pataki to please help me in this search and he replied with several agency's names in the Bronx and they claimed that I don't exist on their system.

I greatly appreciate your interest to assist me in any way, I hope to receive guidance if that's possible so that my life mystery can come to an end. Thank you so much for your time and consideration.

Sincerely,

Christina

Do you think this woman would feel that her birth mother was causing an unnecessary conflict in her life if she were to call upon her daughter?

One more thing, that I did not bring up that night: Aston's father was the guardian ad litem for the Schmidt/DeBoer child, Baby Anna/Jessica. Who argued in the Michigan court that the baby's best interests were with staying with the DeBoers....Who in my mind were nothing but baby snatchers as the real mother asked for the child back within the time limit but fought her for two years in the courts. Incidentally, the DeBoers later divorced.

Oh yeah, where did all this take place? At my dinner table, just the cozy four of us. I'd love to hear from other birth mothers about the reactions they get when it becomes clear they were the ones who did the searching.
--lorraine

The Trauma of being adopted

Lorraine

NOTE: Today's blog is about the impact of adoption on our children, the adult children we natural mothers surrendered for adoption. This is not to diminish the impact of surrender on first/birth mothers or excuse any behavior of this group; that is what First Mother Forum is primarily dedicated to. However, the discussion of last week about post-reunion relationships brought led us to today's subject: The Trauma of being adopted.

When "best interests of the child" violate reason and decency

Jane

Last week Harry’s Law presented the familiar drama of a child adopted illegally and his natural parents suing for his return. We know from the beginning that the judge, lacking the Wisdom of Solomon, will rule for the adopters (the most perfect of couples), citing the best interests of the child.

The Harry’s Law segment had a contemporary twist: the aggrieved couple is Chinese. Their child was stolen by corrupt Chinese officials and given to an African-American couple. The Chinese parents come to the United States and sue for return of their child. The judge, an African-American who had been adopted as a child by a white couple, rules for the adopters, repeating the old platitude about how it’s not about the rights of the parents but about the rights of the child. To overcome any lingering doubts the TV audience might have about the correctness of the decision, the Chinese girl is shown happily singing and swaying to Gospel music along with African-American children.

Can Feminists Adopt and Still Be Feminists?

Can a feminist adopt in good conscience?

No, says one Korean adoptee. Read what Kathie Leo has to say about that in the Minnesota Women's Press.

While we talked about international adoption lately, and then we've had the surrogacy and embryo debate, we skirted around the issue of what makes these issues so distasteful: the caste system inherent in all such transfers of human commodity. Because that's what babies are in our current milieu: a commodity, just like electric shavers and cheap toys. It's cash that makes the export of infant human flesh such a thriving business.

Is France sending us their excess babies? NO. Great Britain? NO. The babies are coming from Third World, undeveloped countries where the women are too poor to take care of them--and thus wealthy white women swoop in and buy them. Yes, I use that word buy because cash is what makes the transfer of babies from one country to another possible. In China, the one-child-per-couple policy led to the massive baby-export business, so lucrative that today China has a problem with baby and child kidnapping. HBO recently aired a documentary about it, China's Stolen Children.

Where are the baby farms where surrogate mothers are willing to take on the job of bearing children for wealthy foreigners? India, a country where great poverty exists side-by-side with great wealth. Once some enterprising capitalist gets wind of this, more poor countries will be setting up baby-gestation farms.

And the same monetary principles, generally speaking, work in adoption. It is not wealthy girls and young women who by and large are offering babies to adopt; they are having abortions or keeping their children. It's girls and young women and mothers in poor families who can not keep them who say, Here, take mine, I can not afford to keep her. The humane thing to do would be to make it possible for the poor woman to keep the child. A few years ago, the sister of a friend adopted a child from an intact, but poor, family in Rhode Island. What is that if not baby-selling? Would it not have been more humane to simply help support that family?

This caste system is why we find surrogacy and egg donation for money repugnant. Why adoptions from Third World countries--or China--are so prone to abuses. I have, among my acquaintances, a far-left feminist law professor. But where did she adopt?

Guatemala.

Did she not see the apparent dichotomy in this act? Obviously not. Elizabeth Bartholet, a feminist law professor at Harvard, imported two boys from Peru. She showed up to be on the television when the Anna/Jessica transfer the wicked DeBoers (now divorced) back to her natural parents, the Schmidts (ah, also divorced) was going on. She and I had a shouting match on the McNeal-Lerher Report that day. The jacket to her book (Family Bonds), says that she "produced" one child (drum roll, please) then "endured her own struggle with infertility" for ten years before she flew to Peru to adopt, some eighteen years after her first child was born. Interestingly enough, her age--when she was "struggling" with infertility aka perimenopause--is not mentioned there. The timing had to be up to and into her forties. But because you want to have children beyond the reasonable time frame of your fertility and your body refuses does not make your lack of fertility a disease. It is, dear ladies, a reality of aging!

Yet the snarky Ms. Bartholet--who told me the research showing that adoptees were prone to more mental health problems than the norm was "garbage,"--saw nothing anti-feminist is taking boys from their poor country to give them a "better life."

For that is what is stated or implied in all adoption stories: that life that the adoptive family offers is better than the original one. Here's how Kathie Leo put it:

The story further implies certain suppositions about what "a better life" means. In this scenario, "better" clearly means American, but it also suggests wealthier, Caucasian, and most important, not with my birthmother. This notion of "a better life" has permeated adoption narratives since the practice began, often used as justification for its existence.

Amen. Ms. Leo's piece has more to say. It's worth reading. As for me, I tried for years to get a piece in Ms. magazine about birth mothers with the above theme. No luck. The feminists who were putting out the magazine had the mindset of Ms. Bartholet and friends. No--wait, they were Ms. Bartholet's friends.--lorraine

PS: Tomorrow we'll hear from Jane.

Biological Dad Seeks Return of His Son; Adopters Resist, Claiming: Best Interests

Sellersburg family continues fight for adopted son
Talk about courts that delay and laws that are stacked against natural parents of children! This is another case of what is out-and-out child snatching passively approved by our slow-moving legal system in America. But at least in this case an Ohio judge saw the light of right and has ordered that the three-year-old in question, now called Grayson Vaughn, be returned in 48 hours to his rightful, natural father. However, since the prospective adopters live in Indiana, they have been fighting the return of the child to his father in both states.

Corruption in International Adoption? Highly Over-rated.

Rev. Mark H. Diebel of East Greenbush, NY, attended the 2009 Adoption Policy Conference on International Adoption, The United States, and the Reality of the Hague System, presented by the Center for Adoption Policy, The Child Advocacy Program of Harvard Law School, and The Justice Action Center at New York Law School on March 6 at the New York Law School. We met Mark a year ago when we were in Albany to lobby for open records; he’s a cool guy and an Episcopalian minister. An adoptee, he found his mother in Hawaii, and connected with a large family.

We asked him to share his impressions and thoughts about the conference. The keynote speaker was Elizabeth Bartholet, Harvard adopter of two from Peru and adoption-corruption enabler and author of Family Bonds, about the glories and rewards of international adoption. She told me when we appeared on PBS together the day Anna Schmidt was returned to her rightful parents from the DeBoers that her children were meant for her. In the introduction to Family Bonds, she reveals her underlying thesis that would lead to a Brave New World of adoption:

“It would be liberating for women and for their children if we were to enable birth parents to think more positively about giving their children to those who cannot bear children but who want to provide the nurturing piece of parenting.”

Why doesn’t she just come out and write: Hey, we’re rich, we want kids, let us have yours! She is a completely heartless on what it is like to relinquish your own flesh and blood.

So…without further ado, here are Mark’s impressions of the Conference:

What is the impact to International Adoptions of America's signing on to the Hague Convention?

William Bistransky, Chief of the Adoption Unity, Office of Children's Issues, Department of State; Anna Mary Coburn (DOS) attorney-advisor, Miki Stebbing (DOS); Richard Klarberg (Council on Accrediation); USCIS -- immigration services people explained details, answered questions from the audience, many of whom seemed to be adoption agencies and adopting moms, law students...representatives from Ethica, PEAR, NY Statewide Adoption Reform and one embassy representative from Kyrgyzstan.

Who was not on the panel? Not one international adoptee.

Things overheard during the meeting: an adoptive mom's thirty-something daughter is getting married. "Things do settle down," she said to the gathered adoptive parents. I thought, "Do adoptees have problems?"

Someone on a panel asked quite seriously, "Is poverty a reason to separate a child from their family?" Silence. The subject changed. I had the feeling that children from poor countries and their families had better be watching for well-meaning rescuers. This is another potential pool of ungrateful adoptees.

One howler from Dr. Bartholet was the statement that "heritage is over-rated." This was said in respect of the millions of children who are left to languish in appalling conditions because some people think that it would be better for them to remain in those conditions "with their heritage" than be "set-free" for international adoption. A response came from Karen Moline (member of PEAR) who called her out. "This sounds racist," says Moline, especially as she herself considered her adopted child who was from Vietnam.

Dr. B replied that she has been involved in civil rights in America all her life, and figures that one just has to take comments like this for standing up and saying challenging things...second, that her two adopted "children" were from Peru and wants them to think well of their heritage. She is concerned that the heritage argument is used to manipulate international adoption and reduce its attractiveness (my word.) (I think her "children" are in their twenties.) —True, they must be by now because the are pasts toddler stage when her book was published in 1993--FMF.

Corruption is important. A woman in the audiences talks about corruption in a Guatemalan adoption that she is directly involved with. Another woman trying to adopt from Guatemala tells the story that "her child" came with what turned out to be falsified DNA records. Apparently, doctors were colluding to falsify these records. The adoption faltered, the child remains in Guatemala. She wondered what could still be done to get the child to America. Someone I don't know, who runs an adoption agency that is involved with Guatemalan adoption, stood up shortly afterwards and complained that the Hague shut-down adoptions from Guatemala. Was it the Hague (Convention) that shut it down? Or was it the corruption? Her point was the corruption is minor, exceptional; and that adoptions from Guatemala should continue. (See Firstmother’s previous posts on the corruption in international adoption.)

I asked, can the Hague Convention provide a foundation for opening a new discussion in America for opening records? The reply came from Dr. B, who said how encouraged she is to see that records are getting opened across the country. Apart from that, not one word from the panel, but there were a few words of support from the audience. Someone said to me after, "what world is she from?"

The conference had good parts. There was food and refreshment; registration was free. There was opportunity to ask questions. The panels were informed about certain things, especially if you wanted to adopt a child internationally. A professor of social work from Virginia Commonwealth University complained that the conference design lacked any real engagement with adoption fraud, and no social workers who conduct home studies. Who designed this? How can one get international adoptees involved with policy discussions like this?

My final story is a personal one. After the conference I spoke to Dr. Bartholet. My adoptive uncle taught at Harvard Law and I wondered if she knew him. Yes, for many years. And she explained something I didn't know about how he got there. Then, she said, "I'm sorry about his death." I hadn't heard. When I told my wife that I had the "adoptee experience", she replied, "my family is screwed-up too. It's not just adoptee's." I said, "but I bet no one is looking to tell me."

How did I feel about the conference?

How did I feel? Hey I'm an adoptee. I'm still figuring it out. Am still getting over the fact there were no adoptees speaking at all. I thought...I should stand up and say thank you for all your hard work. But I am not grateful.

The passion exhibited on the panelist's part was all pro-adoption, about getting children to America. Very little self-criticism. No deconstruction going on, which was all strange since that is very "in-school" these days. Old school human rights talk...fifty years old. I did say to the group..."You all sound like my parents fifty years ago." I am too indirect perhaps?

[Self: Keep a low profile. Don't draw fire more than need be to survive.]

Was it a up or down for the overall conference?

Definite down in that it did fail to come to grips with the larger picture. Furthermore no discussion of things like family formation; gay/lesbian adoption; surrogacy.

For those interested, the conference was videotaped, and will posted on the NY Law School web site sometime in the next few months.

____________________

New Post on adoptamania in the media coming Tuesday evening. --lorraine

Biological Father Wins in Court, Again; Will the Vaughns Comply?

/

The natural father of "Grayson Vaughn," not the boy's his legal name since he was never adopted, will be able to raise his child,  and the couple who have been holding him for the last three years must turn him over to the father, Benjamin Wyrembek, within twenty-hours, as ordered by the Ohio Supreme Court this afternoon. The court referred to the "right of a natural parent to the care and custody of his children (as) one of the most precious and fundamental in law."

Hooray!  Christy and Jason Vaughn, who have been making the rounds of the media hoping to drum up sympathy for their keeping the boy,

Talking out about adoption is not always easy. In fact, almost never.

Talking freely about about our children lost to adoption is something that does not come easy, no matter how open one is about it. Reading Stone Diaries recently, I came across a passage where the protagonist, Daisy, is glad to escape from her home town because everybody there knows her marriage of two weeks was not consummated. Her upper-class husband was a secret drunk who fell out of a third-story window on their honeymoon in France. Once back home, Daisy's doctor discovers that she is still a virgin, and tells no one but his wife, who tells no one but her best friend who tells no one but...and eventually this startling news reaches her ex-mother-in-law. Who blames the lack of marital consummation on Daisy, who must be "frigid." Daisy  then became a woman whose story enveloped her around like a coat she cannot throw off.

The shock of recognition hit me hard when I read that passage because that is how I often feel about my status as a birth/first mother. That I am a woman with a story. That precedes me into any situation. Sometimes I merely want to be a woman without such an interesting story.

So I often keep my mouth shut. Do I announce to casual strangers, like someone I might meet at work (if I worked out of the home) that I am a first/birth mother, walking freely among the non-birth mothers of the world? No. Do I tell a dinner partner whom I have never met before that I had a child who I gave up for adoption, and that I searched and found her, and now she is dead, when asked if I have children? Do I sometimes just say no? Depends. (Actually, it's easier now that my daughter is dead, because saying that my daughter died usually kills further questioning and only elicits sympathy.) Do I join a new group of people and introduce myself, if asked, Do you have children? as a woman who gave up a child for adoption, or a birth/first mother? No. That's a question I have dreaded ever since 1966, the year my daughter was born and I surrendered her.

I have to have some privacy about this. I have to not let my adoption sadness and grief and activism take over every aspect of my life. I can not handle being on a soap box every moment. Thank god for good friends, because with them, adoption is only a part of who I am.

If you are a woman with a story such as this, first and foremost most people go, Ohh that's too bad, and Ahh, how are you today? Where's your daughter, how did her parents handle this, did you regret giving her up, why did you do it, who is the father, why didn't you get married?  That takes up the rest of the lunch/hour/group session/afternoon. I do not want to be a woman "with a story," a story that precedes me everywhere, obliterates all other information about me. It's what Jane talked about in her last post.

Sometimes I just want to be a woman joining a reading club, a writer and magazine editor, someone with Francophile tendencies, someone who finds amazing stuff at the local thrift shops, a fan of Elizabeth George mysteries and Preston Sturgis movies, a lover of triple-creme cheese, Indian food, horseback riding, dogs and ballet. It is exhausting to be first and foremost an activist birth mother.

Some may think that because I wrote Birthmark way back in the dark ages of the open-records movement--and been interviewed about adoption reform literally fifty or sixty times in the media--it is a piece of cake to speak out all the time about adoption issues. Wrong. If I have to debate a gang of angry adoptive parents (who usually turn out also to be lawyers with their tongues sharpened), it's emotionally draining and exhausting. If people wonder why I sometimes are not overly sympathetic to adoptive parents without knowing more about them, it's because so many have been gunning for me over the years. One guy I knew slightly told me at a party that he knew people "who wanted to kill me." They lived in his building, he said, they were friends, and yep, they were adoptive parents.

On the day in 1993 that Baby Jessica/real name: Anna Schmidt was returned to her natural parents, Dan Schmidt and Cara Clausen, from the the DeBoers, the couple who fought in the courts for two-and-a-half years, I was the only one speaking up for the Schmidts on the then MacNeal-Lehrer Report on PBS against a group of about six people, including adoptive mother and Harvard professor, Elizabeth Bartholet. You bet that was exhausting. Similar hostile interviews were common after Birthmark came out in 1979.

On the other hand, having people know who I am (reunited birth mother, adoption-reform activist, writer) does make some encounters easier, since I do not have to explain this part of my life. People who might say nasty things about birth mothers are likely to hold their tongue if I'm within earshot. Prospective adoptive parents do not invite me to Gladney fund raisers. Yes, the agency urges prospective adopters to have them, and adopting parents I know held a cocktail party for that purpose. I was not on the guest list. They got a boy soon after.

However, if someone has never talked to a first mother before (that she is aware of), and the situation allows, she is typically riveted in exploring every possible aspect of the story. She has a million questions, and so it goes for the next hour. I remember spending most of an afternoon at a friend's house one summer day and her sister-in-law was full of such questions as we paddled about in a pool. There was nothing to do but answer her questions; to do anything else would have been rude.

But if I can do so, and say, I'm at a social event and someone wants to launch into a discussion of the pros and cons of open records, adoption, my searching, whatever...I do what adoption-reform pioneer Florence Fisher taught me: She says, I am at a social event, I want to have a good time, this is such an emotional issue, I just can't talk about it now, OK? Smile broadly, hope for understanding. If that doesn't work, I add, You know, giving up my daughter was the worst thing that ever happened to me, and revisiting it now is like talking about the time I was raped. (I was.)

I put Florence's advice once to good use on a couple of occasions. Once I "helped" a friend's college-age daughter who was to argue that "adoption records ought to remain sealed" in a debating class (true story). At her father's request I sent her a packet of material (though what I sent argued for the opposite of what she was looking for) about sealed records. I don't know what her father was thinking, as he had already met my daughter, and knew that I searched for her. I did not hear from the young woman, or learn what happened in debating class. Several months later, however, here she was at a Christmas party. She introduced herself and a half hour later called me over and introduced me to another woman as, "This is Lorraine who wrote a book about adoption."

Gulp. Who is this woman? I'm thinking, Somebody about to adopt? Err..."This is a woman who wrote a book about adoption, too," the young woman making this awkward introduction said. "Bye." And then our go-between was gone.

Is this woman my enemy, I'm wondering now. Is she an adoptive mother against open records? About to adopt? What? It turned out that she had been a social worker (not an adoptive mother) who indeed had written a book about adopting for adoptive parents. We stared at each other uncomfortably. After hearing about her book, I said my piece about not talking about this at a party. We parted and have been cool to one another on the infrequent occasions our paths cross. We smile, nod, and turn away.

Being public about your status as a birth mother and lobbying for open records in Albany or Trenton or Boston or Philadelphia or Austin is a whole different ball game. You are with people of like mind, you meet legislators and their aides and tell your story succinctly and hope to open minds and hearts, and it is exhilarating, a great good feeling that gives back more than you give--even when you encounter the folks who will never vote for open records for adoptees and most certainly, not for first/birth mothers.

But sometimes someone I've just met strikes me the right way, and I end up revealing my story. I've told strangers in airports who turn out to be understanding and sympathetic adoptive mothers; I told someone sitting next to me at a dinner party and it turned out that she too, had given up a child many years before, and we spent the next hour talking barely above a whisper; I once told a man I met on a vacation half-way around the world and it turned out he was a birth father and now, with plenty of money, wished he could find a way to help his child, if he needed it. I could send him to college, he said. Just before Birthmark was available, I told a stranger in a bar in Sag Harbor, and he turned out to be adopted, and was excited with the idea of what I was doing. I never met him again. However, a few weeks later he sent a dozen red roses to me on the set of the first media appearance I did for the book. I never knew how he even knew where I would be--the interview was in Detroit, where I grew up, it was not a national talk show.

I think about him now and then. I hoped he found whom he was really looking for, and she was gladdened in her heart. We birth/first mothers have to make the call every day: whether to tell or not. Speaking out and speaking up is what we need to do, but sometimes a woman gets weary and needs a little room.

Can the media get adoption right?

Jane

"US could face a critical adoption shortage" wails the headline in the Salem, Oregon Statesman Journal over a January 11 USA Today article.* 

What's the cause of this claimed calamity?  "A cataclysmic implosion of intercountry adoption (emphasis added)" according to Tom DiFilpo of the  Joint Council on International Children's Services. In addition to Russia closing its doors, adoptions from China, Ethiopia, and South Korea have declined. Domestic production cannot make up for the shortage because, according to Jenny Pope of the adoption agency Buckner International, "as single parenthood becomes more acceptable, 'there are just not as many women placing their children for adoption.'"

Birth Parents Win One in Michigan

More positive news about children NOT being separated from their natural parents has been in the news. A Michigan couple, Christine Wolfe and Kenneth Barnett learned on Christmas Eve that the Court of Appeals sided with them after a five-year battle for their son.

A prospective adoptive couple, Phyllis and Phillip Unthank, of Dearborn (coincidentally, my home town) had custody of the boy from birth to 18 months--though the mother never relinquished him legally. As a divorcing mother, she did not think she could financially care for the new baby as well as a daughter the couple already had. Again the story--as these stories all are--is complicated: a couple divorcing, the husband/father questioning paternity, the paternity confirmed, the couple get back together, and the father asks for his son.

The Unthanks said, No thanks, and thus began the long court process.

The father filed for custody of the boy in both circuit and and probate courts and was denied. Now why is that, you ask. Clearly, he was the father and had never agreed to give up his son. Answer: He didn't have a lawyer. When the couple divorced, they were granted joint custody of their daughter.

And although Christine had given the Unthanks power of attorney for medical reasons for the boy, she never signed surrender papers. When the boy was 18 months old, Christine asked for him back and revoked the couple's power of attorney. The case dragged on because Wayne County does not have a family court to handle all the family's issues from divorce to custody, and so two different judges were involved in the early stages.

Now I know it is difficult for adoptive parents to have a child, believe that she or he will be a part of their family, and then lose that child, but what in their DNA makes them go against the ethical rightness of returning that child to her or his natural, biological, genetic parents? When Aston some months back asked me what part of my pie chart could be ascribed to selfishness when I was reunited with my daughter Jane, I was speechless. But what in adopters like the Unthanks can be ascribed to compassion for the natural parents? In their unremitting determination to have a child at all costs, they lose all moral authority and human dignity. They become craven child snatchers. And the courts have so often sided with them.

Guess who pops up in this story: Roberta Deboer, the she-devil of child snatching. "Once you have a baby that you care for day in and day out and you in every right believe that child is yours," she says in The Detroit News, sounding every so much like Sarah Palin with her fractured syntax. "Those parents became parents the moment they took that child in their arms." Sorry Roberta, that would made every nanny a parent with the right to hang unto the child...forever.

Time passed, the Barnetts had another child, and got a lawyer, and a good one: the same one who represented the Schmidts in the Schmidt/DeBoer case we've been discussing here of late: Marian Faupel. So far the couple has paid about $30,000 in legal fees. They are in debt for another $80,000. Their home in Dearborn Heights was foreclosed. "Most people would have lost their child -- that's the tactic," said mother Christine of the many motions and counter-motions brought by the Unthanks. "It's to force you to give up."

The Barnetts (who also have an older child, Samantha, now seven) were eventually granted visitation, and when that went well, the courts came up with a time-share plan: the boy, called Daune by the Unthanks, and Cody by the Barnetts, was to spend a half week with his natural parents, a half week with the Unthanks. Think of it, on Sunday, you're Cody, on Thursday, you're Duane. The story stays he was being schooled in different religions, but does not specify. I doubt it was between Presbyterian and Methodist. Is this sick or what? But all this child-sharing ended abruptly in February of 2008 when the Probate Judge June Blackwell-Hatcher granted the natural parents full custody. Hurrah! Now Cody could be Cody 24/7.

What did the Unthinks do? Ka-ching, Ka-Ching, they had the bucks to continue dragging it out in court, and that they did. Fortunately common sense and moral rectitude prevailed when the State Court of Appeals upheld the lower court's decision to give the Barnetts' fulltime custody on December 24. Talk about a Christmas present! Interestingly, the Court cited the Michigan Supreme Court's decision in the Schmidt/DeBoer case in their decision.

Whew!

The story in the Detroit News covers the ups and downs of the case and includes this particularly tasty tidbit I quote here: [Child] advocates laud the ruling, which underscores parents' constitutional rights to raise children regardless of their circumstances as long as they are fit. They say birth parents frequently give up or lose such battles because adoptive parents typically have more money to spend on qualified representation and extended court fights.

But adoptive parents and their supporters sympathize with the Unthanks, and say courts sometimes favor birth parents over the best interests of the child.

Courts sometimes favor birth parents over the best interests of the child?

Why do adoptive parents think that simply because they have more money they are always "in the best interests of the child?" We know that's how adoptive parents often feel--and act on that--but this attitude makes me nuts. Unless there are serious compelling reasons to remove a child from his parents, everyone is better off with their natural parents--people who look, think and act like them. Who can give them a kidney if necessary.

If we first mothers and fellow travelers keep winning these cases, maybe prospective adopters will stop fighting in court to get children that are not theirs when the natural parents are ready and willing--and want them back.

This case of course reminds us of the DeBoers, but more recently a Chinese couple had a protracted and expensive fight to get back their daughter, who had been born in the U.S., and return to China. That was the Anna Mae He case, which dragged on for five years, from 1999 to 2007 until the Tennessee Supreme Court decided for the Hes, the biological parents. One of the reasons the adopters used against the couple was that they were planning to take their daughter back to China.This was a particularly noxious case in Memphis, with all the prejudices of race and money on display. Learn about it here. --lorraine

The Light Between Oceans: Bloated melodrama defies your sympathy

The book, the movie poster

As soon as I learned that The Light Between Oceans was about the tug-of-war over a child between a mother and one who pretends to be the real mother (as was evident in the pre-release TV commercials) I knew I would see it. I took plenty of tissues; I wanted to go alone.

Since I found the story of The Place Beyond the Pines, one of the director Derek Cianfrance's earlier films, devastating and compelling from the first frame, I expected the same. After that story of a child the father did not know his short-term girlfriend had, and its the tragic end, I was an emotional mess. I know too many stories about guys who don't know they left behind a child.

So I was set up to like this movie.  I excepted my own personal waterworks.

Yet I didn't even need the tissues. The story is way too preposterous, the filming veers to high melodrama, the moral question at the heart of the story

Adoption and Mental Illness: The facts ain't pretty

I can not tell you the number of times that I have been accosted, accused, looked at with disdain, told that I was publicizing "garbage research,"* because for years I have said that being adopted leads to ...ahem, problems. Mental health problems. Author and adoptee B.J. Lifton first sounded the warning bells about this in her book Lost and Found (one of the seminal adoption books), but the subject has always raised hackles not only among adopters, but also, at times, adoptees.

Even as late as 2007 when I mentioned these statistics (from the back of the room) in one of the workshops at the kinship and culture conference at the University of Pittsburgh, my comment was met with derision--Oh, that's only because the adoptive parents have more money and are likely to send the kid to therapy, was the response my comment elicited. Well, not so fast, dear adopters and enablers:

From the Psychiatric Times comes this:
January 26, 2009

NEWS

Adoption and Mental Illness

Arline Kaplan

---

Does adoption pose psychological risks? University of Minnesota researchers revisited this controversial issue recently and found that common DSM-IV childhood disorders are more prevalent in adoptees than nonadoptees.¹ They also found that adoptees are more likely to have contact with mental health professionals.

The mental health of adoptees has become an increasingly important issue as the number of adoptions in the United States continues to rise. According to the National Council For Adoption,1 there were 130,269 domestic adoptions and 21,063 intercountry adoptions in 2002. (In 1996 there were 108,463 domestic adoptions and 11,303 intercountry adoptions.) US Census figures in 2000 indicated that nearly 1.6 million children and teenagers under 18 years in the US and Puerto Rico are adopted.²

The adoption study compared a random sample of 540 adolescents born in Minnesota, who were not adopted, with a representative sample of adoptees (514 international adoptees and 178 domestic adoptees). The children had been placed by the 3 largest adoption agencies in Minnesota.³

“All of the kids were adopted within the first 2 years of life, but the great majority were adopted within the first year,” said Margaret A. Keyes, PhD, lead author of the study and a research psychologist. “The average age at placement was 4 months. So it is not as if you are looking at 3- and 4-year-olds coming over on a plane from a faraway country.”

At the time of the assessments, the study participants ranged in age from 11 to 21 years. The assessments were rigorous and involved use of the Diagnostic Interview for Children and Adolescents-Revised (DICA-R) and the Structured Clinical Interview for DSM-III-R (SCID-II). (Both had been updated to cover DSM-IV criteria.) The modified DICA-R was also administered to mothers of participants to assess disorders in their children.

Disorders assessed over the lifetime of the adoptees included oppositional defiant disorder (ODD), attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD), conduct disorder, major depressive disorder, and separation anxiety disorder.

Because of its design, the study makes a major contribution to the medical literature, Keyes told Psychiatric Times. It is one of the first to investigate the prevalence of common DSM-IV childhood disorders in a population-based sample of adopted adolescents. In addition, it improved on the methodology of prior studies.

While previous studies had relied extensively on parent reports and checklist descriptions of problems the kids had, Keyes said, “We had parents and children come into our laboratory at the University of Minnesota and complete individual clinical interviews . . . then we also collected teacher reports.” Two individuals with advanced clinical training reviewed the interviews, according to Keyes, and “they had to come to consensus about every single symptom. That information was then entered into the computer, and the diagnoses were assigned by computer algorithms.”

The odds of having ADHD or ODD were about twice as high in all adopted adolescents. For example, Keyes said, 7 to 8 out of 100 nonadopted adolescents had ADHD compared with 14 to 15 out of 100 of the adoptees. In addition, domestic adoptees had higher odds of having conduct disorder than nonadopted adolescents. Consistent with a meta-analysis by Juffer and van Ijzendoorn,⁴ the University of Minnesota researchers found that international adoptees had fewer externalizing behavioral problems than domestic adoptees. This finding is somewhat provocative, because some researchers5 have speculated that international adoptees would be at increased risk for mental health problems because they are more likely to have been placed in the adoptive home at a later age, to have experienced preplacement adversity, or to have been exposed to postplacement discrimination.

In contrast, Juffer and van Ijzendoorn (authors of the meta-analysis) suggested that adoptive parents of international adoptees may be better prepared to rear an adopted child than the adoptive parents of domestic adoptees. They also suggested that domestic adoptees may experience greater prenatal exposure to teratogenic substances or have a greater genetic risk for mental health problems than international adoptees.

International adoptees were significantly more anxious than nonadopted adolescents and, according to their parents, had significantly more symptoms of major depressive and separation anxiety disorders.

Despite the study’s findings, Keyes emphasized that most of the children adopted as infants are well-adjusted and psychologically healthy.

“That point gets lost in a discussion of a paper like this,” she said.

Mental health contacts

The adoption study also found that all adopted adolescents were significantly more likely to have had contact with a mental health professional than nonadoptees. “We have known for a long time that adoptees are over-represented in mental health settings,” Keyes said. “One hypothesis is that it relates to referral bias—that adopted parents on average have greater economic resources, are a little bit better educated, and have experience with social services agencies through the process of adopting, so they are more likely to refer their kids to a mental health setting.

Now, we think that at least part of that over-representation is due to the fact that the adoptees are experiencing more of the kinds of behavioral problems for which parents refer their kids.

_____________

1. National Council For Adoption. Adoption Factbook IV. Sterling, Va.: National Council For Adoption; 2007.
2. Kreider RM. Adopted Children and Stepchildren: 2000. US Census Bureau. Issued October 2003. www.census.gov/prod/2003pubs/censr-6.pdf. Accessed October 6, 2008.
3. Keyes MA, Sharma A, Elkins IJ, et al. The mental health of US adolescents adopted in infancy. Arch Pediatr Adolesc Med. 2008;162:419-425.
4. Juffer F, van Ijzendoorn MH. Behavior problems and mental health referrals of international adoptees: a meta-analysis. JAMA. 2005;293:2501-2515.
5. Hjern A, Lindblad F, Vinnerljung B. Suicide, psychiatric illness, and social maladjustment in intercountry adoptees in Sweden: a cohort study. Lancet. 2002; 360:443-448.

*by none other than Elizabeth Bartholet, adopter of two from Peru and someone who continually espouses adopting from poor nations as a way to...god knows what. And remember, she is the keynote speaker at the March 6, 2009 Center for Adoption Policy conference at New York University. Also on the panel is the woman who wrote the Uniform Adoption Act several years ago that included the provision that adoptee birth records be sealed for 99 years, Joan Hollinger. On final note, they both signed an amicus brief in the Schmidt/DeBoer court fight over Anna...for keeping the child with the prospective adopters, the DeBoers. Parents for Ethical Adoption Reform plan to attend. Anyone interested in an alternative point of view ought to contact them here. Email: reform@PEAR-now.org.

Just a note here: A few years ago friends of ours were having trouble with their (natural-born) son in his teenage years, and eventually sent him to a school for troubled kids. When I checked the website, a special note was made that the school specifically had programs to deal with adoption issues....Yes, many adopted kids do not evince mental-health issues out of the norm, but the evidence is there: a statistical number do. And while an acknowledgment of their specialness can not cure all, keeping anyone's birth background from them can only exacerbate whatever problems are there.

Why should a child grow up with her natural, first, birth parent? Because.

Lorraine

The other day a first mother who hopes to get back her child before the adoption is finalized asked me to write a letter for her to be sent to several government officials. In doing so, I could not but help think of the case that so many of us can't get off our minds--that of Dusten Brown and his daughter Veronica. We wait now for some kind of word from the Cherokee court where the case is now. 

I am not sure how the Cherokee court now is able to get involved after the decisions of the U.S. Supreme Court and the South Carolina courts, but nonetheless, that is where the fate of Veronica Brown now sits. Everything in the letter below is true not only in the case of the Canadian mother and child I am writing this for, but also for Veronica.