ALTERNATIVES to FOSTER CARE
& ADOPTION in AMERICA
We do not choose the ideas we believe in...They choose us.
Alternatives to Foster Care
Alternatives to Adoption
(from Chapters 8 & 9 of Chosen Children, by Lori Carangelo)
Train up a child in the way he should go
and in keeping with his individual gift or bent
and when he is old he will not depart from it.
-The Bible, Proverbs 22:6, amplified
Alternatives to Foster Care
Real family preservation programs, community-based care, funding of education and vocational training, public and private partnership job training and placement programs, with employer incentives to hire trainees, residential schools, free national health insurance, on-the-job day-care, with incentives for small businesses, as well as large corporations to participate, and work-at-home incentives for business, an open system for out-of-home placements with public accountability, uniform fair laws. These are some of the necessary elements to providing a real alternative to the current system of foster care.
Prevent Government Protected Child Stealing
It boggles the mind to contemplate the long-range negative impact, even on future generations, that foster care has had upon the former foster kids who contributed their stories here. It is even more mind-boggling to realize that the billions of dollars of federal and state funds presently poured into the Foster Care industry have, overall, perpetuated family dismemberment. In recent years, the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) justified funding by building a bureaucratic Child Abuse Database and many parents lost children to the foster care system as result of false claims of child abuse.
On A Current Affair (FOX TV, April, 1991), Kerry and Kurth Davidson lost their child due to false charges of sexual child abuse. HHS investigator, Don Chapman, was quoted as saying he has "the power of God" after kidnapping the Davidson's daughter, Crystal, for 15 days. It was determined that the counselor had put the "molestation" idea in the child's head.
Such injustices have escalated in recent years as media and Internet newsgroups such as CPSWatch.com attest. Like the Davidsons, many innocent people became permanently registered as child abusers or sex offenders on the FBI's national registry, despite being cleared of all charges. In Nazi Germany, a vindictive neighbor could anonymously accuse someone falsely; the Gestapo then carried off the accused and built a case by conducting a coercive interrogation. The U.S. Bill of Rights protected Americans from this kind of activity until it was violated by the Child Abuse Industry. Russia outlawed anonymous reporting in 1988. Anonymous reporting has continued in the U.S. since 1977 and needs to be abolished. Responsible reporting and prosecution must be restored. Parents' legal costs, to recover children who were wrongly taken, have ruined them financially; state laws prevent victims of child abuse laws from recovering damages by giving DHHS a shield of sovereign immunity.
In "Foster Care System Begins Overhaul," Los Angeles
Times (11-10-98, A-1) staff writer James Rainey reported:
Children and Family Services will boost staffing in reorganization
that will allow closer, community- based oversight of 73,000 youngsters...
Taking a page from the many police departments that have community-based
programs with success, the over-burdened, often-criticized Department of
Children and Family Services will assign social workers to small neighborhoods,
attempt to recruit thousands of new foster parents and place foster
children in their existing neighborhoods... When taken from problem parents,
the children would no longer be scattered to the far corners of the vast
county. Instead, they would remain in their own neighborhoods, in
their own schools and close to support them in coping with the trauma of
being removed from their parents... encouraging foster parents and
'birth' parents to work closely together so the children can maintain contact
with their biological parents.
The "neighborhood approach" has been employed on the largest scale in Cuyahoga County, Ohio (including Cleveland) which finds that reversing the feelings of distrust for "faceless bureaucrats who used to come to snatch babies and break up families may take years."
Family preservation programs are only as good as their facilitators. The Casey Foundation and others now suggest that children will be better served if parents and foster parents work together. Social Services personnel are being upgraded. The family participants are referred for voluntary assistance by Social Services, Salvation Army and legislators. But social welfare activists in Los Angeles are skeptical of programs touted as the "solution" to the problem of abused and neglected children after years of focusing on "foster care adoption" as the "family preservation program of the 1990's."
Couched in terms of "family preservation" the Family Preservation Act of 1991 made federal subsidies and tax credits available for adoptions. The Income Tax Credit for Adoptive Parents was raised from $5,000 to $10,000 in 2001. "Subsidized adopter" is now the conservative term for what used to be the vilified "welfare mom." The State has abdicated its obligation to insure that any child will have quality of education, skills training and preparation for adult living, not just for those who fuel the adoption industry. One way to insure these things for children is to help their parents.
The Clinton Administration's welfare reforms limited Aid To Dependent Children (AFDC); compel the average welfare recipient--a mother with two or more children--to get off welfare and go to work within two years. The Los Angeles Times (10-16-98, B-1) "Welfare Reform Is Flawed, Study Says," by Carla Rivera, confirms the nearsightedness of such plans:
Employment - It finds many recipients are being trained for dead-end, low-paying jobs. County official disputes recommendations. A variety of well-paying jobs that can support a family are available in Los Angeles County but welfare recipients are not being trained for them...The report... funded by the Arco Foundation by the nonprofit Economic Roundtable, identifies 48 entry level jobs that pay living wages and are projected to yield 145,000 openings over the next five years... there are as many as 5.4 unemployed job seekers for each new opening... few of them have the skills to put themselves in contention... Although the majority--76%--have worked before, 54% lack a high school diploma, 23% have limited or no English language skills and 38% do not have access to a car, the study found... the emphasis is on work over training.
A new approach may help thousands but the "experts" are saying the real challenge will be to coordinate a new approach "with other programs which may have faded from the spotlight" into one system of care.
In "One Shelter's Approach," Los Angeles Times (12-27-93, B-4), it was reported that on any given night 15,000 parents and children were homeless in Los Angeles County. Founded by the Sisters of Carondelet in 1978, "The House of Ruth" has provided women and their children with long term-temporary shelter, comprehensive support and skills they need to obtain and keep safe and secure in permanent housing ... basic care, shelter and food, health screening, on-site child care, basic education, parenting classes, high school equivalency, English as a second language, community college classes and money management, substance abuse case referrals, housing placement and moving assistance.
"A Mother's Addiction, a Family's Recovery," (Washington Post, 7-31-01, A-1), highlights the recovery of Iyarn Brice. The House of Ruth, Washington, DC, provided $38,000 worth of housing and services, therapy and drug testing, two Ruth counselors, and a Ruth staffer for Iyarn Brice, mother of 9--one of eighteen women and forty-one children--in their drug detoxification, supervised rehabilitation and reunification programs. A bill before Congress, the Child Protection, Alcohol and Drug Rehabilitation Partnership Act, calls for spending $1.9 billion nationally over five years to treat and rehabilitate substance abusing parents who have children in the welfare system. Local districts plan to add funding. Some child advocates believe that the indulgent acts of addicts nullify their right to raise children. Even when addicts manage to get clean, only one-third are able to do so without a relapse, according to treatment experts.
Other child welfare advocates say the best solution is having children raised by their parents-- despite years of drug addiction--if they are drug-free and caring. That reinforces children's sense of being loved and diminishes their fears of abandonment.
A recently enacted federal law, in fact, requires officials to find permanent homes for any child who has been in foster care for fifteen of the previous twenty-two months--a response to dysfunctional child welfare systems and long waits for addicted parents to reform. As a result, there were 330 adoptions in the District in fiscal 2000, a record. Of the 2,796 city children now in foster care, 1,072 are on track for adoption. THREE OF THEM ARE IYARN BRICE'S CHILDREN.
Public-Private Partnerships
Rather than "reorganization" or total privatization, perhaps the solution to government incompetency in the Foster Care industry is to offer incentives for public-private partnership roles to corporations as well as small businesses in the management of temporary or long term care of children for whom kinship care cannot be found.
* "Model" programs for both care and education of children who cannot be in the custody of their parents.
Homebuilders is still a successful, community-based
family preservation program headquartered in Washington state and designed
to assist families at risk of losing their children to foster care.
By helping families in trouble, the program seeks to avoid removing children
from the home. Washington estimated it saved $17-million dollars
in its first few years since the program began in l974. The comparisons:
-Homebuilders, 5 weeks $2,600
-Foster care, 9 months $3,607
-Group Care, 12 months $19,465
-Correction all institutions, 3 months $14,437
-Acute Psychiatric Hospital, just 1 month $10,000
-Residential Treatment, 12 months $67,525
(Source: National Governor's Association, chart in Family Values newsletter.)
These figures do not include all of the long-term savings from keeping children out of the "born loser system."
There have been and still are tens of thousands of successful voluntary projects initiated by one person, like "The Wandering Monk" who fed poor children in special soup kitchens separated from addicts and derelicts, in New Haven, Connecticut.
"STARSS" ("Sharing, Talking And Relationships for Students Success ") was begun in the 1992-3 school year in Oceanside Unified School District, San Diego County, California, for kids who already have severe acting out problems as well as for kids who just need to know they are okay and need more self-confidence.
"PIP"(Primary Intervention Program) an early detection and prevention program, is the basis for STARSS. With completion of the second year of the three year grant program which was funded through California's "Early Mental Health Initiative," teachers, parents, school administrators and even the 900 children involved pronounced it a success. It provided children with one-on-one time and attention in a special activity room with a paraprofessional called a "special friend" for non- directed play. The child could take the lead, make choices and have their choices respected-- something children often do not have a chance to do. Free parent education was also a key element of the voluntary program which addressed problems in the home to strengthen relationships between parents and school.
Teen Parent Services is offered to 350 young mothers by BBF Family Services, also known as Building Brighter Futures, a 37-year old non-profit organization. In order to continue receiving public assistance, the young mothers must stay in the program until they obtain their high school diploma or GED. They get counseling and help with transportation, child care and discuss issues such as parenting skills, birth control, employment, with volunteers according to their expertise. The focus on the program is to help the young women become self-sufficient.
The New York Times, July 15, 1990, Section 12, "Teenagers Need Effective Parents To Win Drug Battle," by Brien O'Callahan:
... We must reverse our spending priorities so that 80% of our 'drug war' monies is taken away from interdiction, enforcement and rehabilitation and put into parent education and assistance. Parental assistance programs like Homebuilders or family preservation and parent-school collaboration programs must be given more funds. The focus must be on talking to parents, not just children. Better parents are a better weapon in the "war against drugs."Senator Patrick Moynihan, when arguing against a $1-billion dollar appropriation for family preservation and support, said 'The ability of social workers to intervene with the goal of family preservation has never been proven."
"Away School" is described in "Boot Camp For Moms," Los Angeles Times (May 27, 1993, E-1), brainchild of Asenath Andrews, Principal of Catherine Ferguson Academy, which teaches students living skills needed to make it on their own. They camped in Yellowstone National Park and helped build a day care center in Washington, DC, funded with both public school money and a grant from the state of Michigan.
Co-parenting is an alternative to permanently removing a child from parents. One or both biological parents may share custody of their child with a relative or court appointed guardian. The benefit to the child and his parents is an extended "family" to share the responsibility and one or two homes with which the child is familiar rather than frequent moves f rom one foster home to another and no real family.
The Women's Alternative Center (WAC)," an alternative to foster care, was created to prevent the need to separate mothers and children. In 1887, the Milford Industrial Home, also known as the Nebraska Maternity Home, was a reformatory and charitable institution for unwed mothers who had financial problems and could not arrange their own care. Each of the "inmates" was taught homemaking and nursing skills and obtained a high school diploma. Those who could go on to earn a living and pay the monthly upkeep for themselves and their children were permitted to stay. Those who did not pay within 6 months had to give up their babies for adoption, which need not be the price to pay today. An innovative program, sponsored by Women's Alternatives Inc. in Delaware County, Pennsylvania, today it serves only female heads of households and their children by providing educational and clinical services to women in a crisis situation through 3 to 6 month comprehensive residential and non-residential programs for mothers and children with problems. By providing temporary housing, a supportive environment, relevant skills and necessary training for female heads of household, WAC enabled families to become financially and emotionally independent and effectively manage and direct themselves and their children within their communities and the mainstream of American society. WAC was initially headquartered in a 3-story home in rural Chester Heights, offering families a contrast and easy access to urban areas. WAC was funded as a demonstration project on a grant from the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) and its operation was maintained through corporate, foundation and community support. The Center's residential families lived in a safe and supportive environment. WAC also helped prevent child abuse and neglect and made the community more aware of the needs of the female headed household.
Bridge of Hope, which the media called "the most innovative program for homeless mothers and children in the nation," is similar to WAC but extends post-program services including mentoring. Headquartered in Coatesville, Pennsylvania, the Michigan program was launched with 1,000 homeless applicants.
Genesis House is described in "Life Off The Streets," TIME (November 16, 1998, p. 8), by Wendy Cole:
At Genesis House, society's 'throwaway women' get a fresh chance... Opened in 1983 (on Chicago's South Side) by a British-born feminist theologian named Edwina Gately, Genesis House is just one of a handful of U.S. recovery centers for prostitutes (many of whom are raising children). As social services and law enforcement agencies have learned about its success rate and unusual approach in dealing with seemingly intractable clients, it has become a model for similar programs from Florida to Thailand. Nonetheless ... Genesis House is in financial jeopardy from the loss of a half million dollars in federal funds and had to find volunteers to replace about half of its 25 paid staff members. About 70% of enrollees complete the program and 80% of the graduates don't relapse.What about children whose parents cannot parent them, even with help? There are alternatives to traditional foster care that can be implemented for these children also.
SOS Villages works. In "SOS Tries To Save Unadoptables," The Press-Enterprise (10-11-92, C- 6), Maya Bell of the Orlando Sentinel reported:
These are women who are committed to giving new lives to children with dim futures, children who have drifted from foster home to foster home, children torn from their brothers and sisters. They will live in the first 'SOS Children's Village' in the United States, a one block neighborhood in northwest Broward County, Florida, where the recipients are about to embark on an important experiment to treat one of society's greatest ills. They will participate in a program that has built homes and provided professional full-time mothers for 25,000 'unadoptable' children in 26 countries around the world. They have been succeeding in salvaging some of America's neediest kids. Launched 43 years ago in Austria to care for the orphans of WWII, SOS Village came to Florida at the urging of Broward Circuit Court Judge Estella Moriarity. When Moriarity read the obituary of SOS Founder Hermann Gmeiner, a Nobel Prize nominee, 6 years ago, she knew kids who would benefit from his vision. She had seen plenty of them in her courtroom.Why aren't SOS kids being adopted? According to David Hughes, Director of the organization's North American headquarters, they are subjected to too many changes, reinforcing their feelings of rejection and depleting what little self esteem life had left them. Single women proved more suitable than couples who are difficult to find and keep for the long term. Perhaps it's because these single moms do not have the pressures of marriage to contend with and can be more centered on the child. SOS retains custody of children in its care as a form of quality control. The organization can easily get rid of the rare mother who does not work out.Although highly regarded, the SOS Villages had not come to the United States without questions from Child Welfare experts for one reason: By its design, SOS Villages do not provide traditional homes. Fathers are not welcome. In fact, SOS Moms who marry are asked to leave. Neither does SOS allow the very thing driving Child Welfare experts dealing with society's "throwaway kids": adoption. SOS Mothers are expected to be forever the psychological and spiritual parent for their care, but not the legal one.
Although Al Polito, Director of Broward County's SOS program says it will not accept children with severe emotional behavioral problems, the Moms know the road will not be an easy one. Few foster children are without problems, especially those who fit the SOS criteria of "having little chance of being adopted." The professional Moms in the Broward program were paid $18,000 per year in 1991 but their only job has been in their homes and their only commitment their children. They were given no allowance to run their households, to feed their kids, to buy them clothes, to pay their power bills. They had only the support of Polito, the Village administrator/father figure, three "aunts" who live in a nearby house and a "network of experts."
Father Flanagan's Boys Town, and its affiliate, Girls Town USA, example, historically, was billed by the state for only for the costs of wards who needed special education. But in 1991, Boys Town demanded additional payments for the costs of general education. In September, 1998, the Nebraska State Supreme Court ruled that Nebraska taxpayers must shoulder the costs of educating young wards of the state who are placed at Boys Town and similar institutions. State officials said the decision is likely to cost taxpayers $2 million annually, plus $11.5 million in back payments, to Father Flanagan's Boys Town and other institutions that educate wards of the state.
Cal Farley's Boys Ranch in Texas, Stephen Girard College and Milton Hershey School, both in Pennsylvania, are examples of other model residential care and education programs.
Open Arms, co-sponsored by a Savannah, Georgia hospital and Lutheran Ministries, f ills the gap left by parents without grandparent support, HMO'S, Social Services and busy nurses who don't have the time to simply cuddle and nurture an infant. "Open Arms" takes care of "border babies"--infants who are born seriously premature or who have been abused or abandoned or who have parents who cannot care for them. The infants stay in a three-bedroom bungalow operated by Open Arms until the courts place them in foster care, put them up for adoption, or return them to their parents who might otherwise permanently lose their babies from temporary situations. Communities need to promote hospital volunteerism through churches, libraries, retired citizens groups, local organizations.
What You Can Do
Where kids are in need of foster care, citizens, community civic groups, churches, synagogues, and the corporate community need to be actively involved in foster kids' transition into adulthood and provide support for their educational and career goals. Acquiring sites for the new foster home model includes converting abandoned military bases, hotels and other abandoned structures to permit use as residential educational-vocational schools. Almost every city has an abandoned building that might be in an area suitable for a day academy for training kids in the skills in demand in the area--a school, a church, or a "big box" (former K-Mart, Target, Montgomery Ward stores, etc.) Might require little conversion. Public-private joint-efforts can make dreams a reality. Community-based public-private partnerships could both fund and benefit from the resulting "employables."
By expanding such alternatives to foster care, the "need for adoption," can be greatly reduced and eventually eliminated. The next chapter offers alternatives to adoption and explains why adoption must be phased out rather than reformed.
Before I built a wall I'd ask to know
What I was walling in or walling out,
And to whom I was like to give offense.
Something there is that doesn't love a wall,
That wants to tear it down."
-Robert Frost, "The Mending Wall"
Alternatives to Adoption
True alternatives to the current system of adoption would include support for families in danger of losing their children for economic reasons, individualized custody (not ownership), fostering, child guardianship, co-parenting, an open system under uniform fair laws guaranteeing uniform rights, true and uniform birth records, joint public-private partnerships for family preservation and program oversight, and removing financial incentives for separating children from their families...
|
Program Helps Pregnant Teens But these days, the 16-year-old has little time for daydreaming -- her days begin at 6 a.m. with a warm bottle for her 10-month-old son, a diaper change and a quick dressing before she heads off to school. Instead of hanging out, Casillas spends every second of her free time cramming in homework, then she's putting her son down for a nap before heading off to work. While a federal report released in June reveals U.S. teen birth rates declined for the 10th straight year in 2001, birth rates among teens in California remain higher than the national average. In particular, officials are concerned by an alarmingly high number of Hispanic teens like Casillas who are having babies in lieu of finishing high school and pursuing a career. "It's a culture thing," said Yadira Kashak, a teacher with the Cal-Safe Program, which helps students in the eastern Coachella Valley finish their education during and after their pregnancies. Kashak said more than 60 percent of the students enrolled in Cal-Safe this year were Hispanic, and she attributes the high birth rates to religious and cultural differences of many of the girls. "In the Hispanic culture, abortion is not something that's readily available, and the girls see it as a rite of passage to have a child," Kashak said. "It's as if their status in their family is elevated once they've started a family of their own." In the federal report, the teen birth rate nationwide has fallen to 45.9 percent, dropping almost 26 percent since 1990. Although teen birth rates for girls age 15-19 in Riverside County have fallen 27 percent since 1990, the decline has been much smaller for Hispanics and blacks than for whites. Statistics show birth rates have declined 59 percent for white teen moms from 1990-99, 14 percent for Hispanics and 32 percent for black teens. The high numbers of teen births have prompted officials to turn their focus to teaching sex and family education to a whole new audience -- mainly young girls' male partners and their families. |
Kashak said Cal-Safe has started enrolling teen fathers in the program in
an effort to teach better parenting skills, while also encouraging them to
finish their education. They also reach out to the girls' families through
workshops at area schools and home visits.
Kashak said they try to teach parents -- many who come from several generations of women who started having babies early -- that an education can be more effective in escaping poverty. "A lot of the parents have come from backgrounds where, if you're poor, you have children," Kashak said. "We want to educate them that just because you can't pay for tennis lessons doesn't mean your child starts having sex at 14." In Coachella Valley Unified, school officials have even started offering students programs that teach them about some of the alternatives to having children at a young age. Program Coordinator Lynn Lightcap said in addition to aggressive sex education, self-esteem and HIV/AIDS training, the district has started taking students on field trips to universities, museums and other places where they can learn about education and careers. "A lot of students feel like they don't have choices," Lightcap said. "We're not just about preventing teen pregnancy, we want to show them that they have different opportunities that warrant putting off starting a family." Jennifer Larson, 17, learned early the drawbacks of having babies as a teen-ager. Larson got pregnant when she was 15 and was forced to miss an entire semester of school because of illness. But despite having to care for her child and work a full-time job, Larson eventually enrolled at Mt. San Jacinto Continuation School in Cathedral City and went on to graduate this year as the school's valedictorian. "A lot of teens feel like they need to have a baby to fill a void -- to love the baby in a way that they weren't loved -- but that's a lack of real education," Larson said. "I haven't regretted it because I had a lot of support from my family. It's a lot harder for other girls." Like Larson, Casillas is looking forward to finishing school through Cal-Safe, and she still hopes to attend college to become a veterinarian. But Casillas admits she now wishes she had waited to have children. And unlike many teen girls, she realizes how fortunate she is that her boyfriend and family have stood behind her. "Girls need to know the truth -- that having a baby doesn't give you some kind of perfect life," Casillas said. "If you're responsible enough to have sex, you have to be responsible enough to know the consequences." Jeff Donaldson is a writer for The Desert Sun. He can be reached at 778-4652 or by e-mail at jeff.donaldson@thedesertsun.com |
An-ti-adop-tion (an-ti-adop-shun) (against adoption) n. 1. the normality of the intact, assisted or extended biological family; adj. to refuse to choose and bring into certain relationship; specifically, to refuse to permit a non-related person or persons to take into the non-related person's or persons' family by legal or illegal process and raise s that person's or persons' own child. 2. to reject and not use (ideas, policies or practices of adoption) as one's own; 3. to not choose adoption, in favor of truer expressions of custody which do not commodify children and which d not remove a child's equal protection rights for life in exchange for a home and care. (Based on Meriam-Webster Dictionary, 2nd College Edition, definition of "adoption," and as used by anti-adoption organizations.)
Just when the general public was getting used to pro- and anti- sealed records rhetoric, anti- adoption dialogue began to proliferate, particularly on Internet. One anti-adoption web-site is this author's "amfor.net" web- site which was first publicized by ABC-TV affiliate, KESQ, Channel 3, Palm Springs, on 2-14-02.
The Petition to Abolish Adoption, which is on the home page, is joint sponsored by Adoptees and "Birth" Parents for Open Records (ABORN); Adoption: Legalized Lies (ALL); Americans For Open Records (AmFOR); Musser Foundation; Origins-USA-A Legislative Inquiry; Orphan Voyage aka Jean Paton (the "mother" of the Anti-Adoption Movement). Their web-sites are listed in the "Resources" section at the back of this book. The petition is addressed "To the American People; The President of the United States; The United States Congress; American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU); Amnesty International; Hague Intercountry Adoption Conference; United Nations "Rights of the Child" Convention; and Whom It Concerns. It outlines the negatives of the American system of adoption, with viewable comments by those who have been injured by adoption and so have added their names in support from all over the nation, as well as from several other countries, most notably Canada and Australia.
Legislation: Repeal or Amend?
As with voters who voted in Oregon's new law for adult adoptee access to their original birth certificates ("Measure 58") was voted in by a non-adopted majority, anti-adoption proponents are not only individuals directly affected by adoption. They are also those who simply understand and support the civil liberties and human rights issues. They understand that amending bad law still leaves bad law. Perhaps no law has undergone so many amendments as adoption law.
Jess DelBalzo (Adoption: Legalized Lies) is neither an adoptee nor parent. She is a college student outraged by the civil rights violations inherent in the American way of adoption. That sentiment is echoed by the anonymous leader of ABORN whose screen name is "JeepDrivingGenius." She is not, herself, adoption affected. Those who criticize her preference for anonymity are quickly squelched by Jeep's reminder that neither are adoptees' true identities known--even to themselves.
Chosen Children has examined not only the "sealed records" component to adoption but also adoption itself. In Theory of War, the true story is told of Jonathan Carrick, an American White slave, Carrick was purchased for $15 in 1865 at age 6, to be "bound out" until age 21. Adoptees express their pain of being denied their birth right in identical terms as Jonathan Carrick: "There's more than just the fact of slavery (adoption)--My family tree stops short of this Deed of Purchase (Adoption Decree)."
American adoption as a form of custody relies on contract law in much the same way that property is contracted for. The property--the adoptee--is not a party to the adoption contract. Neither is the adoptee's parents--They merely agree to "relinquish" parental rights and custody. The main difference is that the consumer has more rights when purchasing a used car than when adopting a human being. Legislation usually seeks to restrict or remove rights. When legislation seeks to "restore" rights (by amending instead of repealing adoption law), the result is still the creation of a class distinction with special, or different, or limited rights.
On November 3, 1998, thanks to adoptee Helen Hill's generosity in personal funding of $100,000, Oregon's "Measure 58," passed with 58% of the electorate n favor adult adoptees' right to their true birth certificates. It was the first time the issue was on any state ballot. Perhaps more than any other single reform in recent years, "Measure 58," was heralded by its supporters as signaling the phasing out of America's closed records system--but not adoption itself. Adult access to one's birth certificate is not a solution to the medical and social amnesia still imposed on adoptees by statute for 18 or 21 years in Oregon, Kansas, Alaska, and Tennessee, the so-called "open records" states. Neither has any state addressed the broader adoption issues swept under the seal.
Nothing awful has happened in Scotland, "open" since 1935, nor in England, open since 1976, nor in "open" societies such as Australia, New Zealand, Norway, Finland, Israel, Mexico.
When put to the vote, polls have always been in favor of the adoptee regaining his "right to know." In 1991, Cecile Comeau, then Executive Director of "Mouvement Retrouvailles" (Canada's equivalent to "The Open Records Movement" in the U.S.), conducted a televised poll in Quebec province which asked viewers: "Should adoptees have the right to origins?" The switchboard "blew out" when 10,000 viewers attempted to call in simultaneously; before the "blow out," 2,600 were "For," and only 52 "Against."
The August 1985 issue of Playgirl magazine included a Reader's Poll which asked "Should adopted children have the right to seek out their natural parents?" (Note that "adoptees" and "children" were considered synonymous.) The results were published in Playgirl's November 1985 issue: Of 641,016 readers participating, 82% said "Yes, they have the right" and only 18% said "No, they do not."
One wonders if the response would have been the same had the question been "Should adopted children be emancipated from their adoptive status at legal age?"
Fifteen years later, Parenting magazine (November
2000, p. 30) published the results of their 3- part August poll of its
readers:
1. Should adoptees be able to access their own birth records?
77%--Yes, in all cases
21%--Yes, except when the "birth" mother has requested otherwise
2%--No
2. Should the release of information be restricted to medical
records and not include the
identity of the "birth" parents?
No--70%
Yes--30%
3. Should "birth" mothers be informed when their children
access their birth records?
Yes--78%
No--22%
ABORN has collected tens of thousands
of signatures on its petition to open records nationwide at http://ABORN.org.
A 1986 study by Harriet Ganson and Judith Cook, presented
to the American Sociological Association's 81st meeting, cited "94%
of adoptees who wrote to public officials favored model state adoption
legislation allowing open records; only 6% opposed it."
Right to Personhood
Until AmFOR's petition captioned "Abolish Adoption,"
no poll had ever questioned whether the practice of adoption be abolished.
The issue of "personhood," through knowledge of one's identity, origins
and biological connectedness, is the primary issue for most adoption reform
activists. Should the practice of adoption be abolished? Children's
rights advocates argue for the right of a child to a safe, permanent home.
Why strip the child of his personhood in the process? Homeless children
have immediate needs and intervention may be necessary. But does
a child have a "right to be adopted" as some child rights advocates claim?
Or does the child have a right not to give up his personhood through adoption
in exchange for care? In Chapter 3 of this book, 23 Articles of the
Declaration of Human Rights are provided and how each is violated by the
practice of adoption.
California is one of few states which gives
"priority in placement" of children to existing family members, particularly
the grandparents. Yet baby brokers and courts in every state, including
California, have more often opted to "send a message" that the child is
somehow "better off" by filling the needs of infertile or childless strangers
wishing to adopt.
Just as there are better alternatives to the present Foster
Care system, there are better alternatives to the "quick fix" of secret
adoption for temporary problems of young, poverty stricken and even substance
abusing parents. Parents do not "own" their child for life; neither
should adopters be able to bind their children to contracts for life.
Jean Paton, an adoptee and former social worker, conducted
the first studies on adoptive families and negative affects of adoption
secrecy, in 1953. Paton has, over the years, suggested an alternative
to present-day adoption--which she refers to as colonialism--may be to
"adopt a family":
Merge the two families for the good of the child. Let the child have contact with both families with responsibilities shared. Instead of legal conflict, which makes very lucrative profits for lawyers, let there be a core of people who now how to encourage reconciliation in these situations. Let the child know his name from the outset and that he is loved and cared for by everyone involved. For this to succeed, we must learn adoption all over again and give it a new name. It is ridiculous for a society to spend thousands of dollars over the custody of one child who needs less conflict rather than more. In the same way that we now advocate getting the government off our backs, let us also get the lawyers out of adoption. Instead, let us find wise reconcilers and put them to work. We would save money, save souls of children and give peace to those who bring them into the world.All of us are on the planet as result of the sex act. Where pregnancy was simply the result of unprotected sex, there exists several alternatives for prevention -- abstinence, birth control, the "morning after" pill, temporary or permanent surgical sterilization; women in, for instance, overpopulated third world countries have been given a "sterilization pill" that works, though it is regarded by some as a form of genocide. Abortion is often misused as a form of birth control.
Sex is not the only cause of pregnancy. A girl or woman may want to have a child for a variety of reasons, including to have someone to love and to be loved in turn. So the politicized issue of teen pregnancy is not properly addressed by simply offering birth control, abortion or adoption, when what is needed is a family for the mother as well as for the child.
Falsification and sealing of birth records as an "alternative" sends the wrong message that while it's not okay to abandon one's child on a doorstep, it is okay to abandon one's child to the adoption industry. How is it that a mother can be "unfit" or "incompetent" to raise her own child yet competent enough to sign an irrevocable agreement to give away her child to an unknown fate to strangers while desperate and pressured by a crisis situation. In contract law, incompetence, and coercion or duress voids the contract.
Pro-closed adoption supporters cite the need for adoption "to prevent dumpster babies." In 2001 "baby dumping" became legal in Texas and Florida "in safe places," theoretically giving the mother a brief time period to reclaim the baby she so unceremoniously dumped. Just how the mother will be able to prove which anonymously dumped baby is hers and how the courts will do a turnabout and decide that it's "in child's best interests" to be returned to the mother who abandoned him, remains to be seen. Such laws will not save babies because they do not help mothers to keep their babies. Instead, they encourage abandonment to the adoption industry.
Like death, adoption is a drastic "final solution"--one that the child must live with permanently--a solution that preclude all other possibilities. In "Together Again: Mom, 17, Gets Back Infant She Abandoned on Church Steps," The Examiner (8-8-89, p. 13) Nina Breem, a teenager, did not know she was pregnant until delivery in her parents' bathtub. Panicked, she hid the baby from her parents at a local hospital until the hospital discharged the infant and she then left the baby on a church doorstep. She got her baby back, perhaps due to compassion of the court in England where this incident occurred.
In similar recent cases in the United States, teenagers were unaware they were pregnant or just too frightened to tell their parents, so abandoned their babies. The result has usually been convictions of the young parents for child abuse with court ordered placement of a surviving infant for secret adoption by strangers--a legal abandonment.
In "Woman Pleads Guilty To Baby's Prom Death," The Desert Sun (8-21-98, A-5) reported:
Freehold, New Jersey: In an emotionless and childlike voice, a young woman described how she gave birth in a bathroom at her senior prom last year, fished the baby out of the toilet bowl, wrapped him in plastic bags and dumped him in the trash. Twenty year old Melissa Drexler pleaded guilty to aggravated manslaughter in the baby's death, sparing herself a murder trial and a possible life sentence.Drexler, dubbed the "Prom Mom" by media, contended she did not know she was pregnant; she said that the baby was stillborn. The American system prefers to punish the parents with imprisonment, instead of assisting them.
What about drug addicted mothers? There are alternatives to permanently separating the drug addicted mother from her child through imprisonment and adoption. In "ABC Club Helps Mothers- To-Be Fight Addiction," The Desert Sun, Palm Springs (9-10-90). Kelley Russell reports:
The infant born addicted to the drugs Rebecca abused during her pregnancy was taken from her mother after birth . Losing her baby prompted the 24-year old to quit her amphetamine habit and stay in a recovery home. Ten months later, she got her baby back. The 27 year old ABC Club is one of only two recovery homes in Riverside County to also offer a program for pregnant addicts. The Club plans to add nurseries so the women can also stay a short period after their deliveries, to help handle the extra stress of becoming a new Mom and getting clean.As for encouraging fathers to take responsibility, The Los Angeles County District Attorney's computerized, punitive child support collection program proved a catastrophe. Instead of enforcing court ordered child support from truly "deadbeat dads," the computer made many mistakes--billing men by the same name who did not owe child support, nor even had children, putting liens on their property, suspending driver licenses of men without notice so that they lost their jobs and could not make payments even if they wanted to. But also, the multi-million dollar computer system failed to collect support payments sufficient to justify cost of the program. President Bush's 2001 Federal Budget Proposals included expenditures for "booting" cars owned by persons owing child support. Restricting their transportation will not enhance their ability to find a job and be responsible parents.
On November 11, 1998, the Los Angeles Times reported that the Los Angeles County Board of Supervisors had voted to "test" privatizing the child support system.
A program for fathers was featured in the Los Angeles Times on (6-30-93, E-6). Manpower Demonstration Research Corporation (MDRC) demonstration programs in 9 states, called "Parents' Fair Share," were helping non-custodial fathers to get jobs and to participate in their children's upbringing. The program cost $2,000 per person served, mostly for worker training. A man cannot support his family without skills for a job of value that will provide adequate income. Being a participant in his child's upbringing is a more powerful motivator than any DA's threat for non- support.
Abolishing Adoption
Closed adoption, the practice of granting
property interest in children via coerced relinquishment, falsified birth
certificates, sealed records and lifelong secrecy, is already beginning
to be phased out by independent adoption practice in which the parents
choose adopters and participate in making an adoption plan. Called
"open adoption," it has been a successful demonstration program disproving
the need for closed adoption in voluntary relinquishments. However,
in the cities and counties in some states that permit open adoption (such
as Traverse City, Michigan and San Bernadino County, California), any agreements
made between the involved parties--such as about post-adoption visitation
by parents--have not been enforceable by law. California, in 2001,
is the first state to enact legislation recognizing such agreements.
But, as in closed adoptions, the child's original birth certificate
is still sealed and a falsified version issued according to statute, a
slap in the face to the parties striving for truth in custody arrangements.
Child Guardianship
In one version of "subsidized guardianship," the court
appoints co-guardians to act on behalf of a child when the parents cannot
do so. In the Vera Institute on Justice Report on Guardianship, author
Maerl Schwartz envisions a situation where co-guardians work as family
mentors and partners during times of crisis. The co-guardians may
be family friends or relatives. The co-guardian is like a caseworker
in a family preservation project but with access to the family that no
outsider can hope to achieve within time limits imposed on those efforts.
Schwartz' study names 10 states that, as of 1995, operated subsidized guardianship
programs at some level. Feedback from the states indicated varying
degrees of success and challenge.
Three years into the Massachusetts and New York "Guardianship
Demonstration Project," researchers reported that the majority of children
were thriving with their guardians. An Illinois program administrator's
efforts to transfer about 2,000 children from kinship care to guardianship
were slowed by a lack of alternative funding to cover the cost of federal
medical insurance. Like other child welfare plans, subsidized guardianship
must be monitored. It is not the panacea for every situation but
it is an option that could help achieve permanence for kids without permanently
severing their kinship ties and basic human rights as adoption does.
(Source: New York City Comptroller, Office of Policy Management,
A Model For Subsidized Guardianship, by Matthew Grosser, Diane Pausell
and Regina Poreda, NY May 1995; Merrill Schwartz, "Re-inventing Guardianship:
Subsidized Guardianship, Co-Guardians and Child Welfare, Institute of Justice
Inc., June 1993).
Guardianship and Co-guardianship are truer expressions
of custody for gay and lesbian parenting. Presently one of the gay
or lesbian partners adopts the child of his/her partner (the child being
conceived by donor insemination in the case of lesbian co-parents, or by
a surrogate in the case of gay co-parents. The courts struggle with
the realities of the child's situation versus the desires of the adults.
Again, the child must adjust to a legal fiction, particularly if adopted
by one of the co-parents. Why place the burden of "make believe"
on a child? Why not raise the child honestly, as his/her guardians,
or parent plus guardian if that is the case, rather than as "two mothers"
or "two fathers" plus a "birth" mother? It is not only the legal
lies of adoption, anonymous donor-assisted insemination and the surrogate
process that must be addressed, but also the false sense of "entitlement"
to someone else's child as part of their "American dream"that bad law encourages.
In Doe v. Sundquist, 1997 FED App. 0051 P, the US Court of
Appeals for the Sixth Circuit found that information concerning a birth
is not protected from disclosure by the Federal Constitution, and:
.... privacy does not encompass a general right to non-disclosure
of private information. A parent's privacy, or anyone's, can be adequately
protected by tort law, including restraining orders. Further, the
court opined that a birth is simultaneously an intimate occasion
and a public event--the government has long kept records of when, where,
and by whom babies are born. Such records have myriad purposes, such
as furthering the interest of children in knowing the circumstances of
their birth.
The original birth certificate is not sealed upon the
mother's relinquishment, only upon final decree of adoption, thus
negating the argument that sealing protects the mother's identity.
As previously detailed, judges, attorneys and agencies
callously still say "no" to adult adoptees needing to open their adoption
files, even to save their lives, despite publicized need of some adoptees
for a lifesaving bone marrow transplant from a biological relative. Aforementioned
examples (Chapter 3) are: Melinda Kerner (CA, 2001), Tami Brundage
(2001), Patricia Martin (2000), Melinda Kerner (CA, 2001); Susan
Martin (MA, 2000); Patricia Coleman (NY, 1999), Michelle Robertson
(NY, 1998); Leonard Hargrove Jobron (LA, 1998); Kim Sun Duk (MN,
1996), James Grant George (MO, 1981). The only way to obtain accurate
medical information is directly from the parents whose identities are kept
secret. Exactly what constitutes "good cause" as required by statute
to open a sealed adoption file and how closed adoption serves child's best
interests remains a mystery, since discretionary decisons as to "good cause"
and "child's best interests" will differ from judge to judge..
Uniform Fair Laws
"Government protected child stealing" is a
term used when a child is stolen to sell for adoption and the abduction
and sale was made easier because of statutory secrecy over adoptions, the
"legal" falsification of an adoptee's birth records, the sealing of the
original, true birth record, and the ease at which non-uniform birth certificates
can be forged and passed off as "originals." Birth certificates
issued from state to state, even from county to county-- in addition to
birth certificates issued by hospitals, physicians and clergy are
not uniform, making out of state verification difficult.
Some suggested reforms include:
1. Require the child's presence during custody proceedings;
2. Require uniform birth certificates nationwide;
3. invalidate relinquishments signed during pregnancy
and within 6 months after birth
or where parents were not
notified in time to prepare a defense or were not represented
by counsel at termination hearings with witnesses cross-examined (See U.S.
Supreme Court, Armstrong v.
Manzo, In re Gault, and others from Sheppard's);
4. Require the court to determine authenticity of
original birth documents
by contacting the issuing state's
or country's vital records agency;
5. Make inability to confirm original birth
documents prima facie proof of kidnapping
and take child into protective
custody on the spot pending criminal investigation by law
enforcement (not Social Services);
6. Make all past and present adoption records public
records for inspection by anyone;
7. Require a "show cause" to seal a vital record.
A child's ignorance is a strong ally of adult society and some adults have learned to rely heavily on it for so long, they simply cannot recognize a child's--or even an adult adoptee's--right to truth.
The truth is that most adoptees were not taken from parents who were unfit, just impoverished.
The book, Wrongful Adoption-Law,
Policy and Practice, by Madelyn Freundlich (Executive Director
of The Evan B. Donaldson Institute), and Lisa Peterson (Legal Consultant
to Spence- Chapin Services to Families and Children, an adoption agency),
was published by Child Welfare League of America (CWLA) as an "official"
account--an historical, social and legal monograph. Spence-Chapin
is one of the oldest pro-adoption propagandists. In the Overview
to Wrongful Adoption, Freundlich and Peterson tell us:
During the first half of the twentieth century,
the majority of adoption agencies had full disclosure policies that supported
providing adopters with all the facts in a child's case record.
Actually, records were open until post-WWII prosperity
enabled an increased demand for adoptable newborns by infertile couples.
Before that, nothing prevented exchange of information. But
a child born of an unwed pregnancy was a kept a family secret. It
was not known, in the first half of this century, that there were more
than 4500 genetically transmittable diseases to be concerned about.
Adult adoptees of that era find little or no medical information in their
agency or court files.
States began retroactive sealing of adoption court records
in the 1940's and CWLA social worker pamphlets advised not disclosing
negative pre-adoption history--medical or otherwise--to the prospective
adopters. The Child Welfare League's concern in their 1932 pamphlet
was for any known family mental defects, from the new theory of "eugenics"
or "bad seed" which could render the child "unadoptable. From the
1930's through the 1960's, the mother's unwed status alone was the
"bad seed' sufficient to retroactively close records to all parties, even
to those for whom the same records had been previously open. The
1940's journalists Leontyne Young and Pearl Buck, both adopters, helped
to propagandize the "bad seed" stigma of illegitimacy.
Fruendlich and Peterson claim that some things "have changed."
What they neglect to mention is how the changes were brought about.
In 1988, Americans For Open Records (AmFOR), and Nancy L. Fisher, MD, MPH,
Society of Human Genetics, Seattle, Washington, began polling the states
and determined that adoptees' background information, including medical,
was not routinely collected. No state had mandatory collection laws,
policies or practices. Mandatory collection of such information as
well as mandatory disclosure of adoptees backgrounds, was not made law
in the until the 1990's in most states, as result of adoptee-parent efforts
such as AmFOR's lobby. Internet- assisted adoptee-parent searches
and the resulting televised reunions brought issues to the general public
in the 1980's and 1990's.
In 1990, Carangelo/Schafrick v. O'Neill/State
of CT, (summarized in Part I, Chapter 3) concerned this author's claim
of "wrongful adoption" and the agency's and court's refusal
to transmit medical information, post-adoption, from mother to adoptee
or adopters. The case also alleged several civil rights violations by the
Defendants, particularly The Children's Center, (a private foster care
and adoption agency) and Judge Glenn Knierim, (then CT probate court judge),
who repeatedly refused, in 1986 and 1987, to transmit life-threatening
post-adoption medical information to my son or his adopters. The
"life threatening" aspect was supported by a physician's letter.
Judge Knierim and the attorney for The Children' Center wrote that they
refused because no statute compelled them to do so. Neither was it
agency "policy." Neither would Connecticut legislators pass bills urged
by Yale Law School's Law Clinic Professor Steven Wizner - bills that were
presented for such provision as result of the lawsuit and publicity.
The tort of "wrongful adoption" has been successfully
litigated when suits are initiated by adopters who have collected large
damage awards. Rarely has a parent reached base with suit based on
adoption agency fraudulent misrepresentation or refusal to disclose medical
information; the Supreme Court has repeatedly refused certiorari
to hear such issues by adoptees and parents. Access to information
could save the adoptee's life has been of no concern to agencies and courts.
Typically, when medical disclosure is made, it is excerpted
and summarized, not photocopied, due to agency paranoia that some bit of
"identifying" information may be accidently leaked in the process.
The recipients of medical summaries which have been "sanitized" at social
worker discretion and interpretation, have no guarantee that these non-medical
personnel understood the full implications of medical terms and opinions.
At best, selective disclosure "at agency or attorney discretion,"
rather than concern for "full disclosure in child's best interests," is
still the norm throughout the United States. Social work theory and
policies have fluctuated according to market demand for "adoptable children
?"
The Introduction to Freundlich and Peterson's Wrongful
Adoption alleges that "in response to litigation initiated by adoptive
families, their actions overall have shown little evidence of it,
despite an increase in litigious adopters, commensurate with an increase
in fraudulent domestic, foreign and Internet-assisted adoptions. Freundlich
and Peterson ask "Should agencies automatically communicate any information
provided to them after the adoption has been finalized?" Shouldn't the
question be "Why aren't agencies automatically communicating medical updates
and conforming to standardized policies?" Perhaps the answer is that there
is no profit in burdening an already overburdened system with such "standards"
when children can adopted from around the globe, with only a cursory physical
exam .
The Clinton Administration's "Adoption 2002" quota
program is designed to "double the rate of adoptions in five years," even
though social workers are already over-burdened by high caseloads.
Fruendlich and Peterson's "recommendations for practice" includes
a provision for written disclaimers stating that "the agency can
disclose only known health and other background information" and that the
child may have "undiagnosed" conditions and "the agency cannot, therefore,
guarantee present or future health or development of any child." Wouldn't
the adopter do better buying a used car?
The only real solution to prevent "wrongful adoption" misrepresentations
in the present closed adoption system is not more band-aid legislative
amendments or Acts that seek to partially restore some rights in some cases.
The only real solution is to restore full human rights by to discontinuing
the practice of commodifying children - by abolishing adoption.
* Addresses, phone numbers, website URLS and e-mail addresses for "model programs"
mentioned in Chapter 8 as "Alternatives to Foster Care" (and many other programs and helpful nonprofit resources) can be found online and in the "Resources" section of Chosen Children
