Guest Blog by Mirah Riben
On Friday, March 6 I attended “
The Sixth Annual Adoption Policy Conference” at the New York Law School. The conference was sponsored by The Center for Adoption Policy, The Child Advocacy Program at Harvard Law School, and The Justice Action Center.
I am grateful to my connection with PEAR, Adoptive Parents for Adoption Reform, for making Origins-USA aware of this conference and also of the paper
“Red Thread or Slender Reed: Deconstructing Prof. Bartholet's Mythology of International Adoption,” by Johanna Oreskovic of University at Buffalo Law School, SUNY and Trish Maskew, Ethica, Inc., which I highly recommend. (Note that the paper is not really as long as it appears to be because of the magnitude of footnotes on each page. Also note, that although it is focused on international adoption, much of it applies to all private adoption.)
“Under U.S. law, ….Virtually all agency contracts contain broad exculpatory
clauses absolving agencies from liability..[from] any aspect of the adoption
process.”
“[T]he private agency system is structured to maximize profit potential for the
agency, while minimizing its legal exposure and responsibilities to those it
serves.”The paper and the conference are very inter-related. Elizabeth Barthelot, Prof., Harvard Law School, was the glue that held the conference together, introducing all panels. The theme of her paper was the theme of the conference: How can we remove “barriers” to international adoption?
It was a LAW SCHOOL conference and the majority of attendees were attorneys and adoption practitioners there to learn the ropes of filing adoptions under the Hague Convention. There were also panelists from the U.S. Dept. of State and Immigration (USCIS) to help with INS forms and such. One such presenter, William J. Bizransky, Chief of the Adoption Unit of the U.S. Dept. of State, said that countries with dual track domestic and international programs are “problematic.” He said that Russia is “difficult” because of “politics”, public sentiment and swept 15 murdered children under the rug with a passing mention of “some tragedies” which were also part of “difficulties.” Miki Stebbing, adoptive mother, Attorney and LCSW, said that a Hague Registry had recorded 40 complaints and that some are “serious; some children had been “mistreated.”
Other attendees were adoptive and prospective adoptive parents (several of whom re social workers), one internationally adopted person, myself and my friend Janet, both mothers who lost their child to adoption.
The adoption policies they were interested in were those that would reverse the current trend of decreasing international adoption and closing small private adoption agencies – 94 have closed or are considering closing - all of which obviously are taking a toll on their livelihoods. It was a conference about how quickly can we get as many "unparented" (Barthelot’s new replacement for “unwanted”) children as possible out of institutions and the streets and into “permanent families.” Other quaint newspeak included “children looking for families.”
Paolo Barrozzo Visiting Prof from Brazil, spoke of human rights. I asked him over coffee if he believed that children’s rights included mother/child rights and he said he did not. He advocates for the rights of children as separate individuals. The only speaker who believed as we do that the order is: family preservation, extended kinship care, domestic adoption and international as a last resort was Susan LoBosco a Clinical Social Work Supervisor at Maine Adoption Placement Services, where she worked as a “birthmother” counselor and home study evaluator. I await receipt of a copy of her presentation.
By holding separate conferences focusing on domestic and international in alternate years, one presenter after another was able to speak about "the best interest of the child," and human rights of children and sound like child advocates while totally ignoring the half million kids in US foster care, 100,000 plus of whom
could be provided with permanent homes. In fact if ONE in 500 of those seeking to adopt took in one of them, the problem would be solved!
I felt a great deal of denial of reality, hypocrisy and entitlement in many of the presenters’ alleged altruistic concern for child-saving, as they bemoaned countries like Guatemala’s moratorium on international adoption, asking how we can reopen it, especially on the part of the attorneys and adoption practitioners whose livelihood depends upon the continuation of a steady supply of babies imported and exported.
I must also note, however, that I also got a very strong sense of justification and defensiveness in the air from Barthelot and some of the other speakers. It seemed very obvious that they were very much aware of Oreskovic and Maskew’s paper which systematically and methodically attacks the validity of all of Barthelot’s claims.
Barthelot favors minimal regulations to allow for the quick and free flow of children from impoverished parts of the world. Her position of relies on unproven, misleading and false claims of such as: the number of children in “orphanages” (many of whom are not orphans), that adoption by Westerners reduce these numbers, and that such children are not losing anything in the way of culture and merely benefiting.
Oreskovic and Maskew masterfully take Barthelot’s clams to task, point by point, with facts that belie every claim Barthelot makes. While the article is about international adoption, much of what it says about lack of regulations and “market-driven” adoption practices clearly apply to all private adoption:
Whether domestic or international, adopters want the youngest and healthiest, not the children “languishing” in institutional or foster care. Thus impoverished and resourceless mothers both here and abroad are pressured and coerced, or their children are simply stolen or kidnapped and sold to baby brokers and orphanages to be adopted. Such practices are at best ignored, or worse are encouraged and promoted by U.S. government tax incentives used primarily for private domestic and international adoptions while the “languishing” children languish. Even churches that offer all kinds of financial supports for adoptions to “rescue” orphans being newly created to meet a demand.
I took the mic and made sure they all heard from a mother who lost her child to adoption, heard about Origins-USA, and heard why we prefer not to be identified as “birthmothers.” I also addressed my grave concerns about the U.S. being one of a small handful of countries that both imports and exports children for adoption. Oddly, Chuck Johnson of NCFA, complimented me for bringing up this subject which was of concern to him as well. An attendee, whose name I failed to obtain, proudly shared with me over coffee that she arranged adoption of American children to the Netherlands, and that most were interracial children, with an implication that they would not be adopted Americans. Cheryll L. Appell of Canada spoke of the open door policy through which children are passed back and forth between Canada and the U.S., presumably at the request of their natural families or because it is an in-family adoption.
The entire conference was videotaped and the will be available online at some point in time, and of course Origins-USA will let you know! It will be interesting to see whether it will be in its entirety, or if the comments of those of us who disagreed – and in some cases quite vehemently, angrily and forcibly, even confronting Barthelot’s comment that “heritage is over-rated” as racist—will be cut.
This brings me back to the defensiveness I sensed throughout. Barthelot – who admits to “baby selling” objects to the term “child trafficking.” Thomas DeFilipo of the Joint Council for International Adoption, as well as Dr. Jane Aaronson of Worldwide Orphans Foundation, all both made a point of repeating numerous times the figure of 143,000 or 145,000 orphans worldwide…a figure which they know is highly inflated as 88.7% of those labeled “orphans” in fact have at least one living parent and are in institutional care temporarily often for medical care their parents have no other way to obtain for them.
They know this. They know that we know it. In the presentation of Anna Mary Coburn, Attorney, adoptive mother, and Advisor of the U.S. State Dept, one slide states: “Accurate and reliable information on the number of children ‘in care’ and eligible for adoption is rare” and she said there is an “unclear” definition of what an orphan is. Coburn further recognized that large numbers of orphans are reported when agencies seek funding but not all are eligible for adoption.
Yet they kept repeating that numbers don’t matter. One child in an institution is too much …apparently only in countries outside the U.S., of course that is. There was defensiveness in the talking about what appears to be drastically high and increasing numbers of disrupted adoptions as mentioned by Coburn and others, such as Stebbing who mentioned concern for the children being returned to the “country of origins.”
Another linguistic concern throughout the conference was a preference for “country of origin” instead of “sending country.” Interesting, that they prefer a term that implies some concern for origins while “heritage is over-rated.”
But the most obvious indication that they were on the defense was the repeated mention of “those who want to end all international adoptions” and how wrong-thinking “anti-adoption biases” is. Barthelot dragged out the hackneyed old adage about babies and bath water to describe how we need to simply get rid of the corruption and let the babies keep on floating in…with no mention whatsoever as to how we could accomplish that, in fact, when confronted on those issues, the answer was that we cannot control the laws of other countries!
The Hague is tracking international adoptions, however it is not clear if they are tracking only those that involve the small handful of Hague compliant countries or all international adoptions. But this tracking will include the tracking of disrupted adoptions and is a start, albeit a small one.
It was important and well worth it, albeit difficult, to be there. It was a pleasure to meet Karen Moline, Gina Murphy, Karen Rotabi and the other adoptive parents who are making their voices heard as agents of ethical adoption practices, insisting on stronger and more controls to stop the blatant abuses, including falsified DNA tests as testified by Jennifer Hemsley and others. It was also a pleasure to meet Rev. Mark Diebold who was a sole voice for all of the internationally persons and addressed the issue of sealed records. I am grateful for their bringing balance to an otherwise distorted view of adoption, and for their courage to speak the truth. With adoptees concerns too often ignored as “ungrateful” and mothers who speak out labeled “bitter”, it will be interesting to see how numbers of adoptive parents speaking out against adoption abuses will be labeled.