Adoption
And The Role Of
The Religious Right
By Mirah Riben
04 November, 2007
Countercurrents.org
November
is National Adoption Awareness Month: time to take stock and rethink
our adoption practices and goals.
Recent headlines reveal such
contradictions as:
- 3,700 U.S. families in the process of adopting children from Guatemala
are concerned, upset and unsure about their pending adoption because
of Guatemala’s crack down on child trafficking.
- British Foreign Secretary David Miliband and his wife are joyously
celebrating their second adoption: both adopted as newborns fresh from
American delivery rooms.
- Six French “child rescuers” are among sixteen jailed for
illegally taking 103 children from Chad who were neither starving nor
orphaned.
Adoption Awareness Month was intended to increase the awareness of the
needs of US orphans in foster care who could benefit from adoption.
Today, such children number in excess of 100,00 of the half million
children in foster care, while we promote and encourage adoption without
distinguishing these children from infants who are sought after.
The U.S. imports more infants for adoption that any other nation, while
also exporting Black children to Canada and white infants to the wealthy
in Britain, Mexico and elsewhere in a seeming endless redistribution
redistributing these marketable commodities as private entrepreneurs
profit from their demand with little to no regulations.
L. Ann Babb, author of Ethics in American Adoption. reports that American
adoption “[professionals] have yet to develop uniform ethical
standards… or to make meaningful attempts to monitor their own
profession … In other professions and occupations, licensing or
certification in a specialty must be earned before an individual can
offer expert services in an area. The certified manicurist may not give
facials; the certified hair stylist may not offer manicures ….Yet…individuals
with professions as different as social work and law, marriage and family
therapy, and medicine may call themselves ‘adoption professionals’.”
Babb continues: “There remains no national professional organization
for adoption specialists, no professional recognition of adoption practice
as a specialty of any discipline, no established education and training
requirements, and no regular professional meetings and forums for adoption
‘professionals'.”
Brits are lauding America’s lax regulations that allowed the Miliband’s
to twice adopt an American infant. The British media articles bemoan
the fact that Britain does not allow such exploitive measures, as if
adoption was about providing babies in the quickest way possible with
the least amount of red tape, eliciting comments such as:
American websites currently offer[ ] mouth-watering
incentives to would-be buyers. "Delivery within four
months", "Discounts of up to $19,000", they proclaim.
If it were cars they were selling this would not seem
odd, but it's babies that are for sale – bright,
smiling newborns to tempt the childless into parting
with about £20,000.
There is no shame in treating babies like any other
purchase in America, where the adoption industry is
largely privatized… (“Why adoption is so easy in
America” Telegraph.co.uk 10/31/07)
Is there no shame?
Why are infants such as these are leaving the US while US couples are
traveling half way around the word to meet their desire for a baby when
both countries have children in foster care?
The answer is that adoption is far from an altruist social program to
care for needy orphans. Instead, adoption is a business; babies are
priced based on age, race, ethnicity, health, and physical ability.
It all sounds vulgar because it is.
“It feels harsh to use concepts like supply and demand when talking
about children and obviously it’s wrong to say that international
adoption is just a trade in children,” says Riitta Högbacka,
University of Helsinki, Finland, reporting on the global market for
adoption . “But if we look at the direction of this human flow—which
countries are sending children, which countries are receiving and who
is doing the adopting—then it is very clear. It goes from the
South to the North and from the East to the West. The recipients are
always the richer countries in North America, Europe, and Australia.
Evan B. Donaldson Institute for Adoption, Anaheim Conference “Money,
Power and Accountability: The ‘Business’ of Adoption”
summary: No., 1999, concludes:“Thinking of adoption in economic
terms is an uncomfortable reality. There has been a deterioration of
the constraints once put in place to protect members of the triad from
exploitation, with market factors such as inflated inventories, scarce
commodities, demographic trends in the marketplace, products in oversupply,
and the principles of supply and demand affecting adoption services.”
“Profit-based motivation in child placement [that] is …
loathsome” and “largely driven by money… Money has
become the critical variable for determining who gets a child….”
according to L. Anne Babb: The fees western adopters are willing to
pay to obtain a child often support a lucrative black market coercing
mothers, stealing and kidnapping babies and children that are sold to
orphanages to be internationally adopted.
International adoption has become an unregulated “entrepreneurial
venture,” according to Debra Harder, network director for Adoptive
Families of America. (Laura Mansnerus, “Market Puts Price Tags
on the Priceless” New York Times, October 26, 1998)
Högbacka additionally finds that internationally, as well as domestically:
“Demand is focused on quite a small group of under three-year-olds,
where the number of potential parents far exceeds the supply of children.”
(Feb 22, 2006 “The global market for adoption.” SixDegrees
cover story)
Child trafficking for adoption is an issue of concern addressed by UNICEF
and other non-profit watchdog agencies throughout the world. Sandra
Soria, executive director of Peru’s nonprofit Institute for Infancy
and the Family said: “It’s a situation that favors the proliferation
of these trafficking rings and creates the markets and conditions for
these international networks to operate,” said. Soria notes that
it is impossible to know how many children are sold each year, for adoption,
forced labor, or the sex trade. (Rick Vecchio, “Pregnant Teen’s
Murder Shocks Peru.” Associated Press, March 13, 2006.)
The recent incident in Chad illustrated the fact that worldwide 80%
of children targeted for international adoption have parents. Even those
in orphanages have family who visit them and use these institutions
for temporary care. Such was the case with the family of David Banda
who Madonna adopted. Children who are truly orphaned, could be adopted
within their own nation if not for the competition of foreign fees to
orphanages.
Program director of International Social Service, Chantal Saclier is
responsible for the United Kingdom’s ISS Resource Centre on the
Protection of Children in Adoption. Saclier finds that although inter-country
adoption is intended to find stable homes for children who do not have
the opportunity for a loving family environment, many of the children
being adopted have a family that could have been preserved. Factors
such as pressure from wealthy adoptive families, and the selfishness
and greed of officials, have created a situation in which economically
disadvantaged children are exploited and sold. (Chantal Scalier, “In
the Best Interests of the Child? International Resource Centre for the
Protection of Children in Adoption.” In: Selman, P., Ed.)
Peter Dodds, author Outer Search\Inner Journey: An Orphan and Adoptee's
Quest finds: “International adoption isn't the answer to improving
the overall plight of children in developing countries. Even the strongest
supporters admit the movement of adoptees across international borders
represents only a tiny fraction of the neglected, abused and abandoned
children in these countries. And supporters of international adoption
are quiet about the children who are not adopted and left behind.”
The stripping of children from eastern Europe, Asia and South has been
called colonialism and cultural genocide. According to Ethica, thirteen
countries have suspended or ended their adoption programs in the past
fifteen years. Another half dozen countries have temporarily stopped
adoptions to investigate allegations of corruption or child trafficking,
the latest Chad.
Jane Jeong Trenka (jjtrenka.worldpress.com)is a Korean born adoptee
whose Korean mother searched and found her after she was sent to the
U.S. and before she was legally adopted. Trenka was raised in rural
Minnesota by white American parents, and has been going back and forth
from Korea since 1995 maintaining continuous contact with her Korean
family since 1988. She writes extensively about the need to end exporting
children from Korea. Other Korean born adoptees are returning to their
homeland, and some are filled with pain and anger that they were torn
from their rich cultural heritage. (Vanessa Hua, “Korean-born
in U.S. return to a home they never knew Many locate lost families,
others work to change international adoption policy” San Francisco
Chronicle. September 11, 2005)
Trenka says, “South Korea’s dependence on the international
adoption program has stunted the growth of more appropriate government-funded
social welfare programs, as well as delayed the social acceptance of
single-parent families….International adoption is NOT the solution.
Instead, the South Korean government must find its own solution by investing
in sex education, supporting single parents and creating incentives
for domestic adoption.” (Adoption from South Korea: Isn’t
50 Years Enough? Jane’s Blog, June 27th, 200)
Jae Ran Kim, a South Korea-born/American raised adoptee and social worker
in the field of adoption and child welfare laments: “It is ethnocentric
and arrogant to think that the United States has any business telling
another country how they should manage the problem of orphaned, abandoned
or relinquished children. We can’t even solve this problem within
our own shores.
(http://harlowmonkey.typepad.com/harlows_monkey
/2006/08/adoptee_vs_adop.html)
Maureen Flatley political consultant and media advisor specializing
in child welfare and adoption, observes: “Our national policy
allows large sums of cash to leave the country in an entirely unregulated
system and browbeating foreign governments into surrendering children
in a decision-making process for their foster children that none of
our fifty states would permit for America’s waiting children….Lacking
training in foreign policy or a sound regulatory framework, would-be
adoptive families and their adoption agencies are encouraged to navigate
the increasingly complex and treacherous geopolitics of countries around
the world with virtually no training and in many cases a vested self
interest. The result has been diplomatic and emotional chaos.”
(“Federal Regulation of International Adoption,” Decree,
American Adoption Congress, 1999. www.childlaw.us/2005/05/federal_regulat.html)
Who is behind it
all?
The Brits have also rightly pointed to U.S. restrictions on birth control
and abortion as a contributing to “marketable” infants in
the U.S. The religious right’s imposed morality is perfectly partnered
with those whose livelihoods depend upon the redistribution of children.
In May, 2007 Evangelical
Christians organizations such as Focus on the Family and pastors from
across the nation held a three-day summit in Colorado. members of to
promote adoption via a media blitz.
Focus on the Family founder James C. Dobson, a major player in this
new path of evangelism, and present at the summit, expressed concern
that foster parents typically are permitted to take children to church
but cannot force religion on them. They must adhere to other state guidelines
as well, some of which may contradict their faith such as parents “disciplining”
their children physically with switches as taught by Dobson, a child
psychologist.
While some of the flock may in fact adopt children from foster care,
concern for orphaned and abandoned children is a smoke screen to use
adoption as a tool against abortion, against single parenthood, and
for evangelism. That is why, among those present at this event was Tom
Atwood, president of the National Committee for Adoption, the largest
lobbying organization of adoption agencies, primarily those of the Later
Day Saints. The NCFA is also the major opposition to legislation aimed
at restoring adoptees’ right to their own true identity.
The NCFA web page purports to be about finding homes for children in
foster care, yet their mission page shows in black and white their first
and foremost agenda item: “Train pregnancy counselors and health
care workers in infant adoption awareness, so women and teens with unplanned
pregnancies can freely consider the loving option of adoption.”
And, contrary to promoting the adoption of U.S. orphans, on the NCFA
agenda is “Work[ing] with the U.S. and foreign governments to
establish sound policies for inter-country adoption, so foreign orphans
can be placed with loving, permanent families.”
The NCFA and the religious right are partners in a full-fledged propaganda
war being waged to recruit Christian soldiers through adoption. With
all the ingenuity and marketing skills available to them, the NCFA and
the religious right couch their pro-adoption stance as a noble plan
to help the hundred of thousands of children in foster care, using these
kids as the foot in the door by both to get tax incentives and other
benefits for their clients who seek to adopt primarily infants. All
good social engineers know the advantages of starting with a “blank
slate.” (For more on American adoption as social engineering see
Barbara Melosh, Ellen Herman, and E. Wayne Carp.)
Ken Connor, the attorney who represented Governor Jeb Bush in the Terri
Schiavo case and Vice Chairman of Americans United for Life, reporting
on the pro-adoption summit (A Selfless Choice: In Celebration of Adoption,
Townhall.com May 12, 2007) calls abortion big business and extols the
“virtues” of adoption—a far bigger and corrupt—multi-billion
dollar industry.
Connor goes on to tout infant adoption as a win-win for everyone including
the mother who suffers a lose-lose: the irrevocable permanent loss of
parental rights, her child, and her relationship with him.
Lost in the dogmatic rhetoric being spewed by both ideological extremes
among pro-choice and pro-life proponents….is pro-family. UNICEF’s
position is that adoption should be a last resort. “Families needing
support to care for their children should receive it, and that alternative
means of caring for a child should only be considered when, despite
this assistance, a child’s family is unavailable, unable or unwilling
to care for her or him.”
The only reason to encourage and promote more relinquishments and more
adoptions is to fill a “demand” for healthy white infants,
which, in fact, is counter to a goal of finding homes for older, non-white,
or physically challenged children being supported by state funds. It
is uncharitable and un-American. The same is true for supporting and
encouraging international adoption.
Other items on their agenda list include the promotion of anti-family,
anti-parenting programs such as so-called “safe havens”
that allow for the legal abandonment of infants and putative father
laws to speed relinquishments of newly born babies, causing one to ask
if the real reason is to maintain the supply of “adoptable”
[read acceptable] babies for their contributors, cronies, constituents
or clients.
Pro-life organizations can be known by whatever family-orientated, all-American
cutesie “baby saving” and “hope-filled” names…they
may even invoke the name of, or believe that they are doing the work
of, God…. but their tactics are all counter to true Family Preservation
as spelled out in the constitution of the United States which protects
parental rights; the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the
Child; and message of Judeo-Christianity. Being pro-family means being
supportive of all families…not judging who has the necessary finances
or marital status.
Worldwide 80% of children
in orphanages have families, most who visit them and hope to regain
custody. Poverty is the major cause of children needing adoption, not
abuse, neglect or abandonment. Removing children from impoverished families
does nothing to ameliorate the plight of the family, village or nation
from where they originate.
Not all international adoptions—nor all domestic infant adoptions—support
corruption, but there is no way to distinguish which do or to determine
the accurate source of children offered by international orphanages.
We thus need to rethink our romanticized view of adoption as a “rescue”
mission as well as ethnocentric international adoption policies that
in many cases support black market trafficking operations. We need to
rethink our child adoption policies that ignore the needs of hundreds
of thousands of children in domestic foster care who cannot be reunited
with family and might benefit from caring homes, and reduce tax loads,
while we continue to import children for placement with families ill-equipped
to handle their special needs.
Only when adoption puts the
needs of orphans first before the demands of those seeking to be parents,
can it be “celebrated”, encouraged and promoted.
Mirah Riben is the author of shedding light on…The
Dark Side of Adoption (1988) and THE STORK MARKET: America’s Multi-Billion
Dollar Unregulated Adoption Industry (2007) http://www.AdvocatePublications.com
and on the Board of Directors of Origins-USA.org
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