Misperceptions

I don’t know where these people get ideas like this. Here’s today’s story –

“So when I talked to the foster care recruiter she basically said I can’t license you for the age group you want (0-3). You will have to do 0-18. I don’t want to do older kids because I’m only 25 and all my kids are 7 and under. She said we would only be allowed 1 child because we are going to have another baby soon. We would have 5 biological children (though one is stepchild, who is only with us weekends). Our state limits the number of children in a fostering home to 6 total. OK, I’ll be honest, I was really hoping to adopt a little girl since all of our children are boys. Well the foster care recruiter basically dashed my hopes. Based on the rules, it looks like we won’t be able to foster kids until we’re old and our kids are grown. This makes me sad. We have the room in both our hearts and our home for lots of foster children but because of the limit on how many kids we can have in our house, we are just stuck with the kids we already have. I am brokenhearted because I really wanted to be a ‘girl mom’. Even thought I know the goal of foster care is family reunification, what I really want is to foster to adopt.”

This is a real person.

One woman suggested – “become a Big Sister or volunteer with the Girl Scouts with that ‘room in your heart’.”

Another woman shared this – “I was raised in a church where people were expected to have big families… The first thing it does is make the oldest kids grow up way too fast. They usually end up half raising the youngest ones. The other thing it does is divide up the parent’s attention waaaaay too much. My friends from huge families often felt like their parents didn’t know them well. So yeah, I’m glad they are limiting this person and not allowing them to pack some really young kids in there.”

Another woman noted – “If this woman could have her way, her boys would grow up to resent the little girl, because they would know that they’re second best to the girl their mother so desperately wanted. Nothing entitles a person to take another mother’s baby and that should certainly be true when a couple already has five wonderful children of their own. How selfish and ungrateful can one person be ?!?”

One woman admitted – “My grandmother had two sons and then adopted a daughter. She favored all her granddaughters over her grandsons too, which really impacted my cousins who lived near her. The daughters of her daughter were the most prized.”

One replied directly to the woman who’s story leads this blog with this – “Do IVF and a designer baby. Sounds like you’re super fertile anyway, so maybe easier than you think. Talk to a fertility specialist.” And then added this reality check, “It’s gonna break your heart more if it isn’t forever when you have that infant in your arms and then the baby is returned to her rightful family . . . because honestly, reunification is the goal, as it should be, as long as it is safe for the child to be returned.”

And this, “I taught classes for prospective adopters and for a long time the #1 reason for picking China was the virtual guarantee if a girl, a ‘china doll’ (usually named Lily or the like. ) It is so incredibly harmful to a child to be adopted for their gender. It puts that child in a gender straight jacket. Same for sex selection sperm treatments and sex selection IVF etc. But especially for adoptees. This kind of perspective is heartbreaking.”

Un-Adopted

The Stauffer Family minus Huxley

The video began like so many others. YouTubers Myka and James Stauffer, in the glow of camera-friendly lighting, staring into the lens. But this time, instead of energetically updating their roughly 1 million subscribers (over 700,000 on Myka’s YouTube channel and over 300,000 on the family’s vlog, The Stauffer Life) on their “kiddos” or Myka’s “mommy morning routine” or vegan-meal ideas, the couple had somber expressions.

“This is by far the hardest video James and I have ever publicly had to make,” said Myka. Wearing white shirts that matched the linens on the bed where they sat, the Stauffers revealed that they had placed Huxley, their then almost 5-year-old autistic son from China — whose adoption process and life they had documented for more than three years — with “his now new forever family.” Myka and James tearfully explained that the extent of Huxley’s needs had not been clear when they’d adopted him, that it was never supposed to happen this way, and that they loved him.

In the kindest light, Myka, now 33, and James, 35, were painted as well-meaning but naïve parents who had gotten in over their heads; in the harshest, they were fame-hungry narcissists who’d exploited a child for clicks and profit only to discard him when caring for him proved too difficult.

According to the US Department of Health and Human Services, anywhere from one percent to 5 percent of the more than 100,000 adoptions in the U.S. each year are legally terminated in what’s called a “dissolution”. The Stauffers’ decision to relinquish custody of Huxley could be called rare but it is not uncommon in adoptionland.

Myka said she’d long wanted to adopt; at one point, she and James talked about having six or seven children, with multiple adoptions, and were specifically interested in a child from Africa. James was more reluctant, she said, and after several conversations, she finally pleaded, “Can you please, please in your heart just consider adoption? Just really genuinely think about it, because it’s really important to me.” He ultimately agreed, and, later in 2016, the couple posted a video announcing their plans to adopt and their intent to take viewers along with them on their “journey.”

Sharing information about a child’s adoption before he or she is in the home is frowned upon by adoption experts. Not only can publicizing an adoption jeopardize it, but it’s often seen as playing into the stereotype of white families swooping in to “save” foreign children.

International adoptions to the U.S. have dropped to a fraction of what they were a decade and a half ago, as many countries, including China, have revised their protocols. (For the 2019 fiscal year, the U.S. Department of State reported just 2,971 adoptions to the US from other countries, down from almost 23,000 adoptions in 2004.) China still accounts for more adoptions to the US than any other country, but now almost all adoptees from China to the US are toddler age or older, and many have existing health conditions. If the Stauffers adopted from China, they would almost certainly be choosing a child with special needs.

Myka and James asked viewers to invest not only time in Huxley’s adoption story but money. In October 2017, Myka and James, along with their three biological children, traveled to China to pick up Huxley. The accompanying video, which they called Huxley’s “Gotcha Day” — a term popular on YouTube but criticized by the adoption community — racked up more than 5.5 million views. Myka and James dedicated it “to all the orphans around the world” and set the video to “You Set My World on Fire,” by Sweden’s Loving Caliber, an acoustic track with the lyrics “Just tell me you’ll stay or take me away / I want you for myself every single day.”

Since adopting Huxley, Myka and James’s online success had grown substantially. Total earnings are difficult to estimate, but the Stauffers earned from $4,100 to $66,700 from their three channels in April and May 2020, according to analytics site Social Blade, a number that does not include revenue from sponsorships. Myka had hired a manager to handle all the direct marketing from companies that wanted to work with her.

The Stauffers began to consider a way out that was never part of the “journey” they had expected to experience, much less share. When they finally broke their silence in late May, they said they had initially kept quiet because they didn’t want to jeopardize Huxley’s transition to his new family. In their video, Myka said that Huxley was thriving in his new home, that he was happy, and that “his new mommy has medical-professional training and is a very good fit.” But the optics of their situation were fraught. In the middle of a pandemic and a national reckoning over racial injustice, when the president and multiple other right-wing leaders repeatedly referred to the coronavirus as the “kung flu” or “Wuhan flu,” Myka and James were a privileged white couple who’d given away their Chinese son.

Other adoptive parents have described situations that seem to echo the Stauffers’ sense of hopelessness. In her memoir The Best of Us, author Joyce Maynard describes adopting two girls from Ethiopia and then, just over a year later, placing them with another family whose mother she met during the adoption process. “With an ignorance that staggers me now — ignorance, and some arrogance, no doubt — I had believed my love would be there like an eternal flame, and that this love of mine could fix whatever had been broken in my daughters’ lives.” When this proved not to be the case, that the road to attachment would be a long one, she describes it as “the most profound sense of despair I had ever known.”

One of the biggest misconceptions is that dissolutions happen because the child is bad. Nine times out of ten, it is NOT the child’s behavior. It seems like it’s the child’s behavior, but it’s the child’s behavior triggering something in the family. The most common reason for dissolution is that the parents feel incompetent to manage the child’s behaviors.

These are just excerpts. You can read the entire story here – Why Did These YouTubers Give Away Their Son? I had encountered the story previously but I didn’t know it in depth. It is a cautionary tale about international adoptions as well as chasing after lucrative clicks and sponsorships. It is a double edged sword waiting to cut the next victim.

Exactly How Is It PRO Life ?

The latest manifestation of “caring” among some conservative people is that we should allow massive amounts of death among the old or immune compromised and just get back to work and crowding public places.

When it comes to MONEY it is clear that Pro-Lifers are really only pro birth. Once that baby is born, they could care less about the quality of life. And for some, even better, please surrender that baby to us. We will BUY your baby through adoption and we could care less about the pain and trauma that you and that baby go through due to our selfishness.

I know this sounds harsh. I’m not in a generous mood at the moment. With the Coronavirus, the new trajectory for these Pro-Life people is – let’s sacrifice the old folks on the altar of pandemic and get this over as quickly as possible – so we can go back to living like we want to.

Yesterday, the United States set a new record – the highest single day death count on the planet since this virus began spreading. And still, they support this president – who lied to us about how lethal this disease was going to be and who did NOTHING to prepare for it. Even now, he projects blame everywhere else but accepts NO responsibility for his own failure to take this threat seriously in the earliest stages (or even before it reached our own shores from China).

Forgive my rant. I wonder how many of these people will crowd their churches for Easter ? Maybe this country would be better off without them – though I wish no one to die from this wretched enemy of too many people.

Too many are Pro life unless you are old, poor or in jail. Then, they could care less – really.

Selling Babies

My original maternal grandmother and mom were exploited by the Tennessee Children’s Home Society branch at Memphis. Though no actual records exist to show that any money changed hands, I believe it did based upon the history of that organization and the fact that my adoptive maternal grandmother had actually “specified” the characteristics that she wanted in the baby sister she was adopting to go with the little boy she had adopted from the same agency a couple of years earlier.

The TCHS warned my adoptive grandmother that “rarely do they have a baby so desirable” and therefore my adoptive maternal grandmother must act quickly and she did. Georgia Tann’s story teaches everyone about the importance of ridding adoption of lies and secrets. That is the purpose of pushing for open adoption records.

There needs to be a law making the sale of, or traffic in, children for the purpose of adoption illegal because while it isn’t known for certain to be happening in the United States, there is every indication that American adoptive parents who are looking overseas because they are unable to adopt quickly enough here in the United States, may be victims of inappropriate adoptions originating in other countries.

In 2006, a reporter wrote that 23,000 children – born in other countries – had been adopted by Americans. China is the most common go-to country with nearly 8,000 orphan visas granted from there. Russia comes in second, followed by Guatemala, South Korea, Ukraine and Kazakhstan. And Americans are increasingly turning an eye to African countries including the celebrities Angelina Jolie and Madonna.

When The Baby Thief was written by Barbara Bisantz Raymond in (published in 2007) an international adoption by an American parents cost as much as $40,000 and she noted that can like seem an enormous sum to brokers in countries where the average annual income is $1,800.