Another One Bites The Dust

Not since Georgia Tann’s Memphis Branch of the Tennessee Children’s Home has an adoption agency operated so brazenly and been allowed to continue selling children as government officials turned a blind eye to reports of malfeasance.

A federal grand jury today charged Margaret Cole, Robin Langoria, and other employees of European Adoption Consultants (EAC) with fraud, money laundering and bribery in connections with adoptions from Uganda and Poland.

EAC had been granted accreditation under the Hague Convention for Inter-Country Adoptions by the Council on Accreditation. That accreditation is considered a sort of gold standard in the realm of international adoption agencies: it involves a substantial amount of time and work and fees to receive.

In 2015, EAC had a complaint lodged against it for a case in China. In December 2016, the State Department debarred EAC, and their Hague accreditation status was revoked. The IAMME website (IAMME became the sole Hague Convention accreditor in 2018) states this: “Nature of the Substantiated Violations: The Department of State temporarily debarred adoption service provider, European Adoption Consultants, Inc. (EAC) from accreditation on December 16, 2016, for a period of three years. As a result of this temporary debarment, EAC’s accreditation has been cancelled and it must immediately cease to provide all adoption services in connection with intercountry adoptions.

The Department found substantial evidence that the agency is out of compliance with the standards in subpart F of the accreditation regulations, and evidence of a pattern of serious, willful, or grossly negligent failure to comply with the standards and of aggravating circumstances indicating that continued accreditation of EAC would not be in the best interests of the children and families concerned.”

The FBI raided EAC in 2017, and the agency closed. Cole had founded EAC in 1991. EAC had worked in adoptions in Bulgaria, China, Democratic Republic of Congo, Haiti, Honduras, India, Panama, Tanzania, and Ukraine, in addition to Uganda and Poland.

According to federal court records, 574 named defendants got away with $200 million selling 8000 children over 40 years. Yet the State Dept continues to present a campaign against human trafficking, but does not include adoption trafficking. The State Dept does not define adoptions as force fraud and coercion as they do for human trafficking. They never connect their own dots. The problem is that adoption trafficking isn’t illegal. Only trafficking for sex or slavery. Agencies like EAC knew this as well as how hard it is to prosecute cases – and plenty of adoptive parents just didn’t care either as long as they got the kids they wanted.

It’s so sad that the department of state has been aware of this type of corruption, orphans are being “created” through fraud and deception for the purpose of adoption, and for years and years this has been happening. The US authorities have looked the other way. Factual complaints have been filed on case after case, there has been investigation after investigation, authors have researched and books have been published, outlining the crimes and those involved, many articles have been written and testimony given, the news is given coverage with major networks, and yet still, charges towards those involved fail to achieve justice.

There is still no accountability for those who have lied, coerced, and trafficked children for the purpose of adoption. The agencies and the identities of directors and staff, as well as those they chose to work with in another country, are no secret to the US authorities, both federal and state. Yet, most all of these people walk free and live their lives with ease. But for the children and first mothers involved, some will face irreparable physical damage, and emotional trauma forever. For the adoptive families, emotional and financial damage continues.

One person noted that they knew this had happened to an innocent mother and her children in Guatemala. And also to her own family around 2006,..and here we are,…still talking about it. Nothing seems to ever change when evil intent is afoot. With international, transracial adoptions everything is cleansed and purified. Any wrong doing is raised to a level of calm speculation and cool logic. The horror of it all never dwells on the harm done to the victims. At worst, some will admired the shape of the argument, never shuddering at the distortion caused by the criminal mind. The end justifies the means . . .

The Effect of Social Stressors on our Genes

I was reading this article in Science News and thought about the trauma that adoptees suffer.

Jenny Tung, an Evolutionary Anthropologist at Duke University asks – “Why when you don’t have the right sort of social connections, why does your risk of death just shoot up? And, What’s the consequence of chronic social stress?” Not that she answered those questions but posed them.

As the child of 2 adoptees, I have wondered about how their stressors impacted the genes they passed down to me. Some studies have indicated an ability to inherit these stress affected genes.

My husband also shared with me an article in The Guardian – “Families separated at border under Trump suffering severe trauma” according to a study by the Physicians for Human Rights, a first analysis on mental health effects. These effects have endured even after they were reunited.

Adoptees in reunion with their original families can probably relate. For myself, one simply can’t recover the kind of relationship they would have had with these people decades later. The lack of family history between us is permanently damaging to a familial sense. However, it is possible to attempt to build some kind of good relationship, it simply won’t be as close as if one had been around the people all their lives.

Between 2017 and 2018, the US government under Trump’s direction separated more than 5,000 children – the youngest just four months old – from their parents as an act of deterrence to other would-be asylum seekers fleeing violence and persecution in Central America.

The study group comprised asylum seekers from Honduras, Guatemala and El Salvador and included 19 parents and 12 children of whom the youngest was six at the time they were wrenched from their families. The experts included psychologists, psychiatrists and pediatricians. The most common conditions were post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), major depressive disorder and generalized anxiety. The most shocking finding was that severe psychological distress continued in some cases long after parents and children had been brought back together. A Guatemalan girl aged six was suffering from PTSD a year after she had been reunited with her parents, while an eight-year-old boy displayed severe symptoms of PTSD and separation anxiety two years later.

The clinicians recorded a range of symptoms that frequently arise following traumatic experiences, including feelings of confusion and panic, depression, frequent crying, nightmares and other sleep problems, and loss of appetite. Among the children, several displayed regressive behavior such as crying, clinging to parents or caregivers, incontinence and uncontrollable fear. The overall conclusion of this study was that US officials intentionally inflicted severe pain and suffering on Central American asylum seekers in order to punish and coerce them not to pursue asylum claims. The report said that the actions of US immigration agents amounted to torture and cruel and inhumane treatment as defined under international law.

None of these findings will be surprising to adult adoptees.

“This analysis shows the trauma and agony endured by parents and children who were forcefully separated from one another, and the compounding toll that trauma takes on both mental and physical health, lingers with these individuals for weeks, months and years after they’ve been reunited,” said Ranit Mishori, PHR’s senior medical adviser and co-author of the study. PHR said that its study underlined the urgent need for mental health treatment for the parents and children.

Adoptee Citizenship Act

I didn’t realize this was a problem until tonight. The Child Citizenship Act of 2000 awarded citizenship retroactively to what advocates estimated were more than 100,000 international adoptees under 18 who were already in the country when it went into effect in February 2001. Today, children who are adopted from abroad by US citizens generally receive automatic citizenship, and adoption agencies and embassies are better at informing parents about any follow-up they need to do.

There are estimated to still be tens of thousands of people who were adopted internationally by American parents between the 1950s and 1980s but never naturalized. They are in effect stateless. They are also potentially deportable to countries they don’t even remember.

The Adoptee Citizenship Act is proposed federal legislation that would grant citizenship to anyone who was adopted by a U.S. citizen regardless of when they turned 18. It would also allow those who have been deported to return to the United States. U.S. Senators Roy Blunt (MO), Mazie Hirono (HI), Susan Collins (ME), and Amy Klobuchar (MN) introduced the Adoptee Citizenship Act of 2019. A Virtual Rally will take place on Twitter on Wednesday, September 23rd at 2pm EST because HR2731 has still not passed the House. #Citizenship4Adoptees

Widespread adoption of children abroad by US citizens began in South Korea in the 1950s after the Korean War and then spread to other countries. It was initially less regulated than it is now. Advocates estimate there could be up to 18,000 from South Korea alone in this situation, along with an undetermined number from countries such as Venezuela, Germany, India, Guatemala, Vietnam and Iran.

Growing up, they were able to obtain Social Security numbers and driver’s licenses. Before the 1990s and early 2000s ushered in a stricter era of screening, many even received US passports, served in the US military and voted — unaware that they were not citizens.

Hopeful Adoptive Mother

I already knew that trans-national adoption is problematic and a global problem. I was riveted reading a OLD story in Mother Jones magazine from the Nov/Dec 2007 issue titled – Did I Steal My Daughter ? by Elizabeth Larsen.

She started a journal to document her daughter’s adoption. In this she writes, “I feel so sad for the pain your birth mother must be in since she is not able to raise you,” I wrote. “But I believe now that I am your ‘real’ mommy.” Reading those words now sparks a flash of shame. Because even though my daughter was, as is required by U.S. immigration law, legally classified as an orphan, she had two Guatemalan parents who were very much alive.

People have been parenting children not born to them since the dawn of time. But adoption as an irrevocable severing of a child’s relationship with her biological family is largely a European and American practice.

“Informal adoption and kinship care have always existed, but our form of formalized adoption by nonrelatives is very, very new,” advises Hollee McGinnis, policy and operations director of the Evan B. Donaldson Adoption Institute, a research and advocacy organization.

The push toward secrecy and sealed records took hold in the postwar culture, when adoptions were increasingly run by social workers. Confidentiality was thought to shield both mothers and children from the stigma of illegitimacy, and it allowed parents to hide their infertility even from their own children—birth certificates were simply changed to list the adoptive parents.

As more women gained access to contraceptives and legal abortion, and the stigma of unwed pregnancy lessened, fewer American women placed their babies for adoption, and those who did had more power to get what they wanted, including knowing their children’s fate. Today, almost no American woman deciding on adoption seeks anonymity; roughly 90 percent of mothers have met their children’s adoptive parents, and most helped choose them.

While society has belatedly acknowledged the trauma of American women who were forced to surrender their children, birth families abroad have remained shrouded in mystery, allowing parents and professionals to invent the narrative that best suits them. “Practitioners 20 years ago assumed we were rescued from these horrific nations and would never go back,” says Hollee McGinnis, who was adopted from Korea when she was three and has been in touch with her Korean family for more than a decade.

More in the Mother Jones article if you are so inclined. Here’s the link – https://www.motherjones.com/politics/2007/10/did-i-steal-my-daughter-tribulations-global-adoption/

When Adoption Is Outed

“Children of the Corn” is a short story by Stephen King. A couple explores what appears to be a ghost town and encounter local children after their vacation is sidelined by a car accident when they run over a young boy who ran into the road. The couple notices that many things about the town are out of date, such as gas prices and calendars, which have not been updated since 1964- twelve years previously.

Laura Ingraham played clips of Thunberg’s United Nations speech imploring political leaders to take climate change seriously, remarking, “Does anyone else find that chilling?” She then played a clip from the 1984 horror film Children of the Corn and said, “I can’t wait for Stephen King’s sequel, Children of the Climate.” I found the image here of the girl with braids and thought, now I understand why this particular story came into Ingraham’s mind. The image below is from a Twitter post by Ingraham.

The reason this story has become a blog is that Ingraham’s children are adopted from other countries. Her daughter was born in Guatemala, while her two sons are Russian. This matters because transracial adoptions are more problematic than same race adoptions. It is hard enough to relate to people you weren’t naturally born to. Add such profound differences and the situation becomes more demanding. And it is a sad commentary on the animosity in Ingraham’s own family that her adopted children even became a part of this “other” story.