I could say this a million times and it will never be enough. Let’s break this down.
Money means choices.
No money means no choices.
Therapy is a privilege. It is a privilege 99% of those in poverty do not have. At least not, quality mental health care. Don’t even get me started on primary care.
Everything costs money. Not having money means you don’t have options. I’m so sick and tired of people from a place of privilege recommending shit those without privilege can’t afford. Like those who need it don’t even think of it….
Even people in poverty don’t live under a rock. They know what they need and could use but there’s no money!!!
Don’t judge because they haven’t done this or that – unless you want to pay for it.
Because I am in a good mood today – No More Excuses . . . it’s all about the money.
Today’s blog is thanks to my friend, Ande Stanley and her The Adoption Files.
I like to garden. I was looking at fruit trees at the local plant nursery. An employee was describing the benefits of grafted fruit trees over the non grafted variety.
This seemed a natural process to compare with adoption. We even have the images of family trees to grapple with; whose tree do we belong to?
We are frequently informed, both directly and indirectly, of how much better off we are as adoptees, grafted onto this superior tree. So much so that there is no need, supposedly, for us to be curious about our origin tree. The tree that brought us forth, gave us life, and then lost a part of itself.
With grafts, a wound is left on the tree of origin. An incision is made on our next tree, a wound that closes around us to create a new fruiting branch.
We are on the tree, but not of it.
As I listen to the employee talk about extended life and new vigor and flowering and fruiting; about the cost of the tree and the benefits I would enjoy by planting this tree in my garden; I can’t stop thinking of another definition of the word graft: obtained by means of corruption.
So much corruption, deception, and coercion exists in adoption. Politicians routinely ignore this reality. There’s too much power and money involved for most to find an interest in backing the rights of adopted people. Always a loophole or a fabricated obstacle that can be employed to deny adoptees access to the truths of our origins. A way to perpetuate the graft.
An article in The Guardian caught my attention – LINK>”I was owned by the state” Samantha Morton on foster care.
Question ? What advice would you give to a foster mum ?
First of all, love. Whether you are fostering for a week as a short-term foster carer or you’re a long-term foster parent, try to show love. What hurt me when I was younger was being separated as the foster child. So I wasn’t included in family photographs or family dos, or they went on family holidays and left me behind. Try to get support to make the child feel part of the family as much as possible, which isn’t always easy financially if you’ve got your own kids and only getting a little bit from the council for your foster child.
Also don’t tell everyone all the time: “Oh, this is my foster child.” I really liked it when we’d have a little fib that I was, say, a cousin’s cousin or something like that. So I felt that I belonged.
Question ? What do you think the treatment of children – especially in care or those who are vulnerable – tells us about our society ?
Somebody posted an image on Twitter the other day of how many politicians were in parliament for a debate on the Care Act. There was nobody there. I think that it comes from the top. So if our politicians are not taking it seriously – the welfare of our children, the care system, how broken the care system is – then how is society expected to take it seriously? We need our politicians to take notes, to listen to doctors and social workers and teachers, and look at how broken this country is. The most vulnerable people in society are children and young people, and because they don’t get a vote, they are just disregarded. Politicians have to show compassion and care, and a commitment to real change, before other people kind of go: yeah, we believe that too.
Question ? Have you met a politician (in the current government or otherwise) who said they understood the value of art but then voted to shaft the vulnerable ?
No. The last time I had anything to do with government was after I made my film LINK>The Unloved (2009), about a character who goes into care, and Ed Balls invited me to talk to him and then asked me to be a children’s tsar. I took that role very, very seriously and had lots of discussions about how best I could help with my knowledge and experience. He really took it seriously. And I was incredibly proud of what the Labour government did then in regards to a huge initiative to recruit more social workers and provide better funding. I think since the coalition got in, they have done nothing but decimate children’s services. Anything that makes life better for children, they have actively sought to destroy.
The government has failed us miserably in regards to young people and culture and healthcare and national security. We need a general election now. We need to fight. It makes me very weepy. I cannot get my head around the lack of integrity. It’s just so bad at the moment and it’s going to get a lot worse. It will get better when a different government gets in but they’re going to inherit an absolute mess. Carnage.
Question ? Is it strange to have so many people know your story ? How do you protect your privacy while also allowing yourself to be, at times, very vulnerable ?
I made a choice to share my story because if I didn’t, I wouldn’t be able to make a change. I believe certain things happened to me so that I could make a difference. I was somehow given the toolkit to survive, to not become a victim, to be a survivor. I do have privacy, though. I don’t really talk about my family and children and husband. I feel incredibly private. But I feel my childhood is certainly up for public scrutiny and conversation because I was a child of the state. I was a ward of court. I was owned by the state and the state treated me a certain way, and I’m a product of that. The legal system is built to protect people with a lot of money.
I am short on time today and if things go as planned, there won’t be another blog here until Friday. This is an important issue and so I want to give it some space. Very often money in adoption causes problems. It is not only the direct expenses related to adopting a baby that cause the problem, it is money passing from hopeful adoptive parents to expectant mothers that causes many problems. Sometimes, it is the hopeful adoptive parents that have been scammed by a woman pretending to be pregnant who then goes silent and disappears about the time the baby is due to be born. Of greater concern to me and many people within the adoption community is the coercive effect adoptive parents giving money directly to a pregnant woman who may be in difficult circumstances to make her obligated to turn her baby over to the hopeful adoptive parents.
This is becoming an issue in the awareness of legislators in some states. In my example here today – Louisiana House Bill 568. Present law provides for the crime of adoption deception and defines the crime as being committed by any person who is a birth mother, or who holds herself out to be a birth mother, who is interested in making an adoption plan and who knowingly or intentionally benefits from payment of adoption-related expenses in connection with that adoption plan if any of the following occur: (1) The person knows or should have known that she is not pregnant at the time the payments were requested or received. (2) The person accepts assistance for living expenses from a prospective adoptive parent or adoption entity without disclosing that she is receiving such assistance from another prospective adoptive parent or adoption entity at the same time in an effort to adopt the same child. Proposed law amends present law to include when a person has the specific intent to make false representations to induce the payment of living expenses or other benefits in connection with a purported adoption placement. Proposed law does not apply to a person who agrees to an adoption plan agreement and subsequently, in good faith, declines to proceed with the prospective adoption in favor of parenting the child.
Amendments Adopted by House –
1. Specify that the person needs specific intent to make false representations to induce the payment of living expenses or other benefits in connection with a purported adoption placement. 2. Provide an exception for persons who do not agree to an adoption plan agreement and subsequently, in good faith, decline to proceed with the prospective adoption in favor of parenting the child.
A women concerned with the reform of Ethics in Adoption is proposing this – eliminate direct payments from hopeful adoptive parents to expectant mothers. Vulnerable women/parents should be able to change their minds at ANY point without penalty. Exchange of money and threat of prosecution should not be leveraged against vulnerable women/parents who want to parent their own children and change their minds. The proposal would move all payments for medical, etc… to social services instead of “direct payments” from hopeful adoptive parents, and make such transfers of money, “direct payments,” illegal.
It has become quite common for hopeful adoptive families to turn to crowdfunding to pay the expenses of adopting a newborn baby. The cost is often $50,000 for an international adoption, about $30-40,000 domestically. That is due to additional costs of bringing a child in from another country.
Hank Fortener, is the founder and CEO of AdoptTogether. The website says – “His family fostered 36 children and adopted 8 from 5 different countries while he was growing up. He knows firsthand how painful & euphoric adopting a child can be, and it is this experienced heart for adoption that drives AdoptTogether.”
In my all things adoption group, someone asks an obvious question – how many original moms could that $30,000 help to keep their baby, instead of surrendering it to adoption ? I agree. As a society we really don’t care enough to help families stay together.
An article in Forbes back in September 2021 highlighted the work of this organization. In that interview, Hank says – I had the idea that if we could turn crowds into communities, if it truly takes a village to raise a child, it can also mean it takes a village to raise funds to bring a child home. It did not seem fair that insurance could cover most expenses of having a baby in a hospital, but there was nothing for those who could not have a child, or chose to parent a child that needed parents. AdoptTogether was born in our hearts 2009, and then went live in 2012. The organization has helped over 5,000 families raise over $26 Million.
According to Daniel Pollack and Steven M Baranowski writing in The Imprint – Ethical Challenges Remain in The World of Private Adoptions. Adoption practices continue to challenge the ethics of social workers due to myriad conflicting interests which have existed since the practice began. Dangerous informal child care arrangements in the early to mid 1900s have been replaced by a patchwork of state and federal laws, regulations and child care practices meant to serve the best interests of everyone associated with adoption, but we continue to allow for ethically concerning “wrongful” adoptions.
Social workers have found themselves observing or being caught up in ethically challenging adoption practices that have continued to lead to unethical family disruptions and poorly implemented adoption policies, all of which have created more “wrongful adoptions” and a continued mistrust of the profession. Disrupting family structures for the so-called “best interest” of the child is the most ethically challenging aspect of adoption and child welfare practices. The rescuing of “orphan” children from “Third World” countries has led to an increase in human trafficking and is the most blatant form of family disruptions for the sake of making money through the guise of a legal adoption.
Personally, I do not believe that crowdfunding making it possible for more families to afford to adopt improves the ethics of the adoption industry.
Though the podcast has been live since Feb 6th, I was only able to finish listening to my interview yesterday. I had gotten through the first 41 mins previously. Life is busy and it is long and so I do forgive anyone who doesn’t want to listen to me talk about my experience of being the child of two adoptees for an hour and a half approx. Though my satellite quality of transmission is inconsistent, it seemed to me that somehow the audio zoom file was able not to lose words but after a disruption continued where it would have been anyway. I am happy to say I was not embarrassed when I listened to it. Though most listeners would not notice my only big blub – giving the wrong part of my dad’s birth name as it relates to his father’s actual name – I can accept that as mistakes go, it wasn’t significant to the quality of listening to my interview by Ande Stanley of The Adoption Files.
For those who don’t want to listen to such a long interview, I’ll try to hit on the key or more significant points.
Though both of my parents were mid-1930s adoptees, their individual responses to having been adopted could not have been different. My mom always felt like her adoption had been, in her effort to be polite, inappropriate. She knew a bit about Georgia Tann and from what she knew and from a weird quirk in what she did NOT know (having been born in Virginia but having been adopted still technically an infant in the first year of her life from Memphis TN, how did she get there ?) she had crafted a story to explain what she was never going to be allowed to know.
I say that because she did try to get her adoption file in the early 1990s from the state of Tennessee who rejected both her initial and subsequent appeal because they could not determine the status of alive or dead for her father (who had actually been dead for 30 years by that time). Basically for $180 dollars she had the privilege of being told the mother she sincerely wish to reassure as to her outcome as an adopted child had been dead for several years. It broke her heart.
No one ever informed her that just a few years later, by the end of the 1990s, she would have been given her adoption file as Tennessee changed the law of closed and sealed adoption records for the victims of Georgia Tann (who bought and sold babies for 30 years). That is why for less money ($150) I received over 100 pages of her adoption file (which thankfully was intact though minimally inaccurate – deliberately) plus 4 black and white negatives of photos taken the last time my maternal grandmother held her baby.
Had my mom been given her adoption file, it would have cleared up misunderstandings caused by a lack of information and given her a lot of peace. She would have seen how hard her original mother fought to keep her and the obstacles against her. She would have seen how over the moon her adoptive mother was to have received her (though in life they had a difficult relationship). Though not stolen, her mother had been exploited. More importantly, my mom could have reconnected with her genetic, biological family and learned a lot of first hand impressions and lived experience regarding both of her parents.
Closed, sealed adoption records continue to be an issue that turns adoptees into second class citizens in these United States. I encountered this in Virginia, Arizona and California. I believe the main impediment is money – who has it and who stands to gain from keeping adoptees from their own valuable personal information. These parties are the adoptive parents, the adoption agencies and the legal system including adoption attorneys. They are the ones with the money to hire lobbyists to impress upon legislators the need to keep secret adoptees records. It is a big money business.
My dad was never interested in knowing his origins. I tend to believe he was afraid of what he would find out as he didn’t much like my mom searching and warned her against opening a can of worms. For $100, the Salvation Army gave me one paragraph of information, which even so gave me something important – my dad’s full name at birth and that the Salvation Army had hired and transferred my paternal grandmother from Ocean Beach CA (near San Diego) to El Paso TX with my dad in tow. I do believe they coerced her into giving him up. They had legal custody at the time he was adopted. Also, my dad was adopted twice due to his adoptive mother’s divorce and remarriage. Therefore, he experienced a name change at the age of 8 (he also was originally adopted as a infant less than one year of age).
The aspect of my story that seemed to interest Ande the most was how being the child of adoptees had affected me personally. Adoption does not only affect the adoptee but their children as well and even more so when both of the parents are adoptees. There was only a black hole of familial and medical history information beyond my two parents. Just as my mom had made up a story of being stolen from the hospital in which she was born and transported to Memphis, I had made up a story that my dad was left in a basket on the doorstep of the Salvation Army in El Paso TX by an unwed Mexican national mother because her child was mixed race with a white American father.
I readily admit that I got lucky in my own attempt to learn the truth of my parents’ adoptions. Nothing we believed due to our lack of true information has proven to be true but the truth is definitely preferable. Not all efforts at learning an adoptee’s origins are as productive or end as happily as mine with acceptance by my genetic biological relations. Persistence and determination are important. And getting one’s DNA tested can make all the difference. I had mine tested at both Ancestry and 23 and Me. Also noted in the interview however, without actual names, just finding DNA matches does not yield very much useful information as my own story shows.
From an article in Intercountry Adoptee Voices by Jessica Davis. She is an American adoptive mother of a Ugandan daughter, who successfully returned to her daughter back to her Ugandan family. She is also a co-founder of Kugatta which brings families together who are impacted by Ugandan intercountry adoption.
Jessica writes – Every year I think I will not cry and it will not hurt as deeply as it once did. But each time I see all what was almost permanently taken from Namata, the pain returns just as deep (if not deeper) than the first time when I realized what I had participated in — and what needed to be done. I still have extended family members who refuse to admit that reuniting her with her Ugandan family was the RIGHT and JUST thing to do.
There are many people that believe it is okay to take children from LOVING families if these families are poor, living in the “wrong” country, practicing the “wrong” religion, or for a number of other irrational reasons. It is incredible how much money, time and resources contributes to the separation of families who should never be separated in the first place.
I will never stop speaking out against the wrongs being perpetuated within the intercountry adoption system. I won’t stop fighting for those that have been exploited by this system and I will certainly never forget the amazing little girl that came into my life and taught me to do better. As much as I miss her, my heartache pales in comparison to the joy I feel seeing her home with her family and thriving.
We did everything “right”. We used a highly rated adoption agency, followed all of the proper protocols and procedures and reported everything that was wrong as we discovered it. In fact, even though it has been proven our adoption agency was corrupt, Namata’s paperwork was fabricated, the Ugandan judge was bribed, the embassy interview showed Namata’s mother did not understand what adoption was and we were not told this at the time, our adoption of Namata from Uganda was and still is considered LEGAL. What does this tell you about intercountry adoption?
Namata didn’t get to go home because it was the right and just thing to do. Serena’s rights being violated and Namata’s best interests ignored were irrelevant by those that should have cared. The reason Namata got to go home and be reunited with her family was because Adam and I refused to accept that this was all okay or “for the better”.
Rarely do I hear anyone express concern for these injustices or what has been lost, rather people use good intentions gone awry to ignore these realities and press on as if nothing wrong has occurred.
If people won’t listen or can’t understand the problem at hand, maybe they will SEE it when they look at this family and realize all that was almost lost and there was literally NO reason for it at all.
Jessica did her research. Due to her findings, Jessica appealed to the authorities for an investigation into the American adoption agency, European Adoptions Consultants, Inc. (EAC) that had facilitated this adoption (I wrote about them in yesterday’s blog). As a result of that investigation, EAC was debarred and as of August 2019, one of their employees pled guilty to federal charges of visa fraud, wire fraud and bribing Ugandan judges and other officials in order to facilitate illegal adoptions abroad.
Many hopeful adoptive parents experience the uncertainty of whether that unwed young mother they have matched up with to take her newborn after birth will back out. And some do experience that outcome after spending tons of money on baby stuff in anticipation. Many of these are angry. Why are your family’s hopes so high that another family must fail to satisfy their hopes ? Me. Me. Me. My family. My family.
Because newborns are a scarce commodity bringing in huge profits for adoption agencies and lawyers, the field is competitive and the effort expensive. Here’s one example of the perspective of a whole family of hopeful adopters.
First comment on the above – Your family needs to change their expectations, and their expectations are not your responsibility. Its NOT your baby. Even if you get the placement. If Dad steps up that would be the BEST thing for that baby ♡ if dad can’t and you get the placement then that’s great that you are so well prepared and your heart and your families hearts are so open for that baby! ♡
It should be the reality that the father has to be PROVEN UNFIT before that child is taken into care. The father should NOT have to prove he is FIT to get his own child back! The child shouldn’t be with the woman complaining AT ALL, if there is a dad coming forward. I don’t care what his legal record is, as long as he isn’t a child abuser.
The hopeful adoptive mother is already feeling this way, before she has the baby ? What about the father ? He has to get a lawyer to even get this child back-during FORMATIVE BONDING MOMENTS that no amount of money can bring back. She gets those moments – but why? WHY!?
If there are concerns the father can’t parent, then society should support him with the resources they would have sent the foster parents – parenting classes, therapy, any assistance for supplies/etc. There should be no need for him to have to fight for HIS baby, the fact this is even a thing is appalling, and sadly, this is not a one off circumstance.
One adoptee shared this sad story – My poor sister had her 3rd child stolen out of her arms in the hospital and had to go to court postpartum (like that is on any woman’s to do list after delivering a baby and should be bonding) to get her baby back. The effects of this on her mental and emotional health was awful to watch-and triggering (cuz you know, she didn’t have the support she needed already). I was an adult by this time and had been removed/adopted into another states system and seeing them steal my nieces and nephew and have our family have to deal with all the lies of the courts again, well it just sent many of us into dark holes for many years.
Another comment – Personally, I don’t believe that anybody should get into fostering with the sole intention of potentially adopting a child. From everything that I learned in my classes and have read, the goal should always be to have a child return to their biological family if possible. In the event that is not a reality, then bringing a child into your life is the most beautiful thing that you can do for them. I’m a little concerned that this person may have been one of those people who is only interested in fostering newborns/babies…because they hope to adopt one.
Sharing the attitudes, language and culture surrounding the adoption industry are a primary purpose of my own in conveying information like this.
What could be wrong with a couple who has experienced infertility and has the financial means adopting the baby of an unwed mother ? Many people would see nothing wrong with this.
The problem is that behind this happily ever after scenario is a great deal of exploitation. In both of my parents’ adoptions, this was a definite factor, even though my mom’s parents were married. There is a great deal of money changing hands in the domestic infant adoption industry.
So, let’s consider domestic infant adoption. Only a newborn baby will do for these adoptive parents. They desire to only adopt a newborn baby. Let us judge this as selfishness. Maybe you as the hopeful adoptive parent just want to have the baby “experience.” Maybe you believe you’re getting a “blank slate” (that was what Georgia Tann who was involved in my mom’s adoption would tell her prospective parents). The truth is babies are NOT blank slates. Maybe you want the “as if born to” parenting experience (being there at the very beginning and you as parents being the only ones the child will ever know). Maybe you think this is as close as you can get to having your “own” child.
Some reality checks –
1. You are NOT needed. There are over 100 hopeful adoptive parents/singles/couples for every ONE newborn baby that is available to adopt. These babies are in high demand and sought after. They won’t age out of foster care, if you don’t adopt them. Furthermore, they have biological genetic families. Contrary to popular belief, there are very few women who just don’t want their kids. Imagine the desperation, fear and poverty you must live in to give away your own child. Adoption rates have gone down drastically over the last year. Why? Because families have received so much more financial help and resources due to COVID. With help and support, even more mothers are parenting their own children.
2. If you’re a hopeful adoptive parent glad that “support” from the government is stopping to increase your odds of getting a baby – you are not adopting because you are a good person.
3. If you’re praying for a woman to feel desperate enough to give you her baby – you are not adopting because you are a good person.
4. If you match pre-birth with a pregnant woman and coerce and manipulate her during her pregnancy – your desperation is showing and you are not adopting because you are a good person.
5. Agencies are a for profit business and often are not at all ethical. Know this, if you’re paying thousands of dollars to adopt through an agency – you are not adopting because you are a good person. You are adopting because you have the money to do so (or have raised the money through a Go Fund Me or other such platform).
6. A standard adoption practice is for the hopeful adoptive parents to be present in the delivery or hospital room. The agencies tell the birth mother that “this is just how it’s done.” Know this – it’s done to make it harder for the mom to change her mind, when she sees her child. If you’re there breathing down her neck while she is giving birth and in that moment when she first meets HER child – you are attempting rob her of the only precious moment with her baby that she may ever have. And maybe she WILL change her mind and her baby will be glad that she did.
7. If you make her feel guilty for wanting to keep her baby, the same way the agency will – you are exploiting her. If you employ an agency to call Child Protective Services on her (mind you, just standard adoption practice) when she wavers regarding giving her baby up to you, just to scare her into going forward – you are exploiting her.
8. So, the mom has changed her mind and is going to keep and parent her baby. Then, you fight against her decision by using the legal system or the agency does it on your behalf – you are exploiting her.
9. If the father is not on board with the adoption and his rights are being completely ignored – you are exploiting the father.
If any of this is true of your circumstances – you are guilty of exploiting a difficult time in someone’s life. A situation that will likely change for the better given time. You will leave a baby with lifelong trauma from sundering that child from its original family.
This woman ended up on the radar of my All Things Adoption group.
The very first comment was related to a baby shower photo Breanne Paquin posted with this remark – “Anchor centerpiece for a baby shower. Does she understand the implication of anchor baby? Wearing a dress with her stomach pooched out too. Makes you wonder if she was even going to tell the baby he was adopted.” “Anchor baby” is a derogatory term that insinuates these children are little more than pawns.
Someone else worries – I’m convinced she’s going to end up physically stealing someone’s baby if she can’t find an expectant mother to give her theirs, like it’s seriously concerning.
Another notes – If there were red flags why was she continuing to purchase a baby from someone she literally never met anyway? So much hate towards the biological mom, questioning if she existed at all. This is all her fault. And all the hundreds of thousands of comments boohooing with her and celebrating she’s on the news, meanwhile she’s deleting heartfelt comments trying to raise awareness.
Yet another notes the truth – Desperate people believe what they want, not what they see.
Regarding this woman’s self-promotion on social media, someone else wonders if she’s doing this as a go around. A way to make people offer her their babies. Jump the waiting list so to speak. Stand out from the crowd. And adds – she’s just another entitled white savior. They’re a dime a dozen.
The motive seems transparent to someone else – that’s my guess. If she was actually “traumatized” she wouldn’t be doing this. She is trying to get another baby. And the other person notes – maybe just “a” baby because this one didn’t exist. To which another says, yep a baby I’m sure any baby will do. Unfortunately some birth mother out there will probably do it for some internet clout alongside her.
It is sadly noted – why can these people be so blind – acting like the money is the issue here. “Sorry you lost so much money so you can’t PURCHASE your wanted baby.”
And I am one with the others – we will change the narrative, of that I have no doubt.
Missing Mom 