Separating The Two

I received a nice message from an adoptive mother who found this blog. I do try to be realistic about adoption. But for adoption, I simply would not exist. Both of my parents were adoptees. Also, both of my sisters gave up babies for adoption – both of these now grown individuals – a niece and a nephew – have met the family who’s genetic inheritance is part of their own. I am glad for these reunions.

An adoptee I respect wrote – I have recently been reminded of the importance to distinguish adoption from the industry and criminal practices that have confused and conflated the two. To regain clarity, it does start with recognizing this distinction between adoption and the industry.

He continues – The challenge comes when we start dismantling the way modern adoption works. The very definition states “the fact or act of legally taking someone else’s child and raising it as your own.” This definition does not identify orphaned child, falsifying birth records, coercive tactics of separating the child from their origins, baby farming, child harvesting, colonization, cultural eradication, and war crimes, leaving it conveniently vague as “legally taking” which all the above has been identified as adoption.

Domestically, foster care is used as a means to adopt, where states have been incentivized to remove children and terminate parental rights which makes them eligible for adoption. Again, this is due to the industry and practices of recruitment, supply and demand, and sustainability of a waning human market.

The majority of laws and policies are focused on making these practices more streamlined and ethical. Curious why this is an issue when it comes to child protection and child welfare, especially since it has been well documented for generations. Books like The Child Catchers, The Girls Who Went Away, American Baby, Relinquished among others have brought up adoption as an industry in great detail.

The problem that remains is how the US continues to be a stronghold for the industry. Those in leadership positions have used pro-industry propaganda: “adoption is an option” and “best interest of the child because it gives them a better life” – continuing to conflate adoption with the industry and its criminal practices.

I have been saying that we need to call it for what it really is… only then can we begin to offer solutions. The first step to problem solving is identifying the problem. To your point, adoption is not the problem, it’s how adoptions are being conducted. Removing children from living parents and relatives through force, threat of force, abduction, kidnapping, coercion, deception, falsifying documents, transporting and “rehoming” and exploitation for profit are all elements of another term: trafficking. Sadly, the vast majority simply refuse to acknowledge this despite the overwhelming evidence. Even with admitting the truth, people argue “but not all adoptions are trafficking” – but we’re no longer talking about adoptions at this point are we?

I want also to share this from a kinship adoptive parent – I feel like a lot of this comes from our consumer mentality (as a nation). Because we’re such capitalists, we think that money is what makes one home better than another. Instead of supporting mothers who are struggling, we often perpetuate the lie that their child will be better with someone who can afford to give them more. So little of the industry centers around children and what’s best for them. Over and over, studies show that mom/family is best whenever possible, but our foster and adoption system don’t follow science.

The adoptee above responded to this with – children (born and unborn) are the focus of the industry as the products/commodities it’s selling. The propaganda diverts attention from this crime by focusing on the buyers and making it into a human rights issue of reproductive rights.

Targeted Marketing

I’m always short on time to get these blogs done on Tuesdays. Yesterday, an essay from a site I’ve appreciated in the past got my attention and so I saved it to comment on it for today. That site Adoption & Birth Mothers feature Musings of the Lame is what I am sharing with you today LINK>Re-Marketing Adoption.

Marketing makes use of “a series of calculated moves, designed to appeal to the targeted end users, and reached a desired outcome that benefits the business. It really helps to understand adoption as an industry when you apply the lenses of a marketer. To begin, let’s just remove the idea that adoption is here for some altruistic reason like “proving homes to children that need them” in some vein of social services or community outreach or as part of the metal health field or anything like that. We need to look at adoption like it is; a business that has supply and demand and profits and losses.

An adoption agency pays it bills through the acquisition of “fees“. These adoption fees are paid for by the perspective adoptive couple for the services rendered by the adoption agency. These are various application fees, home study, counseling, court and legal fees, attorneys, paper filings, plus the hospital and doctors fees, travel costs, and various other “birthmother expenses”.

We know that the US average “cost” for a voluntary domestic infant adoption runs anywhere from 10 to 60K. At the end of the day, a “successful” adoption results in a baby being relinquished by one family and handed over to another family who pays the “fees” for this service to be rendered.

In business terms, that makes the adoptive parent the customers or end consumer who pay for the service of transferring over the parental rights of a baby. The now up-for-grabs parental rights, are, in turn, the product. The writer note’s yes, we can also say very easily that the adoptee is the final product, but I know they don’t like to be treated like that, so I am not going to call them that for this purpose.

Bottom line, without the adoptive parents being willing to pay this money for these services to buy the product, the agencies would not have a business, so they MUST make adoption appealing to the final consumer, the adoptive parents.

You can read more at the link above.

The Goal Is Reunification

Officially it is. However, too many foster parents do it as a means of adopting a child in a market with limited availability. As one former foster care youth notes – “I keep telling everyone reunification is lip service and the younger kids never get reunited.”

The New Yorker has an article out in collaboration with ProPublica – When Foster Parents Don’t Want to Give Back the Baby by Eli Hager. The subtitle reads – In many states, lawyers are pushing a new legal strategy that forces biological parents to compete for custody of their children.

In this story, a typical couple who’s infant ends up in foster care, actually decided to do the “hard work” to get their baby returned to them (the infant had been placed with foster parents). The couple had met every one of the judge’s requirements, and then some. They’d tested negative on more than thirty consecutive drug screens between them, including hair-follicle tests that indicated how long they’d been clean. They had continued to visit their son weekly, even when due to the pandemic that meant Zoom. The father took a job as a maintenance man for the county, installing plumbing in low-income housing and mowing the fairgrounds. The mother quit working in a bar and began delivering mail for the U.S. Postal Service plus manning the deli counter at a grocery store on her days off. They spent much of what they earned replacing carpets, repainting walls, and fogging air ducts to remove any lingering trace of meth from their one-story house. They had completed parenting lessons and were in therapy, getting support for their sobriety and learning how to be better partners to each other. In other words, the foster-care system, whose goal under federal law is to be temporary, in service of a family reuniting, seemed to be working.

Then, after being sober for 6 months, another requirement was added – an expert evaluation of how well they interacted with their son. What they didn’t know was that they would be competing for him. His foster parents, hoping to adopt him, had just weeks earlier embraced an increasingly popular legal strategy, known as foster-parent intervening, that significantly improved their odds of winning the child.

The background is this – it has become harder and harder to adopt a child, especially an infant, in the United States. Adoptions from abroad plummeted from twenty-three thousand in 2004 to fifteen hundred last year, largely owing to stricter policies in Asia and elsewhere, and to a 2008 Hague Convention treaty designed to encourage adoptions within the country of origin and to reduce child trafficking. Domestically, as the stigma of single motherhood continues to wane, fewer young moms are voluntarily giving up their babies, and private adoption has, as a result, turned into an expensive waiting game. Fostering to adopt is now Plan C, but it, too, can be a long process, because the law requires that nearly all birth parents be given a chance before their rights are terminated. Intervening has emerged as a way for aspiring adopters to move things along and have more of a say in whether the birth family should be reunified.

Intervenors can file motions, enter evidence, and call and cross-examine witnesses to argue that a child would be better off staying with them permanently, even if the birth parents—or other family members, such as grandparents—have fulfilled all their legal obligations to provide the child with a safe home. Regarding our unfortunate couple, the evaluator who is a social worker reported “Neither parent has the kind of relationship with (their son) that will help him feel safe in a new situation.” The mother was bewildered when she read the report. Didn’t the evaluator understand how hard it is to bond with a baby you’ve only been allowed to see a few hours a week. Why was the baby’s eye contact with her described as lacking “affective involvement”? She also opposed the baby being returned to his parents on the grounds that the foster-parent intervenors had reported that he pitched fits and struggled to eat and sleep after seeing them.

It turned out this social worker had a long-standing independent agenda: helping foster parents succeed in intervening and permanently claiming the children they care for. No wonder some people feel the system is rigged against them. Relying heavily on this expert assessment, the county moved to permanently terminate the parents parental rights. In the 1950’s, the British psychoanalyst John Bowlby posited that being separated from a maternal figure in the first years of life warps a child’s future ability to form close relationships. The the American Academy of Pediatrics has concluded that kids who grow up with their birth family or kin are less likely than those who are adopted or are raised in non-kinship foster care to experience long-term separation trauma, behavioral and mental-health problems, and questions of identity. It’s not acceptable in most family courts to explicitly argue that, if you have more material (financial) advantages to provide for a child, you should get to adopt him or her.

Ultimately, even though the couple had complied with their treatment plans, the filing concluded, their son had been in foster care for three years and needed “the permanence that only adoption can afford him.” However, his parents fought back. They filed an Open Records Act request, and soon received dozens of invoices. In all, their tiny, unaffluent county had spent more than three hundred and ten thousand dollars on their son’s case. An internal investigation found improprieties in the handling of the case. The trial was cancelled, and, the county finally dropped its case. Then, his mother joined other birth families in testifying in favor of new state legislation that would give biological relatives more priority in foster-care cases and prevent foster parents from intervening, until they had cared for a child for a year. In August, that law went into effect.

There are a lot more details in the article, if you are further interested. PS it is possible to get around the paywall with a bit of persistence and read the article in full.

Ethics of Destroying Families

All You Have Is Love documentary

Infant adoption has long been big business in the U.S. A typical domestic infant adoption runs between $40,000 and $70,000. Adoption entities – crisis pregnancy centers, agencies, lawyers, social workers and independent facilitators – may all profit from a finalized adoption. And the demand is huge! Each year, close to two million hopeful adoptive parents throw their well-crafted picture-perfect profiles into the adoption arena, hoping to be the chosen ones.

The documentary intends to explore, through interviews with birth family members, industry professionals and reform advocates, how the adoption process exploits expectant mothers. while providing infants to those hoping to adopt.

LINK>All You Have Is Love (hopefully coming in the Spring of 2024) is a project by Lisa Elaine Scott at Seed & Spark. She is a writer, video journalist and life-long human rights activist. The documentary will explore the challenges of an unplanned pregnancy and expose the tactics used to convince resource-less women to relinquish their babies. Most people assume that adoption is about finding parents for children when, in fact, the industry’s focus is on finding children for parents.

Is it ethical to build one family by destroying another ?

However, fewer than 1% of all pregnancies result in adoption. This means that most hoping to adopt will not. This also means that a lot of money is left on the table. So how does an industry survive with an inadequate supply? The answer: Rebrand with the promise of a “modern adoption.” Then find resource-less women and convince them that their babies are better off being raised by someone with more to give.

The documentary intends to identify the various entities in the pipeline, expose the myth of “open” adoption, and present community-based solutions and evaluate proposed regulations and reforms that will place the focus on family preservation.

Do watch the YouTube for an eye-opening view of what is really going on in adoptionland.

Really Missing The Point

This graphic image was posted in another group than the one indicated. It was posted in a group for all people who have an experience of adoption. I have learned a lot there. In the beginning, I didn’t know squat. I will admit it. Both of my parents were adoptees, both of my sisters gave up babies to adoption and even in my own life, I unintentionally lost physical (but not legal) custody of my first born daughter. All of this, I have learned, is at least somewhat, if not directly, related to my parents having been taken from their original mothers in the first year of their life.

So I did come into this particular group believing that adoption was a good thing. I got smacked down right out of the gate in getting to know this group. I shut up and started learning. One adoptive parent who adopted the children in her family out of the foster care system system, admits similarly – “There are a lot of things in this group that are hard to read. I will admit that my feathers were ruffled at first and thought I should leave. I’m so glad I didn’t because I have learned a lot that I hope will make me a better adoptive parent. The truth is spoken here. Sometimes the truth hurts but maybe that just means we need to learn to be comfortable being uncomfortable.”

One adoptee said – You know what pisses me off the most – about how they claim how “mean” adoptees are? The adoptive parents and foster parents that think that they can just “erase” the fact that the child was not born to them. Then, they think that when adoptees correct them, and say that our past SHOULDN’T and CAN’T be erased, we’re being mean. Like seriously, you want a “beautiful and life changing” relationship, but when somebody that has experienced what adoption is, and explains how to change it, it’s met with closed ears and we’re told “not every adoption is traumatic.” It’s absolutely infuriating. We’re trying to educate you, but honestly, you just want to continue to believe the stereotype and stigma that “adoption is all butterflies and rainbows” and it’s not. It’s just not.

One says – the anger is being treated as the minority opinion among adoptees, a voice that doesn’t matter and shouldn’t be as loud as that of grateful adoptees, because it is abusive to adoptive parents or hopeful adoptive parents.

To which one adds this clarification – I am more than my anger, and my anger doesn’t mean what I say is just out of anger. Calling people angry paints them as emotional and irrational, claims they see the world through a distorted lens or may make rash decisions. Being “angry” is a intentional mischaracterization.

No, when I’m angry, it’s because the research shows adopted people are suffering but “oh it’s just angry adoptees who had bad experiences projecting their trauma.” I’m angry because adoption in the US is a multibillion-dollar industry that commodifies the wombs and children of people in crisis, but hopeful adoptive parents don’t want to hear how they contribute to the demand for a domestic supply of infants. I’m angry when arrogant adoptive parents seem to think their kid’s experience will be the one that escapes trauma but they sound EXACTLY like my parents, and they don’t want to hear that.

I’m angry when people think there’s a magical formula where their kid will never have any hard questions for them, never develop any complicated emotions about adoption, never want to know where they came from. I’m angry when people assume any curiosity about our roots means SOMETHING about how we feel about our adoptive families. I’m angry when the people who could have a direct impact on the quality of an adopted child’s life come in here – expecting they won’t be told they have to learn and grow and change.

blogger’s note – A book consistently recommended in the all things adoption group (and one I have read myself) is Nancy Newton Verrier’s – The Primal Wound. What makes her unique is firstly – she is the mother of two daughters, one adopted and one her biological, genetic child. She also has a master’s degree in clinical psychology and is in private practice with families and children for whom adoption is a major component of their reason for seeking her out. She has both – heard much and experienced much – directly.

Buyer’s Beware

LINK> Elle magazine has an article – Inside America’s Adoption Fraud Industry – by Sarah Green. Stories like those shared in that article are not new to people involved in adoption related communities. And generally speaking, the internet has brought not only more contact for many of us with family and friends, plus a wealth of information we may not have encountered otherwise, but also the danger of being taken in a scam. If you are thinking of adopting this way, do read the article for examples of red flags and safe ways to proceed.

One couple in the story spent dozens of hours and thousands of dollars perfecting every detail for their baby’s homecoming — from building and furnishing his nursery, to stocking frozen breastmilk and baby supplies. Arriving in Houston Texas, instead of a baby they met disappointment. Meeting with their lawyer on a deserted restaurant patio, “All I can remember is our lawyer sitting us down and opening with, ‘I think this is a scam. I’m so sorry’.” Deep down, they knew he was right.

Sadly, this deception is not uncommon. America’s public adoption industry includes high infant price tags, often years-long wait times and a frequent lack of autonomy. This has prompted thousands of couples to look into alternative resources, such as social media, in order to take personal control. In America, privately-handled adoptions are not outlawed as they are in many other countries. This unprecedented shift towards reliance on a federally unregulated market has created the perfect breeding ground for scammers wanting to exploit hopeful adoptive parents.

Social media adoptions represent a significant trend where prospective parents and birth mothers locate each other independently, with little or no professional assistance. Only 18,300 babies are voluntarily relinquished for adoption annually, yet over a million American families hope to adopt each year — this translates to 55 families vying for each adoptable infant. In 2022, adoption ads have sprung up all over Instagram and TikTok, featuring strategic hashtags and polished profiles of eager couples promoting themselves as the perfect parents for any available newborn.

The scale of adoption fraud has not been quantified. There are no publicly available statistics on the prevalence of this crime. One FBI investigator believes that adoption fraud is as prevalent as any other financial crime. There are also elements of shame and hurt that prevent victims from admitting what has happened to them. It appears to be an under-reported crime.

Social media has allowed this type of criminal activity to transcend state borders. Whatever legal or procedural safeguards a state imposes, the internet can render them meaningless. This makes it nearly impossible for victims to pursue legal action. However, a Georgia state law passed in July 2021 made both adoption fraud and deception illegal. If someone allows you to expend money on a reasonable reliance of a false adoption plan, it is now a prosecutable offense.

There is even a Facebook group dedicated to LINK> Ending Adoption Scams. Their ever-growing list of known scammers has become an invaluable resource for countless prospective parents.

Ethics In Adoption

From an adoption community post –

There is an economy at work in adoption.

Let’s begin with adoption agencies –

An adoption agency connects hopeful adoptive parents with expectant mothers in crisis who may wish to relinquish their child for adoption. In the process of negotiating, the adoption agency receives money from the hopeful adoptive parents (in most cases), and sometimes (rarely) from expectant mothers. The money is used to pay for the associated legal fees, the matching service, and sometimes for care for the expectant mother. This money also pays the salaries of the agency employees. This is true even if the agency is listed as a “not for profit” agency. The employees, social workers, and directors are not working for free.

Hopeful adoptive parents reach out to agencies for help in finding an available child (usually an infant) to adopt. There are 40 hopeful adoptive parents (couples/families) for every infant available for adoption. That is an estimate, some say it may be as high as 1,000 hopeful adoptive parents for every infant who becomes available for adoption.

If you look on websites and in social media, an expectant mother who indicates anywhere that she is considering adoption, will receive hundreds, often thousands, of responses from people who would like to adopt her baby. The demand far exceeds the supply of infants available for adoption. In the leaked Supreme Court draft written by Alito he makes a note of that lack of supply.

So, let’s apply the law of supply and demand –

In order for an agency (which, whether for profit or not for profit, stands to make money from the transaction) to keep itself in business, the agency must provide a certain percentage of infants for the demand. When supply is low and demand is high, coercion enters into these transactions. Agencies must obtain children for their market and are willing to do whatever it takes to supply that market. Social workers and agency contacts do whatever it takes to convince an expectant mother that one of their adoptive couples is better for her child, than she could ever be.

If she receives any money from the agency to cover her expenses but then decides she wants to parent, they will call her a “scammer” or a “fraud.” In many states there is no revocation period during which a woman who has given birth but indicated she is willing to give up her baby can change her mind. Those are considered “adoption-friendly” states Some have short revocation periods. In many cases, social workers pressure expectant mothers to hand their babies over and sign their termination of parental rights, while the new mother is still within the first 48 hours after birth.

Coercive tactics are part and parcel of domestic infant adoption. International infant adoption is even more coercive and heinous because some parents are not even told that their legal rights to their child are being severed.

So, what about the children in foster care ? They’ve already had their parental rights severed. Some hopeful adoptive parents believe they are only motivated to help these unfortunate children. But there’s an economy at work there too. You can be forgiven for not knowing that, thanks to the many promotions of this method of adoption by various states. A federal stipend is paid to foster parents for children of all ages, from under a year old until they age out of the foster care system at 18.

In 1997, the Adoption and Safe Families Act (ASFA) went into effect. Its purpose was to achieve permanency for children who had been in foster care for a long period of time by having them adopted. The intent of the law was good: permanent placements for children who had been abused, neglected, or abandoned. Its implementation, however, has proven faulty. It has amplified the corruption that has always been endemic within the Child Protective Services system.

The ASFA provides federal stipends to state agencies for each adoption they process out of foster care. Because the states receive money for having children adopted out of foster care, they now have a financial incentive to take children from actually SAFE families and place them into foster homes, so that they can be adopted. The more recent Family First Prevention Services Act includes federal funds to pay for services aimed at preventing the use of foster care by providing better support to parents at risk of losing custody of their children.

Regarding the current concept of “Foster to Adopt” –

Foster parents already receive a generous stipend from the state for caring for the state’s ward. Often, a foster parent will even receive an infant fresh from the hospital due to “risk of future harm” from their parents. These infants are placed with foster parents whose aim is to adopt. Both the foster parents (who wanted to adopt an infant) and the state child protection agency (which receives federal monies for every adoption from foster care) stand to gain from the adoption of this infant “out of foster care.”

The economic implications of adoption are the most straightforward and fact-based way to address whether ethical adoption is even possible. To whatever degree this all matters to you personally – consider the social impact of adoption and the reasons why adoption is considered unethical based upon social reasons.

Include in your considerations why children are removed by protective agencies simply due to perceived neglect caused only by poverty. Consider how it is possible that stipend money paid to them somehow makes foster caregivers more fit to parent than the biological parents. Look into the statistics for suicide and mental health issues among adoptees. Contemplate why laws promote adoption rather than legal guardianship.

Adoption is a contract made between two people – in which a third person is subjected to its ramifications – without their consent. Thank you for contemplating the ethical ramifications of adoption and the use by the state of foster care to increase adoptions.

Short And To The Point

I wanted to make a point that I did not in yesterday’s blog – Conveying Personhood to Embryos. Who is motivated to adopt babies in the United States ? Infertile couples. Due to the overturning of Roe v Wade, there is now much more uncertainty now upon the best path to parenthood for such couples – that is – using IVF and having children with one or both of the parental inputs donated. If this avenue becomes inaccessible (as abortion already had in much of these United States, even though federally protected), more of these infertile couples will be seeking to adopt any available baby.

My husband and I considered adoption to build our family but decided against the uncertainties of taking on someone else’s baby. That was even before I knew my own adoptee parents’ origin stories. In the 5 years since I started uncovering that story and along the way learning so much more about the trauma associated with separating a child from its biological parents, I have turned against adoption for the most part, even though I owe my very existence to that method of creating a family on the parts of my adoptive grandparents.

We know that increasing the supply of domestic infants available for adoption factored into several of the Supreme Court Justices thinking, I have to wonder if they considered further pressure on that supply if assisted reproduction becomes more expensive and/or inaccessible.

Fairy Tales

Today’s story – I have been trying to become a mom for four years. I have had four miscarriages, five IVF cycles and more surgeries than I care to count, and I just keep getting older. As I come to grips with the likelihood that my husband and I may not be able to have biological children, I thought that adoption could be a beautiful way to have a family, but I definitely don’t want anyone to be exploited or hurt as a result.

An honest response – I am sorry for your loss suffering from infertility. I’m sorry the adoption industry preys upon your grief and got your hopes up about adoption being some kind of beautiful alternative to having your own child. I’m certain you didn’t mean to be self-centered about it. You’re just trying to work through it. You have been told adoption could soothe your pain.

Unfortunately the sweet serendipitous miracle situation you hope for is the same as 40+ other couples desire. You all want a guilt free, uncomplicated scenario. That’s the fairy tale the adoption industry would like to sell you. But it is inherently extremely complicated and painful for children who are used this way. There is no way around it. Obtaining a stranger’s kid will not fix the hole left in your heart from infertility. I’m so sorry.

The Exploitation Problem

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.