Strollerderby : international adoption

Paper Girl Delivers Food and Shelter to Haitian Family

Shannon LC Cate — Tue, 26 May 2009 13:07:00 GMT

Taphatna Duncan is a normal sixth-grader with a paper route. But she does something extraordinary with her $100/month in earnings. She supports her family.

Taphatna was adopted at age seven from the "orphanage" where her biological father had taken her when he and his family could no longer afford to care for her. Her Canadian adoptive mother, Deborah Duncan, has four children, three of whom are adopted, and is an adopted person herself. She met Taphatna at age five, while on a trip to help deliver food for a relief agency. After volunteering in Haiti for years, she had decided to adopt a Haitian child in need of a home.

Last year, she received an email with the news that Taphatna's father had died, bankrupting her mother and younger brother with funeral expenses. They had been living on the street until someone was able to contact Deborah. The Duncans quickly sent money for food and the funeral and solicited help to find them housing. But rent in Haiti must be paid a year in advance, so the Duncans also borrowed $600 to rent a home for Taphatna's family. Now Taphatna is working to pay back that loan and earn next year's rent as well.

Mom, Deborah, helps Taphatna deliver the papers twice weekly and has organized a walkathon to raise money to help Haitians in poverty. To join in or otherwise help, visit To Hope For Haiti.

The Orphan Trade and International Adoption

Madeline Holler — Tue, 12 May 2009 19:26:00 GMT

E.J. Graff has investigated and written extensively about international adoption, and what she has found is hardly a feel-good story of child rescue. Rather, she concludes that hopeful parents from wealthy nations (the U.S., European countries, Australia) have created a market where babies are bought and sold.

Here's what she has to say, in a New York Times editorial, about international adoption and Madonna's latest attempt to add to her family.

But in trying to adopt a child who already has a family, Madonna is inadvertently exposing the seamier underside of international adoption: the fact that, too often, the amounts of money that Western adoption agencies spend in poor countries is helping to defraud, coerce or kidnap children away from families that wanted to raise them to adulthood.

Graff writes that happy families created in the adoptive countries have, in countless instances, left anguished ones in search of their missing children. Even more heartbreaking is that families who search for -- and, against all odds, eventually find -- their stolen children aren't necessarily reunited with them. So has been the case of a number of children born in Nepal and adopted in Spain.

In a slideshow on Slate, Graff tells the stories of some of the families who were affected by an often corrupt international adoption system.

So how has this happened? With millions of abandoned babies and toddlers throughout the world, how could a baby-selling market thrive? For starters, those millions of babies? Total myth, Graff writes.

From Slate:

Westerners have been sold a myth that poor countries have millions of healthy abandoned infants and toddlers who need homes. But it's not so. In poor countries, as in rich ones, healthy babies are rarely orphaned or given up—except in China, where girls have been abandoned as a result of its draconian one-child policy.

Yes, tens of thousands of needy children around the world—many languishing in horrible institutions—do need families. But most children who need new homes are older than 5, sick, disabled, or somehow traumatized. Quite reasonably, most prospective Western parents don't feel prepared to take on those more challenging kids, preferring to wait in line for healthy infants or toddlers.

The result is a gap between supply and demand—a gap that's closed by Western money. Adoption agencies spend sums in-country that are enormous compared with local per-capita incomes. In poor countries without effective regulation or protections for the poor, that can induce locals to buy, coerce, defraud, and kidnap healthy children away from their birth families for sale into international adoption.

To use the language of globalization, orphans are sometimes "manufactured": Children with families are stripped of their identities so that Westerners can fill their homes....

Families who lost their children aren't the only ones who suffered. More than one adoptive family has found out -- once their child learned English -- the circumstances they truly left behind, including a mother, father and siblings.

Still, others argue that shutting down international adoption ignores the needs of children who truly are abandoned or facing a childhood of institutional living. Four others who work in adoption or study the laws and consequences weigh in on the international adoption in the Times "Room for Debate" feature. Some argue, like Graff, that a lack of oversight and regulation has created this baby market. Others defend Madonna and other families who look overseas for children, saying forget politics, forget money, these kids just need a loving home.

Be sure to check out antiracistparent.com for arguments against Graff's conclusions.

Second Parent Adoption Legislation Moving in Michigan

Crocheted Doll Gives Birth

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Mother-to-Be: Save The Baby's Life, Not Mine

They Say: Episiotomy Rate ... Cut!

Photos: NY Times, Slate

They Say: Early Childhood Stress Negatively Affects Health for Life

Shannon LC Cate — Wed, 04 Feb 2009 15:30:00 GMT

Parents of children adopted as older babies or toddlers from institutional care settings have a lot on their plate. They have to assess the child's immediate physical needs which could include malnutrition, undiagnosed diseases and developmental gaps, all depending on the quality of care the child has been receiving and for how long. In addition to these physical concerns, adoptive parents of older children must work hard to create safe, nurturing environments and healthy emotional attachments for their kids.

The good news is that thousands of parents do this all quite successfully every year.

The bad news is that researchers are beginning to suspect that even once these things are addressed, children who began life in stressful conditions--particularly institutional care--have ongoing, lifelong health concerns.

The alarming study found that:

"Even the health of children adopted before the age of 3 who then spent more than a decade with their new families was no better than the health of children who had spent their entire childhoods in abusive families."

The study was done at the Child Emotion Laboratory in the University of Wisconsin-Madison Waisman Center by Seth Pollak, Elizabeth Shirtcliff and Christopher Coe. It measured immunity by comparing teens adopted from institutions as young children, teens raised in abusive families and teens from a control group. By comparing the teens' levels of antibodies for the herpes simplex virus, they found that children living in abusive situations and children living in healthy families but with a history of institutionalization had similar immune responses to the latent virus.

The researchers conclude that children under stress have compromised immune systems, putting them at risk for other health problems throughout their lives.

Hopefully, learning about this phenomenon will help doctors whose patients have these kinds of early childhood stress histories. Researcher, Christopher Coe advises the thousands of international and foster-adoptive parents out there to "go into adoption with your eyes wide open...[and] love these children. Give them all the support they need."

Disabled Children Removed from Care of "Compulsive" Foster Mom

image: gleasonworks.com

Intercountry Adoption Figures Fall in 2007

Shannon LC Cate — Fri, 21 Nov 2008 00:30:00 GMT

According to the State Department, "foreign" (AKA international or inter-country) adoptions by United States citizens fell by 12% in the past year. The all-time peak in foreign adoptions was 2004 when 22,884 children were brought home by adoptive parents. Last year, only 17,483 foreign adoptions were completed.

Fators leading to this decrease include increased restrictions on foreign parents wishing to adopt from China, as well as increased domestic adoption in that country, which, throughout the 1990's and early 2000's grew to be the largest "sending" country in U.S. foreign adoptions. Similar factors in Russia have decreased adoptions from that country, which has been in the number two spot recently. Guatemala, third on the top-three list has recently frozen new adoptions to overhaul its system and clean up unscrupulous adoption professionals. Similarly, Vietnam, another popular sending country has recently halted the process for adoptions out of country, leaving some waiting families in the lurch.

Ethiopia has been growing in popularity as a sending country in the past year, with a relatively smooth and predictable adoption process.

In spite of the visibility of foreign adoption in the media, the actual percentage of foreign adoptions of all adoptions in the United States annually is roughly 15-20%, with far and away the majority of adoptions being kinship adoptions in which a grandparent adopts a wayward child's offspring or a step-parent adopts a spouse's child from a previous relationship.

DNA Test Proves Baby Sold for Adoption

Madeline Holler — Thu, 24 Jul 2008 19:01:00 GMT

Adoptions from Guatemala were abruptly halted in May to give officials a chance to investigate the country's troubled $100 million adoption industry. Now, DNA tests have confirmed that at least one chid was stolen and eventually sold for adoption, a practice some have suggested is widespread.

The girl, reported stolen more than a year ago, was found by her birth mother recently while the little one was nearing the end of the process of being adopted by an American couple.

From MSNBC.com:

The baby's mother, Ana Escobar, said armed men locked her in a storage closet at the family's shoe store north of Guatemala City and took the 6-month-old.

"When I got out, my daughter was gone," she told the AP in an earlier interview about the case.

She spent months searching hospitals and orphanages, looking for the child.

One day the mother was sitting at the National Adoption Council's office hoping to review documents that might show her daughter in the system, when she saw a toddler that looked like her daughter being carried into an office.

Escobar convinced officials to take a new DNA test, even though the DNA in the girl's records did not match Escobar's. The results came in: a match. The girls has been returned to her birth mother and all doctors and judges and lawyers, as well as the adoption agency, are under investigation.

Guatemala was known for relatively quick and easy adoptions, one reason it was second only to China in the number of children adopted internationally before the May freeze. But many inside the country -- and some international agencies -- believe there is rampant abuse in the system. In May, a dozen adoptions in process were canceled. Reports of stolen children have also grown in that country over the years.

Photo: guatemalanadoptionsblog.com

Try Before You Buy: The Maybe Adoption Process

Madeline Holler — Tue, 08 Jul 2008 12:32:00 GMT

Does the thought of adopting a child -- particularly an older one -- leave you in fear of making a huge, huge mistake?

A new program now lets you try out a kid before signing on the bottom line.

The program places children with families for five weeks over the summer -- no commitment. The child returns to his or her home country and families can then decide whether to pursue permanent placement and adoption.

This summer meet-and-greet program is an effort to get older kids, from 5 to 15 years old, into families. Many people fear potential problems that may come with older kids. This program seems like a win.

CNN featured one boy from Taiwan and his summer visit with a family in the U.S. The family is now working on adopting him.

But the mind kind of involuntarily migrates to the sadder cases, the ones where things didn't quite work out, which this peppy piece of reportage doesn't feature.

Still. At least some hard to place kids are getting permanent homes.

Photo: commonwealthadoption.org

Strollerderby Playdate: Getting Orphanage News From China

Amy Kuras — Fri, 16 May 2008 21:02:00 GMT

This week's horrific earthquake in China is bringing heartbreaking stories of all kinds, but some that especially hit parents right in the gut – the collapsing schools, for example, that killed hundreds of kids who were their families' only child thanks to the country's one child policy.
And for people trying to become parents, or add to their families, through an international adoption from China the news must be especially upsetting. There are a number of orphanages in the earthquake zone near Chengdu in Sichuan province, although thankfully there have been no reports of injuries to children at any of the welfare institutions.
I was pointed to China Adopt Talk by a friend who's currently in the process of adopting a special-needs boy from an orphanage in another part of China. They have frequent updates on the status of all the orphanages in the affected zone. It seems to be a pretty good source of information on the whole process of adopting from China.
The Half the Sky Foundation provides preschools and help finding foster homes to children in Chinese orphanages. According to China Adopt Talk, they are on the ground helping out with relief efforts and are posting daily earthquake updates on their site.
I know that adoptive parents are not considered real in some quarters, but these parents to be waiting to meet their children halfway around the world feel this disaster very keenly. Let's all keep a good thought in whatever way you choose to do that, and try to help if you can.

Photo: Half the Sky

Madonna's Malawi/UNICEF Fundraiser Gets Criticized

Madeline Holler — Thu, 07 Feb 2008 22:57:00 GMT

Critics say Madonna's recent fundraiser at the U.N. was actually a Gucci store opening attention-getter in disguise and also an indirect promotion of Hollywood's favorite mystic religious center. These same critics think the U.N. should never have allowed the event, which raised more than $3.7 million for relief efforts in Malawi, the country of origin for Madonna's adopted son, and UNICEF.

Yes, but she brought Lourdes. We never see Lourdes! Doesn't that count for something?

From UPI:

The Guardian said Internet bloggers and some mainstream media outlets have blasted the United Nations, claiming the event -- which was presided over by pop star Madonna -- was used to drum up publicity for the Kabbalah Centre and a new Gucci shop in New York.

They say it was inappropriate because half of the funds would go to Raising Malawi, an organization run by the Kabbalah Centre. The rest of the money was donated to UNICEF (weren't they critical of Madonna's adoption, by the way?)

Still, where's the critics' sense of fun? The turnout was all star and loaded with celeb moms and dads. Jezebel's got pics of the best and worst dressed and pics of Gwen Stefani and a very preg. Jennifer Lopez.

Photo: via Jezebel

Ranch for Adopted Kids Gone Wild

Madeline Holler — Mon, 21 Jan 2008 23:02:00 GMT

This is one of those things where you're happy that there are people out there doing good things so that you can live in complete and comfortable oblivion about the problem they live with and deal with and try to make better on a daily basis: a ranch for adopted children whose desperate families cannot handle them.

It turns out, a statistically small but growing number of adoptive families -- particularly those who adopted internationally -- are pushed to the point of wanting to give up their adopted child. They realize that their adoption agencies glossed over or falsified their child's history of abuse or living conditions, all of which wind up contributing to abusive and dangerous behaviors the children start exhibiting in their tweens and teens.

Which is how Ranch for Kids in rural Montana got started and also why it's therapy of hard ranch work and responsibility will likely be needed for years to come.

The Ranch isn't a first stop for adoptive families whose children are going through hard times, of course.

The LA Times:

Most had already logged countless hours in psychiatric units, wilderness programs and residential treatment centers, searching for answers to their disturbing behaviors. The goal is that, through intense intervention and structure, their conduct will improve enough that they can go home.

But some will never return, moving on to new families. They are part of an expanding phenomenon known as adoption disruption -- the official term for parents attempting to return their adoptive children.

It's heartbreaking, as is this story in Newsweek a while back of an American adoptive mother who is in prison for beating her adopted daughter to death. Also a tragedy, also the result of a lack of real information about her girl's early childhood history, which may have been helpful in understanding and treating her subsequent behaviors.

The ranch, started by an American woman who lived and worked in Russia, where she also adopted her daughter, has a pretty good sucess rate. Of the 150 kids that have gone through the program, which is not cheap, only six have gotten the boot (all, incidentally, within the last year). One third of the kids go back home after their stay at the ranch, another third, usually teens, go on to Job Corps, a government program that trains them for work. The last third, sadly, wind up being relinquished by their parents.

Sometimes, the task of telling a child he or she will be joining a new family falls to Bill Sutley, an electrical engineer by training. "I just say: 'This is not your fault. You have a screwed-up brain.' And then I do my best to explain why the current situation isn't working."

Which is when yet another group is called on: A Child's Waiting in Akron, Ohio -- one of the few adoption agencies that works with youth they did not originally place.

The kids are rated according to levels of difficulty and then the search for a new family or living situation is begun.

Truly, truly sad.

Does anybody have any experience with this or adoption disruption?

Photo: rainbowkids.com

Santa Claus Is Coming to Your Town

Kelly Mills — Tue, 25 Dec 2007 14:40:00 GMT

I guess Santa is a busy guy. In addition to overseeing the elf toy-making operations, and keeping a nice/naughty tally of every dang child, he's also been busy elsewhere. Joining PETA protests, visiting hospitals, participating in pub crawls, running up buildings--I hope he takes the whole of January off or he's gonna burn out. I mean, he probaby gets like, two hours sleep, tops.

I'm not even a huge Santa fan (sacrilegious, I know) but I enjoyed this Santa slideshow. It's nice to keep up on Santa's activities and to see how that big red suit gets used for all kinds of things. For those who celebrate such things, Merry Christmas to you and yours.

Rafting Photo: Reuters/Crack Palinggi

The Jolie-Pitts Need to Pick Up the Pace

Madeline Holler — Sun, 02 Dec 2007 12:02:00 GMT

Not even Angelina Jolie could turn these numbers around. International adoptions in the U.S. have fallen dramatically for a third year in a row.

State Department figures show that only 19,411 children were adopted by Americans from foreign countries last year, a decrease of 15 percent in the past two years.

The huge drop is due to tougher requirements in two countries – China and Russia -- where most children have been adopted into the U.S. in recent years. As waiting times strectched in China from 8 months to 2 years, families started looked elsewhere for children. Russia suspended all out-of-country adoptions this year, until it could reaccredit the agencies handling their adoptions. Both countries are trying to boost adoptions within the country.

Angelina Jolie certainly brought international adoption into the spotlight, but even before she snatched up baby Maddox and brought him back to Hollywood, foreign adoptions had been on a fast and steady increase since the early 1990s, tripling until they reached a peak of 22,884 children in 2004. The number then fell by more than 2,000 kids in 2006.

According to State Department figures: “U.S. adoptions from South Korea and Haiti also declined significantly, although the overall drop was partially offset by large increases in adoptions from Guatemala (up from 4,135 to 4,728), Ethiopia (732 to 1,255) and Vietnam (163 to 626).”

Adoptions from Guatemala will also drop drastically for the next couple of years as that country suspends adoptions and in an effort to ensure the legitimacy of the whole process.

Guatemala to Suspend Adoptions

Madeline Holler — Thu, 04 Oct 2007 23:08:00 GMT

After growing unease with his country's adoption process, the president of Guatemala said he will suspend adoptions from his country starting Jan. 1, 2008, leaving 3,000 children already in the process of being adopted in limbo and countless other families mulling adoption to look elsewhere in the world.

The country's president said he is taking the measure -- seen by some as extreme in that it ignores the fate of what will quickly be thousands of abandoned children -- amid growing concerns about the current system, which opponents say has led to paying mothers for children or coercing them to give up their babies.

An average of 17 children born in Guatemala leave the country for the United States every day with the parents who adopted them. Guatemala has long been considered a place where adoptions are relatively fast and uncomplicated. The Central American country is behind only China in the number of children adopted out to American families every year.

Guatemala has the highest per capita rate of adoption of any country in the world. One of every 100 children born in the country is adopted internationally. American officials say 5,000 adoptions have been approved this year, an all-time high for Guatemalan adoptions to the U.S. American officials also say that last year's 4,000 adoptions were legal and untainted by any problems.

Hotels, lawyers, social workers and some orphanages and foster families have built up businesses around Guatemalan adoptions, which cost an average of $30,000 to process and include at least two trips to the country before bringing baby to a new home permanently.

Adoption has been hotly contested for years there, too, with some people claiming the fact that the process is run by lawyers and social workers -- not the government -- leaves it vulnerable to undesirable practices, such as baby selling or stealing.

NPR's recent report on the country's adoptions looks at charges against a recently raided agency in Guatemala, which was shut down pending charges of exchanging cash for children. The owners, an American and a Guatemalan, deny the charges.

International adoption has become very visible -- and even more attractive, some might say -- thanks to celebrities like Angelina Jolie, Madonna, Mary-Louise Parker and others Hollywood stars. But it is a subject that is fraught, made even more so whenever accusations of baby-buying surface.

Still, who doesn't know a family who has created a family through international adoption? What do you think? Is Guatemala solving a humanitarian crisis but shutting down adoptions or is it creating one?

International Adoptions Slowing Down Despite Jolie-Pitt Singlehanded Attempts to Adopt Every Orphan

Karen Murphy — Mon, 04 Jun 2007 12:08:00 GMT

It's bad news again for would-be adoptive parents looking to bring home a baby from overseas: the waits are getting longer with little relief in sight. Not surprisingly in the convoluted world of international adoption, this conflicts with the justification heard not long ago when China tightened restrictions on potential adoptive parents, claiming at the time that the new regulations would reduce the wait time. So far, it hasn't happened: in fact it's more than doubled.

In addition, several countries have shut down their foreign adoptions altogether: countries having done so or that are experiencing prohibitive delays include China, Guatemala, Ukraine, Nepal, Russia, and South Korea. International adoptions only represent about 25% of total American adoptions. The recent added wait times for international adoptions are making domestic adoption through the foster care system more appealing than it once was (there's still an enormous amount of bureaucracy to wade through no matter how you slice it). Unless your name is Angelina Jolie, in which case the Adoption Gods just seem to smile endlessly.

On the flip side, several countries are opening up adoptions a little more which may help ease things, and huge increases are being seen in African countries like Ethiopia and Liberia. And Malawi. I just hope that all the countries concerned are really attempting to ensure that the best possible families are found for their children who need homes, and that they just aren't preying on susceptible, desperate and hopeful parents.