But then, the focus of child welfare law in these United States, post “The Adoption and Safe Families Act” [also called “ASFA”] is to speed up permanency, by which the law means terminating parental rights and moving children to “better” families. States get money every time a parent’s rights are terminated – and not one cent if the parent and child are reunified.
How different is that, really? According to Professor Richard Wexler, poverty – not neglect or abuse is the primary reason for termination of parental rights in the United States. See: http://www.nccpr.org…
In our state, Foster parents receive compensation [granted, not lavish, but not taxed, either] of $400 – $600 per week per child. Many have their own children too, and it is the only support for a parent to stay at home that our state or country offer, actually.
The parents of these children are offered not one cent. Over and over in termination cases I see parents blamed “because they did not get a job soon enough” or “did not get into stable housing” – so their children do not come home.
But in “Make New Parents But Keep the Old”, by Candace M. Zierdt, 69 N.D.L. Rev 497 (1993) this reality is blamed on adoptive parents who “need” to totally own their children, and are not open to the realities of identity formation. Children need to know that their “roots” are not so worthless that no connection with them need be kept. This too is harmful.
Let me try to understand the points you are apparently trying to make. Working from the bottom.
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One. You believe that adopted children should have the right to have access to their birth parents. I’m sorry, but that doesn’t parse. Suppose the birth parents don’t want to be accessed. Now, if you would like the adopted children to have access to their birth parents for medical reasons (history of disease in the birth parents’ families), it seems to me that than can be done anonymously, presuming, of course that the sperm donar can be found. Or the birth mother, for that matter. Many of those issues will be alleviated with the human genome project (thank gawd for science).
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Two The parents of these children are offered not one cent. of course not. If you won’t say it, I will: the foster care system, in which children are snapped from their parents, is a vestige of Social Darwinism. I sincerely do not know how to put it more succinctly. If you look at it as that, you will know exactly what is going on. We (the state) will take them from you and make them better than you could make them. I hate to use another German expression, but es ist einen grossen Schmarrn. (I’d be banned here if I used the term “Bullescheiss” but you get the idea)
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Three, regarding adoptions of Guatemalen kids by Americans, I seriously do not know all the issues, and I’m not going to opine. I do know what a woman (a Lesbian) from Ohio on the old NYTimes gay rights board adopted a child out of Guatemala several years ago, and, at last report they (the woman had a partner, but since they were in Ohio, there is no 2d party same-sex adoption) were doing fine. How that affected the child, I will never know, because the board is gone.
…at last report, the adopted daughter (who was, at the time of the report 3-4 years old) was doing quite fine.
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Interestingly, the adoptive mother, although she was living in Ohio, was from Massachusetts!
That the writer of the story in the Globe was interested in reporting on the “anguish” of the adopting parents and oblivious to the anguish of the birth parents. My “outline” was only one point, with attached venting.
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Also, I call what the United States and Massachusetts child welfare system do “social engineering”. Feel free to google THAT. I do not think we disagree.
“Social eugenics” means that by taking children from those viewed as “less than” and having those children raised by “better classes of people as parents” the underclass will be reduced. What does THAT “look and feel” like??
…but it is an amalgam of Social Darwinism, social eugenics, and a concoction of other topics that suggest that the amorphous “we” know better for “you.” The sad fact is, however that the “we” don’t necessarily know better than the “you.”
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No, we do not disagree. But, I don’t know what to do about it. From experience, it appears that few Americans are particularly interested in lifting people out of poverty. Even Americans, much less Guatemalans. We can go through a litany of the attrocities that have been perpetrated by the US government in Central America, but, can you conceive of the number of Americans who would actually pay attention? About the number of fingers on your hands.
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So, what do we do? One thing that we can do is to not discourage adoptions from the region. At least the kids might grow up in a reasonably secure environment, which US military intervention did not provide them. I sincerely do not know what the solution is, but that is at least something.
At least according to the Dalai Lama. That is, how widely inclusive is the ability to love as the measure of greatness…certainly not the media’s measure, is it?
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As to the competing equities in adoption, while I can list the competing webs and currents of desire I certainly have no cure.
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I guess what bothered me the most is that the adoptive parents aguish received support and empathy, and the birth parent’s anguish received no compassion at all.
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I am not intending to say who felt more or less pain, but rather than both sets of parents were in pain, and to credit only the pain of the American adoptive parent – and not the Guatemalan parent faced with such a heinous choice [the choice I am talking about is “to give up my child or perhaps watch my child starve]- caused something in me to cry out, “this is wrong!”
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2. The foster care system doesn’t snap children from parents, kids in foster care know who their parents are are often reunited with them if the problems that caused the child to need a foster home are fixed. And she is talking about the parents of the child not being offered one cent to help them get out of poverty, but money is lavished on the foster family. The reason money is given to the foster family is so that there will be foster families, because often times the problem isn’t just poverty but also abuse or substance abuse and therefore we need foster families to care for kids temporarily. But when the problem is just poverty – AmberPaw is right – why don’t we give the $400 to the parents? Oh yeah, it is because Jane in Newton desires a baby to go with her husband and house, so DSS turns into an army of child hunters who get paid when they score one for the Newton ladies.
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3. Try opining based on what you do know: rich families pay agencies to score infants from people who have no other options. No one doubts that the babies don’t do “fine”, especially compared to how they would be doing, that’s so not the point. Don’t let your friendships with people stop you from considering their unintentional complicity in something that might have bad consequences. It’s a policy issue, not a personal one.
We felt the same way about the focus of that article.