"Fears of a new adoption rush in today’s border crisis"
July 6, 2018 8:36 PM   Subscribe

The Threat of International Adoption for Migrant Children Separated From Their Families "To adoption reform advocates, who monitor unethical and abusive practices in child welfare, it looked like any number of adoption crises in the past".

Kathryn Joyce is the author of The Child Catchers: Rescuing, Trafficking, and the New Gospel of Adoption, and various articles, many about adoption and foster care.
posted by readinghippo (22 comments total) 25 users marked this as a favorite
 
My international and indigenous NA US adoptee peeps, on FB or in person, have been in meltdown about this issue since it broke. Reading narratives about children involuntarily separated from parents leading to a likelihood of foster care and legal separation, with a possible adoptive outcome, well, yeah. Rage and fear. That said, the Intercept is absolutely not the place I hoped to see a piece from someone knowledgeable about and committed to writing about and confronting issues around international adoption. I guess it's still preferable to silence.
posted by mwhybark at 9:13 PM on July 6, 2018 [10 favorites]


"crtl-f Chile no matches"

well, I can address that, then.

Adoption in the United States' war on the left and the people of Central America has a long heritage, most notably documentable as an outcome of the September 11, 1973 CIA coup in Chile which resulted in the temporary end of more than a century of Chilean democracy and the elevation of the neofascist Pinochet regime. In the immediate aftermath of the coup, rape was used as a weapon of torture by the regime in the service of intimidation, misclaimed as interrogation, and pregnancies resulting from the rapes were carried to term. The children were then given to regime officials while in many cases the mothers were killed.

The United States, historically, has no compunction about deploying involuntary child separation and adoption as a weapon.
posted by mwhybark at 9:26 PM on July 6, 2018 [24 favorites]


I'm in her book! ahahah every time I look at the Trumpcamps and the children and the foster parents they're being placed with, I just think of the overwhelming number of involuntary adoptions happening.

It's already happened to other deported immigrants to the US, having their kids separated and forcibly adopted and being unable to have the SO ILLEGAL AND UNETHICAL adoptions undone.

All I can think is: some day, those cute kids are gonna grow up and turn into angry young people wanting to know why they were stolen. And unlike previous Bastard Nation generations, they'll have the internet and families with internet access still looking for them.

Because there are Spanish and Korean and Guatemalan parents who have searched for their stolen kids for decades.

Being in an open international adoption triad is hard. Being the adoptive parent who stole a fucking kid? You better take your cute gotcha day snapshots now, 'cause you are gonna be left with an empty damn house once that kid realises what you did to them and their family to spare yourself some pain.
posted by dorothyisunderwood at 9:31 PM on July 6, 2018 [42 favorites]


It is based on a much more benign situation, but the film's that been in the background of my mind through much of this crisis was Lion, and I kept wondering about how many kids are going to grow up with a gnawing search engine habit, trying to find their parents as they grow up.

And how many of them are going to receive a second heartbreak when they find out that their parents were murdered, because they came to the US seeking refuge from violence, and we deported those parents right back into the crucible and kept the kids.
posted by bl1nk at 4:25 AM on July 7, 2018 [5 favorites]


This is all the more concerning since the revelation via Washington Gov. Jay Inslee that HHS considers permanent adoption or long-term foster placement to meet the definition of "family reunification" for migrant kids.
posted by Holy Zarquon's Singing Fish at 6:11 AM on July 7, 2018 [13 favorites]


I have been thinking this would happen since they started separating children from parents at the border. My son and I were a casualty of the adoption system in the US in 1968 as an unwed mother in what has been called "the baby scoop era" 50s-70s. First it was foster care, which ramifications were never explained to me and I signed for this before my son was born, then eventually adoption after I was sufficiently worn down by post-partum depression and "counseling" that made me feel even more worthless. This was the way it worked for unwed mothers who would not agree to surrender the baby at birth. And all this was "voluntary".

I can't imagine the pain and horror of immigrant mothers whose babies were snatched out of their arms at the border, everything I went through and ten times more. I predict that children older than 5 from this latest baby snatch will age out of foster care (no longer so cute and docile) but that babies and toddlers will disappear into the adoption system with new phony birth certificates and no oversight of the people who buy them. This is an old story with new words.
posted by mermayd at 6:21 AM on July 7, 2018 [21 favorites]


I was discussing this with a group of people yesterday who work with indigenous people affected by the Sixties Scoop:
The Sixties Scoop is the catch-all name for a series of [Canadian] policies enacted by provincial child welfare authorities starting in the mid-1950s, which saw thousands of Indigenous children taken from their homes and families, placed in foster homes, and eventually adopted out to white families from across Canada and the United States. These children lost their names, their languages, and a connection to their heritage. Sadly, many were also abused and made to feel ashamed of who they were.
I am horrified by what I see happening in the US, and agree that, like other baby scoops of the past and present, it is part of a deliberate governmental attempt to traffic children to adoptive families.

My partner and I are involuntarily childless, and people frequently suggest adoption to us without acknowledging how incredibly complex and problematic it can be. I am not in any way saying that adoption is always bad, but I think a lot of people never realize its coercive, colonialist, and partriarchal underpinnings. The naive narrative around adoption is always, always, "but you can give a home to one of the millions of unwanted kids out there in the world!" Just think about that for one damn second. Do you really think all those kids are unwanted?? Come on.
posted by hurdy gurdy girl at 7:24 AM on July 7, 2018 [17 favorites]


I was wondering when adoption was going to rear its head in this issue of forcible separation of children. Adoption, and especially international adoption, is a huge thing with conservative evangelicals to the point of being their personal ministry. It's long been my fear that Trump's forced separation of children was going to end up feeding the yawning maw of international adoption.

This is fucking sick.
posted by Thorzdad at 7:26 AM on July 7, 2018 [13 favorites]


This is horrifying.
posted by cooker girl at 7:30 AM on July 7, 2018 [2 favorites]


I have a number of adoption reform friends both adoptees and first moms who are finding it painful to watch the signs and protests of "families belong together" while also knowing that even on the left it's been crickets when young or struggling mothers are met with coercion or pressure to "give their children a better home". When I was a young mother wishing I had the resources I needed to parent well no one was by my side saying families belong together, instead it was "Your child is better of without you, other people deserve that child more, you don't deserve the resources you need to parent well" from both the right and left. Everyone I sought support from. You're too young, single, low income.

I hope that we who want families to stay together will really truly embrace that slogan and change both our immigration policies and the current abuses to families being done, and also the abuses we do to struggling families who are not immigrants or refugees in the name of "helping" that winds up pressuring women to give children up or breaking struggling families apart instead of providing support when it's needed. These are tragedies that have been happening without cameras watching the mothers pain at removal and there are social narratives we all tell that allow us to think "that mother deserves that loss" or "it's the best thing".

I hope especially when no abuse is involved we can challenge the excuses we tell ourselves that let us see these tragedies as "positives" and to sit back and do nothing. No mother deserves to lose her children because she is facing a tragedy, fleeing abuse, without housing, without money.... we need to stand up for families.
posted by xarnop at 8:01 AM on July 7, 2018 [19 favorites]


I hope that we who want families to stay together will really truly embrace that slogan

Being coerced by poverty into giving up your child for adoption is one of the sickest manifestations of our very sick society. No one should live in poverty in this incredibly wealthy country, and no one should have their kids taken from them because they’re poor. This just seems like basic fucking morality. And yet.

I’m so sorry.
posted by schadenfrau at 8:35 AM on July 7, 2018 [16 favorites]


So now is it okay to say "America is the worst -- the literal worst -- at this, with an industrial adoption complex that ignores the needs and rights of two thirds of the triad, and the American savior complex around adoption is disgusting and needs to be replaced by the more accurate victimization narrative"?

Because those of us with that point of view have been treated as fringe lunatics for decades, but now this is suddenly a hot issue for the left so it's suddenly all good.

Except for the inevitable #notalladoptions being tweeted from the organic food aisle at Whole Foods in 3, 2, 1...
posted by DarlingBri at 8:59 AM on July 7, 2018 [19 favorites]


Hurdy Gurdy Girl: My partner and I are involuntarily childless, and people frequently suggest adoption to us without acknowledging how incredibly complex and problematic it can be. I am not in any way saying that adoption is always bad, but I think a lot of people never realize its coercive, colonialist, and partriarchal underpinnings. The naive narrative around adoption is always, always, "but you can give a home to one of the millions of unwanted kids out there in the world!" Just think about that for one damn second. Do you really think all those kids are unwanted?? Come on.

It's the "Kiddie Shelter" mentality: Want a kid? Go to the Kiddie Shelter and pick one out! There are millions! I was even reading an article on voluntary childfreedom in the Guardian the other day and someone just had to bring up "adopting one of the millions of orphans." It's not as simple as that. There are some orphans, and some children who have abusive birth families, but not as many as one might think. It's not an Oliver Twist world with a surplus of children anymore.

I remember when it was all over the news that there were not as many missing Chinese girls as was thought. Their parents concealed their births because they were desperate to keep their daughters - not give them up.

I have Metafilter - in particular xarnop, Mermayd, and DorothyisUnderwood to thank for giving me a new perspective on adoption and realizing it's not all sunshine and kittens. I'm not anti-adoption, I have friends who have adopted kids (they love them, and are not evangelicals), but I realize it's not the fun and shiny ethical alternative to having bio kids that it is so often presented as. Nor is love enough in trans-racial adoptions of children of color by white people.
posted by Rosie M. Banks at 10:25 AM on July 7, 2018 [13 favorites]


I truly wish (and this may be naive of me) that there was a way that regular people like my family could sponsor a refugee family. We are almost empty nesters, we have extra room in our house and we could financially support a mom and a couple kids while they get started building a life in the U.S. I have no interest in adopting one of these children, I want them to stay with their parents and provide support for the entire family.

I just realized this sounds very "white savior-ish"and that's completely not my intention. I just see articles about people seeking asylum having to scrape together exorbitant amounts of money, their bio families that are here aren't able to safely sponsor them and it frustrates me to no end. We could do those things, but we aren't related to these refugees so we can't sponsor them.

I'm a mom and this situation makes me literally, physically sick. I call, email, fax, all my reps and even House and Senate leadership that don't rep me-I just wish that there was something more tangible and concrete that I could do to help keep these families safe and together.
posted by hollygoheavy at 9:36 PM on July 7, 2018 [11 favorites]


So Bethany Christian Services is one of seven agencies that help settle refugees in the USA. I live in their town and this Thursday there is a meeting to discuss re-zoning a parcel at the end of my block for them to use.

I've been doing research and these folks are at best questionable, at worst horrible, literally using forced-birth to create more adoptable babies, anti-lgbtq, anti-birth control and women's health.

I'm eager to attend the meeting but I'm not sure what my mission should be.

Get the organization out of the neighborhood?
Allow them in but require transparency and scrutiny?
Allow them in because at least their services are better than the kids being put in a jail?
Protest and disrupt the meeting with my pro-lgbtq, woman's health views?
posted by rebent at 2:34 PM on July 8, 2018


One of my good friends who like me slowly began to see the degree of coercion that was used to take our babies for sale lost her baby to the techniques of Bethany Christian services. Back in those days, and who am I kidding, still today, from basically every politically party we who woke up faced mockery, cold words, shame, reminders that we "made our choices" as we looked aghast at the degree to which these organizations know full well the trauma destroys the women who lose their children but try to make the sell and convince themselves and vulnerable pregnant women that they truly don't deserve their children or the help they need to parent. So basically, like myself, she has ceased all writing endeavors after the toll from dealing with the false judgements and the prejudices and lack of support even from the people who should have our backs (this included reaching out to major organizations like NOW and being completely ignored).

This is what's left of her blog Paragraphein.


The comments from trolls and even members of the right who don't care about those in need don't bother me as much or at least surprise me; the comments wherein people who claim to care about the welfare of their fellow humans completely fail to grasp the trauma our community is perpetuating on mothers who lose their children who are then sold for profit is just horrifying. Not to mention in the case of infant adoption, these women are supposedly receiving "counseling" which is essentially provided by an entity that gains from their trauma and loss. There is no way this should be called counselling or should be legal to provide crises response while fishing for babies to sell that directly benefit your career or status. Talk about the wolf guarding the henhouse "we'll provide "non biased counseling" to help them see the light of how inadequate they are and how amazing and rich and better and more stable all our glorious adoptive parents are. And then they make ALL the CHOICES!" They literally researched how to frame this to make vulnerable pregnant women insecure about their parenting abilities feel both inadequate to parent, in awe of the adoptive parents and process, and EMPOWERED by losing their very much wanted children.

I will add, I am totally fine with women who don't want their babies giving them up- yet in the research done the women who don't want their children at all if they had the resources and support to parent were extremely low among women who place.

Those working in adoption already know that overwhelmingly the mothers whose children are being used to create the adoption market are crushed and dealing with very real trauma, PTSD and lifelong consequences from losing their children.

Bethany as always been good at this from the women I've talked to who lost children to them over the years. That adoption agencies and the adoption market in the US is all too prepared to take the children of vulnerable, disenfranchised, and persecuted groups of mothers in the US is the way this system functions exactly, it is nothing new. Taking wanted children from mothers who are under supported to prevent themselves being preyed on this way is they way this system is designed to function. I have my hopes that more are walking up, I literally have to hold on to hope because it is a thread that holds my soul up in this seemingly often wretched world. I made a commitment that would do everything in my power to stop this happening to other women, and all too often all that is is desperate words on a screen begging for someone with more power than I to listen, only to be told over and over, and over--- it's not time yet. We don't want to hear that now, this isn't the place, it doesn't quite fit with the topic, it's too intense for this format, it makes people uncomfortable, it doesn't comfort adoptive parent feelings....


never... never ever the right time. So many things are changing right now... maybe... maybe we can also make time for this.
posted by xarnop at 8:22 PM on July 8, 2018 [3 favorites]


I'm a fan of Bastard Nation as pretty fearless advocates - their website is down (it used to have a page on Bethany - they track news and reports on individuals and agencies in adoption) but their Facebook groups appear active. I would contact them and ask for advice. Bethany are pretty awful.

If it's a public meeting, what you can get on record might be helpful. I honestly am gobsmacked that the government is openly admitting to destroying family records. It's happened, but it was always this secret thing that had to be uncovered. Now it's just policy.

Getting them to talk about The Hague Convention would be good - that's got very clear guidelines on what is supposed to happen for children separated like this, HINT NOT THIS.

Getting them to talk on record about how they plan to prevent PTSD and trauma further in these children - are they housing them in mixed-age and gender groups in small family-style settings, with trained caregivers? Have they actively recruited same-language caregivers? How many counselors and education specialists do they have on staff? What are their CVs? Ask for CVs for as many people as possible, for some reason that freaks them out.

What's the staff to child ratio, how often will the children see physical and mental child health specialists? How are the children going to communicate with their family members overseas, once located, and how frequently (Skype, etc)? How do they plan to integrate the children with the local community children to prevent institutionalisation? Will there be tie-ups with the local schools and kindergartens?

How are they going to background check and train local volunteers who want to get involved? What's the same training and background check for their staff, given the extreme vulnerability of the children? What's their media access policy for staff vs clients?

What is their adoption, fostering and guardianship policy (these are VERY different legal concepts!) for these children? What is their discipline and medical emergency policy for these children? For infants - they need to have a ratio that follows at a MINIMUM whatever the state foster care ratio is, and not for daycare. For foster care - usually that's like 1 adult to 1 infant, or 3 adults to 2 infants. Babies take an insane amount of 1:1 time. For older kids, the adult: child ratio goes down, but it should still technically be very high.

Group homes should NOT be understaffed and not run like a fucking boarding house. They are meant to be run like a village to reduce children's trauma - you should have several "parent" sets, with mixed age and gender groups. Sleeping quarters might be gender separated after a certain age (Oh - good question - are you allowing siblings to sleep together to what age? Or phrase it - to what age will you allow siblings to sleep together? BECAUSE YOU DON'T SEPARATE SIBLINGS ahem) and so on.

Ask about a typical daily routine for different age children. Ask how they will introduce education for special needs children. Ask what they will do for traumatised children, what their responses are, how much counselling and treatment options are, and what types of therapy will be available. Who will be paying, and will the children risk being denied essential services?

Those are questions just off the top of my head, but they DAMN well better have answers. These are BASIC child shelter questions.
posted by dorothyisunderwood at 8:56 PM on July 8, 2018 [3 favorites]


Sorry - I ran a child shelter on pocket change and we managed to do better than the hellholes I see in the US and it's just fucking insane. Like, I get when the system fails, but now this IS the system.
posted by dorothyisunderwood at 8:57 PM on July 8, 2018 [5 favorites]


If it's a public meeting, what you can get on record might be helpful.

Rebent, can you get a couple of friends or neighbors to go to the meeting too? I love dorothyisunderwood's questions but I can see the people running the meeting letting you ask maaaaybe 2 questions, then announcing, "Time for someone else to have a turn!" If they did that to you, maybe friends could get the mike next (and next and next) and keep them on the hot seat with other questions. (I'm also visualizing the friends sitting in different parts of the audience from you, or each other, but maybe I'm too paranoid.)
posted by cybercoitus interruptus at 12:15 AM on July 9, 2018 [4 favorites]


The public meeting was last night. It was a bit of a bind for me because the conversation was in no way about if the organization was doing the right work, but rather about if using the land would impact the noise, traffic, etc. in the neighborhood. I did ask a few questions.

My gut feeling was no contest, based on two feelings. The first is that they require all their staff to be Spanish speakers and trauma aware. The woman who gave the presentation was a Latina herself, and I could sense her passion not for building organizations or getting funding or converting kids but for helping asylum seekers.

The second feeling I had was around what the kids entering the country needed, and what services this organization provided. Would there be an org with better religious and political views in the wings to move into this building, if Bethany did not?

So my gut feeling was.... I hate Bethany because the stories I hear about it, but I can't stand in the way of these kids getting these services.

And here are what the services are. When boys (they only work with boys?) arrive at the boarder seeking asylum, if they come from certain countries and are under 18, Bethany takes them in to one of their temporary housing locations. They focus on giving the boys what they need to be healthy, mentally and physically. They immediately start helping the boys pursue their objective, which is to find a friend or family member currently living in the US. Once they locate that person, they run background checks on that person to help the boy choose if that is where they want to go, and then they help the boy transfer into that other person's custody.

While in the space, which is typically for 2 months max, they provide language and culture integration services, counseling, field trips, etc. It's not a locked building so the boys are free to walk out the front door - but because they are minors the org does ensure they don't run away.

The ratio is better than required, at one staff per six residents, with staff present 24 hours a day.

I asked how they assisted gay and transgender boys. They said that they have a very strict anti-harassment policy and all workers have received diversity training. They said that, when they identify that a boy is gay, they will ask him what they can do to make him feel comfortable and safe, and do that. They say that they have not had a resident come out as trans while in their care, but they did have one reach out to them for advice after being placed elsewhere.

A neighbor asked very pointedly if these boys ever end up adopted, and the team was very clear to say that they were not. These were asylum seekers who had someone to stay with. They were not there for adoption.

There are a lot of unanswered questions. What happens if the person they want to stay with doesn't pass the background check? Where are the girls? When they say psychological support, how much of that is religious based? When they say they respect LGBTQ kids, how much of that is religious support?

I don't know the answers to the questions. I don't know if these people are good. But I know these boys need help, and I don't know any other organizations in my city who want to open a highly funded and staffed group home to help them.
posted by rebent at 6:15 AM on July 13, 2018 [7 favorites]


Thank you for telling us how it went, rebent. So glad you asked specifically about the gay and trans boys. It shows them that some of the observers are watching out for that conversion therapy shit.

I wonder if the neighbors will be allowed to befriend the kids. That'd be one way to keep an eye on whether the place is being run as well as they say it will.
posted by cybercoitus interruptus at 1:55 PM on July 13, 2018 [1 favorite]


I'm glad to hear that too rebent. Even the agencies with bad reputations are capable of making changes and continue to spread awareness of the direction things should go will help counter the ideological problem of assuming the white and wealthy deserve the children of those who are struggling along with challenging the agencies who directly profit from selling the children of the struggling to wealthier families can help make the shift. I think the ideology is even stronger than the financial incentive, most working in big money adoption really do assume taking children of the struggling and putting them with the wealthy is how to solve the problem of child poverty and strife in their families and don't question this as an innate good- to then making money off an assumed good seems less sinister to both them and the public. I assume the larger percentage do have good intentions but when you couple that with seeing the amount of trauma produced in families who lose children combined with the profit incentive and classism/racism behind the ideology it starts to look a lot less rosy and more like exploitation.

We are all blind to how much we profit off the vulnerable, especially in a society that bottles and sells us this exploitation as normal and essential way of life. We all must challenge this and also grant each other a little grace room and assumption of ability to change while also putting greater pressure on making the changes really happen against the forces of denial, inertia, and assumptions the status quo is HOW IT MUST BE because CHANGE IS TOO HARD. It's a tough balance because most of us in nations like the US are part of the problem, even those of us broke as our ideologies all assume that when it's hard exploiting others is of course fine to do. But frequently the people we exploit when we struggle are even worse off than us. We all need to shift this thinking, in my opinion; while also having a gradient in which we understand that making changes is vastly easier and more accessible for some portions of the population than others.
posted by xarnop at 9:02 AM on July 22, 2018 [1 favorite]


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