Kerry and Niels' blog

Every year the Congressional Coalition on Adoption Institute(CCAI) organizes a gala where Members of Congress can give an Angel in Adoption Award ^TM to constituents of their state or district who have been advocates for adoption.

Originally intended to champion the adoption of children from foster care, the Angels in Adoption Awards have grown into an adoption industry love-fest, awarding adoption attorney's, directors of adoption agencies and other representatives of the adoption industry.

Many of the recipients of the Angels in Adoption Awards have nothing to do with adoption from foster care, and their main achievement is making a sound business out of the commerce in children.

In 2007 Pound Pup Legacy instituted the annual Demons of Adoption Awards to raise a voice against adoption propaganda and the self congratulatory practices of the

Much has been written in the last week about the case of Angelyn Lisseth Hernández Rodríguez (aka Dulce Maria or Karen Abigail) daughter of Loira Rodrígue, and much of the discussion revolves around the question, what is in the best interest of the girl involved.

Ethica puts it like this:

And really, the bottom line is this: in this case, and in thousands like it, there is a child, and she is no longer living with the loving family that intended to raise her. She was adopted by people who love her and intended to raise her, too. In the balance swings the child, her entire life experience shaped not by her parents, but by those who stand to profit from the very experiences that cause her trauma.

While it is certainly true that much of Angelyn Lisseth's life is shaped by those who have profited from her sales, Ethica's statement introduces a false equivalence between her real parents and her adoptive parents.

Insisting on an equivalence between the two families easily leads to the conclusion that Angelyn Lisseth should stay with the adoptive family, because she has by now bonded to them.

This line of reasoning ignores the fact that the adoptive family knew long ago that Angelyn Lisseth had been stolen and kept her, resulting in the bond she now has with the adoptive family.

If this line of reasoning applies to adoption, it would also have to apply to kidnapping. Would we insist a child stays with a kidnapper if for some reason the kidnapping results in a bond between the child and the kidnapper?

The case of Angelyn Lisseth is not all that different. She does not live with kidnappers, but she lives with people who acquiring her through kidnapping; she lives with adults who willfully let her bond to them, knowing she may have been the victim of a kidnapping.

If adoption were legally defined as the commercial activity it actually is, laws related to handling of stolen goods would actually apply to this case.

Unfortunately, adoption is not legally defined as a commercial activity and with that all protective measures that exist for commercial trade don't apply to adoption. It almost seems as if adoption laws are created to protect most parties in the adoption supply chain, not the victims affected by corrupt and illegal placement practices. In spite of criminal activity, such as kidnapping, an otherwise illegal act can magically become a "legal" adoption, making it virtually impossible for the rightful parents to have parental rights to their own child.  In short, the victims of a crime become victimized by the adoption industry, as their parental rights get stolen by those who insist the completed adoption is "legal" and binding.  For parents who had their child kidnapped or stolen, this is an outrage.

Today we added the 500th case to our abuse case archive. This dubious honor goes to a case of sexual abuse of a ten-year-old girl adopted by Jon Paul Reid. Among the 500 cases we have archived over the past three years, this case, unfortunately, doesn't stand out as particularly exceptional. There have been many children like the Reid girl before, and since little is done to prevent these situations, we will likely have to document several similar cases in the future.

When we started collecting cases of abuse in child placement, we weren't certain about the extent of the problem. In fact the initiative for this archive was partially inspired by the desire to find out the extent of the problem.

Of course the collection of individual cases as presented in news paper articles, and sometimes court documents, will never be able to give an answer to the question how likely it is a child will be abused in an adoptive/foster family. There simply are too many cases that never make the news, and too many cases that simply are never reported as taking place in an adoptive/foster family.

Our most recent case is actually a good example how the adoptive status of children is easily overlooked. When the case first broke, it was reported as first-degree statutory sodomy, first-degree statutory rape, endangering a child and incest. Even when authorities in Arkansas pressed additional charges, the case was still not reported as involving an adopted child. Only when news reports emerged about the actual court case, the victim was identified as the adopted daughter.

More than a century ago, Mark Twain popularized the expression "There are three kinds of lies: lies, damned lies, and statistics". In this post we'd like to focus on the most egregious of these lies, statistics.

In 2007, we started collecting inter-country adoption statistics, which we present on our various country pages. Our first source for these statistics was the website of the Hague Conference on Private International Law, which at the time, published the statistics of several countries for the years 2001-2004.

While entering this information into our database, we had to make the decision which statistics to use, those of the receiving countries, or those of the sending countries.

At the time. relatively few sending countries supplied statistics to the Hague, even fewer had their own website, presenting up-to-date statistics, so we decided to use the data provided by the receiving countries.

Christianity Today published a clever response to Kathryn Joyce's article, The Evangelical Adoption Crusade, published in The Nation, last week. The author of this response, Jedd Medefind, happens to be the executive director of the Christian Alliance for Orphans, a coalition of Christian churches and child placement organizations that act like the functioning heart-muscle behind the Evangelical adoption movement.

The article, which carries the subtitle,

, is clever in the sense that it claims to acknowledge some of the concerns Kathryn Joyce raises, whilst dismissing them at the same time. This is to be expected from a man who once held the post of director of the White House Office of Faith-Based and Community Initiatives, a political insider, who became a master at damning someone with faint praise.

Recently, the adoption blogosphere has become abuzz with the case featuring a Christian family wanting to adopt, a Russian boy with Down Syndrome, and the Russian government.

Greg and Tesney Davis, a couple from Tuscaloosa, Alabama, seem to believe their desire to adopt this "special" boy is being blocked by the Russian court, and their story has made small-time news. The news-media version of the story begins with the following three lines:

"This child is better off just staying in an institution than having a forever family."

That's basically what a judge had to say after a hopeful and prayerful Alabama family was questioned last week in a European court room. Questioned by judge and prosecutor. Questioned for FIVE HOURS.

Apparently the prosecutor and judge were having a hard time understanding why the couple would want this particular little boy

[From:  Adoption: Family fights to adopt son, despite judge who says no ]

The dramatic and emotionally-charged article ends with a final post script note, written by the author.  As if in "Pst!" formation, she posts, "*** Not only is this devastating new [sic] for Kirill & his family - but also for 2 others families seeking to adopt children with Down Syndrome from the same region (which means the same judge)."

Thankfully, the news article provides a link to the original story, which reveals more details, not covered by those anxious to call the press.

The chain of current events began in 2009, when the adoption application for a child with Down Syndrome was submitted to Reece's Rainbow, an adoption agency directed by Angel of Adoption Award Winner, Andrea Faris Roberts, People's Hero, saving little lives.

Last week the Joint Council on International Children’s Services (JCICS), the trade association of adoption service providers, started an online petition in response to Ethiopia's decision to reduce the number of inter-country adoptions by 90%.

We already addressed the text of the petition in a previous post, and would like to focus on the actual petition in this installment of the Ethiopian adoption saga. Before we do so, we would like to pay a little more attention to the organization that started the Ethiopia petition.

Despite a thin veneer of child advocacy, JCICS exists to serve the business interests of organizations like Holt International Children's Services, Bethany Christian Services and Gladney Center for Adoption. To put this in better perspective, just like PhRMA serves the business interests of organizations like GlaxoSmithKline, Pfizer and Eli Lilly, and the American Petroleum Institute serves the interests of organizations like Exxon Mobil, Chevron and ConocoPhillips, JCICS serves and promotes the interests of adoption service providers.

Don't let there be any misunderstanding, JCICS is just as interested in the well-being of children and child safety as PhRMA is interested in health and public safety or the American Petroleum Institute is interested in the environment, and public safety.  Each one of these trade associations may play the occasional sympathy card, but their primary focus is the business interests of their members.

Last week the Children and Youth Affairs Office of the Ethiopian Ministry of Women's Affairs (MOWA) announced their intent to bring down the number of children placed for intercountry adoptions by 90%, starting March 10, 2011. This decision is not only predictable, it was long overdue.

Since the year 2000, American adoptions from Ethiopia have seen a more than 26 fold increase:

Such growth figures are actually not uncommon in inter-country adoption. Similar increases were seen in Romania and Guatemala before those countries closed down, and are an indication that corruption is systemic and rampant.

Not only do figures indicate the Ethiopian adoption system has become out of control, concrete child trafficking cases have emerged too over the years:

Last week the US Department of State released its annual report on inter-country adoption for fiscal year 2010.

The trend of declining numbers of inter-country adoption continued even when the 1090 children from Haiti for whom a Special Humanitarian Parole was granted are included in the statistics. In 2010, 12,149 children were adopted from abroad (11,059 excluding the children from Haiti who entered the country under the Special Humanitarian Parole). In 2009 the total number of inter-country adoptions in 2009 was 12,756, while the US at its peak, imported 22,972 children in 2004.

The decline of inter-country adoption is most notable when looking at the Russian figures. The number of adoptions has dropped under 1,000, while in 2004, still 5,862 Russian children were adopted by American citizens. This figure is unlikely to bounce back in the near future, given the ongoing problems with abuse of Russian children in American adoptive families.

Adoptions from China showed a 13% increase in 2010, remaining the number one sending country, with 3401 children. At its peak, in 2005, China sent 7,903 children to the United States.

This week the Department of State put out the following question on their blog:

How can the international community best ensure that adoptions are transparent, and that the rights of adopted children, birth families, and adoptive families are protected?

It is good to see the Department of State is looking for input, though the assurances being looked for can only be appreciated when realizing adoption is a business and has been around for more than 100 years.