Pound Pup Legacy

When we started Pound Pup Legacy in 2006, we felt there was a need for a website for those adoptees that experienced the dark side of adoption. For the longest time we were a marginal website at best, but we always had members willing to share their personal experience.

Since the ratification of the Hague Convention on Protection of Children and Co-operation in Respect of Intercountry Adoption on April 1, 2008, and the closure of Guatemala, around that same time, inter-country adoption has changed the inter-country adoption landscape significantly.

December 31, 2009 the litigation team in Masha Allen's case against the agencies involved in her adoption by Matthew Mancuso, filed a Motion for Leave to File Amended Complaint. This motion for the first time makes direct allegations against Adagio Health, a health care provider in Pennsylvania, which also performs adoption services.

On January 6, the blog My Journey to Alyssa presented Alyssa's Story, a post which tells about an adoption in Pakistan allegedly performed through Adoption Ark. I will not rehash the story here, Linda, the owner of the blog, has gone at great length to present the entire story, so I refer readers to her blog to get acquainted with the story.

Over the last two years we have written extensively about the case of Masha Allen, culminating in the article The untold story of Masha Allen, which attempts to explain the circumstances of both Masha's adoption by Matthew Mancuso and her adoption by Faith Allen.

This week the U.S. State Department presented the figures of intercountry adoption for FY 2009, and for the fifth year in a row the numbers have dropped.

Here are the total number of inter-county adoptions for the last 6 years:

2004: 22,990
2005: 22,734
2006: 20,680
2007: 19,609
2008: 17,475
2009: 12,753

For years adoption advocates and adoption agencies have used the claim that there are 143 million orphans in the world, based upon an estimate made by Unicef, to further the agenda of inter-country adoption.

Joint Council on International Children’s Services (JCICS). a trade association of adoption service providers, claims: Deprived of a basic of human right, these unknown children are denied the nurturing needed to thrive as children and later as members of our global society.

In September we published the untold story of Masha Allen, an attempt to make sense out of all information published about Masha, well knowing there will never be a definitive story.

Until now, very little was known about Masha's Russian history. The Wikipedia page about Masha, which was removed two years ago, made the following statement:

Yesterday, the Associated Press reported the State Department released the international adoption figures for fiscal year 2009. The reported numbers are no surprise, more than a month a ago, we already published the preliminary numbers, and the figure presented now are nearly identical.

Yesterday a representative of the Joint Council on International Children's Services (JCICS) sent me a message in which they respectfully requested that I kindly remove the posted information regarding their Stakeholder's Initiative. The complaint relates to a document leaked late last week, which describes proposals of JCICS to change their organization in response to impending bankruptcy.