Kerry and Niels' blog

Last October we instituted our annual

to raise a voice against adoption propaganda and the self congratulatory practices of the

Today James Marsh' blog presents a new post containing just a single link. That link points to an article called One Child's Unending Abuse - From Disney World Girl to Drifter, which opens with the following statement:

A lawyer who represented a young girl who was adopted from Russia by a Pennsylvania man and sexually abused and exploited for five years claims the girl's new adoptive mother has physically abused and neglected her, including withholding important medical and psychiatric treatment that would help the young victim move forward in her life.

What follows is a shocking exposure of the negligence of the Pennsylvania child protection system. The article on Wikileaks is based upon James Marsh' legal notice of claim, in which he states:

Late in the evening of May 27,2003, after Masha was evaluated by the Children's Hospital of Pittsburgh, the Respondents knowingly and intentionally placed Masha into the home of 26 year old Lynn Ginn, who was at the time a Families United Network [FUN] foster parent;

At the time of Masha's placement, Ms. Ginn was under investigation for allegedly abusing an infant foster child who was previously in her care. FUN had removed the child from her home and instructed staff not to place any more children with Ms. Ginn. The Respondents improperly deemed Ms. Ginn's home available to accept Masha since it was "closed;"

furthermore his claim says:

While Baby Broker Watch already has a great page on Seymour Kurtz and we don't want to rehash too much of what is already written there, there was still an urge to find more about the current state of his activities. When perusing the website of the Georgia State Department to look up information about another agency, we accidentally stumbled upon his Golden Link Foundation and decided to look into the published documents.

The most interesting document was also the most recent. a certificate of merger, issued on 13 May 2007, which deals with the merger of Adoption World (Illinois) and Golden Link Foundation (Georgia), into a new Adoption World (Georgia). More specifically, the old Adoption World (Illinois) ceased to exist after the merger; and Golden Link Foundation as the surviving entity was subsequently renamed into Adoption World, head quartered in Illinois, but registered in Georgia. All signed sealed and delivered by Seymour Kurtz himself.

Looking through all the documents I found out there is another important figure in the Kurtz network, not mentioned on the Baby Broker Watch website, by the name of Mary Ann Mijajlovic, executive director of Adoption World as indicated by the license of the Department of Children and Family Services of Illinois. She was also the one who, in 1999, authorized the name change of Adoption Care Inc, into Golden Link Foundation, as is indicated in one of the appendices of the certificate of merger.

Adoption Care Inc. at the time had Diane Newton as its executive director, who held the same position with the now defunct Kurtz organization Friends of Children Inc., whose secretary was Margot Hamilton who at the time was executive director of Easter House, the agency with which Seymour Kurtz' adventures in baby selling all started in the early 1960's.

Over the years many calls for adoption reform have been made, most of them aimed at opening birth records, some of them aimed at ethical adoption practices, some put into practice, but most lingering on the various websites on the internet. Reading through several of the proposals, the impression can't escape that all of them take the current system as a starting point, trying to implement changes to the patch work of rules and regulations. What we would like to do here is open the discussion for a radically different approach to infant adoption.

When looking at the landscape of adoption there are two vastly different spaces: infant adoption and older child adoption. The infant adoption system is mainly characterized by a demand market, where adoption facilitators, adoption attorneys, adoption agencies and prospective adoptive parents (PAP's) form a powerful coalition with the means to dominate the system. Older child adoption is mainly characterized by welfare organizations trying to find families for children needing a family to live with. While we are aware this is an over-generalization and there are several organizations that work both markets, we believe as a general trend it is a valid distinction.

We'd like to concentrate on infant adoption here, because it is in that sphere the desires and monetary potential of prospective PAP's and the marketing potential of the related industry prevail over the best interest of children.

Many authors have written about the money involved in infant adoption, so we shall not rehash that and refer to the various sources that can be found both on this site and on several other websites on the internet. We take it as a given there is an economy around infant adoption with an overly strong power-base on the demand side. So the first suggestion we'd would like to make is:

Make adoption free of charge

In our never ending quest for information about the adoption industry, we started plowing through the IRS 990 forms of the various adoption related organizations using the guidestar.org  website. We were already aware that the non-profit status of the organizations doesn't imply a non-profit attitude of the people working within those organizations.

The complete list of non-profit organizations was far too long for us to go through, so we took the 50 organizations we knew best and created a list of the people earning more than $100,000, excluding benefits and expenses, that can be as much as $125,465 in the case of Buckner International's president.The list is sorted in descending order of income. Some organizations are mentioned more than once, because they have more than one official making over $100,000.

This list is far from representative, because of the preselection we made, though we hope it is indicative of the personal income being made by these officials of non-profit organizations.

According to the US Department of States, Bureau of Consular Affairs the following number of children where adopted by the United States of America from Guatemala:

According to Guatemalan authorities as they published their figures to the Hague Conference on Private International Law, the following number of children were sent to the USA for adoption:

With the exception of 2003 all years show Guatemale saying they are exporting more children to the USA than the USA says they import.