Kerry and Niels' blog

Two months ago, we published an article about the Families for Orphans Act 2009, a piece of legislation co-authored by the Joint Council on International Children's Services (JCICS), a trade association for adoption service providers. We do believe in the power of repetition and in the need to oppose this bill, so today we will again pay attention to this attempt to institutionalize federal promotion of inter-country adoption practices on behalf of adoption service providers.

The Families for Orphans Act is the result of a lobbying effort of the so called  Families for Orphans Coalition, of which JCICS is the self-proclaimed leader, claiming to have written this specific bill. The proposed legislation is every adoption agency's pipe dream, unfortunately it is at the expense of children and vulnerable families.

The language of the bill is strongly embedded in the strictly American notion of permanency, which finds its roots in several studies of foster care children in the mid-1970's.

Faced with an explosive growth of children in foster care, researchers studied the effects of long-term foster care versus the effects of adoption from foster care and decided that on average adoption from foster care has better outcomes than long-term foster care. Based on these finding the notion of permanency was developed.

Policy makers, confronted with the explosive growth of children in foster care, sought means to cut the ever growing cost of child welfare programs. The findings that children in foster care fared worse on average than those being adopted, helped create the idea that foster care, which was defined as temporary, was worse than measures that were considered permanent.

Yesterday a representative of the Joint Council on International Children's Services (JCICS) sent us a message in which they respectfully requested that we 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.

Upon reception of said request, we were faced with the dilemma to either honor the request or to ignore it. The message written was certainly most polite, making it harder for us to simply ignore it. So eventually we decided to choose neither the option to honor nor the option to ignore the request and instead pay some more attention to the document we obtained.

When a document is leaked to the media, this is often done by someone closely affiliated to an organization. Who else has access to confidential information? Often material is leaked because a public interest is being served, sometimes it is done for personal or political motives. Apparently someone close to JCICS sees a public interest in divulging this information, or has personal or political motivations to leak this confidential information. That by itself would already be compelling reason to publish the provided documents. It makes us wonder who within JCICS sees benefit in making information public about both the dire financial situation the organization is in and the lack of credibility the organization has with governments and certain NGO's like Unicef and Save the Children.

Could it be that there are people working for JCICS memberships organizations that actually agree with us that the Families for Orphans Act 2009 as co-written by JCICS is a total abomination, like we demonstrated in The Families for Orphans Act 2009 and the inter-country adoption agenda? There certainly must be ethical adoption workers out there, equally appalled by the language in that bill.

Given JCICS made such an issue of working on this atrocity of a piece of legislation, could it be that some social worker decided: enough is enough. If this is what JCICS stands for, lets spill the beans that JCICS is neither solvent nor credible.

On December 3, 2009, the Joint Council on International Children's Services (JCICS) presented to its members a proposal to change the organization. It seems, if nothing changes, JCICS will have to close is doors somewhere in the year 2010.

The proposed plan is confidential and intended for JCICS members only, but was leaked to the internet earlier today. Since it contains interesting information about the workings of JCICS, we decided to republish it on PPL's website.

The document establishes two distinct problems JCICS is facing. First of all the trade association of adoption service providers is in dire straights and needs to seriously cut back its activities to remain financially sustainable. The document is not all that specific how financial sustainability can be achieved without eliminating their core activity "advocacy, awareness and public policy initiatives".

The second issue addressed is even more interesting. JCICS, as a trade association of adoption service providers has a credibility problem. The document states:

This week Uganda was in the news big time because of proposed legislation which would make homosexuality an offense to be be punished with life imprisonment or even execution. Although newsworthy of itself, much of the debate focused on American influence on this piece of legislation.

For more than a decade Uganda has been the focal point when it comes to addressing the AIDS problems in Africa. When HIV/AIDS was first discovered in the 1980's, several religious and social conservative leaders responded in a most hateful way. Jerry Falwell described AIDS as

. And Jesse Helms defended his position to oppose federal funding for AIDS research on the grounds that:

It has been more than 150 years ago since the first modern adoption legislation was passed in Massachusetts. Since then, a business model of adoption has evolved, one that has received constant criticism for at least fifty years, but has never really been redesigned or reformed.

Thirty years after the first modern adoption act, several syndicated news papers ran a story about baby brokering in New York City. The article contained a striking phrase:

".

This week preliminary figures for the number of children adopted from abroad were made public. Not surprisingly the downward trend continued, and it is to be expected that in there were at least 5000 inter-country adoptions less in FY 2009 than in the previous year.

A big contributor to the decrease is Guatamala, which in 2008 still exported 4100 children and has since stopped inter-country adoptions, except for those cases that were pending. It is to be expected some 750 children have been adopted from Guatemala in 2009.

After having a peak of sending 7900 children in 2005, China's numbers have dropped ever since. In FY 2008, the number was down to 3900 and in 2009 the number further decreased to 3000, according to preliminary data.

Most of the other countries saw a decrease too, though not as dramatic. The only two countries seeing an increase were Ukraine, growing from 490 to 600 and, not surprisingly Ethiopia, which saw a further increase from 1724 to 2275. With that increase Ethiopia is now the second biggest sending country in the world and if trends continue, it will surpass China next year as the biggest child exporting nation in the world.

Ethiopia's exponential growth curve is not sustainable, just like it wasn't in Romania and Guatemala before. Somewhere down the line it will hit a brick wall and Ethiopian government will be forced to close its borders. Stories of child trafficking and other forms of illegal adoption are coming in more and more and it's only a question of time before the first country will close its borders for adoptions from Ethiopia.

Every year the Congressional Coalition on Adoption Institute (CCAI) presents the annual Angels in Adoption Awards^TM, an award for those, who according to CCAI, made a contribution to the promotion of adoption of children from the American foster care system and other "orphans" world wide.

While presenting adoption as nothing but a good cause, CCAI is in effect one of the few industry lobbying groups in Washington that actually consists of active members of congress. It is a well known practice that politicians, after leaving office, join lobbying firms to further the interests of particular industries. CCAI is exceptional in that it looks out for the interests of an industry, while its members are still being in office.

Much more than a good cause, adoption is a largely unregulated business that offers jobs for ten thousands of people working for thousands of organizations directly or indirectly involved in the placement of children. It also provides children for families that usually are affluent and likely to be voting constituents. For legislators, there is much to be gained by making adoption as easy a process as possible, while politically there is not much to be gained by promoting stricter regulation.

The incestuous relationship between the adoption industry and members of congress, has led to the creation of the annual Angels in Adoption Awards

Last month Christian World Adoption (CWA) was prominently portrayed in Australian Broadcasting Corporation's documentary Fly away children, where they were being accused of "harvesting" children, a process where adoption workers go to villages to have meetings in which they encourage families to give up their children for adoption.

This was not the first time CWA ran into trouble with ethics.

Some years ago, a Californian adoption facilitator named Yunona USA, ran an aggressive advertising campaign to place children from Russia. Yunona had several photo listing websites offering children for adoption as a for-profit business. Some of the children listed were actually available for adoption, others were just put out to lure customers, who would then be directed to children that actually were available.

Since Yunona was an adoption facilitator, not an adoption agency, they were not allowed to place children, nor were they allowed, for that same reason, to obtain children from Russia. To do so they needed an adoption agency willing to umbrella for them, an often used practice, which is illegal in Russia, but happens all the time.

The umbrella'ing agency for Yunona was Christian World Adoption.

Members of Congress introduce legislation related to inter-country adoption, they jointly write letters to urge actions being taken when countries have closed their borders for inter-country adoption.

The following table shows those senators and representatives active on the issue of inter-country adoption and the issues they promote.

In June 2009, Sen. Mary Landrieu and Rep. Diane E. Watson, introduced two identical bills (S. 1458 and H.R. 3070 respectively) before Congress, known as the Families for Orphans Act 2009.

The introduction of the bills created immediate controversy; both Ethica and Parents for Ethical Adoption Reform raised objections to the proposed legislation, after which the Joint Council on International Children's Services felt it necessary to respond with a rebuttal of the objections raised.

The Families for Orphans Act is a grand and sweeping piece of legislation proclaiming to be a solution for "orphans" world wide. It's not only broad in its aim, it's also broad in its definition of the word "orphan". This is a tendency we have seen before with the work of the Christian Alliance for Orphans and it's relatives, Hope for orphans and Cry of the Orphan.

Before looking into the specifics of the bill, let's look at the authors, often a good indication of the intent behind a piece of legislation.

As with most legislation introduced before congress, the Families for Orphans Act is not written by elected law makers, but by special interest groups. The organization behind the Families for Orphans Act is the Families for Orphans Coalition, which is not as the name suggests a coalition of families, but a coalition of organizations primarily working in the field of inter-country adoption.