Last night I was awaken by God, a prophet, an childlike angel. He spoke to me.
He wants me to lead the Mormons, the Baptists, the Jew,s the Catholics, the Lutherans,and the Methodists to Somalia, to retrieve the starving orphans. I usually never question this type of authority, but at first I asked, do you mean Samoa? Do you mean Western Samoa, where their are "orphans" who have neither a mum nor a dad? He answered, no my child, Focus on Children, has "saved" those children already from the evils of their own.
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.
Found a red flag among the many Christian adoption blogs calling for others to heed the call to adopt.
Adoption Ministry of YWAM - Ethiopiais a Christian agency establishing Widows and Orphans Homes in Ethiopia. The heart of our ministry is to find loving Christian families in the U.S. to nurture, love and disciple children in forever homes and to minister to those in Ethiopia who are without hope.
Over the years we have posted extensively about abuse in adoptive families, and within our archives collected information about many different abuse cases. Abuse in adoptive families comes in many shapes and forms, ranging from neglect to deprivation, sexual abuse, exploitation and physical abuse.
When looking at the physical abuse cases, there seem to be two patterns that often emerge. Children, especially babies, beaten or shaken violently, and cases related to so-called "discipline".
Just two weeks ago, the California town of Paradise, was shocked by the abuse taking place in their community, when Lydia Schatz was "disciplined" to death by her adoptive parents for the mispronunciation of the word "pulled".
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 not just God's punishment for homosexuals, it is God's punishment for the society that tolerates homosexuals. And Jesse Helms defended his position to oppose federal funding for AIDS research on the grounds that: "There is not one single case of AIDS in this country that cannot be traced in origin to sodomy".
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.
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.
Word is out 62 year old living music legend Elton John and his husband "would love" to adopt a 14-month old boy from Ukraine. Apparently the HIV positive child living in an orphanage won the hearts of both Elton and David and even managed to change the star's mind about adoption. [According to news reports, in the the past, the famous musician did not feel his lifestyle of frequent traveling would be fair for a child.]
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Over the years we have posted extensively about abuse in adoptive families, and within our archives collected information about many different 
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. 
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.
Last month