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%.

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:

When Pound Pup Legacy started the Demons of Adoption Awards in 2007, it was very much a spur-of-the-moment action, triggered by the sugar coated news surrounding the Congressional Angels of Adoption Awards^TM. Over the last couple of years the Demons of Adoption Awards have grown into an anticipated annual event, followed by many in the adoption community, and a critical voice kicking off Adoption Awareness Month.

This year we want to add an even more sobering element to the start of the adoption love-fest, introducing Rohnor's Angels, honoring those children who died this year due to abuse in their forever family.

Over the years we have documented abuse in adoptive families and raised awareness for increased safety in placement procedures. Despite our efforts, every year several children die at the hands of their adopters and many more are physically or sexually abused. Rohnor's Angels is part of our ongoing effort to make the public more aware that, even when many outcomes appear to be good, adoption practices continue to be unsafe and reform is still needed to serve the best interest of children.

This year's edition of the Demons of Adoption awards drew unprecedented attention. Several bloggers raised awareness for the awards and helped by posting PPL links to their pages, encouraging readers to vote for their preferred Demon of Adoption. As a result we can proudly state that this year 70% more votes were cast than in any previous edition.

Readers of Pound Pup Legacy nominated 14 candidates, all "worthy" candidates to receive the Demons of Adoption Awards. A full month of polling showed a clear neck and neck race between two contestants: LDS Family Services and the Joint Council on International Children’s Services. The two nominees constantly remained within a few votes of one another, leaving all other nominees far behind.

This week the Evan B. Donaldson Adoption Institute published a lengthy report calling for improvement in post-adoption services.

The executive summary starts with the following observation:

This week, E.J. Graff published a long article called Anatomy of an Adoption Crises, in which she describes the shut down of adoptions from Vietnam in 2008. The article is based upon the release of several government documents obtained through the Freedom of Information Act. We are not going to rehash the story as told by E.J. Graff, instead I'd like to focus on the players in this drama.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

When perusing the internet for information about the incidence of abuse in adoptive families it's impossible not to come across the scribblings of the apologists:

Adoptions have recently become difficult or impossible in China, Guatemala, Kazakhstan and Vietnam the main countries that send ‘orphans’ to the United States.

from: sfin.ro

Many European organizations involved in a forceful lobby for the resumption of international adoptions

October 9, 2006
Robert Veress
Saptamana Financiara

I usually check up the latest child placement news on the internet and when interesting put the article here on PPL. This month though we are faced with headlines like: