The economics of adoption

Despite an alphabet soup of titles, Dr. Joyce Maguire Pavao, Ed.D., LCSW, LMFT, seems to be completely out of touch with reality. Of course one cannot expect a Licensed Marriage and Family Therapist (I admit I had look that one up), to have any understanding of economics, then why make the claim to have any knowledge on the subject.

Supposedly Mrs Pavao is going to speak at the Hillside Children’s Center’s 17th annual conference, where she is going to deliver the keynote address, under the illustrious title “The Changing World of Adoption: How Far Have We Come”.

May I suggest Mrs. Pavao a couple of issues to address in her speech,

We have come so far that:

• the body parts of children adopted from foster care are found in a basement freezer, put there by there forever mom;
• the vast majority of children in Nepalese ophanages are there only because of international adoption;
• we send back adoptees to their country of origin when we don't find them cute and cuddly anymore;
• children are being adopted with sexual abuse as the intent;
• children are being adopted from foster care to line the pockets of child abusers;

Instead of addressing this angle Mrs Pavoa will probably address the economy and will make the case that:

So many things have changed. In the early days of adoption it was a supply and demand kind of situation.

Of course I have taken this remark out of a context, but I didn't glue together these two sentences to make it read like it does here. When trying to give an example of what has changed in adoption, Mrs. Pavao has the audacity to mention the supply and demand aspect. Of course we cannot expect Mrs. Pavao, who happens to lives in Cambridge, Ma, to be much in touch with the realities of the atrocities happening to children adopted from foster care or the reality behind orphanages in far away countries; we cannot expect her to know more than the realities as faced by the rich clientele she meets while offering her post adoption services at the Center of Family Connections, but we could expect Mrs. Pavao to walk over to the Harvard business school, which is just right around the corner and get herself informed about the meaning of "supply and demand".

Better still, she could just maintain doing her job as a counselor and shut the hell up about everything else. There is enough hogwash coming from Adam Pertman, the Even B. Donaldson's mouth piece for the adoption industry. Oh wait a second.... Mrs. Pavao is on the Practice and Ethics Board of the Evan B. Donaldson Adoption Institute herself. Now that explains the lingo mud protruding from her oral cavity. Has anyone ever heard anything but self-grandeur and apologetic adoption appraisal from these so-called researchers? Besides, anyone who is able to use adoption practice and ethics in one sentence without suffering a stroke is either utterly retarded or a fraud. Which of these options applies to Mrs. Pavao, I still can't figure out.

Having read the remainder of the article promoting Mrs. Pavao's presentation at the Hillside congress, it is clear this adoption pioneer is still struggling with the issues that were in the limelight 30 years ago. We know about the triad, adoption loss and secrecy. It's been discussed a gazillion times and where has it taken us? Well, credit where credit it is due, it has taken some of us to the offices of Mrs. Pavao's Center of Family Connections, so after all it has not been entirely in vain. Next to a supply and demand for children, we now have a supply and demand for post adoption services too. Who was I to think Mrs. Pavao had no knowledge of economics.