Marshallese, Hawaii join to control adoptions
Marshallese, Hawaii join to control adoptions
Pacific Business News (Honolulu) - by Kristen Sawada Pacific Business News
Hawaii and the Marshall Islands plan to partner to clean up Marshallese adoption abuses.
Representatives from both sides met during a forum at the State Capitol this week to discuss ways to stop the illegal practice of flying Marshallese mothers to Hawaii to give birth and relinquish their babies for adoption.
"This is about cleaning up the process, not shutting down adoptions," said Jini Roby, an attorney and social work professor at Brigham Young University in Utah, who spoke at the community forum Tuesday evening. She said Hawaii must act to respond to the situation locally.
"This is as much a Hawaii problem as it is a Marshall Islands problem," she said.
Roby helped write a Marshall Islands adoption law that created a Central Adoption Authority last Oct. 1 to oversee previously unregulated adoptions of Marshallese children to American adoptive parents.
Hawaii's role as a lucrative Marshallese baby market has gained national exposure and prompted an Attorney General's Office investigation into allegations that agencies have placed pregnant Marshallese on Medicaid so Hawaii taxpayers foot the bill for prenatal and birth expenses.
Adoptive parents pay between $25,000 and $35,000 for a Marshallese child. Agencies allegedly have turned to Hawaii to bypass the U.S. immigration and international adoption laws since a baby born here becomes a U.S. citizen and a domestic adoption -- a simpler, faster and potentially cheaper process.
Michael Jenkins, head of the Central Adoption Authority, and Julie Walsh Kroeker, an anthropologist and program director for Small Island Networks, a federally funded nonprofit agency that works with Marshallese in Hawaii, participated in the forum and an earlier closed-door meeting where government officials, judiciary and law enforcement discussed their knowledge of the problems locally.
"The goal of the informal adoption task force was to identify initial points of contact," Jenkins said. "Now together we have to look at legislation and make sure it's consistent with policies and training."
Meanwhile, state officials are taking action with legislation to stop Marshallese adoptions here "without the prior written approval of an appropriate court of the Republic of the Marshall Islands consenting to the adoption."