Yesterday’s Minneapolis Star-Tribune ran an article focusing on the adoptive family’s end of an adoption of two girls from India, an adoption rooted firmly in lies. The girls were the second and third adoptions Maria Melichar and her husband Carl had done through the agency.

Minnesota couple caught up in apparent adoption fraud

(By way of context, Minnesota has the highest international adoption rate in the country with 17 agencies doing intercountry adoptions. 14 investigations against 8 firms have been brought by state regulators in the past three years.)

Yeah,  adopting a twenty-one year old (presented as a “12 year old”) isn’t exactly what most people have in mind when they start plunking down the big bucks for “kids” from across the globe.

Melichar family photograph Komal and Shallu

Crossroads Adoption Services (a Hague Accredited member agency of the JCICS, the  Joint Council on International Children’s Services) handled the adoption.

Note Crossroad’s previous ugliness related to trafficked children in El Salvador. In light of such, you’ve simply gotta love their tagline:

Building families through adoption. The first thing we build is trust.

Their homepage brags of the supposed age range for the kids they place:

Each year, approximately 150 children join Crossroads’ adoptive families. The children come from across the United States and from other countries. They range in age from days old through teenage. Most of the children Crossroads places are under 2 years of age and are healthy. Crossroads continues to place children who have special physical, mental and/or emotional needs or are part of a sibling group.

The Star-Tribune article points out, the fabrication of ages for children adopted from India has been an ongoing concern:

While India has been criticized for changing children’s ages to make them seem younger to adoptive parents, experts said a nine-year discrepancy is unusual.

This October article, also from the Star-Tribune, Burned by a baby broker, contains a bit more detail:

The family has sued, and state regulators are investigating the conduct of Edina-based Crossroads Adoption Services, which handled the adoption.

Thing is, the real story at the heart of this particular case is the foot dragging on the investigatation on the part of U.S. officials at the State Department. The Star-Tribune has previously delved into some of the investigative problems inherent to the current system, see Adoption treaty sets up double standard in U.S.:

The job of investigating complaints was given to the Council on Accreditation, a nonprofit organization in New York that also handles accreditation duties. Only the state of Colorado will investigate its own cases. If an investigation confirms that an agency violated standards, it can lose its accreditation, shutting it out of the 77 treaty countries.

But in an interview, Richard Klarberg, the council’s chief executive, conceded that the council isn’t prepared to conduct international inquiries into complaints of corrupt adoption practices. Baby stealing or other fraudulent adoption practices have been alleged in Vietnam, China, Liberia, Guatemala and India. Some countries halted adoptions after such revelations.

“The reality is that the Council on Accreditation lacks the resources, either in staff or financial resources, to send someone to China to review a complaint. … We lack that capacity,” Klarberg said.

and

Klarberg said the council has just three staff members to investigate complaints against U.S. adoption agencies. They can question U.S. agencies and gather documents related to their foreign activities. So far, the agency has opened at least 17 investigations, but no agencies have been sanctioned. The council will leave the more complicated job of investigating foreign conduct to foreign governments or the State Department.

That’s not good enough, said Gina Pollock, an adoptive mother and board member of Parents for Ethical Adoption Reform, a group that lobbies for changes in federal laws. She said the job of investigating international wrongdoing should be the government’s, not a nonprofit organization’s.

That outsourcing is precisely part of the problem. The very same non-profit agency that provides accreditation to agencies is also responsible for investigating their crimes. On the very face of it, that’s laughable at best.

Add in the complete lack of capacity and apparent lack of will to impose actual consequences both on the part of the COA and the State Department lies at the core of the girl’s case (the following is from yesterday’s article).

A U.S. immigration judge ordered the sisters sent back to India in July 2008 for visa fraud, after medical tests confirmed the age discrepancies. It appears to be the first time the U.S. government has expelled orphans under such circumstances, experts said.

The Melichars complained about the misrepresentations in 2007, but the organization that probes questionable adoptions for the State Department said it didn’t hear about the case until this year. Even then, officials postponed the investigation for months.

The United States implemented the Hague Adoption Convention last year. The State Department handed the job of policing international adoption agencies to the nonprofit Council on Accreditation, which enforces the treaty’s ethical standards. The reforms directly affect Crossroads and 13 other agencies in Minnesota, which has the highest rate of international adoptions in the United States.

Critics of the United States’ commitment to the treaty say the Melichars’ case shows the government is not aggressively investigating adoptions that go wrong. “I can’t understand why the U.S. government is moving so slow on these cases,” said Arun Dohle, founder of the Belgium-based advocacy group Against Child Trafficking and author of a 2008 law review article on Indian adoption fraud.

The answer of course, is that adoption lies at the core of American foreign and domestic policy.

Adoption is inherently viewed as ‘always a positive thing’. Any counterexamples to that mythology are to be ignored, swept under the rug, or quietly dealt with in ways such that the institution itself is not questioned, instead such circumstances are re-framed as mere ‘personal problems’ or ‘exceptional circumstances.’

For the U.S. to get serious about fraud in adoption would mean tarnishing the image of international adoption, and thus risking turning off potential adoptive couples (and the loss of cash that that would entail), something neither the architects of the policies nor the industry are willing to risk.

If intercountry adoption contains a certain percentage (as to what percentage, that remains quite unknowable) of reliance on child trafficking, that’s simply a ‘cost of business’ certain interests have been more than willing to embrace, as evidenced by the industry’s track record to date.

Last Friday, December 5th, 2008, the SECA web-page finally went live. (http://www.stopdumpingkids.com/)

SECA, short for “Stop Encouraging Child Abandonment,” is a concept that has been a long time coming.

From the first of the legalized child abandonment laws passed in 1999 until now, efforts to repeal and stop the dump laws have suffered from a lack of an alliance dedicated to focusing primarily on the issue.

Before SECA, responses to dump laws had been piecemeal, portions of existing organizations’ broader missions. Over the years numerous organizations have opposed and testified against the legalization of child abandonment, and individuals have contacted legislators and worked against legalized child dumping. But, there had been no one place dedicated to dismantling the evolving child abandonment infrastructure.

Thus, SECA has finally been created.

Stop Encouraging Child Abandonment works toward nothing less than the full and permanent repeal of laws that legalize child abandonment.

We feel it is not the proper role of any government to encourage child abandonment as policy.

We approach this work firmly grounded in a human/civil/identity rights perspective. We support kids, women, and reproductive autonomy.

The need for SECA had become apparent over the past nine years, but the child welfare crisis in Nebraska with its law legalizing the abandonment of older children finally made it clear to the broader public, a formalized response to legalized child dumping is necessary.

Since the beginning, the consequences of such laws have been clear to those of us “in the field.” With bills rushed through state legislatures and policy and legal criticisms by and large dismissed, the general public simply never had reason to even think about the consequences of “safe haven” laws. Most people had never heard the voice of a kid who had been legally dumped. They had never seen the desperation of mothers and families utilizing the legalized abandonment laws.

Nebraska changed everything.

Nebraska’s older kid dumps, and the state’s eventual age down of eligible dumpees from 18-year olds to those 30 days and younger has solved nothing. It has merely attempted to put off dealing with the inevitable consequences “safe haven” laws create until the infants abandoned under the new law grow old enough to speak for themselves.

The child welfare abandonment disaster across the United States, legalized everywhere except Washington DC., is far from over. It is just beginning.

Out of that context, SECA was born, not so much a formal organization, for now more of a collective voice of allies, organizations, bloggers, and individuals among others working together towards the repeal of the dump laws.

If you are interested in working against the legalized child abandonment laws, or already are, SECA can serve as a resource in that work.

We can be contacted through the SECA contact page.

***

So here’s a brief post I’ve been meaning to write for some time now. Start with this November 21st article out of the Star Ledger in New Jersey, How you can put a baby in a loving home.

Sure enough, “Boarder Babies” are being folded into New Jersey’s “safe haven” stats.

(See the National Abandoned Infants Assistance Resource Center’s 2005 Fact Sheet on Boarder Babies, Abandoned Infants, and Discarded Infants {link opens a PDF} for some basic information on the boarder babies phenomenon and some of the ongoing issues with “safe haven”/legalized child abandonment laws.)

Keep that in mind the next time you hear some legalized child abandonment advocate bragging about their alleged number of “baby saves.” How many babies turned in under the safe haven program? ‘Oh we’ve “saved” tons!’

Just don’t look too closely, or you might realize how many of those were exactly the problem we’ve had all along, boarder babies, now just moved out of one column and into another. Which is to say the “baby savers’” stats are for shit at this point.

Lumping in the boarder babies not only vastly inflates the “safe haven” numbers of alleged baby “saves,” (a pure mis-characterization, as it’s pretty damn difficult to “save” said babies from mothers who are abandoning them after birth at the hospitals where the children were born. These were babies who never had any genuine chance to be “at risk” of anything outside hospital walls, in some cases, they were never outside a nurse’s care.) but it also sets up one hell of a conundrum.

You have state and federal programs geared towards preventing boarder baby abandonment, trying to encourage womyn to take their babies home rather than walking out the hospitals without them while SIMULTANEOUSLY creating a separate program going the exact opposite direction, wherein the state actively encourages womyn to abandon their newborns or infants.

On the one hand, you have the state putting programs and funding towards family reunification and getting the kids out of the system whenever possible, on the other you have the safe haven program working at cross purposes in most states encouraging anonymous child abandonment making family reunification an impossibility, dumping kids into the system.

Articles such as this, New program hopes to keep ‘border babies’ in arms of their parents are common. Unfortunately even within existing boarder baby programs you have programs already pulling in opposite directions. You have the mothers themselves, as but one number, 63% (link opens a PDF) of them want to keep their kids, and yes, you have programs geared towards either keeping them together or working towards reunification, but at the same time you have Child Protective Services (often encumbered by guidelines created in relation to American drug law policy) making the final determination as to whether or not the child will ultimately be discharged to go home with their parents.

Boarder baby policy(ies) is already more than enough of a conflicted mess without adding “safe haven” laws into the mix.

Boarder Babies are not only a huge drain on the entire health system, they are the ongoing “background noise” of health care itself. This has led program after program aimed at dealing with such, (and the media) to label the ever mounting numbers of abandoned at hospitals post birth and after the mother’s discharge an all out “boarder baby crisis.”

Let’s be clear here. The alleged raison d’etre for the legalized abandonment/”safe haven” schemes was to “save” babies who were supposedly at risk of immediate harm. A boarder baby born in a hospital, and either abandoned by its parents or forced to be left behind by a child protective services determination is NOT and NEVER WAS in any danger. It was born in a hospital and in most cases has been in hospital care its entire life up to that point. To lump boarder babies into baby-dump/”safe haven” stats is not merely disingenuous, a BLATANT fabrication.

Unless of course, the whole point was always to increase the supply of adoptable history free infants, permanently separated from their parents of origin.

Seeing as to how the legalized abandonment laws were the (sick) spawn of the National Council for Adoption (NCFA), and the primary organization pushing for the dump laws, the National Safe Haven Alliance grew out of the NCFA, I’ll leave it to readers to make up their own minds about said motivations.

More recently of course you have the federal adoption ‘bonuses’ to states that move children from the public system into “permanent homes.” Children who are abandoned are automatically categorized as “special needs” and states placing “special needs” kids get even larger adoption bonuses.

When you hear the term “safe haven” keep in mind that much of what we’re really talking about here is fast tracked, so called “non-bureaucratic placements,” i.e. adoptions whenever possible.

While the preferred mythology of the “safe haven” babies is that of the alleged young and desperate (preferably white) teenage mother with nowhere else to turn, “safe havening” her (preferably equally white, or at least passable) newborn only to be adopted as soon as possible after relinquishment with (yet another preferably white, preferably heterosexual) loving couple out in the ‘burbs with a white picket fence and a dog, add the reality of boarder babies into the mix and clearly there’s more to to all this than first meets the eye.

When boarder babies are lumped under those same words, adopters may find themselves with a kid going through weeks of withdrawal or even lifelong effects after drug additions, lifelong effects that even experts can’t predict, or they may be receiving an HIV+ child. Due to the lack of prenatal care and the facets of their mother’s lives (poverty, inadequate food in the household, mental illness, addiction, etc) the adopters’ newly acquired little bundle of joy may turn out to be quite a bit more than they bargained on.

Under normal conditions, boarder babies are some of the least desirable kids in the adoption food chain, for many of the reasons I listed above. That said though, via re-branding, boarder babies can now go up for adoption as “saved” “safe haven” babies, suddenly now a desirable commodity to some.

This is tremendously beneficial to the state, as without the re-branding, boarder babies tend to languish in hospital care for months, only to eventually be bounced around the foster care system, they’re the kids nobody wants.

Take this older story out of the New York Times, BOARDER BABIES FIND COMFORT IN FOSTER GRANDPARENTS’ ARMS, in which the low income elderly are being recruited to deal with the them:

Besides providing a support system for the babies, the foster grandparents’ program tends to counter stereotypes of older people, said Marcia Vogel, the director. ”It shows how useful they can be,…

“Safe Haven” babies come “as is.” Most states actively make no point of collecting medical information or histories on the kids. The less known about them, the more marketable they are.

So it’s “buyer beware” for the adopters who clamour to get a hold of the little media friendly “saved babies.”

But that lifelong question mark of lack of information while a downside for the kids, is an upside for the state and its marketing. Phone lines buzz with desperate infertile couples trying to get a hold of “Safe Havened” babies after news reports.

So, how many other states are padding out their numbers of “safe haven saved babies” with boarder babies?

Perhaps more importantly, how many states are ’solving’ their boarder baby problem by sliding them over a column?

I can just hear it now:

‘Wow! New Jersey, fewer boarder babies? That’s great! How’d you manage that?’