• National Council for Adoption celebrates 30 years of opposing adoptees’ human rights- part I
• National Council for Adoption celebrates 30 years of opposing adoptees’ human rights- part II

NCFA has been kind enough to document their excesses for us.

As Bastardette pointed out, NCFA  has complied a slideshow of pictures from their 30th anniversary gala.

Go click across to NCFA’s slideshow  Bow Ties and Pearls 30th Anniversary Gala 2010 (just beware the hideous wipes between each and every photo!)

Few things can truly drive home the realities of the adoption industry’s political access and wealth quite like these photos of the opulent debauchery that went down at the Willard earlier this month.

As part of NCFA’s fundraiser to support their industry and industrial lobbying efforts, they held both a raffle and an auction, (quoting their page):

Live Auction Click here for detailed information about the live auction

• Villa Bella Vita – Located in the prestigious Pelican Key Estates neighborhood of Dutch St. Maarten (This property rents on average $14,000 per week) Click here for photos and details
• Ski Utah: The Greatest Snow on Earth – Perfect for the ultimate family vacation in the exclusive Deer Valley enclave, Silver Lake Village (Valued at over $8,000)  Click here for photos and details
  
• African Safari Excursion – An Extraordinary African Safari (Valued at $16,000) Click here for photos and details
• MIKIMOTO Akoya Pearl Necklace – A Timeless Treasure (Valued at $2,300)  Click here for photos and details
  
• Hot Air Balloon Rides – A Dream Come True! Click here for values, photos, and details

Raffle

Premium Raffle Ticket – Minimum $100 for a book of 5 tickets Click here for photos

• FIRST PRIZE:  TIFFANY & CO. Pearl Necklace Stunning multi-strand pearl torsade with sterling silver clasp designed exclusively for TIFFANY & CO. by Paloma Picasso (Valued at $1,450)
  
• SECOND PRIZE:  Lucien Piccard Men’s Watch Classic two-tone stainless steel timepiece features a round gold-tone bezel and white dial with diamond markers at all hour positions (Valued at $395)
• THIRD PRIZE:  Lucien Piccard Ladies Watch Sophisticated two-tone stainless steel timepiece features a round gold-tone bezel and white dial with diamond markers at all hour positions (Valued at $325)

Raffle Ticket – $30 each or $100 for a book of 5 Click here for photos

• Win a MADREPERLA Perlas de Mallorca Organic Pearl Necklace 20″ faux baroque pearl necklace with 18kt yellow gold tone over sterling silver lobster claw clasp and Swarovski crystal end caps.  18 creamy grey pearls are intersperesed with seven large black pearls which have undertones of blue, purple, and green (Priceless!)

Where do such funds go? Into NCFA’s adoption marketing efforts, their work to pry Guatemala back open again, their efforts to extract kids from Nepal, their work towards a national putative father’s registry, their efforts to increase tax credits for adopters, etc.

I ask you, do the adopters in that room really look like they need tax incentives for adoptions?

Who made NCFA’s gala possible?

Here’s a quick look at their sponsors:

Thank you to our 30th Anniversary Gala Sponsors

Pearl Anniversary Sponsors

Wayne and Linda Sharp
Walmart

---

Gold Sponsors

LDS Family Services
The Paraskevaides-Papathomas Family

---

Silver Sponsors

Morton and Grace Bender
Bethany Christian Services
Jonathan and Donna Conway

Ralph and Lou Hill Davidson

Sandra and Elmer Doty
The Gladney Center for Adoption
Dan and Tamara Kilmurray
Brian and Renee Luwis
Robert Parker and Mona Charen

Vicki and Roger Sant
Lou and Carol Stern
Larry and Pamela Stevenson

Stan and Michelle Swim

---

Bronze Sponsors

Golden Phoenix Foundation

Jason and Shannon Devine
Mr. Handyman (Lee and Jennifer Allen)
National Capital Area Gladney Family Association (Cal and Sally Simmons, Stacey and Kevin Reynolds, Jane and Greg Castanias, Karen and Joel Angeles)
Jim and Delia Stroud

---

Special thanks to

Bernie Robbins Jewelers
JOJO Photography & Film
Tiffany & Co.

As for the rest of us? Those who us who have no choice by to live adoption every day of our lives?

This is what a Bastard Nation benefit for BN’s Terminal Illness Emergency Search Program looked like back in 1998. The TIES fund supported Bastards in desperate medical circumstances by providing volunteer search and support services to Bastards with terminal illnesses.

Note the distinct lack of crystal chandeliers and Tuxes, but no lack of Fabulous Bastards in their ever fashionable “spermburst” tees.

BN has been known to auction off a few Bastard goodies in the con suite over the course of conferences, but trust me, we’re talking T-shirts and books, not Tiffany necklaces and expensive watches.

The difference being we ARE adoption, organizing in a grassroots manner, working on behalf of our own rights.

The National Council for Adoption and their like on the other hand are more often than not those who “opt in” to adoption by purchasing a kid, and then lobbying to ensure those child extraction routes remain viable.

I know which side I proudly stand on.

Apparently, so do the likes of Walmart, LDS, Bethany, Gladney, and the wretched lot of  ‘em.

NCFA has made a point of pulling the “Fox/Faux” news trick of leaving an impression of having “hearing both sides” in some effort to maintain the pretense that what they offer is in some way to be considered “fair and balanced” but for NCFA, just as for Faux, such is merely a tactic.

Now in part II, I intend to go into a bit more detail.

NCFA has always been very aware of public perceptions of its work and thus decided upon the format of a non-sectarian organization from the outset as part of its marketing efforts, regardless of the fact that many of its founders were explicitly religious adoption agencies and individuals involved were deeply sectarian.

But the Carter administration’s Draft Model State Adoption Act was enough to put the fear of the loss of the entire industry into adoption marketers and thus NCFA, originally the “National Committee for Adoption” came as a result of sort of a treaty moment when Catholics, Mormons, Protestants, Jews and others made the decision to work collectively to save their own asses.

On paper, NCFA’s abortion stance is carefully crafted to appear some version of neutral, thus enabling them to garner support from both compulsory pregnancy advocates and pro-choice individuals and organizations.

In NCFA’s “Factbook III” lists both their position and the process which resulted in it.

NCFA’s position is listed as:

NCFA’s Board, the objectives and work goals of the organization, and the Staff do not take an organizational position which is either for or against abortion. What NCFA is working for- the rejuvenation of adoption as an option of choice for young, single or troubled parents- will require us to sit down around tables with those who describe themselves as “pro-choice” and those describe themselves as “pro-life” to discuss programs which include adoption.

But to truly understand NCFA’s stance one has to examine both the process by which that statement came to be, and the nature of who has held and continues to hold power organizationally.

As the “FB III” piece explains, at the initial founding meeting for NCFA:

…the founding board discussed a number of public policy issues. Among the topics discussed was abortion. Some of those present favored taking a stand opposing abortion. After extensive discussion, including the fact that NCFA is a sectarian-voluntary organization which seeks to speak to all segments of the pluralistic American society, a motion was made by Marjory Mecklenberg, at that time the President of American Citizens Concerned for Life, and one of the founding board members…

Her motion was and is the NCFA public position.

After being debated and seconded, the motion was passed unanimously.

NCFA has revisited the issue in both 1990 and 1995, but has left Mecklenberg’s motion intact.

There are a number of reasons it may have done so, not the least of which being how useful that stance has been to worm their way into various pro-choice organizations and legislators good graces.

By tactically leveraging this allegedly “neutral” position, NCFA has parlayed its lobbying efforts into what has amounted to not merely the massive international child grab it and its agency members benefited from, but now a public bailout for the adoption industry, sucking on the governments teat for cash, under the guise of a number of programs:

• adoption tax credits
• federal incentives for child placements out of foster care
• various adoption subsidy programs
• cash for Coercive Pregnancy Indoctrination Center (so called “Crisis Pregnancy Centers”) under the guise of “abstinence only”  programs
• and  “infant adoption awareness trainings”
• as well as legalized child abandonment/”safe haven”/”baby moses law” funding.

They have carefully positioned adoption (and themselves) as  an issue neither left nor right, when nothing could be further from the truth.

As we’ve seen with the “choose life” license plate debacle, for many compulsory pregnancy advocates (CPAs) the “opposite” of abortion is adoption. Or returning to the core of NCFA’s stance, “Adoption- the best option.”

When legislators noted that funds raised by the plates only went towards adoption services, not women who wanted to keep their babies, recommending the plate be changed from “choose life” to “choose adoption” to more accurately represent where the monies would go, the proposal was rejected, as to other legislators both “life” and “adoption” in the “crisis pregnancy” context were essentially synonyms for their desired outcome.

Which leads us to the second aspect of how NCFA handles abortion, as it hardly needs to take an organizational stance against abortion for those with the power and decision making within the organization to be compulsory pregnancy advocates.

For let’s face it, every woman’s abortion to those in the industry, ultimately represents the loss of a potential eventual child they stand to potentially make a living off of by passing it along to adopters.

NCFA’s founding president, William Pierce wore a number of hats, but among them, his work as a senior fellow and the DC office of the anti-gay, anti-evolution, and anti-abortion Discovery Institute. He was also the national Vice President of Democrats for Life.

In Kristen Day’s book “Democrats for Life: Pro-Life Politics and the Silenced Majority” she describes Pierce and his work thusly:

My mentor and first vice president of DCFL, Bill Pierce, dedicated his life to promoting adoption as an alternative to abortion and bringing the Democratic Party back to Life… .

As I wrote previously,

Bill Pierce always viewed his baby Moses laws work as crucial to and within the broader context of his anti-abortion work. In short he viewed adoption as a zero-sum-game way of working against abortion.

Early NCFA materials reflected that “Life” centric rhetoric before such was scrubbed in an effort to win broader appeal.

Posters and other materials marketing adoption were emblazoned with the early NCFA slogan,

Adoption. It’s a Choice for Life

“Factbook III” contains both Compulsory Pregnancy (CPA) and Pro-Choice chapters.

The CPA  chapter is titled “Pro-Life Approaches to Adoption.” It comes first in the book and is authored by Donna Warner, the then  director of center development for Care-Net, a national chain of Coercive Pregnancy Indoctrination Centers based out of Columbus, Ohio.

The abortion supportive chapter is written by Frank Bonati, the then president and CEO of  Family Health Council (FHC) of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. FHC is described as “the only non-profit organization in the United States to offer both public funded family planning and state licensed adoption services. ” The chapter is entitled “Pro-Choice Family Planning and Adoption: a Case to Strengthen Mutual Support”

It’s important to bear in mind that the NCFA “Factbooks” were provided to lawmakers and policy wonks and that the inclusion of an essay such as Bonati’s served as a foot in the door, allowing NCFA to maintain that illusion of “neutrality.”

NCFA pulled the same tactic out for objection handling how they organizationally handle Queer adoptions.

First up is Lynn D. Wardle’s essay “Adoption by Adults involved in Homosexual Lifestyles” arguing against Queer adoptions. Wardle (see his resume and obsessive publication listing here) is a well known rabidly anti-Queer crusader who has made a career out of fighting Queers where ever he may find them.

His writings have appeared in the frothing at the mouth National Association for Research and Therapy of Homosexuality (NARTH) Bulletin. (For more on the nature of NARTH’s publications see this post from Box Turtle Bulletin.)

He personally, played a key role on behalf of the Mormon church in the way prop 8 played out in California, see Prop. 8 lawyer vetted first gay marriage initiative with Mormon leaders.

This is then “balanced” by Shannon Minter’s “Lesbians and Gay Men as Adoptive Parents.”

But again, Minter’s essay is there to keep that foot in the door with those NCFA is attempting to market to. Pierce of course was the Howard and Roberta Ahmanson funded Discovery Institute’s presence in D.C..

From those early days with Pierce at the head NCFA has served as a real crossroads of major wingnut funders, political figures, and corporate interests.

Factbook III, published in 1999, was funded by a number of NCFA friends, among the other notables is the wingnut  Scaife Family Foundation, a major source of funding for “far right” causes for decades now.

Bill Pierce eventually left NCFA and has since passed away, but those who followed in his footsteps are of similar ideology. Chuck Johnson is the latest in quite the interesting line of NCFA heads.

NCFA’s boards have always been a who’s who of wingnuttery, from that anti-abortion billboard Catholic wingnut Mary Ann Kuharski:

Mary Ann Kuharski
Mary Ann Kuharski is President of ProLife Across America (The Billboard People) and a nationally known author and speaker. She has appeared on many local and national television and radio programs including the Phil Donohue Show. She was a founding member of and past president of Prolife Minnesota and an advisory board member for the National Committee for Adoption. Mrs. Kuharski’s articles have appeared in Newsweek, Our Sunday Visitor, Christian Living, Catholic Digest, and many other periodicals. She is the author of Raising Catholic Children (Our Sunday Visitor 1991), Building a Legacy of Love (Queenship Publishing 1997), and Outnumbered! Raising 13 Kids with Humor and Prayer (Servant Books 2006). Mrs. Kuharski is a loving mother of 13 children (six of whom are adopted and several with special needs) and a grandmother of 12. She and her husband, John, live in Minneapolis, Minnesota.

on through to the current chairman of NCFA’s board, Mormon Stanford D. Swim, and his GFC Foundation in Utah.

See a profile of Swim’s GFC Foundation in Philanthropy The GFC Foundation: Serving God, Family, and Country.

Swim also sits on the board of the Sutherland Institute with it’s “stand up to protect marriage” petition, fighting Queer marriage.

For FAR too long now those who might be considered “left” in their political orientation have given NCFA a pass. They see the magic word “adoption” and their eyes glaze over. They overlook the growing church based “orphancare” movement’s efforts at church and movement growth through adoption.

Whether they do so out of their own complicit involvement in the industry, their own internalized squeemishness about abortion after more than 37 years of nonstop CPA propaganda, or out of a more general feel good longing to aid what they assume to be “child welfare” efforts they do so not from a position of knowledge or of careful study of what the National Council for Adoption and its pals are up to, but more often than not out of their own responses to the cues NCFA is intentionally sending to keep others from looking too closely.

As Pound Pup Legacy and others have documented, see The adoption industry and politics, an incestuous embrace, “adoption” is a singular realm,

an incestuous copulation of industry and politics under the pretext of the well-being of children.

Looking the other way only allows the adoption industry to utilize the pretext of “choice” and “chosen children” to their own ends.

Non-Legally binding “openness” and “open adoptions” are mere marketing positions for the industry turning to any available strategy to talk women into surrendering their children. But long after the promises of letters and contact disappear in a poof of the adopters moving out of state and cutting contact, at the end of the day, marketing tactics, whether on the political level or the most personal levels are nothing more than that, tactics.

NCFA has no use for legally binding open adoptions. (See the chapter “How Court-Enforceable Contact Agreements Undermine the Adoptive Family” for example.)

They utilize pretty words and pretty promises to ultimately get what they want.

Speaking as a one time kid on the other end of the equation, I’m simply a proud Bastard.

I don’t run expensive fundraisers in Washington, I don’t auction off Tiffany necklaces to support a child selling industry already awash in wingnut funders, and I don’t have multiple lobbies in Washington giving awards to politicians and sipping champagne.

I’m a grassroots activist.

I want all adoptees’ and our families’ access to our own authentic original documentation restored to us.

I’ll be celebrating the day these years of state confiscated records ends.

Tonight the National Council for Adoption (NCFA) has been living it up in style in Washington at their 30th anniversary gala.

Their “Bow Tie and Pearls” gala at the Willard Hotel is a fundraiser schmooze and booze chance to rub elbows with politicians, agencies, and of course, major donors.

The event is also somewhat of a pre-publication party for the forthcoming latest propaganda tome from NCFA “Adoption Factbook V,” due for publication (and freebee distribution if it follows in its predecessors footsteps, to politicians, various government agencies, think tanks and other opinion influencers) in 2011.

All through the awards and the toasts the adoption industry will take the time for some self congratulatory pats on the back.

As I wrote in an earlier post by way of a basic introduction to NCFA,

As for NCFA itself, it is an industry trade group and lobby founded in 1980, (Originally as a the “National Committee for Adoption) as a direct reaction to the 1979/1980 Carter administration’s Draft Model State Adoption Act (DMSAA) which had called for restoring records access by adoptees to their own adoption records. NCFA was created very specifically by industry interests to derail and defeat the open records provisions of the DMSAA.

Similar to NCFA’s reactionary founding, Pierce and NCFA became early promoters of baby Moses laws in the wake of Oregon’s historic Measure 58 (passed in 1998, tied up in legal challenges until 2000), the statewide referendum that restored records access to adult adoptees, as a strategic means of circumventing the open records victory.

After all, how can one have open records when there are no records to get? Baby Moses laws ensure that children, particularly newborns and infants, are relinquished in a ‘paperfree’ manner, and made available almost immediately for fast track adoptions.

NCFA can thus be viewed as  the adoption industry’s reaction to the open records recommendations and other recommendations of the DMSAA.

Rather than accepting the restoration of adoptee’s civil rights, ensuring they be treated just as anyone else under law, portions of the industry chose instead to fight against adoptee equality and for the then sealed records hegemony, working to maintain industry secrecy and preserve the industry’s ability to fabricate and at times outright falsify adoptees’ documentation.

Simply put, the industry wanted to maintain their control and ability to continue conducting their business in the dark, utilizing the state support of the sealed records system to provide cover for their actions.

Bastardette has documented the gratitude those in the industry felt toward NCFA’s founding president Bill Pierce,  and the organization’s work. She recently blogged about it in a piece entitled National Council for Adoption Saves Adoption in the US!

NCFA’s co-opts of the voices of adoptees and even language such as adoptee’s rights, reframing such as some new found supposed “right to be adopted”, rather than the human/civil/identity rights of adoptees to authentic personal history, identity, equal access to our original documentation, equal treatment under law, ethnicity, original nationality, etc.

Let’s be clear, the National Council for Adoption is an industry trade group that lobbies on behalf of its member agencies, their interests ARE its interests.

Thus when NCFA publishes its “Adoption Factbooks”  and distributes them to legislators, governmental agencies, media and others these are materials produced by an industry trade group designed to further the adoption industry’s interests and agenda, not some “non-biased” research volume.

NCFA has made a point of pulling the “Fox/Faux” news trick of leaving an impression of having “hearing both sides” in some effort to maintain the pretense that what they offer is in some way to be considered “fair and balanced” but for NCFA, just as for Faux, such is merely a tactic.

NCFA, similar to other adoption industry trade organizations like the Joint Council on International Children’s Services, or JCICS is ultimately of the industry, for the industry.

Key chapters in their “Factbook III”, similar to sessions held at the NCFA annual conferences make it abundantly clear, NCFA not only understands their industry stands vulnerable to lawsuits over its behaviors, but sees its role as helping agencies protect themselves from those whose children were taken illegally or those who have come to understand their placements had more to do with crimes than child welfare.

Discussion of “Wrongful adoption” suits  are covered in a number of places, for example, under chapters titled:

• Emerging Liability of Adoption Agencies and Attourneys
• Protecting Adoption Agencies from lawsuit

The day to day work of NCFA has everything to do with industry viability, marketing the concept of adoption itself and protecting the industry from both criticism and investigation.

Their place on the adoption pentagon is that of industry,  that is, industry holding a very special relationship to the State, and representing their clients, adopters. While they may employ the occasional adoptee or Parent, they do not and cannot speak for others of us most directly affected by adoption every day of our lives.

As for those of us adoptees and parents, NCFA doesn’t even think we should use such words for ourselves.

“Real,” “Natural,” or even “biological” Mothers  become “birthgivers” or “Woman who gave birth” or the backhanded “Genetic Mothers” in the world of NCFA speak. Don’t even dream of simply calling them Mothers unmodified.

Likewise, Fathers, “Real,” “Natural,” or “biological” are also reduced to “Man who shared in the conception”  or “Genetic Father.”

Both are very specifically,

…not the child’s “parents”…

according to NCFA’s “Factbook III”

The only “parents” in NCFA speak are those who adopted the child. (They must remain without modifier at all times.)

Similarly, “adoptee” is dismissed as

a negative term

we are now supposedly simply

“sons and daughters”

or “an individual who was adopted,” as in NCFA speak, adoption is a one time occurrence, clearly in the past, and certainly not any form of ongoing status.

This linguistic obliteration of adoptive status aims to prohibit any form of class consciousness of adopted people as having an ongoing identity as a result of having been adopted.

It disempowers and diffuses even our own ability to self identify, let alone speak about the structural aspects of the circumstances we are forced to live out the rest of our lives within the confines of.

There are no adoptees within NCFA’s notions of what the world looks like.

Bastard reality is simply erased.

In NCFA speak, there are no “blood relatives.”

This phrase can carry symbolic weight, but it can undermine the adoption bond.

Watching NCFA’s own lists of approved terminology change over time makes quite the study.

The 1989 version of the “Adoption Factbook,” for example, terms “biological” Mothers and Fathers makes for “Positive language” a decade later in “Adoption Factbook III” the entry for “Biological Mother/Father” is listed as a “No” (or do not use.)

In fact, NCFA believes any language that might validate Bastard experience or lead to what some Bastard rights activists have termed a “Bastard moment” are to be eliminated.

That has been a core focus of its work.

When adoption language culturally falls in line with the industry’s imposed standards rather than the language Bastards and our Families use to describe our own experiences we are marginalized and hidden even by discourse or legislation allegedly “about us.”

Our voices are co-opted, and our rendered voiceless existence used to validate the industry’s schemes for what it wants done.

Over time as language is intentionally changed across society the terms in which people think begin to change as well.

Thus when NCFA rebrands restoring records access and ensuring equal treatment under law to “mandatory openness” people begin to falsely equate adoptee equality to something forced and as coming at some kind of cost to others.

Instead of discussing genuine personal medical history privacy and proposed legislation (such as NJ’s bill) under which mothers would be forced to register with the state keeping both health information and their current address on file,  NCFA rebrands state sealed records as “mothers’ privacy” and intrusive measures such as these, which would compel mothers to hand over their personal medical histories as a means by which they can “maintain their privacy.”

Restored records access of course is not an interpersonal matter pitting mothers and adoptees against one another. It is instead a matter between adoptees and the state and between parents and the state.

Yet due to tangling states up in knots over blatantly false notions of “competing rights,” states have gone on to make matters even worse by trying to build structures predicated upon those false models, such as confidential intermediary programs, medical history exchanges, and contact vetoes.

No matter what effects adoption has in the long term to the individuals most directly affected, the National Council for Adoption cares first and foremost about maintaining the viability of the industry itself, a mission that has taken on even greater importance as the international adoption market has felt the full brunt of both American economic woes and other countries closing to adoption in the wake of vast adoption related crimes being uncovered.

NCFA is firmly invested in both “next quarter” short term thinking, and in preserving the viability of the industry itself over the long term.

Long term consequences to adoptees and their families, on the other hand, are both considered dismissible and dismissed.

Take for example, this from the “Adopted Children’s Issues” section  of the Factbook published in 1989, written to teen adoptees themselves (clearly written before terms like “biological parents” and even “adoptee” fell into NCFA’s list of no nos terminology-wise.)

Most adopted kids have some curiosity about their biological parents.

It is natural for teenagers to wonder about their biological parents, what their lives may be like now, whether they are still alive, and what circumstances made them decide to place you for adoption in hopes of giving you a better life. Usually these things remain as curiosities, sort of like people wondering what life was like for their great grandparents in the old country before they migrated to America to start a new life. For many of you, this curiosity will have been pretty well satisfied by now, and you have more immediate concerns, like struggling with math, buying the latest record, developing a new friendship.

NCFA’s “solution” is of course to resolve such feelings by reading, from their recommended list, naturally.

But Bastards will not be deterred from their desire to understand their authentic origins. We are not so easily distracted by quests for “the latest record” or our struggles “with math.”

Also note how NCFA ascribes motivation to parents, “in hopes of giving you a better life” as a way of framing the experience for adoptees. Yet years later, some adoptees have found that far from intentionally giving over their parental rights in hopes of giving their children some form of “better life,” a number of mothers were coerced, their children taken often without their consent. Some were even told their children died after childbirth only to be secretly placed into sealed records adoptions.

For NCFA, though, adoption is always the “Best Option.”

“Factbook III” takes aim at both “Family preservation” efforts and “family reunification” as archenemies of both the industry and adoption as an institution itself (never mind the fact that the vast majority of foster kids will be reunited and that many adoptions in this country are kinship adoptions, not adoptions by strangers.)

NCFA disdains the very concept of, and all practices related to family preservation.

In one of the key essays in “Factbook III”, “Twenty-One barriers to Adoption to Address in the Twenty-First Century” William Pierce, the founding president of NCFA goes to far as to compare family preservation services to “kudzu” vines.

The books also take aim at the Indian Child Welfare Act or ICWA repeatedly as well, calling for its outright repeal:

9. Repeal the Indian Child Welfare Act because it is an unconstitutional discriminatory law

“Discriminatory” to NCFA means the law prevents adoption agencies from selling off native kids to white would-be-adopters at will.

ICWA instead, recognizes First Nations’  peoples tribal sovereignty and independence, particularly in regard to native children, particularly in light of the history of how native children have been criminally removed from tribal contexts in efforts to “de-indian” them.

Pierce, in typical Piercian fashion, reframes enforcement of ICWA as a form of “discrimination” against “children with Native American blood” depriving them of their “right” to be adopted by whites. Worked up into a full froth, he begins tossing about terms like “racial and ethnic apartheid in America.” All because these are marketable kids he and his industry have some difficulty getting a hold of.

All genuine rights, such as the right of the child to grow up within a tribal context are “barriers” to be overcome for Pierce.

NCFA’s demand for access to saleable children is not limited to First Nations kids though. Just as much ire is in store for parents and others abroad who might not wish their children disappear into American adoptions. See “Factbook IV” published in 2007, in which NCFA brags of:

Fighting nationalistic opponents of adoption who would keep children trapped in foreign orphanages

NCFA shows none of the nuance of what role “orphanages” play in other societies, where they are often marketed as more of a “time out” option for short term child care for those parents or families unable to afford to care for their child at any given point in time.

The American impression of the word, that of “orphanages” as child warehousing operations misses much of the nuances to the roles these institutions play in other cultures.

What NCFA decries as “nationalistic opponents of adoption” are sometimes nothing more than those objecting to the way American adoption marketers have moved into countries such as Guatemala and had adopted out 1 out of every 100 babies born in the country. When babies become a primary export product of any given country, no one should be the least bit surprised when some raise an objection.

But again, to NCFA, adoption is always the “best option.”

But I leave readers with Bastardette’s parody post about NCFA’s festivities at the Willard in DC this evening, Exclusive Video from the Willard: What the American Adoption Industry Doesn’t Want You to See

Перевести на русский

The big news tonight is that Russia has put a freeze on all US adoptions until Russia and the US can come to an agreement on terms relating to those inter-country adoptions, (most likely adding additional follow up for Russian children, who remain Russian citizens after adoption) and sign a treaty to that effect.

To those of us who have been following the circumstances leading up to this suspension over the course of years now, none of this comes as a surprise, particularly since Russia had come right up to this brink in the last major US/Russian adoption related incident, (see my posts on Dmitry Yakolev.)

To understand the process by which things came to this critical point, one first has to understand the broader context.

Marley Greiner/Bastardette has been tracking some of the Russian adoptee murders and other forms of abuse, such as the high profile case of Masha (”Allen”) who was adopted by pedophile Matthew Mancuso on her blog “NIKTO NE ZABYT — NICHTO NE ZABYTO/Nobody is forgotten. Nothing is forgotten. A memoriam for Russian adoptees abused and murdered by their forever families.”

Be certain to see her overview Cases: Forever Family, Forever Dead.

Scrolling back through the posts and cases provides a great deal of background to how this level of frustration and anger has built over time.

Also be sure to see her overview of the consequences (and lack thereof) to the adoptive parents, The Russian Adopted Dead: a review of killers and sentences.

I have also done a scant few posts about some of the Russian Adooptees: Masha, Dennis Uritsky here in Maryland and somewhat more in-depth coverage of essentially the last major international incident concerning American adopters of a dead Russian adoptee, the sad death of Dmitry Yakolev/ Chase Harrison.

With that as backgrounder, we then come to the events of the last 24 hours.

Start with this lengthy video segment from Russia Today,

Clearly, each and every system in place to prevent such failed one by one, falling like dominoes.

After the 11 hour flight from DC back to Moscow he was brought to the Russian Education and Science Ministry Thursday afternoon by a man who had apparently been paid $200 by the adoptive mother to meet the boy’s United Airlines flight when it arrived. He had been adopted a mere 6 months ago.

While it’s unclear what Artem had been told about the trip, we have details such as these beginning to emerge:

The online website Gazeta.ru said the child had almost completely forgotten how to speak Russian during his time in the United States, and answered questions posed to him in his native language in English. He said his adoptive grandparents were “good” but his mother was “very bad”, claimed the website. During his time in the US, he had been given a new name – Justin Hansen.

Allegedly he was told by his adoptive mother, from Shelbyville, Tennessee, that he was going on an excursion to Russia and would return home to the US in a couple of weeks. “His adoptive mother beat him and pulled him by the hair,” said Pavel Astakhov, the Russian president’s human rights ombudsman. “Reminding him of her makes him cry.”

At the orphanage in the far eastern town of Partizansk, where the child lived before he was adopted, teachers denied that he had psychological problems. “He’s a smart, clever kid,” said Svetlana Glukhovtseva. “He took in everything we taught him very well.”

Anyone with a shred of empathy can sympathize with the betrayal he must have felt upon realizing that far from some kind of “excursion,” his new “forever mommy” had decided to ship him off as if taking the boy to a returns department.

The Russian media is running with the “returned purchase” meme and I’m convinced, it’s a very valid analogy. They, like many of us Bastards, recognize the American adoptive mother is attempting to pass Artem off as nothing more than ‘defective merchandise’, and are furious at the callousness of her these actions.

There have been promises of an investigation here on the American end to see whether or not any laws were broken, I can only hope such would take into account not merely the actions of these individuals, but the entire system that enabled this human rights travesty.

Children are not objects.

They should not be treated as such.

They should not be purchased, nor purchase-able.

Artem was not treated as a family member, he was treated as little more than an allegedly ‘broken item’ shipped back to the manufacturer.

Now that he’s back in Russia, the Russian media are reporting he will likely go back into the child welfare system after first receiving physical and psychological examinations and some counseling. The language barrier alone may make him feel all the more isolated in his home country.

Bastardette blogged about Artyom Saveliev / Artem Saveliev /Artem Justin Hansen’s flight last night,  LEAVIN’ ON A JET PLANE: RUSSIAN ADOPTEE DUMPED ON PLANE, SENT BACK TO RUSSIA

Throughout the day today, she has posted several updates:

First an initial update that includes a variety of images relating to the case: Artem’s official adoption listing profile on the Russian government website prior to the adoption, and “after pictures” both with his “Forever Family” adoptive Mommy, Torry Ann Hansen and upon arrival back in Russia at the Domodedovo Airport. Bastardette also includes the image of the note that was sent with Artem on his journey to the ‘returns department.’

ARTEM SAVELIEV/ARTEM JUSTIN HANSEN: A PICTURE IS WORTH A THOUSAND WORDS

Later on, she added a second update about the Renton Washington agency that placed him, WAPAC, World Association for Children and Parents. WAPAC is Council on Accreditation (COA) accredited and a Joint Council on International Children’s Services (JCICS) and National Council for Adoption (NCFA) member. Earlier today, the Russian government suspended WAPAC’s Russian operations.

She also points out the possibility that Torry Hansen may have been elligible to adopt the boy at a greatly discounted price at the time.

As WAPAC was in Washington State (and ultimately responsible for the placement) and the Hansens live in Tennessee, there have been some questions as to who did the home study.

See Bastardette’s post:

SAVELIEV/HANSEN AGENCY IDENTIFIED: WORLD ASSOCIATION FOR PARENTS AND CHILDREN

I don’t have video up at the moment, but Bastardette also appeared on Russian Today this afternoon to speak about the case. Other American adoptees are also speaking out about this case.

In this link’s video segment you get a feel for the American Home the boy was placed into.

Meanwhile on the American end, pieces such as this are appearing attempting to put forward a bit more of the adoptive Mother Torry Hansen and Adoptive Grandmother, Nancy Hansen’s perspective on the incident:

Russia threatens to suspend US adoptions after woman sends 7-year-old boy back to Moscow alone

The article also contains preposterous nonsense such as this from adoption industry lobbyists, NCFA, desperately trying to maintain Russia as a sending country:

“Child abandonment of any kind is reprehensible,” said Chuck Johnson, acting CEO of the National Council For Adoption.

NCFA associated individuals have been key to how the baby dump laws, (often call “Baby Moses Laws” or “Safe Haven” laws) legalizing child abandonment came to pass here in the United States. For this latest incarnation of NCFA to decry child abandonment is for them to deny their own organizational history!

But clearly there’s another, more pertinent reason NCFA and JCICS are issuing releases and working hard behind the scenes on this case right now, even above and beyond their desires to keep Russia a “sending country”, WAPAC is one of their own.

Neither NCFA nor JCICS mention that WAPAC is their own member agency (see here and here), as they desperately run around try to sell the it’s an “isolated incident” line, pretending that this latest outrage is not situated firmly within a vast pattern of ongoing history of cases pertaining to what Russian adoptees have suffered at the hands of their American adopters: abuse, starvation, beatings, murders, being adopted by a pedophile, left to die in hot cars in summer, and now sent back alone on an international flight.

“Isolated incident” my ass.

Go see this piece from CNN in which the adoptive granmother claims she was following online instructions from a lawyer:

Nancy Hansen, the Tennessee woman who put Justin Hansen on the plane in Washington, insisted she did not abandon the child, but was following instructions from a lawyer she found online.

and

When the lawyer she found online advised her the adoption could be reversed, Hansen booked the flight and paid the fee for a steward to escort Justin through the airport, she said.

She hired a driver in Moscow she found online to pick the child up from the Moscow airport, she said. She found “safe references” for the driver online, she said.

She then prepared a letter for Justin to present to Russian officials, which included a photo of the driver, whom she identified as “Arthur,” she said.

and we hear from the agency, World Association for Children and Parents for the first time:

The Seattle-based agency which Hansen said her daughter used to coordinate the adoption said it found out about Justin’s return only Friday.

“We were alerted to this situation by our branch office in Moscow, Russia, and are shocked and saddened by this turn of events,” said a spokeswoman for the World Association for Children and Parents.

In the 1 percent of the cases where the dissolution of an adoption has been needed, the agency “has always supported and worked closely with [adoptive] parents to assist the child in moving into a new adoptive family,” she said.

See this comment left over on Bastardette’s blog by an anonymous commenter for more details.

Ongoing corruption and falsified paperwork in Nepal, a suspension, pending a review of adoptions from Swaziland, and child buying and selling, errrr “media reports alleging direct recruitment” in Ethiopia.

Nepal Alert

Caution About Pursuing an Adoption in Nepal March 4, 2010

The U.S. Department of State strongly discourages prospective adoptive parents from choosing Nepal as a country from which to adopt due to grave concerns about the reliability of Nepal’s adoption system and the accuracy of the information in children’s official files. The Department also strongly discourages adoption service providers from accepting new applications for adoption from Nepal until reforms are made, and to be vigilant about operating in an ethical manner under the current adoption system.

the Alert continues (emphasis original to the document):

The Hague Conference on Private International Law recently released a report on its Intercountry Adoption Technical Assistance Program, based on a visit by a delegate from the Hague Conference’s Permanent Bureau to Nepal in November 2009 (http://www.hcch.net/upload/wop/nepal_rpt09.pdf). This report is the result of an independent analysis of Nepal’s intercountry adoption system under the new Terms and Conditions put in place in 2008. The report details a number of weaknesses in Nepal’s current adoption system, including the falsification of documents, improper financial gain, and lack of a child protection system.

Based on our own observations and experience with adoption cases in Nepal, the U.S. Department of State shares many of the concerns outlined in the Hague report. In one of the first cases processed by the Government of Nepal after the revision of the Terms and Conditions, the U.S. Embassy in Kathmandu found that the adopted child was not a true orphan and that her birth parents were actively searching for her.

We encourage parents who have filed an application with the Ministry of Women, Children and Social Welfare (MWCSW) in Nepal, but have not yet been matched with a child or received an Adoption Decree issued by the Government of Nepal, to consider a change of countries. The Department of Homeland Security, United States Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS), allow one change of country to be made in connection with one’s I-600A application without fee. A request to change countries should be made in writing to the USCIS Field Office where the I-600A was originally filed. (Any subsequent request for a change of country would require a fee.)

Swaziland Alert

Adoption Alert March 1, 2010

On February 24, 2010, the Deputy Prime Minister of Swaziland informed the U.S. Embassy in Mbabane that it will not process intercountry adoptions cases while the Department of Social Welfare completes a review of its adoption procedures. Only cases that were already with the Swaziland High Court will be processed during the review. The U.S. Embassy in Mbabane has not been provided with an expected completion date of the review.

Ethiopia Notice

Change in Processing Timeline for Adoption Cases March 5, 2010

The Department of State shares families’ concerns about recent media reports alleging direct recruitment of children from birth parents by adoption service providers or their employees. In response to these reports, the U.S. Embassy in Addis Ababa has implemented some changes to adoption visa processing.

Oh you mean pesky little allegations like this or this about the apparent lies offered up by Christian World Adoption Agency.

Child buying and selling apparently only merits a mere “Notice” (as opposed to an alert.)

Naturally, these promises of an education, of families of origin being able to regain their children, etc should be all too familiar to anyone paying attention to the Haitian adoption mess. It’s the standard pitch. This is what inter-country adoption relies upon to extract kids.

Naturally the CBS piece is more concerned with the families who adopted the kids, not the families left behind.

The Notice continues:

If families have concerns about their adoption, we ask that they share this information with the Embassy, particularly if it involves possible fraud or misconduct specific to your child’s case. The Embassy takes all allegations of fraud or misconduct seriously.

The best way to contact the Embassy is by email at ConsAdoptionAddis@state.gov. Please include your name, your child’s name, your adoption agency, the date of the adoption (month and year), and, if possible, the immigrant visa case number for your child’s case (this number begins with the letters ADD followed several numbers and can be found on any document sent to you by the National Visa Center). Please let us know if we have your permission to share concerns about your specific case with Ethiopian government officials.

We strongly encourage you to register any complaint that you may have about an adoption agency in the following ways:

*You may file a complaint with the state licensing authority where your adoption agency is licensed and conducts business. The Child Welfare Information Gateway, which is maintained by the Department of Health and Human Services, provides such a list at the link below: http://www.childwelfare.gov/pubs/reslist/rl_dsp.cfm?rs_id=15&rate_chno=AZ-0008E

*You may also file a report with the state’s Better Business Bureau. Following is the link to the Better Business Bureau’s website where you may file a complaint on-line: https://odr.bbb.org/odrweb/public/getstarted.aspx

*If your agency is a Hague-accredited adoption service provider, you are encouraged to file a complaint on the Hague Complaint Registry located at the link below. This information will be used by the accrediting entities to evaluate the agency in connection with the renewal of its accreditation status. http://adoption.state.gov/hague/overview/complaints.html

The U.S. Embassy continues to work with the Government of Ethiopia to ensure that appropriate safeguards exist to protect prospective adoptive children, their birth parents, and prospective adoptive parents. Please continue to monitor adoption.state.gov for updated information.

Just how bad have adoptions out of Ethiopia gotten?

Bad enough that one of the industry trade lobbies, the Joint Council of International Children’s Services (JCICS) has decided to supress its own internal report on the situation in Ethiopia. (Note that JCICS is not and should never be described as a “watchdog” as the industry is by definition, unable to “watchdog” itself.)

Christian World Adoption belongs to both of the major trade lobbies. It is both a National Council for Adoption (NCFA) and Joint Council member agency.

Readers may also want to read across to the CWA page taking note of for example, the agency’s political connections:

Our director was former president and liaison between the JCICS and the U.S. Congress concerning adoption legislation.

***

Read ‘em and weep. Then work to kill AB 372.

Bastardette-

CARE’S BRIDGE TO NOWHERE: NEW AB 372 AMENDMENTS RELEASED–DROPS ADOPTEES IN THE RIVER

BASTARDETTE POLL: WILL CARE PULL AB 372?

B.B. Church-

Bad, Worse, Worst: AB 372 limps into Judiciary…

In which he lays out one of the ways in which AB 372 takes the already bad lack of access system and actively makes it worse-

Under the current laws, if you want your birth records, you petition the courts. The court order up your records, take a look, and either releases your records or not. If there is a disclosure veto filed, then chances are slim to nil that you’ll get them. But if there is no disclosure veto the judge has the discretion to release the records.

Under the proposed changes the adoptee fills out an application with the State Registrar. The Department of Health sends out a letter into the aether to a twenty-five year old address. If they don’t get a reply, or if the letter is undeliverable, they have no discretion, they reject the application.

Reading the memo, it’s clear there are MANY more issues with the proposed amendments.

There’s a hell of a lot more to say about this bill, mired in the carefully fabricated lies of both access being predicated upon  ‘medical necessity’ and the ‘balancing interests’ poppycock (in reality, records access is a matter between adopted people and the State,) both of which have been discredited long ago by those authentically working for Bastard Rights (see Bastard Nation’s the Basic Bastard as but one of many such examples.)

For now, though, there’s work to be done.

To get readers up to speed, first a little history:

Ron has done a number of posts on CARE’s crap, including his latest, in which he nails the sappy overwrought emotionalism CARE is employing:

BB Church vs CARE, Nikfa and THE Adopton Institute, with one hand tied behind my back…

Marley also has a number of posts on her California Adoption Reform Effort tag, including her latest about the content of the CA bill itself:

CALIFORNIA: I’M MAD AS HELL AND I’M NOT GOING TO TAKE IT ANYMORE! BAD BILL HITS THE BOARDS!

While you’re there, be sure to note Maryanne’s comment on Marley’s piece:

maryanne said…

I am mad as hell! I am a member of the CUB Board and we were flat out lied to to get us to support CARE’s bill. We were told in an email from Jean Strauss that they were going to introduce a clean bill, with the proviso that it “might” have to be modified somewhere down the road. This clearly not what happened; CARE did not even try to introduce a clean bill, but came out with this travesty.This group deserves no support from anyone who cares about adoptee rights.

Wednesday, February 25, 2009 10:45:00 AM EST

If this is how the bill’s “supporters” are interpreting current events, I’d say CARE has a rocky road ahead of it.

The full text of CA AB 372 as introduced can be found on the California Open page.

Read it and judge for yourself, but simply put, it is not by any stretch a clean open records bill.

As Marley pointed out in her latest piece CARE felt the need to add this disclaimer of sorts to their webpage concerning the bill:

(a word about reading a bill: Legislative language, and the language of statutes, can be confusing. The language is based upon existing legal code which encompasses thousands of pages that are all interrelated. The chane that we are requesting will allow adult adoptees over the page of 18 access to their original record of birth. The text herein is written by the legislative counsel for the California Assembly and is written for lawyers, not for lay people. What’s important is that it cretes a legal right for adult adoptees to get their birth records.)

In other words, it’s a nice little condescending pat on the head, saying essentially, ‘there, there all you adoptees, it’s in legislate-ese, just TRUST US, it doesn’t mean what you thought you read, see? It’s now a “rights” bill, trust us!’

Which of course is ultimately not what it is. This is not a rights bill, this more of the usual conditional psuedo-access predicated upon desires and whims.

Again, Bastards buying that old “trust us” line, I’ve still got that old CARE bridge on the wrong coast to sell ya … .

Bastards have every reason to begin asking the hard questions when someone begins selling us the just “trust us” line in relation to legislation.

These are people’s real lives CARE is being so CARE-less with. The consequences of getting it wrong means real people left behind, screwed over, and trapped behind walls of lack of access.

In Ohio, I’m precisely that class of “left behind” Bastards. Had I been born just a few years earlier, or perhaps a few years later, my chances of actually gaining access to my authentic records would be quite different, but as it stands now, purely due to a “political compromise” I’m locked into those middle, and fucked over, years.

Messed up legislation has real world consequences to those bargained away.

And that is precisely what the CARE bill does, set up a new and damaged system going forward. If their bill were to pass Bastards would be left begging judges for scrubbed of identifying information (unless such is deemed necessary to assist in establishing a legal right) copies of their paperwork.

It says so right there in the CARE bill:

The name and address of the natural parents shall be given to the petitioner or requester only if he or she can demonstrate that the name and address, or either of them, are necessary to assist him or her in establishing a legal right. In all other cases, that information shall be redacted from all records and information provided, including a copy of an original record of birth.

CARE’s pre-emptive answer to such is of course, another pat on the head, ‘there there, you just don’t understand it, TRUST US!’

Trust people who have the unmitigated gall to write such into a bill and then try to proffer it off as a bill that “creates a legal right for adult adoptees to get their birth records”?

Like hell!

Yes, by and large I’m pointing my readers to others writings on the CARE-tastrope, in part because

• Ron himself is a California adoptee (as well as his previous work with California Open)
• and Marley in her Bastard Nation work as a “9-year member of CalOpen Partners” is also in a position to have something to say here.

Both of them not only have something to say about this monstrosity, they come from places to know of what they speak.

What I have to say is mainly in support of the good work they’re already doing.

None-the-less, being a left behind Bastard myself, who has petitioned the court for my records repeatedly, let me tell you, I at least hold out hope that if the judge were to actually sign off on allowing me my own paperwork, it would at least be complete, not routinely redacted by law.

CARE is thus taking a bad situation and ultimately making it worse, setting up NEW roadblocks. This is not merely a bad bill, it’s actively counterproductive.

Living as I do on the other end of a not altogether dissimilar process in Ohio, let me be the first to tell you, “compromises” that create new obstructions and make the already bad situation worse are no answer.

***

Disney’s “Stitch.”

Instantly recognizable as a “fellow traveler” to Bastard moviegoers and adopted “abominations” everywhere.

Not only does he hail from the one and only Disney movie to prominently feature a social worker, alongside the perennial Disney themes of:

• being orphaned, and of impending potential family disruption,
• the importance of family preservation, (even when families are self- found, “little, and broken” they are nonetheless worthy of being deemed “still good.”)
• how even those deprived of their history can come to create their own intentional forms of family, and be reunited with their Ohana of origin
• and how eventually, in movies anyway, the lead always comes to rediscover their previously obscured roots, (Bastards make the best plot twists!)

but Stitch, Lilo, and Nani also have a very great deal to say about notions of leaving people behind:

“Ohana means family, family means nobody gets left behind. Or forgotten.”

Widsom so simple, children have no trouble comprehending it.

Unfortunately, out here in the non-animated world, it’s a lesson all too many adults have yet to wrap their heads around.

***

Marley/Bastardette has written what I consider one of the most important posts on the Bastard condition I’ve seen in a long time.

In light of how some in the adoption blogosphere have gotten their knickers in a collective twist over both the California disaster and the NCFA piece (which simply is not news, except in that Bill Pierce is no doubt rolling over in his grave in light of how much psuedo-”openness” the new NCFA has come to embrace,) Marley brings up what is completely obvious to Bastards, that “reformers” and industry voices such as NCFA have far more in common with one another than either do with any genuine effort which has actually opened records and improved the lives for adopted people.

CARE, the Evan B. Donaldson Institute, and NCFA all have more in common with one another than any of them have to do with us.

Each of these, despite any “openness” language they may come to employ (usually grounded firmly in a cynical pragmatism and industry survival instinct), are ultimately willing to trade away access for some. An often undetermined number or percentage are written off as expendable, or “not politically expedient.”

Bastards on the other hand, leave no one behind.

Speaking as one of those left behind in an earlier Ohio deform effort, and as a black holed Bastard, let me add my voice to Marley’s, genuine Bastard-centric efforts leave no one behind.

No number or percentage should be left back or “forgotten.” Living daily, as one myself, allow me to tell you from firsthand experience, it’s inexcusable.

We will never trade away the person standing next to us. Any notion of “we’ll come back and open those up later” is failure. (Even the briefest study of political history will teach that lesson quickly enough.) We understand, either we all go together or we don’t go at all.

None of the adoption deformers speak for us.

In any case, go, read, and learn:

SWAPMEETIN’: NCFA, REFORMISTS, AND BASTARDS

Marley’s piece from where I sit is a mandatory Bastard backgrounder and has everything to say about where we find ourselves today.

(And ’cause I’m a space geek, enjoy a Black hole picture post.)

***
Перевести на русский

***

This post is an update to an ongoing series of posts I have made about the death of Dmitry Yakolev/Chase Harrison and the agency that placed him, European Adoption Consultants (EAC). EAC is one of the largest international adoption agencies in the world and the top agency in Russia (and had been in Guatemala.)

Russian law requires officials be kept up to date by the placing agencies of the disposition of the children placed through them with regular updates for the first three years. In the aftermath of Dmitry’s death, the Russian Federation Ministry of Education and Science opened an investigation into EAC for their apparent failure to report his death immediately.

Dmitry is the the second Russian child EAC had placed who died apparently as a result of actions by their adopters. Logan Higgenbotham was killed by her adoptive mother in 1988. You can read my previous posts about Dmitry and EAC by clicking here (read from bottom to top, as entries are in reverse chronological order.)

***

Despite what appear to be at minimum impending changes in the Russian adoption system for Americans, by and large a “wait and see” silence has fallen over those portions of the industry most likely to be directy affected.

Russian adoption related message boards and blogs filled with prospective adopters have gone into a tissy in response to the Russian statements:

from- The Moscow Times- Tough New Rules for Adoptive U.S. Parents

The government will toughen regulations for Americans wishing to adopt Russian children after a U.S. court acquitted a Virginia man of felony charges in the death of his newly adopted Russian son earlier this year, officials said Thursday.

and

The ministry has already prepared an official demand to be sent to the U.S. State Department regarding the adoption of Russian children, Levitskaya said. The statement gave no specifics about possible stricter requirements. Ministry spokesman Alexander Kochnev said by telephone Thursday afternoon that officials were in the process of working out new rules.

from RIA Novosti- Russia slams acquittal of U.S. man over Russian-born son’s death

“We will demand that U.S. authorities review the extremely unfair ruling. Further cooperation with the United States in adoption will depend on Washington’s readiness to take practical steps to ease our concerns,” the ministry said.

The statement came after criticism earlier on Thursday by a senior Russian education and social protection official, who said adoption requirements for U.S. nationals would be toughened following the acquittal.

also from RIA Novosti-Russia to toughen adoption rules for U.S. over Harrison acquittal

“We are outraged by the court ruling and believe it to be totally unjust and unacceptable,” Alina Levitskaya was quoted by the Education and Science Ministry as saying. “It questions the reliability of the U.S. system of protection of adopted children’s rights, and will lead to tougher requirements for U.S. nationals in Russia.”

Levitskaya said the ministry would demand that authorities in the United States step up monitoring of children adopted from Russia. She said the education ministry and the Russian Embassy in the United States would seek a guilty verdict for Harrison.

The industry on the other hand, appears to be holding its breath and collectively crossing its’ fingers.

EAC, European Adoption Consultants, despite being at the center of the case, for both placing Dmitry and failing to live up to its obligations to inform the Russian government as to his disposition thus sparking an official investigation, is also tight-lipped.

Earlier they had placed two different versions of a brief statement about Dmitry’s death on their front page of their website. In the wake of Miles Harrison, their “forever family” forever client being acquitted EAC has continued on about business as usual.

JCICS, or the Joint Council on International Children’s Services, a membership trade organization and industry lobby with numerous adoption agencies as members, is remarkably silent. Their Russian news page last updated November 11th.

Unlike these others, NCFA, the National Council for Adoption, yet another adoption industry trade group and lobby, who have been remarkably quiet about both Dmitry’s death and the trial of Miles Harrison, has stirred from its slumber now that it understands its member organization’s incomes streams may well be affected by the verdict.

NCFA’s statement by and large, runs on two patronizing themes:

• Now now, let’s not act hastily!
• Calm down and let cooler heads prevail, anything else would be irrational!

Both wrapped up with a holiday bow of but THINK ABOUT THE CHILDREN! Adoptions MUST allowed to continued- for the sake of the children! (and NCFA member agency’s pocketbooks!)

The full statement, currently available on the NCFA homepage, reads:

National Council For Adoption Calls For Calm and Rational Response to Harrison Verdict

The National Council For Adoption (NCFA) has followed closely the events and legal proceedings involving the tragic death of young Chase Harrison on July 8, 2008 and the not guilty verdict on manslaughter charges brought against his father Miles Harrison. The verdict has attracted a great deal of international attention questioning whether the verdict was in any way related to the child’s international adoptive status.

“Let me assure the international community that adoptive parents in the United States have the same responsibilities to their adopted children as do biological parents to their biological children,” said Chuck Johnson, NCFA’s vice president and COO. “Likewise, children who are adopted enjoy the very same rights and protection of full citizenship under the law as do children born in the United States. We are confident that Chase Harrison’s status as an adopted child in no way influenced the judge’s ruling or diminished the seriousness surrounding this case.”

“NCFA fully understands how difficult it may be for some to accept this verdict as appropriate and just. However, the number of successful adoptions whereby Russian children have found safe, loving and permanent homes weighs heavily on the side of accepting the Harrison case as unfortunate, tragic and sad – but is in no way representative of the overwhelming majority of U.S. adoptions of Russian-born children,” Johnson said.

NCFA encourages a calm and rational response to the verdict, and hopes that the Russian government will continue to work with the United States government and the American adoption community to keep the adoption process between Russia and the United States transparent, safe and successful for the benefit of thousands of Russian-born children. Those who would suffer most from a disruption of Russian adoptions are the thousands of innocent orphans who otherwise would have been adopted into loving American homes.

While industry may feel threatened, this very press release shows how blithely unaware the industry can be in relation to the very rights and long term well being of the children it places.

Let’s start with what may be the single most amazing quote I’ve ever heard out of NCFA:

…children who are adopted enjoy the very same rights and protection of full citizenship under the law as do children born in the United States.

This is an astounding statement, clearly, provably, patently false.

Adopted people (whether international or domestic) such as myself do NOT enjoy the same rights under American law as the non-adopted.

Non-adopted people, as but one example, do not have records pertaining to their identity and birth confiscated by the state and held under lock and key in all but 6 states (Alaska, Oregon, Kansas, Alabama, New Hampshire, and Maine.) They do not face legal hurdles and barriers such as having to obtain a court order to see their original unaltered birth certificates. We do not receive equal treatment under the law in regard to our authentic documentation.

This affects adopted people in numerous everyday ways from the hoops some of us must jump through in attempts to get something as basic as a driver’s license, to attempts to gain pensions.

The ways in which those adopted in this country do not have equal rights as the non-adopted in this country forms of long list of grievances. Groups such as Bastard Nation: The Adoptee Rights Organization owe their entire existence to the fact that we do not receive equal treatment under law.

As for adoptees and citizenship protections, perhaps the folks over at NCFA would care to explore Pound Pup Legacy’s ongoing list of deportation cases of international adoptees. Under the Bush administration, the Department of Homeland Security has stepped up the deportation of adoptees with criminal convictions. As for one reason or another (often lack of knowledge that gaining such was necessary, or in other cases, being told the child already had citizenship) these adoptees never received their American citizenship, the the Illegal Immigration Reform and Immigrant Responsibility Act of 1996, applies to them, and they have been shipped back to their countries of origin, even if they left as infants and know nothing of the culture or language.

The case of Joao Herbert being doubly sad in that after being deported to Brazil, he was murdered.

In short, if NCFA thinks adoptees “enjoy the very same rights and protection of full citizenship under the law as do children born in the United States” they either haven’t been paying attention, or are outright lying to protect their industry.

Next, let’s tackle this line:

NCFA encourages a calm and rational response to the verdict, and hopes that the Russian government will continue to work with the United States government and the American adoption community to keep the adoption process between Russia and the United States transparent, safe and successful for the benefit of thousands of Russian-born children.

For starters, you gotta love the way NCFA attempts to portray any response to the verdict other than that which they want as perhaps irrational, or not coming from a calm (and clear headed) position.

Such framing, of course denies the ongoing history of adoption policy between the two countries. In the wake of other Russian adoptees dying due to the actions of their adopters, Russia has taken steps to keep the process open while trying to improve information flow. The Russians government has responded “calmly” and “rationally” time and again, yet despite their efforts at making the process work, certain aspects are still not working.

The Dmitry Yakolev case makes it abundantly clear, adoptions to the US from Russia are NOT “transparent.” Despite the previous Russian tightening of restrictions, attempting to ensure that information about the disposition of Russian adoptees (who are Russian citizens) in the US would be reported back, Russian officials learned of Dmitry’s death not from the agency, European Adoption Consultants, (EAC) responsible for maintaining tabs on Dmitry’s health and well being, but from the newspapers after his death.

By any measure, clearly an information break down occurred. EAC failed to live up to it’s obligations.

The process has not been “transparent”, “safe” or “successful” in relation to Dmitry and a growing list of other Russian adoptees.

Russia’s response to such HAS ALREADY been measured and maintained the process in light of previous calls for a full moratorium.

The Russian embassy had a representative in the courtroom throughout the process, watching closely as Miles Harrison’s trial played out. In many ways, they gave the American judicial system every chance to get this right. In light of Harrison taking the full walk, industry reactionaries such as NCFA have no business feigning shock and displeasure at the Russian response. It’s been a long time coming. The Russians have kept the process open time and again in the face of earlier calls for closing to American adoptions.

Will the Harrison case be the straw the broke the camel’s back? That remains to be seen.

Finally NCFA pleads (on behalf of its member organizations):

Those who would suffer most from a disruption of Russian adoptions are the thousands of innocent orphans who otherwise would have been adopted into loving American homes.

The adoption of Russian children to the US had already been declining (just as the rest of international adoption marketplace has slowed:)

Only about 1,800 Russian children were adopted by Americans this year — down from a high of almost 6,000 in 2004.

NCFA pleading for American market share is an industry pleading for its lifeblood. Agencies need kids (particularly white kids) to place. With both Guatemala and Vietnam closing earlier this year, the industry is scrambling for sources. Terminology such as “innocent” and “orphans” are being used as part of an emotional appeal.

I’ve written repeatedly here on my blog about how terminology such as “orphan” means one thing in the American psyche and common usage and quite another under American and international adoption law.

When NCFA utilizes terminology such as “innocent” they are playing on readers sympathies in in relation to “justice.” They are building a construct where-under “innocent” “orphans” would be “punished” by “denying them adoptions” as if it were a child’s “right’ to be adopted.

This relies upon the twin mythologies of a newly constructed out of whole cloth child’s “right” to be adopted, and that of adoption as always providing some form of a “better life,” both of which while devised over decades by the industry are simply that, mythologies.

Far from a “right to be adopted,” the more internationally agreed upon definition of children’s rights (despite the U.S. having not signed on to such) is predicated upon the right of a child to grow up with the context of their biological family save “exceptional circumstances.” See this brief piece of the broader discussion of such I wrote earlier:

Note the UN Declaration of the Rights of the Child. The ‘rights’ being spelled out for children entail more far more than A family, instead the ‘right’ refers to growing up within their family of origin barring “exceptional circumstances.”

See principle 6, in particular, which states in part:

He shall, wherever possible, grow up in the care and under the responsibility of his parents, … a child of tender years shall not, save in exceptional circumstances, be separated from his mother.

And as to that “better life?”

That is predicated upon a form of American nationalism that assumes a child will inherently be “better of” with an American adoptive couple, or within a context of American wealth.

To quote Socorro Treviño, the mother-in-law of a Mexican womyn who sold her newborn to an international adoption baby broker who in turn, was selling Mexican babies into American adoptions:

“A better life?” she said in Spanish while surveying the dilapidated house around her. “If that was the case we would have given everyone here up for adoption.

Adoption must not be offered up as the “better life” solution to global poverty and parental desperation.

NCFA’s “solution” to the problems of those growing up in Russian orphages is relocation and redistribution into wealthy American families.

The Harrison’s paid “about 80,000″ to adopt Dmitry.

His biological mother was described as “mentally disabled:”

“We received Dima in 2006 straight from the labor ward,” said Natalya Vishnevskaya, the head doctor at the orphanage. “His 18-year-old mother signed a refusal of the child and disappeared. It’s unclear where she is now. She is a mentally disabled, lonely young girl who was also raised in an orphanage.”

Which is to say the problems Dmitry’s original parents (no mention of the father at all) faced (or still faces) are far larger than simply picking up Dmitry and passing him along to American adopters.

NCFA and it’s member agencies rely upon that desperation, that lack of services and support to gain children, or “product” for their industry.

They have no interest in working to change the circumstances and situation that brought Dmitry to the point of adoptability, as doing so would fundamentally undermine their very industry.

Instead, they structure their argument in hopes that their income stream remain intact by co-opting the non-existent voices of infants made available to the adoption process themselves, arguing business must go on unimpeded “for the sake of the children.”

Am I surprised by such?

Not in the least. It’s precisely what industry can be counted on to do.

Industry has shown, it only speaks up when its own interests are at stake, not when the genuine rights and needs of those adopted are at stake (other than its attempts to block them.)

If anything, NCFA has show it is often unaware of the real state of, cares nothing for, or more often, works in direct opposition to adoptee rights.

Again, hardly surprising, in that NCFA was intentionally created as a reaction to the prospect of adoptees gaining access to their authentic documentation. NCFA was created by the industry to once again slam those doors of access shut.

As for NCFA itself, it is an industry trade group and lobby founded in 1980, as a direct reaction to the 1979/1980 Carter administration’s Draft Model State Adoption Act (DMSAA) which had called for restoring records access by adoptees to their own adoption records. NCFA was created very specifically by industry interests to derail and defeat the open records provisions of the DMSAA.

For NCFA to now spout off about how adoptees “enjoy the very same rights” is nothing if not bitterly ironic.

So here we have it, NCFA utilizing the very adoptee rights they have fought so hard against and testified in opposition to in state legislatures across the country in a last ditch effort to attempt to keep Russian adoptions open.

Clearly, they have no shame.

*

Just a real quick post tonight urging readers to head on over and read Bastardette’s James Dobson Cries Me a River.

She’s done a great job of picking apart some of the intentional conflations. Healthy White Infants (HWIs) being lumped in linguistically with with foster kids for example.

Of course the myth being proffered of ‘access to abortion as driving down adoption rates’ is just that, a myth.

Though in a country wherein every time a womyn exercises her reproductive autonomy; whether that be to refuse to bear or to self parent, should we be the least bit surprised to then hear institutions advocating on behalf of prospective adoptive parents (PAPs) decrying womyn for not breeding on behalf of their constituency? Thus we come to the labeling of womyn exercising their reproductive autonomy a “sad situation.”

The idea of womyn being nothing more than there to provide “womb services” for the infertile objectifies womyn and reduces them to nothing more than their reproductive capacity, a capacity others wish to tap for their own ends.

Infertile couples are not entitled to other’s children. Womyn must not required to breed children for the infertile. Legislation designed to force womyn down those lines should be decried and opposed by those who support individual autonomy.

Both the Dobson empire and NCFA are no friend to womyn’s genuine autonomy. (The sooner various “pro-choice” organizations get that through their heads the better.)

The other crucial piece of course is that both NCFA and Dobson’s empire are not merely speaking of adoption for PAP’s sakes. They are also speaking of adoption as a tactic of movement growth, beyond any given couple or individual. Both view adoption in eugenic terms, ‘fit’ PAPs and ‘unfit’ PAPs, with the primary dividing line being tribal; based around a statement of faith & visibly heterosexual and church sanctioned married lifestyle.

All of which resides in the realm of the demand driven adoption. This is about the demands of infertile couples and the social movement many of them are a part of which is currently looking to and utilizing adoption as a means of movement growth.

Lost in such are the autonomy, the genuine needs, and the desires of womyn and Bastards, of any age.

If womyn are objectified down to their reproductive capacity for others’ uses, Bastards are likewise objectified, both to merchandise to be bought and sold only to ‘fit’ PAPs, and tallied as but another notch on the evangelists’ bedposts.