This is the latest in a series of posts I have done criticizing Nebraska’s legalized child abandonment laws. You can find my earlier posts via my Nebraska tag.

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Where your children can become memories!

or is that

Making your children memories since July 2008!

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Fly by dumping, flying the child abandonment skies.

Yup, welcome to the daily doom that is Nebraska’s legalized child abandonment law.

The Detroit (Michigan) News reports this morning on a Michigan parent who flew into Nebraska to legally abandon their 13 year old son.

After all what’s the cost of a plane ticket when compared with the looming prospect of college tuition?

KETV is now reporting the mother drove 12 hours in from Detroit:

At 3 p.m. on Monday, those officials said the mother was still in Omaha.

Todd Landry, director of the Division of Children and Family Services, said the department is working with Michigan officials and the Douglas County attorney’s office to resolve the situation.

The department has also been in contact with the boy’s family since the child was dropped off.Officials are trying to learn more about the circumstances of the latest case, but say the Columbus Day holiday is slowing the investigation.But officials reported that the boy was in no immediate danger and was not exhibiting any violent behavior.

Regardless of whether by air or by land, this is the second reported case of a cross state lines legalized abandonment resulting in a kid being abandoned in Nebraska. (The first, from Iowa is now back home in Iowa, “reunited” with her family, in no small part after Nebraska tried to raise the possibility of the parents being prosecuted in Iowa.)

At 6pm, an AP story just hit, containing a few more details:

The boy has been placed in an emergency shelter. Landry said the family doesn’t appear to have ties to Nebraska and he wasn’t sure if the family had sought help in Michigan first.

State officials have met with the boy’s mother, Landry said but wouldn’t immediately address her reasons for leaving her son. He said he believed the boy’s parents were married but wasn’t sure if the father agreed to the decision.

The article also reminds potential dumping parents that there are no guarantees they’ll be able to get their child back, should they want the kid back:

State officials have said parents and caregivers need to understand there is no guarantee an abandoned child could be returned to them if they change their minds. The have encouraged parents to seek other resources before resorting to abandonment.

Both the KETV and AP stories are reporting that per the Nebraska intake process, the boy was placed in an “emergency shelter.”

While I am unable to confirm this means this particular boy ended up at Project Harmony, based on previous statements (see this link for “Kids who are dropped off are brought to an organization called Project Harmony for evaluation,”) it’s a reasonable guess. Project Harmony runs a version of an “emergency shelter,” primarily for kids who have been sexually abused and has been woven into the Nebraska legalized child dumping intake process.

I wrote a post recently dealing with this outsourcing and some of the issued raised by such entitled Nebraska Dump Law, just how deep does this rabbit hole go?

At the tail end of the AP piece, Nebraska’s governor continues to push for a dump law 2.0 aimed at infants, (who due to the age issue, would be less likely to go on the evening news and be able to tell lawmakers and the world from first hand experience how much being dumped sucks.)

Gov. Dave Heineman has been reluctant to call a rare special session.

Landry declined to comment on whether a special session was needed, but he did say Monday that a new law is needed to specifically address infants in danger. Two children coming from out of state is clear evidence changes are needed, he said.

“We need to get back to the intent of the law,” he said. “The intent of the law was always the protection of newborns in immediate danger of being harmed.”

My advice to the Nebraska Governor is to pick on someone his own size.

Or at bare minimum someone old enough to be able to fight back/ able to articulate the damage legalized child abandonment laws do. Subjecting infants, those societally least able to speak out on behalf their own interests, to these laws just means waiting a few more years before being able to hear the first of the dumped infants tell you that child abandonment is not good policy.

No doubt, not all the kids dumped will despise them, but to use “safe haven” advocates rhetoric and twist it back against them, If it harms “just one”…!

Fantasies of infants abandoned and up for adoption resale aside, back in the real world, Nebraska continues to receive teens and older children, not a newborn among ’em. Older kids on the resale market don’t move very well. Maybe that’s why Nebraska is considering hitting up guardian dumpers from child support to pay for ’em.

None-the-less, the more people hear about this law is apparently the greater the number of parents willing to jump in the car and drive 12 hours to be rid of a kid.

We’re up to 21 attempted abandonments now. 21 kids who had it not been for the irresponsible actions of Nebraska state lawmakers would not have been legally abandoned, or abandonment attempts.

For every “baby safe haven” advocate who has ever whined, despairing of how they think their laws simply needed more publicity or a publicity budget, we now have one hell of a case study of what happens once the word gets out that the state will take kids off your hands.

These days, thanks to headlines around the globe and the TV 24 hour news cycle desperate for something to fill that space between the commercials, now unless you’ve been living under a rock plenty of people now think they know at least something about the Nebraska scheme and are happy to fill the blogosphere with their opinions of how “it’s a good law, just being ‘misused'”. However, most of the people spouting off about these legalized child abandonment laws have not passed through any portion of the child welfare or adoption systems. Bastardette, who is also doing coverage on this latest Nebraska dump and I have.

Meanwhile in the American psyche, “NEBRASKA” has taken the place of the proverbial bogeyman under the bed for some kids (note that the kids mentioned on the other end of this particular link have are already hip deep in quack-therapy RAD-land.) They fear they too, will face being ‘NEBRASKA-ED!” (Yup, it’s now a verb.)

Kids everywhere, living in fear, “Behave, or I’ll take you to Nebraska!”

Congratulations Nebraska legislators, you’ve made your state synonymous with state encouraged child abandonment in the national consciousness.

Puts a whole new twist on that ‘we adopted you, and you keep this up young lady, we can unadopt you too!’ (Yes we have seen at least one adoptee dumped into the ‘returns’ department.)

Nebraska legislators nervously eyeing the prospect of hordes of out of state teens being dumped into their already overburdened and underfunded child welfare system are hastily attempting to erect legislative walls trying to keep out of state dumpers out:

State Sen. Mike Flood, speaker of the Legislature, said that when the law is revised, he would like to see it pertain only to Nebraska residents, although he didn’t say how that might be accomplished.

Nebraska not being an anonymous dumper state can at least in theory, determine the point of origin of those bringing the kids to be dumped.

(Anonymous dumper states, of course mean in some cases anyone can bring a kid. One has to wonder whether international child dumping has ALREADY taken place, but due to the broadly written states laws we have no way of knowing. )

My ‘adopted’ home state of Maryland really takes the cake on the baby-dumps though, allowing any mother or anyone with the permission of the mother to leave any newborn 3 days old or less with ANYONE, ANYWHERE so long as the recipient is a “responsible adult”. The recipient then is supposed to take the newborn to a hospital. (see this link to a Child Welfare Information Gateway PDF document, search on “Cts & Jud Pro § 5-641″) Which is to say you gotta watch your back here in Maryland, after all, anyone could hand you a baby at any time.

Back in Nebraska, the ‘brain trust’ who brought us this day by day mounting dumped kid casualty count continue to blather the proverbial, ‘move along, move along, nothing to see here, we’ll get to it, nothing to worry about… .”

Nope, the current state of affairs, the rising toll of legally abandoned kids is apparently just fine by Nebraska State Senator Arnie Stuthman, of Platte Center. Stuthman opposes calling a special session saying:

agencies and organizations such as Boys Town and United Way can make headway in addressing the issues of families so they do not feel they have to abandon children.

Perhaps Sen. Stuthman would care to take that up with the the 13 year-old girl who was abandoned under Nebraska’s catastrophic legalized abandonment law back on September 20th. She had ALREADY been at Boys Town until she was removed by her great aunt the beginning of the summer. She had been removed due to her great aunt’s concerns about potential over medication during her time at Boys Town:

A 13-year-old girl who’d been diagnosed with bipolar disorder, fetal alcohol syndrome, and severe behavioral problems. She was prone to fly into rages and and had been living at Boys Town until her great aunt removed her at the beginning of the summer, concerned that the girl was being medicated too heavily.

After the girl smeared her menstrual blood on the walls of her house, the “aunt called agencies for help but said she could not find a program,” the World-Herald reports. When the girl tried to jump out of a moving car, her great aunt took her to a hospital and asked for help.

“I can’t do nothing for her anymore. It’s too dangerous,” she told the Omaha newspaper.

So Sen. Stuthman’s ‘answer’ is to send her right back into the situation she just came out of.

In other words his answer is no answer, how perfectly circular.

I’ve said from the beginning, we are looking at decades worth of budget slashing and privatization of services, the state abdicating its duty to its citizens, seeing “faith-based” institutions as solution structures. The legalized child abandonment laws are just revealing the already pre-existing rot and failures of precisely those ‘public/private partnership’ arrangements. Kids are falling through those gaps.

Rather than attempting to readjust the shade of lipstick on the pig to a colour more soothing, the only real answer at this point is to innovate.

It’s past time Nebraska did a system-wide assessment, and began to build genuine support structures offering real support to kids and families. Stop outsourcing, stop privatizing, stop assuming someone else can take care of it.

‘Can’t someone else do it?’ may make for a great campaign slogan on the Simpsons, but most Americans expect more of real politicians than of their cartoon counterparts. (Further, real life politicians might do well to remember how that particular Simpsons episode ends!)

Before that assessment process begins, the immediate needs of kids need to come first. The Nebraska legislators have created a crisis, they need to do the only thing that is going actually help these kids instead of continuing the harm already inflicted on at least 21 kids so far, REPEAL the legalized abandonment law. Take the lead nationally, and realize that legalized child abandonment is not something any state should be encouraging.

Being the only state without a law encouraging abandonment is not something to be ashamed of, it would be something to be proud of. Nebraska could, if legislators had the will, return Nebraska to its former place of honour, that of being a state that does not encourage child abandonment.

Encouraging legalized child abandonment is nothing less than the state putting its hands in its pockets, shrugging its shoulders, and mumbling, “we got nothing”, then passing the kids off to whichever ‘someone else’ happens to be handy, (usually along with a nice big fat check).

Kids deserve better.

The Nebraska legislature’s mishandling of child welfare in this manner is unconscionable. These kids are going to have to live with their (legislators) mistakes for a lifetime.

End child legalized abandonment now.

REPEAL the legalized abandonment law.

(Quick, before the next flight lands.)

The financial landscape of adoption itself has changed greatly over the past 30 years here in the U.S.. It is important to study for example, what the implications of the new subsidies and tax breaks will be in relation to the legalized child abandonment laws.

Through those past few decades a number of initiatives both public and private have been created geared towards increasing the number of adoptions. While many were conceived of as a way to increase adoptions from foster care for example, the effects have often included private international adoptions as well. This is one of the core problems in adoption, that words like ‘adoption’ itself covers so much, allowing each individual to hear what they want to hear and assume what they want to assume about what they thought they just heard.

To one, upon hearing about an ‘adoption’ they may think of an 11 year old African American boy removed by the state from an abusive home situation, placed in foster care and now in need of permanency, stability and parents who won’t beat him. He is eventually adopted by relatives with state support as they would be unable to take him in otherwise. Had they not adopted him, he may well have remained in foster care bouncing house to house through the years until he aged out at 18.

To another, hearing the same word, ‘adoption’, they may think of a vanity adoption by a wealthy supermodel hoping for the tabloid publicity of childrearing without the downside of stretch marks. She flies off to another country to pick up her child, a photogenic “orphaned” girl amidst the flashing cameras of the paparazzi. Once she been adopted and brought back to the states, she is left to be raised by nannies while ‘mom’ jet sets internationally. When the media glare has waned, she adopts a second and hits the front pages again.

The bottom line is ‘adoption’ can mean both simultaneously.

(I haven’t even gotten into adoption as a means of movement growth, or for theological purposes, both of which play very central roles in not only a percentage of American adoptions, but also is a major factor in some of the recent adoption related legislation.)

Unfortunately, as government and industry has grappled with adoption, they have in many cases made assumptions about adoption as it being a ‘universal good’ and ‘universally child-centric’ even when provably, in at least some cases, far from an act by which parents are there for children in need, it’s clear we are finding children adopted to fulfill adopters needs. While adoption subsides are predicated upon the idea of adoption as inherently an act of altruism, and a civic good to be publicly supported (financially and otherwise), that again, is based merely upon one set of assumptions about the role of adoption and its place in society.

So for starters, let’s get some very basic assumptions about definitions out of the way.

Let’s talk about foster care. People hear the words and often assume you’re discussing an older child who is spending long periods of time in foster care. While often true, you may also be discussing an infant kept in foster care very briefly, a month or less. People also assume ‘adopting out of foster care’ is always being done by a family unrelated to the foster care, while in practice, you often have foster parents adopting the kids, or infants they foster. So to turn the initial assumption on its head, you may have a child just a few days old placed with a foster family, who perhaps a year or two down the line adopt the toddler. The kid has been with them almost from the beginning, but this still qualifies as a foster adoption.

Next, let’s discuss “special needs” kids. People hear “special needs” and immediately jump to the (incorrect) conclusion that one must be speaking of ‘a black kid’ or a child with severe medical challenges. Again, while some certainly are, the “special needs” classification covers many more kids. Some of the other criteria include membership in a minority group, medical conditions or handicaps (physical, emotional, mental), being part of a sibling group, or older than 5 years old, or (notably, in relation to the dump laws) abandoned with custody relinquished to the state. The precise definitions vary state to state (and the District, Washington D.C.).

Finally, let me just make brief mention of HWIs, or “Healthy White Infants”. These are the kids most sought after in the adoption marketplace. As they can be difficult to come by, they tend to pull top dollar.

All three of these must be kept in mind as we go into just a very brief overview of some of the financial landscape of adoption today.

Adoption now exists amidst a web of forms of financial assistance, both public and private. While there are some differences based on whether the adoption is international or domestic, and there has been some scaling of benefits tied to family income, there are now a number of programs offering financial incentives as a means to encourage adoptions.

One of the most important pieces of the financial picture is the Federal Adoption Tax Credit. Some agencies advocate taking out a short term adoption loan to cover the period between the adoption and when families receive the adoption tax credit itself. The tax credit can also be spread across multiple years.

There can be other forms of federal financial support offered to “special needs” or former foster kids through programs like Medicaid for medical assistance and access to social services as if the child were an AFDC recipient.

Fifteen states offer an additional state tax benefit (Arizona, California, Idaho, Iowa, Kansas, Maryland, Massachusetts, Michigan, Missouri, New Mexico, North Dakota, Oklahoma, Utah, West Virginia, and Wisconsin.) Many also offer additional grants and subsidies.

Even if the adoption has not been finalized, if the child has been placed with a family, they are still able to deduct the time the child is with them on their taxes as a dependent.

Federally, you also have the Child Tax Credit.

Beyond the tax incentives, there are also additional subsidies available to many families via the Federal Title IV-E program under the Social Security Act. The Title IV-E Adoption Assistance Program is for kids adopted from foster care and those deemed “special needs”. These monthly checks can continue until the adoptee is 18 or even 21.

(Recently, I blogged about the Renee Bowman case in Maryland and the $800 per child per month subsidy Bowman had been receiving, even as two of her three adopted children were dead, frozen in a block of ice. The third was being abused. None were apparently ever enrolled in Maryland public schools and to date, there has been no evidence the kids received any education at all. None the less, the checks kept coming as they were apparently not tied to actually proving the adoptees they were intended for the support of were still even alive.)

Both state and federal programs also have special one-time payments of non-recurring adoption expenses available for families adopting ‘special needs’ kids. The special payments usually relate to the costs incurred in the course of the adoption itself.

Additionally, there are now numerous employers who offer their employees various forms of adoption assistance. Beyond family leave time, some workplaces offer matching funds or even outright financial assistance as part of their employee benefit packages. See the Dave Thomas foundation’s “Top 100 Adoption Friendly workplaces for 2008” full list of America’s 2008 Top 100 for a sampling of what some workplaces offer to encourage their employees to adopt. (Dave Thomas, and the Dave Thomas foundation are yet another topic for another day. Don’t get me started… .)

An entire private industry has grown up around the financing of adoptions. Some portions of it are subsets of the banking industry, others are foundations or funds, some religiously motivated (adoption for movement growth or theological reasons.) Many offer low interest adoption loans.

Yes, you can even find places like the (evil) adoptiondotcom telling potential adopters they can put the kid on the their credit cards (suckers!) or better still,

If you can pay off the entire balance within the introductory period of a zero interest credit card, you can use this option free of interest.

While they advocate paying it off immediately, that’s hardly how most Americans relate to the plastic in their pockets. Care to contemplate the interest rates on that one? (Just what is the APR on little Suzy, anyway?)

Then there are those who, for example view “special needs” kids as their christian mission field , or “unreached people group”, (link opens a PDF) thus adoptions can become evangelical ‘missionary work’ (and potentially a suitable venue for “missionary funds”.)

More generally, there are those who view adoption itself as part of bringing children/so called “orphans” into “the house of the Lord” such as Steven Curtis and Mary Beth Chapman’s Shaohannah’s Hope, this too is another form of missionary work. The foundation is one of many such, (gathered under umbrella organizations such as the Christian Alliance for Orphans,) focused upon recruiting churches to fund church member’s adoptions, or “building the church” through adoption by way of “adoption ministries,” as a form of christian movement growth.

Perhaps the single most notable aspect of the adoption for movement growth schemes is that unlike most adoptions which are individual families making individual decisions, adoption for movement growth is marketing and resources geared towards mass adoptions, many people pooling resources so that many families can adopt as a means to benefit the entire structure. Lest one be quick to dismiss such, contemplate what has historically happened when religious groups decide to harness the power of the state for their political purposes.

Finally, there are those who simply stick their virtual palm out on the web and ask for cash to fund their adoption, usually via Paypal. For those who feel the need for a little more reciprocity while handing over the cash via Paypal, you’ll find couples using any number of gimmicks such as adopt-a-pixel. (Their about page is pretty standard.)

In any case, the above focuses upon the financial encouragement of adoption on the individual family level with structures such as government and private industry providing financial incentives, but there are additional financial incentives within the state adoption system itself.

States that are able to move larger numbers of kids out of foster care and into adoptions are given financial bonuses. Larger monetary rewards are available for placing kids deemed “special needs” (which yes, by definition, in some jurisdictions is going to include newborns and infants who pass through the “safe haven”/legalized child abandonment apparatus.)

The incentives to the states (& District), initially created under the Adoption and Safe Families Act of 1997 had expired back at the end of September of this year, but have just been reauthorized and now expanded under the (just signed) Fostering Connections to Success and Increasing Adoptions Act of 2008. The new law provides special financial incentives moving older kids faster, and increases the existing bonuses for placing “special needs” kids. Additionally states (& the District) are now required to notify those adopting, or considering adopting a foster child about the adoption tax credit.

The problem is, these incentives are based purely on the numbers, quantity not quality. States (and the District) earn bonuses purely on moving kids, not on whether or not these are good placements nor whether or not the placement is what’s best for the child.

Now coming back around to kids entering the system under the legalized child abandonment laws (dump laws/baby Moses laws/”safe haven” laws,) these same financial incentives will also apply to any kids adopted after being legally abandoned.

Legalized child abandonment at the local level has in actuality built a new door into the child welfare system. As in most states, the abandoner is considered ‘anonymous’, the infants (as all states other than Nebraska focus on either ‘newborns’ or ‘infants’) enter the system as essentially tabla rasa (blank slate) kids. They come with no ‘baggage’, usually no cultural history, nor medical history, no ‘pesky’ birthparents to be easily found at a later date, and in some cases no fathers (as the dump laws run roughshod right over many father’s parental rights.)

Perhaps most importantly, no high price tag. Why? Because once dumped they are wards of the state, usually placed in temporary foster care until a permanent adoptive family can be arranged for them.

Adoptions out of foster care can come at low to no cost to prospective adoptive families. Through the process, as I’ve documented above there’s an (et-hem), WEALTH of resources available to couples wishing to adopt dumped kids, and once adopted, the state may in fact pay them through ongoing monthly subsidies for taking the kid, up to potentially age 21.

At a time when international adoptions are undergoing constrictions with countries closing and agency consolidation, the dump laws provide a new domestic source. Not just any domestic source, a source that will provide some number of HWIs.

One of the biggest questions surrounding the dump laws relates to the redistribution of the now state collected kids. Are they being adopted in an equitable to all comers manner, or is there a certain degree of ‘line-jumping’ favouritism playing out in who gets them? Many couples wait long years for a child, while others, often with personal or political connections have been able to rapidly adopt the ‘dumplings’.

Rather than going for top dollar out on the open market, the state will actually end up paying couples to adopt them in a perfect storm of inverse economics.

We’re back to how words like foster care, or “special needs” take on whole new meanings when applied to the legally abandoned kids. These ‘foster adoptions’ or “special needs” adoptions will be often be of healthy white infants, the single most sought after commodities in the adoption market. Adopters will be paid to take them off the state’s hands, month after month.

With a deal that sweet who the hell needs stretch marks and childbirth?

This is the latest in a series of posts I have done criticizing Nebraska’s legalized child abandonment laws. You can find my earlier posts via my Nebraska tag.

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Nebraska, meet your neighboring state, Iowa.

Tuesday, Nebraska’s legalized child abandonment law took its latest inevitable twist, a 14 year-old Council Bluffs Iowa girl was brought across the Missouri River and abandoned at an Omaha’s Creighton University Medical Center.

Nebraska CFS proceeded to shit the proverbial brick, calling up the Iowa child abuse hotline and making a formal report in hopes of having the girl’s guardian prosecuted in Iowa:

Todd Landry, director of the state’s Children and Family Services, said the safe-haven law’s legal protections may not apply in this case because the girl is from Iowa, and whoever abandoned the 14-year-old might be prosecuted in that state.

“We have made a formal report of the abandonment to the Iowa child abuse hot line,” Landry said in a statement issued Tuesday night. “We are working with the Iowa Department of Human Services to resolve this situation as quickly as possible.”

Despite the broadly worded nature of the Nebraska law, those dealing with the day to day practicalities of it’s implementation see the writing on the wall, if they don’t do SOMETHING asap, to stem the tide, Nebraska will indeed, enter the national consciousness as a dumping ground of kids of any age. (I can just see the vacation postcards now, “Nebraska, where your kids can become memories!”)

This was nothing if not predictable. And yes, predicted, long before the law went into effect.

What the Nebraska legislature failed to grasp was that upon unleashing this child welfare fiasco, they made their state a NATION-WIDE dumping ground for kids. There’s nothing in the Nebraska law that prevents anyone ( see the “physical custody”clarification at the bottom of this Bastardette blog post) from anywhere showing up, kid in tow, and leaving them at any approved Nebraska dump site.

Now Nebraska wants those who dump in their state prosecuted in their home states. Yeah, good luck with that. After all, such would mean for example, those gambling in Vegas, upon returning home to a state where gambling is not legal being prosecuted for their activities in Nevada!

For those of you counting, she’s abandoned kid number 20, if you count the police station (unauthorized child dump site) dump, the 18 year-old who ‘abandoned’ himself under the Nebraska law, and the redirected dump that turned into a psych ward commitment at the urging of a Lincoln police officer, none of which are included in the Nebraska DHHS legalized abandonment stats as they are attempted, but not tabulated child dumps.

As the numbers grow, the numbers spin increases, resulting in articles headlined misleadingly, 9th Safe Haven Case Reported Tuesday.

Just as I posited in my previous post, clearly there are those who wanted to dump or were even attempting to dump, who were instead redirected. The attempted dumps are left unreported, other than a pair of mentions in passing:

Emergency room nurses at Saint Elizabeth Medical Center said they believe they have averted three potential Safe Haven cases since the law went into affect in July.

This belongs alongside the quote used in my previous post:

Casady says this is the second time LPD has helped a family considering using the safe haven law.

This is in the context of an officer talking a dumping guardian out of dumping and into committing the teen to the hospital’s psych ward instead.

These two quotes allude to potentially four more cases that would have resulted in child abandonments under the law had it not been for the intervention of hospital staff or police.

This is only what is ‘visible’, the few bits and pieces reported in local media. How many other ‘near-dumps’ have occurred is simply an unknown.

Nebraska hospitals are reporting phone calls from relatives wanting to bring in kids:

“People are calling up, ‘Can I bring my child or my nephew to the emergency room? we need help,’” emergency director Libby Raetz said.

As the numbers of legally abandoned children in Nebraska continues to rise, the Nebraska Legislature’s Judiciary and Health and Human Services committees have announced a joint public hearing on the legalized child abandonment law:

The Legislature’s Judiciary and Health and Human Services committees plan to hold a joint public hearing on the safe-haven law on Nov. 13.

Gov. Dave Heineman has not ruled out calling a special session of the Legislature to fix the law, but he has been reluctant to do so.

“The governor remains hopeful that a special session won’t be needed, but this issue must be addressed immediately at the beginning of the next session,” Heineman’s spokeswoman Jen Rae Hein said Wednesday.

From Lawmakers Schedule Safe Haven Hearing:

With new evidence almost daily that Nebraska’s Safe Haven law is having unintended consequences, Senator Brad Ashford, chairman of the Nebraska Legislature’s Judiciary Committee and Sen. Joel Johnson, chairman of the Health and Human Services Committee, Tuesday announced a hearing.

The joint hearing will be held to allow the public to comment on two key issues. The first issue: the use of the Safe Haven Law by parents and guardians since the bill went into effect and the need for possible amendments.

The second issue: what resources are available to children living in crisis, the process a parent or guardian must follow to access that help and whether any of this needs changing.

The hearing will be held November 13th at 1:30 p.m. in room 1113 of the State Capitol.

(the piece then goes on to list the DHHS officially abandoned under the law count.)

Not to be outdone, Nebraska’s Governor, Dave Heineman, released a statement yesterday. See Nebraska Governor’s statement on safe haven law (link opens a PDF) for the full text.

Among other details we have confirmation from the governor that none of the kids dumped was in “immediate danger”:

Children from eight families have been left at hospitals under the safe haven law. None of the children involved were infants and none was in immediate danger. While they cannot be charged for abandoning a child, parents and guardians using Nebraska’s safe haven law can be charged for other offenses. Courts are also likely to require parents and guardians to participate in parenting classes, family therapy, conflict resolution or other services in an effort to reunite youth with their families. Child support payments may be ordered while children are in state custody.

We also get the reiteration that the state may try to collect child support out of the abandoned kid’s guardian while the kid is in custody. These comments echo the Nebraska DHHS press release put out Sept. 26th, Safe Haven Law Does Not Absolve Parents of Responsibility.

The Governor’s statement continues:

Abandonment of an older child is potentially very devastating. Human services professionals have highlighted the difference in giving up a baby who will grow up knowing their birth family wanted a better life for them versus the impact of a parent giving up on an older child.

There are so many incorrect assumptions in this I scarcely know where to begin.

Abandonment of ANY child is devastation.

Just because an infant is not old enough to have a first hand account of the event, that hardly means they will not be affected deeply by it throughout their lifetime.

The primary difference between the abandoned infant’s perspective and the abandoned child’s perspective is in whether or not they remember and have an existing INTERPERSONAL relationship with those previous family members. It is important to remember than A relationship exists between them whether they have ever spent time together or remember one another or not. The permanent loss of that family, even if not personally remembered through an abandoned child’s first hand accounts does not mean that loss is something moved past with ease.

Speaking as an adopted adult who lives behind the wall of sealed records, although I may not have personal memories of my family of origin, that hardly means they somehow matter less to me.

Further, the personal information cut through that break in ties, the child’s identity ‘rights’, heritage, and cultural context, genetic, etc is a lifelong loss. In practical terms, it means living a lifetime without access to the kinds of information other citizens take for granted.

The role of the state, rather than encouraging the loss of such, should instead be to protect those citizens most vulnerable and most unable to speak out on behalf of their own interests. Make no mistake about it, speaking personally, as the living result of another form of child welfare social experimentation, when the state intentionally deprives infants of those bedrock assumptions that other citizens simply have, the state is causing lifelong harm. It deprives people of information, while they are infants, and the effects will echo down through the lifetimes of the class of people directly affected, their families, and their own children.

“Wanted a better life for them” is also another coded piece of language adopted people are all too familiar with.

The more we began to uncloak the secrecy surrounding the circumstances of our own relinquishments is the more we found the real reasons very few womyn relinquish their children to adoption, most womyn would keep their children if only they could. We were often surrendered due to to lack of resources and poverty, as well as the climate of shame inflicted on many pregnant womyn, the young, the poor, those whose families reject them.

To our horror, some of us have found parents who were not consenting parties. Womyn forced to sign papers, fathers simply left out of the equation altogether, other extended family members desperate to ‘keep up apperances’ and ‘make the problem/baby just go away’ pushing relinquishment as the ‘only answer’. To say nothing of industry pressure.

As Nebraska’s current dump law allows anyone with ‘physical custody’ to dump, and to date we’ve seen extended family dumping, questions of consent remain by and large unaddressed for some parties who may well have their legal rights trampled in the process.

Pushing the age limit in Nebraska down from any “child” under age 19, down to ‘newborns’ still does nothing to change the situations of those utilizing the legalized child abandonment laws, it takes the kid out of the equation, but structural issues such as poverty, lack of adequate child care, domestic violence, health care costs, etc remain intact.

Infant abandonment laws make the perfect cover for incest, hidden pregnancy, secret birth, then just dump the ‘evidence’.

Legalized child abandonment laws are harmful to womyn, to families, to communities, and most importantly, to the children themselves.

Again I’m stating the obvious, legalized child abandonment is clearly not pro-child.

To date, no state has ever shown conclusively that any child abandoned under this scheme was ever in immediate danger of being killed.

Just as we’ve seen in Nebraska, more often than not those abandoning the kids feel they have no other options and care deeply about the kids. They often view dumping them as a way of ‘protecting’ them, going so far as to in at least one case, insist after using the legalized abandonment apparatus that the mother still loved her son and wanted him to understand that she didn’t abandon him, and that she still wanted to see him. (Cognitive dissonance in the extreme.)

These are not those at risk of leaving babies in dumpsters.

Those who utilize the laws are simply entering the child welfare and adoption system through a newly created second door. A door that requires little to no paperwork, and has no waiting time to actually rid oneself of the kid. The ultimate in instant gratification abandonment.

As most states legalized child abandonment laws leave the womyn utilizing them anonymous, it has been impossible to build a profile of a ‘typical’ womyn who abandons her child under them. That said, while most states baby Moses laws marketing is aimed at ‘young girls’ often still in school, what little data can be culled from news reports etc, shows a very different profile, that of an older, often desperate womyn, sometimes married, sometimes with other kids.

Aging down Nebraska’s dump law to a 2.0 version narrowed to newborns still avoids the core issues those using the dump laws face.

Insisting over and over again ‘there is help out there’ while pointing the desperate into private faith based programs is again, the state abandoning its own responsibilities to its citizens.

The Governor closes with the following, making it clear what he wants to see is ‘infant’-based dump laws:

The few situations we’ve seen so far demonstrate the need for a change in Nebraska’s safe haven law. In the coming legislative session, I will advocate for changes that put the focus back on protecting an infant in danger. That should be our priority.

While this would ensure the infants- eventual kids- eventual adults will be silenced for a few years at least, all such a bill would really do is push back the timing on when the unresolved issues with the dump laws would begin to surface in that second batch of Nebraska dumpees.

Just as it took adoptees the time it takes infants to grow to age of majority, that 18 year-lag, and then those affected by the sealing of adoption records legislation in various states began to organize against sealed records, I predict the children of legalized abandonments will also face that 18 year-lag, and then begin to organize against what what done to them.

Every single day that these dump laws are in place is a day that yet more kids may suffer irrepiarable harm. The only genuine solution is full repeal.

The longer Nebraska politicians drag out debates about what is to be done is the larger the toll becomes, an ever increasing count of kids for whom the consequences are permanent.

I’ve already written about how the dump bills were built out of the structures fighting openness in adoption records.

Don’t condemn another generation to lives without the basic identity based building blocks they will need to live out their lives.

Learn from the example of what was done under the sealing of adoption records and the lifelong lasting legacy of harm that has caused, then understand, baby dump and child dump laws are just the latest structures built upon that flawed foundation.

As I’ve ended pretty much all my Nebraska dump law posts, I will continue to call for nothing short of the full repeal of legalized child abandonment laws.

They fail kids- for a lifetime.

UPDATE

Between the time I started this piece and finally posting it, the abandoned child from Iowa has since been sent back to Iowa. I suppose we can now label such a ‘return to sender’ abandonment. The 14 year-old is however, listed on Nebraska DHHS’s revised official count. (Link opens a PDF.)

This is the latest in a series of posts I have done criticizing Nebraska’s legalized child abandonment laws. You can find my earlier posts via my Nebraska tag.

***

More of the same, but with a new twist.

Quotes taken from Attempted Safe Haven Case:

…a 34 year old mother showed up at Bryan LGH West 11:15 Monday morning to drop off her 15 year old daughter under the state’s safe haven law. The woman told officials the daughter was a run-away and she couldn’t handle her behavior. The woman also told police she was worried for her young son when the girl was home and had begun filing paperwork to make the girl a ward of the state, but it was taking too long.

Once again, we run head long into one of the real reasons behind these child dumps, going the usual route just takes too long for some. Apparently it’s just too darn hard to get rid of a kid.

Poor thing!

But instead of going ahead with the abandonment, an officer talked the woman down to ‘merely’ having the girl committed to the hospital’s psych unit:

A Lincoln officer talked with the woman and doctors at the hospital and worked out an arrangement where the girl was admitted into the hospital’s child psychiatric service instead of abandoned under safe haven.

I guess all these dump stats are bringing too much attention and heat on Nebraska, they’re down to one on one trying to talk dumpers into alternatives that keep the kids out of the state’s stats.

As I said in yesterday’s post Nebraska- two 12 year-old boys legally abandoned this past weekend, & ‘gaming’ the numbers “Baby Love Child” being a bastard based blog, around here I focus on the experience of the kids themselves, and my numbers are going to reflect the number of kids attempted to be dumped not necessarily NE DHHS’s ‘dump accomplished’ count.

The piece goes on to point out, this is not the first time the Lincoln (Nebraska) Police Department has stepped in to divert dump bound familes:

Casady says this is the second time LPD has helped a family considering using the safe haven law.

So I guess the real question is, statewide, how many other attempted dumps have been redirected and may be going unreported?

Has Nebraska finally begun to reach the point of attempted spin control, trying to keep dump bound guardians from actually completing the child dump?

Clearly Nebraska officials understand the official number count is being watched, (yes you can subscribe to their “Safe haven” webpage). The official Nebraska DHHS count does not include a kid left at unauthorized location (a police station), nor the 18 year-old who tried to “safe haven” himself. Nor will the official tally include cases such as this girl, who but for Lincoln police intervention would have been legally abandoned (kid #19 if all attempted cases are included.) so the question arises, is there now an active effort to keep the numbers down/more cases out of the state stats?

The real answer to legalized abandonment is to for Nebraska legislators to realize that “safe haven” laws are no answer to the real problems kids and families face and repeal the law. They have an opportunity to lead the way, learning from Nebraska’s experimentation with legalized child abandonment, and step back away from this irresponsible form of legislation, back into the realm of actual kid-based social support structures.

Am I holding my breath for full repeal? Unfortunately no.

Why? Because odds are good that rather than doing right by Nebraska’s kids and families and repealing the law, state lawmakers are instead going to go for a round two ‘dump law 2.0’, trying to monkey with the age requirements on legalized child abandonments, which will only end up screwing kids younger and less vocal (for the time being.)

Further, baby dump laws have dire consequences for womyn, encouraging them to hide their pregnancies, ecshew prenatal care, and give birth secretly (endangering their own lives) in hopes of being able to ‘make the problem go away’ via legalized baby dumping.

Nebraska has the opportunity to step up and say ‘no more, we don’t and won’t abandon children (and womyn) that way here’. It has an opportunity to take the leadership position of sending the clear message that in Nebraska at least, THIS state does not encourage child abandonment.

But odds are they’ll opt for what they see as the easy way out, and just go for the aged down version. The damage will continue.

And that’s the real shame, that not a single state is willing to buck the baby-dumping trend to say no, we don’t dump our kids around here.

It is legal to dump newborns in all 50 states.

To our shame.

Bastardette has also blogged about the latest attempted dump, MOTHER ‘ATTEMPTS” TO DUMP TEEN DAUGHTER IN OMAHA. I’ll just close with her wise words:

How much worse does this have to get before the legislature, stops husking corn, and repeals this travesty? No, the law doesn’t need tweaked or tightened-up or any other quaint-worded fix politicians want to throw about. The mass dumping of Nebraska’s children is the perfect consequence of what we have been saying would happen for the last nine years.

How many more kids have to be abandoned before states begin to listen?

This is the latest in a series of posts I have done criticizing Nebraska’s legalized child abandonment laws. You can find my earlier posts via my Nebraska tag.

***

While the hemming and hawing, contemplating potential changes to Nebraska’s disastrous child dump law continues, the raw numbers of kids that have now passed into the Nebraska system by way of the child dump laws continues to climb.

Yesterday, (Sunday) two more boys were legally abandoned at hospitals. One boy was dumped in Omaha, the other in Lincoln, abandoned by his 51 year-old grandmother who had only recently been granted custody of him.

A day of inaction by legislators can translate directly into a lost family for kids.

The dump law never should have passed in the first place. Now that it has, every day without full repeal is an opportunity for destruction. Destruction of families, of a child’s history, of community ties, the list goes on and on. Those who advocate slapping some duct tape on this law, or somehow think they can retool it merely continue the existing track record of harm. Dump laws are by definition, unfixable. Playing with age ranges for ‘little dumplings’ just changes how soon the victims of these laws will be able to be vocal about what was done to them.

The ongoing harm caused by Nebraska’s particular variation on the legalized child abandonment law is not a case of ‘unforeseen consequences’. Those who actually bothered to read the wording of the law understood it was a recipe for disaster.

Lincoln Nebraska’s Police Chief, Tom Casady is quoted as saying:

“I’m rather surprised that Legislature didn’t see this coming because I can assure you everyone at the Lincoln police department saw it coming.”

The notion that Nebraska legislators ‘didn’t see it coming’ while politically useful, particularly to legislators themselves, at this point appears to be patently false.

According to Sen. Vickie McDonald (a sponsor on the Nebraska dump bill) precisely this possibility, that older kids would be entering into the system under the dump law, was understood to be one possible outcome and was discussed among (at least some) Nebraska legislators. See Teens Dumped at Hospitals Under Safe Haven Law (Originally posted back on Sept. 25th) for the following:

But at least one lawmaker who sponsored the state’s safe haven law knew it could be an issue.

Sen. Vickie McDonald of St. Paul said, “We discussed the possibility of something like this happening, but we did nothing to address it thinking possibly it wouldn’t happen.”

Let’s be clear about this, it was discussed, and legislators “did nothing to address it” (emphasis added.)

Not altogether surprising, considering how some view the Nebraska dump situation as what the law was crafted to do, and thereby a positive outcome.

Easy for a term limited politician to spout off about, they’re not the ones who have to deal with the consequences of these dump laws.

With dumps laws now enacted in all 50 states, we as a nation find ourselves with states actively encouraging the legalized abandonment of children.

Speaking as a former child who (to the best of my knowlege anyway, sealed records being what they are) passed through the child welfare system, and as an adopted adult, I find this state of affairs revolting. It is a societal and legal abandonment of those least able to defend their own interests.

While the fretting continues in comments and columns around the country, real kids are day by day being dumped. They will live with the consequences of such for the rest of their lives. Even if they are eventually reunited with family, undergoing the process of legalized abandonment is not something they’re likely to forget, nor fully forgive anytime soon.

Most of those proposing anything at all be done about this sorry mess are advocating Nebraska’s dump law be brought in line with other baby-dump laws across the country. Which is to say, they don’t want victims of these laws who can go on the evening news and tell people what it feels like to be abandoned. They would rather the laws affect those too young and too voiceless (physically, politically, etc) to defend their own interests.

Baby-Dump laws are about pushing the consequences of such horrendous legislation down to those too young to even begin to fight back. As I mentioned in that earlier post, prior to Nebraska upping the age limit, the oldest of the legalized abandonment kids, from Texas, the first state to pass the then called “Baby Moses Laws”, would today be approximately nine years old. The 18 year lag between being dumped and reaching age of majority is more than enough time for the legislators who created the mess to go on about their lives, the direct consequences of such never touching them.

So by way of updating the Nebraska scope of the problem to date, Bastardette has put together an invaluable timeline/roster/status tally (updated to the below in this, her most recent post):

Here’s the revised dumpee roster:

September 1: Male 14–left by mother at Omaha police station. Currently in foster care.

September 13: Male 11–left by grandmother–another report says mother–at Immanuel Medical Center, Omaha; currently in foster care and partial hospitalization.

September 13: Male 15–left by guardian aunt at Bryant Medical Center West, Lincoln.

September 20: Pregnant female 13 left by mother at Immanuel Medical Center, Omaha. Returned to mother.

September 22: Male 18, turned himself in to hospital in Grand Island; too old for foster care, but can receive services.

September 24: 9 siblings, 1-17 (left by father, Gary Staton, at Creighton University Medical Center ER).

• female, 1
• male, 6
• male, 7
• female, 9
• male, 11
• female 13
• female 14,
• male, 15
• male 17
• An 18-year old sister who does not live at home was not abandoned. All these children are now in foster care and several relatives have requested custody Background checks are underway here and here. Go here and here for video of home and neighbors.

September 24: Male 11–left at Immanuel Medical Center, Omaha.

September 24, Male 15–left by guardian uncle at Immanuel Medical Center, Omaha; uncle plans to relinquish guardianship.

October 5: Male 12–left by guardian grandmother at Brian LGH West, Lincoln

October 5: Male 12–left at Immanuel Medical Center, Omaha

Note that this comes out to 18 kids, not the “16” the papers are now using based off the Nebraska Department of Health and Human Services list of cases to date (link to a PDF). The Sept. 1rst police station dump is not being counted as police stations are not authorized dump sites, none-the-less, for the kid involved it most certainly was an abandonment. The other case not being counted in the ‘official’ list of cases to date is the September 22, 18 year-old male who turned himself in in Grand Island.

Being a Bastard based blog, I base my count on what the kids themselves are experiencing, I’ll note if they are dumped at a non-authorized site, but I feel it’s important to remember those dumped, even if left off the State’s official tally. It was no less a dump for the 14 year-old boy (Sept. 1) just because he was left somewhere other than a site mandated by the Nebraska law, he is no less abandoned by his family, no less in foster care as a result of the dump law than any of the other kids. Ask yourself this, had the Nebraska dump law not passed, would his mother have abandoned him at the police station?

If there’s any one thing my blog tries to do consistently, it’s remember those so often forgotten or hidden in (or out of) the ‘official’ tabulations.

To date, we’re talking about 18 kids who would not have undergone the abandonment process were it not for the reckless and destructive passage of Nebraska’s falsely named “safe haven” law. Legalized abandonments are not “safe havens” for kids, they’re just a new and less paperworked point of entry into an already overburdened child welfare system.

Nebraska, like the other 49 states has gotten into the dreadful business of making it easy for those with custody to rid themselves of kids, and in so doing it fails those kids, disregarding both their longterm needs and ultimately their short term needs as well.

This is just another form of (already) failed social experimentation with the lives and relationships of kids hanging in the balance. The longer dump laws stay on the books, the more kids become part of the legalized abandonment experiment.

In Nebraska with its child-dump law the casualties to date have been kids. In states with baby-dump laws, the casualties are babies. Whether newborn or child, abandonment deprives these people of building blocks necessary to them, particularly later in life. The state should never set out to set up systems that intentionally deprives a subset of citizens of basic things other citizens not only have, but consider the bedrock their lives are based on.

No matter what pretty language child-dump advocates attempt to wrap their toxic legislation in, the bottom line is child abandonment is never good for kids.

Some days I feel like I’m down to stating the obvious.

***

Once again, I end my post by asking for what I really want, an end to legalized abandonment laws. Nothing short of full repeal, in Nebraska and across the nation.

Because there’s no such thing as a ‘good’ legalized abandonment law.

Every abandonment is a failure.

Kids deserve better than abandonment.

***

Finally, I have LOTS more writing about the Nebraska situation I’m trying to get to. That said, the situation is evolving far faster than I could ever blog it.

In the mean time go over and read some important posts on Bastardette. She is doing a tremendous job of writing about the dump laws from her own angle, (I’ve ‘starred’ “*” her recent Nebraska related posts):

* NEBRASKA FIASCO CONTINUES: 2 MORE DUMPED AT HOSPITAL (October 6, 2008)

* NEBRASKA FIASCO: BASTARDETTE GETS A SHORT INTERVIEW WITH NCFA’S TOM ATWOOD ON NEBRASKA TEEN DUMPS AND ‘SAFE HAVEN” LAW (October 6, 2008)

CALIFORNIA: THE TERMINATOR TERMINATES “SAFE HAVEN” BABY DUMP EXPANSION AGAIN (October 2, 2008)

“A LITTLE HAYWIRE:” BABY DUMP PUSHER TRIVIALIZES ABANDONERS AND ABANDONMENT (Sept 30, 2008)

* “I DON’T WANT ANYTHING TO HAPPEN TO KIDS LIKE IT HAPPENED TO ME” NEBRASKA ABANDONMENTS REACH 16 (Sept 28, 2008)

* BUILD IT AND THEY WILL COME: NEBRASKA DUMP FIASCO (Sept 26, 2008)

WARNING AUSTRALIA: SAFE HAVENS COMNG YOUR WAY? (Sept 24, 2008)

This is my fifth post relating to the murdered and abused adopted daughters of Renee D. Bowman in Maryland. My earlier posts contain far more detail, this is just a brief update. To find the other four posts, just click my Maryland tag and read in chronological order bottom to top.

***

Just a quick little post today.

By way of this WJZ-TV piece, Dead Girls’ Mother Was Investigated For Neglect, we find two new pieces of information.

First, a fund has been established to support the surviving seven year-old. Below are the only details on it I’ve been able to find so far:

Due to the outpouring of concern and well-wishes from the community, the Calvert County Department of Social Services has established a way for interested community members to contribute funds, toys, clothes or other appropriate items to support the recovery of the surviving child in the Bowman case.Those interested in contributing should send appropriate items and tax-deductible contributions to:

Calvert County Dept. of Social Services
c/o: Calvert’s Child
200 Duke Street
Prince Frederick, MD 20678

Secondly, we have Evon Keller, claiming to have made a complaint call on Bowman back in 2003. The article says the Bowmans were living “near Landover” at the time, which would be in Prince George’s County. Authorities apparently have no record of Keller having called.

Dennis Edwards reports a social worker visited Renee Bowman’s home earlier this year after an anonymous tip.

The children were ok, but their good health didn’t last for long.

The caseworker was dispatched to Renee Bowman’s southern Maryland home in January, an anonymous neglect complaint about one child was at the heart of that investigation, but the child was in good health.

Nine months later, police found the bodies of two adopted daughters in Bowman’s freezer.

“He couldn’t figure out what it was, but they weren’t treating the little girl right,’ said Evon Keller.

Although authorities have no record of her call, Evon Keller says she also made an abuse complaint against Bowman in 2003 when the family lived near Landover.

She believes that complaint, based on information from another neighbor, involved one of the little girls age 9 and 11 whose bodies were apparently moved in the freezer to Lusby.

Keller goes on to say:

“I wish I would have stayed on top of it because I probably could have saved that child’s life. She didn’t have a chance,” said Keller.

Beyond the scope of the article, I wanted to at least pose a very important question that I have yet to see anyone even ask, as to the other two girls, who did not survive being Bowman’s adopted daughters, is anyone giving any thought to their families of origin or potentially even other possible foster families they might have been with prior to be placed with Bowman?

Note that the the (still living) 7 year-old, and (now deceased) 9 year-old were apparently biologically related.

As many foster kids move from foster family to foster family through the years, and no identities have been publicly released, previous families may be unaware that their former foster daughter was one of these kids.

As for their (biologically related) family members and extended family, they too, are likely unaware their daughters ended up being adopted by Renee Bowman.

Notifying the families is the right thing to do.

There can be few fates worse than to go about your life assuming your child is still out there somewhere, only to find out later that your child has not only died, but died like this.

But then, how can a family demand justice and answers if they are never even informed of their child’s death?

Special note to readers-

I’ve done multiple posts within this 24 hour period so be sure to see the post beneath this one as well.

***

This is my fourth post following the horrific events in Maryland this past week, the grizzly discovery of two of Renee Bowman’s adopted daughters kept in a freezer in a Southern Maryland home and a third adopted daughter barely escaping with her life by jumping out of a window after being locked in and left alone. The brave 7 year-old showed long term signs of severe abuse.

My 3 earlier posts can be found by way of my Maryland tag.

As many new readers are finding my page via websearches, the short introduction is I’m an adult adoptee Bastard blogger, who lives in Maryland. If you want to know more, visit my about page, or simply explore some of the tags down the left side of my blog.

***

I don’t have a lot of time to put this post together, but I at least wanted to provide a few of the links readers may want to explore further.

This AP piece details some of the concerns surrounding the issue of outsourcing home studies and other aspects of the process. Lack of oversight on the private contractors has been an ongoing issue.

AP, by way of The Capital DC welfare agency questioned about adoptions after deaths October 1, 2008:

Marcia Robinson Lowry, executive director of Children’s Rights, said the New York-based advocacy group has long had concerns about whether D.C.’s child welfare agency adequately supervises private contractors. The group brought a class-action lawsuit against the city nearly 20 years ago that eventually forced the child welfare system into receivership.

In July, Children’s Rights sought to hold the city in contempt for failing to make adequate progress. Lowry said work done by contractors was one of the concerns.

Wexler, of the reform group, said he worries that D.C. social workers might have been under pressure to hastily finalize adoptions because of payments — up to $8,000 per child — that state and local governments get from the federal government for adoptions.

Gerald said D.C. received an incentive award only in 2004, the year Bowman adopted the two younger girls.

While autopsy findings are not in yet, (and may not be for some time) we do have, by way of the Post, what Renee Bowman told police about how the two girls died.

Washington Post Starvation, Injury Cited as Causes of Girls’ Deaths October 2, 2008:

The Calvert County woman who is being investigated in the death of her two adopted daughters found frozen in her home told police that one child died of starvation and the other died after apparently falling backward, two law enforcement sources said today.

Also be sure to note this paragraph from the same article concerning the private contractor who did the initial home study (Board of Child Care of the United Methodist Church in Baltimore, a faith-based organization:)

The private agency that performed the initial study of Bowman’s application to become a foster parent, and eventually an adoptive parent, released a statement yesterday saying that its recommendations were reviewed by CFSA and Superior Court. The Baltimore-based agency, the Board of Child Care, has a $2.7 million contract to provide services to CFSA through Jan. 31.

Also see the Washington Post for More Tests Are Needed To ID Girls In Freezer October 2, 2008, which clarifies the series of moves, county to county:

“This is an unusual case where all of these girls had limited exposure to the outside world,” Baur said.

As detectives awaited further findings from the medical examiner, they continued to try to trace Bowman’s movements from Montgomery to Charles County to Calvert. The children were apparently in the freezer when it was moved to each location. Investigators have found no record of school attendance in those counties for the children, who would be 9 and 11, or for their 7-year-old sister, who was found wandering a Calvert street last week.

Here are two more pieces:

Gazette.net Initial autopsy of frozen human remains did not show cause of death October 2, 2008

AP, By way of the Baltimore Sun Girls in freezer had likely been dead for months October 2, 2008

WTOP radio is reporting that the remains are those of the two adopted girls, Sources: Remains in freezer are adopted girls October 2, 1:04pm

Authorities are confident the two young girls found in a freezer in a southern Maryland home are the adopted daughters of Renee Bowman, according to sources close to the investigation.

and

Sources say the girl’s names and photos will be released in the hopes someone may remember seeing the girls alive. Police say this could help determine when and where they died.

As I had mentioned in earlier posts, many neighbors were unaware Bowman even had kids.

See WJZ-TV 13 Dead Girls’ Mother Was Investigated For Neglect October 2, 2008

Montgomery County police say it’s almost as if the three adopted girls didn’t exist in to the outside world.

In the house where they believe two of them were murdered, neighbors say they don’t remember seeing children, and they were never enrolled in any Maryland school.

Neighbors in southern Maryland also say they didn’t ever see the surviving child outdoors.

We also learn that Bowman HAD been visited by a caseworker responding to an anonymous tip about her while living in Charles County (between her time in Montgomery and Calvert Counties.) The visit had not shown up in initial searches as Bowman was living under an assumed name in Charles County:

For a short time, Bowman lived in Charles County too, and Social Services is reporting it did respond to a complaint about a neglected child there in January.

They say when they arrived, the child looked healthy and the house clean.

and

Earlier this week, the state Child Welfare Agency said it had never been contacted about Bowman, but when they learned the 43-year-old woman did use an alias late Thursday, they did find that complaint about child neglect.

The Maryland Department of Human Resources issued the following statement involving the case:

“Earlier this week, the Maryland Department of Human Resources (DHR) conducted a state-wide search of our data systems to determine whether our agency had ever received a child abuse, neglect or abandonment complaint regarding the Bowman family.

After learning yesterday that Ms. Bowman may have used a fictitious name while she resided in Charles County, we conducted an additional search of our records.

This additional search has uncovered that DHR received a single, anonymous call from a person reporting an allegation of child neglect.

This call resulted in a caseworker visiting Ms. Bowman’s home in January of 2008. During the visit, the caseworker observed the home to be clean and appropriately furnished but did notice a smell of mildew in the home. Dogs and cats were also in the home.

Ms. Bowman reported the smell in the home was caused by a water leak in her basement. The child was observed to be of appropriate weight and good health. Conditions in the home were adequate to meet the needs of the child. Based on these findings and observations no neglect was found at that time.

DHR staff will work with law enforcement and the state’s attorneys’ office as this complicated investigation continues.”

A second similar story can be found in the Baltimore Sun Social workers found no problem at Bowman home, October3, 2008, which confirms the name deception:

Bowman used a false name while living in Charles County, officials said.

It appears that Bowman moved from Charles County to Calvert County sometime shortly after the social worker’s visit, perhaps trying to stay one step ahead of entanglement with the system in any form.

***

Finally, perhaps somewhat separated from links bearing at least some resemblance to ‘news’, we find today’s Washington Post piece, Shopping On eBay As Girls Lay Dead, which begins to looks a hell of a lot less like actual news and more like the national tabloids. None-the-less, read the piece, it does contain some pertinent details, it’s a shame the writers, Petula Dvorak, Meg Smith and Ashley Halsey III couldn’t be bothered to write such into a real news story.

While titillating readers and appealing to Americans’ socially voyeuristic tendencies, detailing Bowman’s recent eBay purchases down to the clothing size, or her “love for the Internet — she had at least three e-mail addresses” (good grief! Utilizing three e-mail addresses is enough to tag you as somehow extraordinary? Oh please!) and her mention of “Dexter” as her favourite television show, the article completely misses the core fundamental aspect of the Bowman case when the authors ponder:

…fact-finding is unlikely to answer one of the questions that make the case so horrifying: How could a mother go on with life knowing that her daughters lay encased in ice in the freezer?

That aspect of course, being that Bowman was an ADOPTIVE mother, these were her ADOPTED daughters.

Whether or not that made it any easier for her to do what she did we may never know.

But what we do know is that unlike biological parents, Bowman went through a state-run (o.k. D.C, District run) vetting process, and was state approved to parent, not once by three times over.

That is what lies at the heart of this case, not irrelevant space fillers along the lines of “”I love to shop!”

(All of which is to say, articles focusing on eBay habits on page A-1 means it’s time for the Post to get its eye back on the ball.)

This is the latest in a series of posts I have done criticizing Nebraska’s legalized child abandonment laws. You can find my earlier posts via my Nebraska tag.

***

Nine years ago the first of the dump laws, then called “Baby Moses Laws” passed in Texas, signed into law by then Governor George W. Bush.

As the dumps laws in every state except Nebraska have dealt with infants (with varying age limits,) until now, the oldest of the legalized child abandonments dumped as infants would now be roughly age 9. Whether or not the kids themselves were made aware of their abandoned status likely varies, kid to kid.

But this past July, Nebraska’s child dump law went into effect, allowing the legalized abadonment of kids up to age 19. Thus for the first time, we now had teens being dumped.

Until now, abandoned kids have had no voice politically nor societally.

There have been adults, notably adoptees/Bastards (among others) who have spoken out again and again against legalized child abandonment. But the voices of those most directly affected have been notably absent, as there’s an 18 year lag between being abandoned and reaching the age of majority.

This is precisely the same lag we as adopted people have had to contend with in advocating on our own behalf.

The one crucially important detail has emerged from the Nebraska legalized child abandonment disaster is that by covering teen dumps, the legislation has in effect jumped a timeline.

We no longer have to wait long years before we first begin to hear the voices of those legally abandoned while they grow up. Instead we can for the first time, actually listen to the words of a kid legally abandoned under Nebraska’s legalized abandonment law. And listen we should, because kids such as this anonymous girl are in some ways the only genuine voice of expertise on legalized child abandonment laws. She herself has directly experienced the consequences of them.

On September 20th, a 14 year-old pregnant girl was legally abandoned by her mother (who does not speak English, but uses her other 8 year-old daughter as a translator) at Omaha’s Immanuel Hospital. In the wake of the abandonment, the girl has fortunately, been able to return to her home.

Her mother had said she did not want to abandon her, but felt helpless, desperate, and scared.

“I wanted to do what’s best for her.”

As I’ve pointed out repeatedly in these Nebraska posts, the profile of the person legally abandoning the kids is not someone wanting to abandon, nor relinquish all contact with these kids, instead these are people at the ends of their ropes, with nowhere else to turn, who tend to care very deeply about the kids and want help.

In an interview she and her mother did with KMTV News, we finally hear the first person perspective of a kid who has been directly affected by the legalized abandonment laws. Speaking of her mother, the anonymous girl said:

“I thought I was not going to see her anymore. When I was there I was not happy. I was sad to be in there and not see my mom anymore.”

She continued:

“I don’t want anything to happen to kids like it happened to me,” the 14-year-old said.

(Be sure to see the video with the story, Mom Who Used Safe Haven for Teen Opens Up.)

Are Nebraska legislators listening?

Are State legislators nationally listening?

No kid wants to go through the ordeal of legalized abandonment. No kid should ever have to.

These laws are not good for kids, the very people they are supposedly being enacted on behalf of.

This girl was fortunate enough to be reunited with her family, an outcome both she and her mother wanted. But going through the legalized abandonment process is not soon to be forgotten, forgiven, nor ‘healed’. It’s an event this girl and her family will live with for the rest of their lives.

This is no less true for infants who are abandoned. But their voices are missing from these ‘debates’ over what do with the dump laws. If Nebraska pushes the age limit down to ‘infant’ all it does is join the rest of the nation in the long wait while these kids grow up.

Legislators will never have to deal directly with the consequences of the legislation they are passing, abandoned children will. They will be dealing with the consequences for the rest of their lives.

So in light of how unique this anonymous 14 year old’s words are, they bear repeating:

“I don’t want anything to happen to kids like it happened to me.”

The only questions that remain are is anyone listening and will anyone care?

***

As always, I personally, continue to advocate nothing less than full repeal of the legalized abandonment laws.

Special note to readers-

I’m doing two posts tonight, so please also be sure to read Adoption subsidies for frozen corpses, more on the Maryland nightmare for part II of my coverage. (This third post is coming almost immediately on the heels of my second post following the developing Maryland story. I cut this writing about today’s Washington Post piece off the bottom of my last post to cut down the length and try to maintain the continuity.)

For new readers, also be sure to go back to part I, Maryland- 3 adopted daughters; 1 beaten, 2 dead, frozen in freezer for 7 months to get up to speed

***

Wednesday’s Washington Post reveals more details in its most recent article, Girls May Have Been Dead More Than a Year, Police Say. This latest piece says Bowman may have moved to Prince George’s OR Charles County:

Renee D. Bowman, 43, who arrived in Calvert in February, “indicated” in an interview that the bodies were in the freezer when she moved out of her former residence in the Rockville area, investigators have said. Yesterday, authorities revealed that she left that area last October or November and then stayed briefly in Prince George’s or Charles County before moving to Calvert.

So we may still only be dealing with three counties.

The new article also reveals that Bowman on top of the misdemeanor conviction, Bowman had filed for bankruptcy and that the information may not have been included in the outsourced background check:

The case continued to raise questions about D.C. child welfare services yesterday, three days after the bodies were found. The D.C. Child and Family Services Agency recommended Bowman as a suitable adoptive parent even though she filed for bankruptcy protection in 2001, the year she adopted one foster child, and had just emerged from it in 2004, when she adopted two others. In between, she lost her Landover house to foreclosure.

Bowman, now jailed on child abuse charges, had also been convicted in 1999 of a misdemeanor charge of “threatening bodily harm” to a 72-year-old man.

“We want to know how did this person . . . qualify to become an adoptive parent?” said D.C. Council member Tommy Wells (D-Ward 6), chairman of the Committee on Human Services and a former social worker. “Is there anything we don’t know or should have known that would have prevented the adoption?”

Acting Attorney General Peter Nickles said he was not aware of the bankruptcy filings or the misdemeanor conviction and does not believe that the information was included in a home visit report generated by a private contractor.

“That was not revealed. At least, I don’t think it was revealed,” he said. “I’m not saying . . . that I’ve seen everything.”

Then again, as the contractor, Board of Child Care of the United Methodist Church, (yes, folks more faith based adoption entanglement) isn’t saying anything either, we may just be looking at finger pointing and ass-covering in all directions at this point.

According to the Post:

Thomas Curcio, president of the nonprofit Board of Child Care, the private agency hired by the city to evaluate Bowman, has not responded to phone messages seeking a comment on the case.

As details of the adoption process are kept secret by law, determining misconduct in the process becomes an incredibly complicated endevour.

Bowman’s adoptions were approved by a D.C. Superior Court judge after a background investigation by a private agency under contract with the child services agency. Records of the adoptions remain confidential under D.C. law.

Meanwhile baby-step reforms, as opposed to comprehensive systemic overhauls (which I spoke to in my last post) are already being contemplated:

The case is prompting discussion among child-welfare advocates in the region about developing a standardized protocol to ensure thorough examinations of prospective adoptive parents and increasing post-adoption monitoring. Most states and the District have no post-adoption monitoring systems, experts said.

We also get a glimpse of the DC scope of the federal adoption subsidies:

As of last month, 2,295 people who adopted from the District were receiving the tax-free federal subsidy of $800 a month per child, said Mafara Hobson, spokeswoman for Mayor Adrian M. Fenty (D).

And a snapshot if you will of Bowman’s recent work history:

A spokeswoman for Suburban Hospital in Bethesda said Bowman did secretarial work there from September 2004 to June 2006. She worked as a patient appointment scheduler at the Center for Ambulatory Surgery in the District from May 1989 to June 1993, then again from May 1998 to December 2000, according to a spokeswoman for the facility, which recently changed its name to MedStar Surgery Center.

Most importantly, the Post has dug out the details of the the incident that led to the misdemeanor conviction:

In 1999, according to D.C. Superior Court records, Bowman, in a vehicle, pulled alongside a 72-year-old man’s car and angrily demanded that he pay her for damages to her car caused during an earlier accident. The man, who was with a woman, quoted Bowman as yelling: “I want my $900. . . . If that [expletive] wasn’t sitting next to you, I’d whup your [expletive] right now.”

He said Bowman continued to follow him and threaten him that day, at one point saying she would “get the drug boys around the corner” to break into his house and beat him. Bowman received a 6-month suspended sentenced and was put on probation for a year.

The Post article also contains new details about Bowman’s boyfriend who has been questioned by the Police:

When the 7-year-old spoke with Calvert authorities Friday, she said her mother had beaten her, but she spoke kindly about a man she considered to be her father. He is not her biological father, authorities said, but her mother’s boyfriend.

The girl “thought the world of him,” Detective Sergeant Moore said.

Officials identified him as Joe C. Dickerson and said he was cooperative during an interview. They would not say what he had told them when asked about the bodies in the freezer. They said he visited Bowman at her home frequently but did not live there.

At yesterday’s custody hearing:

The 7-year-old was placed in the custody of the Maryland Department of Human Resources after a court hearing that was closed to the public. The girl remained in the hospital late yesterday afternoon, and she was scheduled to be placed with a Calvert foster family, officials said.

The Department of Human Resources said it had found no records of any child abuse or neglect complaints about this family.

This is a follow-up post to my initial post on this story, read Maryland- 3 adopted daughters; 1 beaten, 2 dead, frozen in freezer for 7 months first if you haven’t already.

***

Today more details are emerging. The Washington Post article, Md. Mother Jailed After Bodies Of 2 Children Found in Freezer, for example, contains a wealth of sad new details.

With Bowman in jail, charged with child abuse, and investigators working to piece together what happened, the case again shined a spotlight on the D.C. Child and Family Services Agency, which recommended Bowman to a D.C. Superior Court judge as a suitable adoptive parent in 2001 and 2004. The girls had been wards of the D.C. government.

Secrecy in adoption is leaving many questions unanswered:

Yesterday, myriad questions about Bowman’s adoptions went unanswered as city and court officials in the District, citing confidentiality laws, declined to reveal details of a background check of Bowman that was performed by a private contractor. They said they were unaware of her 1999 misdemeanor conviction in the District for threatening to hurt someone.

We learn two of the girls, the surviving 7 year old and the 9 year old were biological sisters as well:

The missing children would be 9 and 11, officials said. They said the 7-year-old girl is a biological sister of the 9-year-old. All three were foster children of Bowman’s before she adopted the oldest child in 2001 and the other two in 2004, officials said.

There are no records of the three girls having been enrolled in public school in three Maryland Counties Bowman has lived in:

Many neighbors near Bowman’s beige ranch-style home in Lusby and at her former residence in Rockville said they had never seen children at her home and were unaware that she had any. Authorities in Calvert and Montgomery County — and in Prince George’s County, where she lived for a time — said they could find no record of the children being enrolled in public schools.

More details are emerging of the abuse the 7 year old adopted girl endured:

Bowman was being held yesterday on charges of child abuse in connection with injuries to the 7-year-old. The girl escaped from her locked bedroom Thursday by jumping out a window, police said.

Bowman admitted beating the girl with a “hard-heeled shoe,” the sheriff’s office said. The girl told police her mother beat her with a white shoe to the point that it was covered in blood, officials said.

The child had “extensive open infected sores and open lesions,” several injuries to her feet and knees, and ligature marks and extensive scarring on her neck, according to charging documents filed in court.

Clearly if there was “extensive scarring on her neck” her abuse and neglect had been ongoing.

A second Post article details the search for evidence at the former residence in Montgomery County, see Detectives Scour for Evidence in Case of Dead Girls. It also reveals even further insanity, the freezer with the dead girls may have been moved not once, but twice:

Starks said Bowman left Rockville in October or November of last year. She lived in Charles County briefly before moving to Calvert, officials said.

The chronology, which differs from information made public yesterday, raises the startling possibility that the bodies of the children might have been moved not once but twice.

All of which sits firmly in the context of D.C.’s Banita Jacks case from earlier this year and the aftermath. (A snapshot of the Jacks catastrophic failure can be found in articles such as this CBS news piece from last January, D.C. Woman: “Demons” Possessed Slain Girls, it also dealt with issues of kids being in and out of school and lack of follow up to determine the children’s welfare. But then she’s a research topic unto herself.) The disastrous outcome led to ongoing work trying to clean up the mess that is DC Child and Family Services Agency (see articles such as this, Court Orders CFSA To Do Obvious: Get A Plan, from the Washington City Paper for example.)

The case has again shined a spotlight on the D.C. Child and Family Services Agency, which recommended Bowman to a D.C. Superior Court judge as a suitable adoptive parent in 2001 and 2004. The girls had been wards of the D.C. government.

The child welfare agency came under fire in January after social workers failed to investigate reports of alleged child neglect by Banita Jacks, a Southeast Washington woman now charged with killing her four daughters in their home.

The Bowman mess also brings to the fore the issue of background checks being outsourced to private contractors:

…myriad questions about Bowman’s adoptions went unanswered as city and court officials in the District, citing confidentiality laws, declined to reveal details of a background check of Bowman that was performed by a private contractor. They said they were unaware of her 1999 misdemeanor conviction in the District for threatening to hurt someone.

In the midst of these remarkable circumstances, (DC) Mayor Fenty had this to say:

“It would be too premature, too irresponsible, to say someone along the chain messed up,” Mayor Adrian M. Fenty (D) said at a news conference.

(Fenty has been busy covering his own ass in all this, pointing out repeatedly that the adoptions took place before he came to office.)

Again, rather than blaming individuals and saying any one given person let these girls slide, I think we have to look systemically. After the adoption, were there follow up visits? Were there supposed to be any? (Further down in this post I’ve come across a quote which seems to imply that once a child is placed, the job is in all meaningful ways ‘done’.)

Was it ANYONE’S job to ensure these girls were getting any kind of education? Were they ever enrolled in any school anywhere? Do kids who are not enrolled just fall through the cracks? Is anyone tasked with making sure they are in some form of schooling if they are not in public schools, or do parents just get to opt out completely and no one cares? (Further does that mean federal adoption subsidies can be given to parents who opt their kids out of education?) Apparently it’s no one’s job to make sure these girls were getting education of some kind, they’re not in county schools, but no one checks to see if they’ve moved to private, or homeschool? Do they just fall off the edge? If it’s not already, then it’s long past time for it be added to someone’s job description.

The article continues:

Authorities in Calvert and County – and in Prince George’s County, where she lived for a time — said they could find no record of the children being enrolled in public schools.

(I’m still trying to determine when were the Bowmans living in Prince George’s? Before or after their time in Montogomery? How many of Maryland’s twenty-three counties were touched by this case?)

Through all of this the moves, the lack of any evidence of these girls being given any kind of education, heck the lack of evidence that these girls were even still alive, the checks kept rolling in. Federal “special needs” adoption subsidies to the tune of $2, 400 a month. Yes, thousands of dollars without so much as ever asking, oh by the way, the girls are still alive, right?

Adoption subsidies for frozen corpses.

Keep up the ‘good work’ money, no evidence of post placement children required.

In Montgomery and Calvery Counties, just as I suspected, some neighbors were unaware Bowman even had kids:

Many neighbors near Bowman’s beige ranch-style home in Lusby and at the Rockville residence said they had never seen children at her home and were unaware that she had any.

Moving from Rockville/Aspen Hill in Montgomery Co. to Lusby in Calvert Co. Bowman claiming to be in failing health, apparently left a mess in her wake:

A few months before moving out, Bowman complained of back pain and said she had cancer, according to neighbor Shirley Knapp.

After Bowman moved to Calvert, the landlord complained to Howard Knapp, Shirley’s husband, about the mess that had been left behind. “They were pigs,” he recalled the landlord saying. “They trashed the house, and there was at least one dead cat in there.”

So again, I ask, in the wake of the adoptions, where were the follow up visits? Was the house in similar condition through the time the Bowmans lived there?

Today, (Tuesday), the autopsy for the dead sisters was scheduled. Details are likely to be forthcoming soon. In light of this paragraph from early on in the article:

The Calvert sheriff’s office said in a statement that Bowman told investigators the remains in the freezer were those of her older two adopted daughters. She told them she wrapped one of the children in a plastic garbage bag and the other in a rug, officials said.

I am GUESSING that the two girls may have died in perhaps separate incidents. Had they died at once, Bowman would have been more likely to treat the two bodies similarly. As one was in a garbage bad and the other in a rug, there’s the possibility that we could be looking at two separate events.

As for the final surviving daughter, forced to save herself, she’s apparently going into the Maryland system:

The Maryland Department of Human Resources will file a petition in court today to gain custody of the 7-year-old.

A third article in today’s Post, Woman Met Adoption Requirements, D.C. Officials Say details the adoptions of the girls and the “special needs” adoption subsidies Bowman was receiving:

D.C. officials said yesterday that Renee D. Bowman followed the proper procedures for adopting three children and passed the background check and home study required for adoptive parents.

“Based on my review of the evidence today, all that happened,” said Peter Nickles, the city’s acting attorney general. He said that as part of a federal program for parents who take in “special needs” children, Bowman received a total of $2,400 a month for the three girls.

The special-needs designation can mean that children are part of a sibling set or a racial minority group, have a learning disability or were relinquished to the state by their biological parents, among other things.

Despite a previous conviction a misdemeanor that was clearly pertinent, Bowman sailed on through the process:

The city’s adoption process involves an investigation into the prospective parent’s background and home life, a child-rearing class, interviews and other evaluations. The final approval comes from a judge in the Superior Court’s family division.

Bowman cleared the hurdles despite a 1999 conviction on one misdemeanor count of “threats to do bodily harm.” She was given a six-month suspended sentence and put on supervised probation for a year, according to Superior Court records.

D.C. officials said at a news conference that they were unaware of the case and did not know whether a misdemeanor conviction would prevent an adoption .

As the District had outsourced the background check, they are now claiming ignorance of the misdemeanor conviction. This brings us to our next question, how many other people were allowed to adopt with prior convictions and what are the implications for the children they adopted?

Worse, they admit, they don’t even know whether or not the conviction would have disqualified her, or whether the adoptions would have gone forward anyway had they known!

As I continue to say, SYSTEMIC problems.

Fortunately, we do at least get the name of the private contractor:

The private agency that did the background check, the Baltimore-based Board of Child Care, did not respond to a request for comment yesterday.

Which is to say they’re ducking this one and hoping attention goes elsewhere. That would be the Board of Child Care of the United Methodist Church. (Get yer ‘faith-based’ homestudies here!) The BOCC tries to be one stop shopping, providing everything from home studies to “all of the required post-placement services.”

Which brings us around to Adoptions Together, (yet another topic unto itself) from two directions, both the Post article with the quote below indicating that those with a misdemeanor conviction have gotten children in the past:

“Whenever there’s any kind of a criminal history, it’s always carefully evaluated,” said Janice Goldwater, executive director of the nonprofit Adoptions Together, which works with government agencies in the Washington region. “But there are people that adopt children that have misdemeanors.”

and by way of the Board of Child Care adoption page, which makes it clear Adoptions Together isn’t merely familiar with the broader DC adoption milieu, the Board of Child Care is in “partnership” with Adoptions Together:

The Board of Child Care is licensed as a child placement agency in Maryland and the District of Columbia. Through an established partnership with Adoptions Together, a comprehensive array of adoption services are available, including adoption counseling, home studies, assistance in the waiting period, full placement services, reunion services, and all of the required post-placement services.

The real bottom line is that ‘the buck’ appears to have stopped nowhere.

After placement, apparently the job is done:

“Once the court decides a family is fit, once it takes place, that ends the jurisdiction of the state or D.C,” said Mayor Fenty.

In other words, a clusterfuck of no one stepping up to the plate to say ‘damnit, someone somewhere in one of these systems needed to step forward to say it WAS their responsibility or their departments’ responsibility to ensure kids are still alive post placement’.

***

Lots of other factors played into this mess, communication between DC and MD, outsourcing of background checks leading to deniability, lack of follow up once a kid is placed, homeschool laws that place less scrutiny on families when a child is no longer in public schools (based on assumptions that the kids must be getting something somewhere else), adoption subsidies that go out whether the kids is provably alive or not, and as always, the lack of budget, time, personel, etc to do what really should have been done every step of the way.

To do what kids need to ensure their very lives.

The SYSTEM failed these adopted girls. It’s past time to start re-evaluating from the ground up.