I don’t make a point of blogging all the various abandoned newborns articles that go by with regularity.

This story is what might be considered somewhat regional to me, though, and it makes a good case study of how such child abandonments get used by others.

Yesterday morning, a newborn was left outside a Catholic Church in Springfield, Virginia.

See, Newborn found in church parking lot from the Washington Post,

A newborn girl was left in the parking lot of a Springfield Catholic church just before Mass on Sunday, and police were trying to find the mother.

The baby was found about 6:30 a.m. when a patron of St. Raymond of Penafort Roman Catholic Church, at 8750 Pohick Rd., noticed a bag in the parking lot. The infant, thought to have been just hours old, was inside. The patron called for help, and the baby was taken to Inova Fairfax Hospital.

“She had probably only been there for a few minutes,” said Officer Shelley Broderick, a Fairfax County police spokeswoman. “She is in good condition and will be at the hospital for several days for tests.”

Fortunately, there is a great deal of concern for the Mother’s health, an aspect all too often overlooked if not outright ignored in these kinds of cases.

“Detectives are concerned about the health of the mother,” Broderick said. “The child obviously was not born in a hospital, and it’s possible she could have delivered the child on her own.”

The Virginia legalized child abandonment law leaves a fair amount of wiggle room.

Wiggle room that can be utilized by those who want the “safe haven” concept to cover child abandonments at non-specified locations to count kids as “safe haven saves” who otherwise would not meet the Virginia law’s criteria. (Emphasis added by me.)

It was unclear whether the mother would face criminal charges. Broderick said the baby was left outside and unattended, rather than in the church or another safe location. Virginia law allows parents to leave a child who is less than 14 days old at a hospital or rescue squad as long as the baby is left “in a manner reasonably calculated to ensure the child’s safety.“

Media throughout the DC area have been abuzz, see for example this from last night Update: Newborn Found Outside Springfield Church Still in Hospital

She said the baby was discovered by an alert church member who found the duffel bag placed under a light pole, where parishioners passing by could find it. The church member immediately contacted the police.

Caldwell said this type of infant abandonment is very rare in the county.

“Once the baby is released from the hospital, the Department of Family Services is involved,” Caldwell said. “I can’t give any more details on that but we are in contact with them and we were immediately in contact with social workers from that agency.”

Just as we see in any child abandonment case here in the U.S. in no time, the phone calls from wanna-be-adopters began pouring in.

Caldwell mentioned that the police have received calls from the public volunteering to take the child. She said that the care of the child is not a police issue.

Fortunately, the “primary concern” at this point is for the mother and her health. Some states have all but ignored the health of Mothers in these cases, Virginia, on the other hand, apparently understands the implications of having given birth presumably outside of medical care and the potential threat that poses to the woman herself.

“Our primary concern is identifying the mother because most likely she is in need of medical attention,” Caldwell said. “We really can’t say at this point whether or not there would be any charges against her.”

&

Investigators determined that the baby was left outside for only a short time before she was found and appears to be in good condition. Doctors who examined her said that the baby is full-term, is possibly of Hispanic descent may have been born between midnight and 6 a.m.

The baby was not delivered in a hospital. Detectives are concerned for the health of the mother and the baby. If you have an idea of who the mother is or saw a person or vehicle around the parking lot of the church between 6 and 6:30 a.m., please call police at 703-691-2131 or contact Crime Solvers by phone at 1-866-411-TIPS/8477. You can also e-mail at www.fairfaxcrimesolvers.org or text “TIP187” plus your message to CRIMES/274637. 

Never ones to see a child abandonment as anything other than an opportunity for self promotion, the local catholic infrastructure has gone into high gear promoting their pregnancy and newborn interception apparatuses.

The catholic diocese of Arlington, for example immediately saw this as an opportunity to  issue a “reminder” of their programs geared towards collecting as many children for (catholic) adoptions as possible.

Naturally, the “resources” they point towards are “project gabriel” the multi-parish birth instead of abortion effort begun in the Galveston-Houston diocese of  Texas over 35 years ago in which catholic churches team up to obsess over pregnant women in an effort to push them to bear to term (and if at all possible, convince her to surrender the resultant child for adoption.)

Their second “resource” is of course catholic charities’ center for adoption services. No surprise there, as their “alternative” to child abandonment is immediately adoption (preferably though catholic charities placing the child with a suitably catholic couple.)

They then offer a click through to a donation page for some of their anti-abortion efforts: project rachel (their “post-abortion ministry used to recruit women to their anti-Roe and Doe lawsuits and be local ‘voices against abortion’) and catholic charities center for adoption  and pregnancy services. Every child abandonment, an opportunity to fundraise.

All of these are of course but pieces of the broader catholic anti-abortion effort.

Put simply,  they see an opportunity to capitalize upon such unfortunate circumstances. One woman’s misery, the catholic church’s gain.

In every child abandonment, they see dollar signs.

That, and opportunities for framing and cooptation to reinforce their narrative both internal to their own spaces and extending outward into the broader culture.

Thus, now that local news is all abuzz with this rare occurrence,  the church in question, St. Raymond of Penafort Roman Catholic Church, enjoys the free advertising, and quickly slaps a statement, Our New Found Baby Mary, up on the website.

The baby is of course, not “theirs” to name or redistribute to whomever they please, but that never stops a church like this from stepping in and presuming to “name it and claim it” (to use a protestant, “word of faith”/”prosperity gospel” turn of phrase.)

Our hearts and prayers go out to this baby, whom I have unofficially named “Mary Madeleine,” placing her under the special care of our Blessed Mother and of St. Mary Magdalene, patroness of so many troubled women. The parish has been flooded with offers to assist Baby Mary in so many ways, and I am edified by all of these. (I am also happy to collect more!)

The statement gives lip service to reuniting the mother with her child, and vague promises of “standing by her” should she happen to come forward, but primarily she is praised not so much as an individual, but as a useful symbol for giving birth and bringing the child to the church.

But our hearts and prayers also go out to “Baby Mary’s” mother. What dire straits she must feel herself to be in that would make her leave her baby with us like this. And yet, can’t we see here also tremendous love, and courage, enabling her to see through her fears and not only allow her baby to be born, but then to try to bring her to someone who would care for her—Holy Mother Church.

If any of you know anything about this mother, please either talk to me, or to the police, or encourage her to do so. I can’t speak for the police, but I just don’t think anyone really wants to see this poor woman punished. It seems to me that the main concern is for her wellbeing–especially her physical heath. And to reunite her with her baby, if possible.

I promise her that she will find many friends at St. Raymond’s, beginning with me. Friends who will stand by her in the days, weeks and months ahead, and not abandon her to her troubles. And friends who will help defend her in the remote case that some legal action is attempted against her.

Naturally, the retelling is infused with their angel theology as a form of self reinforcement.

On Sunday morning, November 14, right before the 7am Mass, a parishioner noticed a small gym bag that was laying unattended by the light post near the Groveland Drive entrance to the parish parking lot. After dropping his family off at the front of the church, something told him (perhaps a guardian angel?) to investigate.

Not the least bit surprisingly, “angels” and what catholics term “Angel spirituality” are front and center to the project gabriel efforts (See this how to guide out of Dallas for example.) Thus by framing the story this way, it serves as reinforcement of the broader anti-abortion narrative to those far beyond those directly involved in these events.

In every child abandonment, the catholic infrastructure sees an opportunity for self reinforcement, increasing anti-abortion activism and commitment, and donation collection.

That’s what abandoned little girls are good for, to them.

This is another post I’ve been trying to get to for some time now.

I’ve been writing for years about hidden pregnancies, secret births, and how no matter what some of the “baby safe haven” law/legalized child abandonment advocates insist, there will always been some number of women who will never be reached by these laws.

If there’s any one constant globally, it’s that the ongoing “background noise” of dead babies being found from time to time is simply a reality that every culture must come to terms with.

Thus today, I blog the strange case of Michele G.M. Kalina out of Pennsylvania.

See Mysteries abound in case of 5 dead infants

Between 1996 and 2010, investigators said, Kalina gave birth to three boys, one girl and another infant whose gender could not be determined.

Investigators said the infants were 32 to 43 weeks old when they were killed by asphyxiation, poisoning or neglect.

Police found the remains of four infants in her apartment in the 700 block of Court Street during searches in late July and early August, investigators said.

Remains of a fifth infant were found Aug. 6 in the Conestoga Landfill, New Morgan, authorities said.

DNA testing linked three infants to Kalina as the mother and the boyfriend as the father.

The evidence linked a fourth baby to Kalina as the mother, with the boyfriend as the possible father.

The DNA evidence on the fifth infant was inconclusive as to the identity of the parents.

Kalina is charged with criminal homicide and related counts in the deaths.

As is so often the case in these hidden pregnancy/secret birth neonaticides and infanticides, Michele Kalina was apparently deep in pregnancy denial.

See, Wyomissing psychologist says mother’s denial often plays role in infanticides

Authorities said Kalina denied her pregnancies, which Ring said is consistent with other cases involving mothers killing newborns.

“The woman convinces herself she is not really having a child,” he said. “She has no attachment to the child.

“The child is just an object to cause obstruction, not a human being. They just go on living their typical dysfunctional life.”

Authorities believe Kalina had six babies by her boyfriend. They said she put one up for adoption and killed five.

As we’ve seen in other cases, sometimes a woman who has lost a child to adoption goes into denial and on to commit infanticide upon finding herself pregnant and giving birth again. I am not positing the two are directly related, merely pointing out that this is something that some of us have seen before when following other cases.

Kalina’s case is an extreme example in that she was pregnant a total of six times apparently resultant in five deaths.

Ring said factors such as isolation and a lack of support contribute to denial of pregnancy.

“The denial of pregnancy is so strong that when they have labor pains the women report gastrointestinal distress or a need to defecate,” he said.

Ring said women who deny pregnancy typically deliver their own babies in bathrooms.

He said such women often develop mental problems such as amnesia and hallucinations during childbirth

“When a woman delivers a baby on their own they have to disassociate themselves from their bodies,” he said. “Once it’s over they reintegrate back to basic, normal reality.”

Her motivations, whether in any way related to that adoption loss (which we’ll see further down, was in 2003, near the middle years of all this) or not remain completely unknown.

See Mystery of Michele Kalina: Reading infant homicides baffle experts

It’s a case that even experts are at a loss to explain or understand.

They’re struggling for answers – and theories – because they have no point of reference for the charges against 44-year-old Michele G.M. Kalina.

“We can’t really comment on a motive because this is unique,” said Dr. Avidan Milevsky, associate psychology professor at Kutztown University.

Milevsky, like other professionals interviewed, is not working on the Kalina case.

“At the end of the day we have to admit that sometimes we never have a motive,” Milevsky said of psychologists who look at criminal cases. “This is such a disturbing case that we have nothing to compare it to.”

Prosecutors in Kalina’s case do not have an explanation or motive for the crimes.

While I’ve tracked a number of cases of multiple older adoptees being murdered by their adopter, I’ve never seen a case quite like this in which one sees a pattern of multiple newborns.

Apparently the only known precedent is from France:

There is a recent case in France similar to Kalina’s, but experts are unaware of any other case in the U.S. involving multiple deaths of newborns.

In Villers-au-Tertre, northern France, Dominique Cottrez, 45, is accused of strangling eight newborns and hiding the remains in a garage from 1988 to 2007. The case is pending in court and local experts are not yet familiar with it.

As this article pointed out, there are questions of where the babies were kept prior to being killed.

Berks County District Attorney John T. Adams said Tuesday that investigators do not know where a 44-year-old Reading woman kept five infants before she killed them.

And they do not know where Michele G.M. Kalina, a home-care aide for the elderly, gave birth, Adams said.

He said no one has reported seeing Kalina with any of the infants and that area hospitals have no record of Kalina giving birth.

“Nobody knows where she had the babies,” Adams said. “We are still interested in gathering information.”

This takes on additional significance when we look at the estimated age of the deaths of the infants:

Investigators said the infants were 32 to 43 weeks old when they were killed by asphyxiation, poisoning or neglect.

Where she gave birth and where she kept some of these secret babies during their brief lives remains completely unknown.

After death, she kept their remains in her apartment in a closet her family was forbidden to open.

Investigators said the remains of four babies were kept in plastic containers, and a that fifth was found in a plastic bag in the closet of her apartment in the 700 block of Court Street.

The same article goes on to make a comparison to the case of Marybeth Tining, who may have killed to gain attention.

Weiss said most women who kill their babies are suffering from a form of postpartum depression.

“You have to find out if she was mentally ill,” Weiss said. “What were her other circumstances? These may have been unplanned pregnancies. What was she intending when she conceived?

“That sort of pattern would lead one to believe she has mental illness.”

Bowen-Hartung said the Kalina case has similarities to the case of Marybeth Tining, 68, of Duanesburg, N.Y., who is serving 20 years to life in prison for killing a 3-month-old. Authorities said she could be responsible for killing seven other children but has not been tried or convicted in those deaths.

Tining admitted to killing one infant but has told authorities that the other deaths were accidental. Prosecutors did not have enough evidence to prosecute Tining in the other deaths because she brought the children to a hospital, where all the deaths were ruled accidental.

Bowen-Hartung said Tining suffers from Munchausen syndrome, which involves killing children for attention.

One of the few clues seems to pertain to the earlier adoption,

The number of babies intrigues Bowen-Hartung.

Why, she wondered, would someone carry the babies to near term, allowing one to be adopted but killing the others?

Investigators said Kalina wrote a letter to her boyfriend in 2003 in which she informed him that she had delivered a girl and offered it for adoption.

Which is then clarified a bit in this later article,

Kalina also gave birth on Oct. 22, 2003, to a girl she had with the boyfriend, whom authorities declined to identify.

The boyfriend has denied to police knowing of that birth or that Kalina had put the infant up for adoption, officials said.

As the deaths appear to have taken place between 1996 and 2010, this secret adoption the would have fallen near the middle.

Returning to this article again,

Bowen-Hartung said Kalina might try to claim that she is not guilty by reason of insanity.

If such a defense were successful, Kalina would be committed to a mental health institution.

Milevsky said about 70 percent of women suffer postpartum depression for a few weeks after delivery, and that about 10 percent of women have more severe depression with symptoms that linger for months.

He said it appears Kalina suffers from severe postpartum psychosis, a condition he said affects less than 1 percent of women.

“Usually the mothers going through severe extreme psychosis would be the ones more likely to kill infants,” he said.

Once a mother harms a baby, she enters into a mental dysfunction that is unimaginable, Milevsky said.

She was arraigned at the end of October, where she was represented by a public defender.

Following a 21/2 month investigation, Kalina was charged additionally with a blanket charge of criminal homicide in the five deaths.

Adams said that prosecutors will determine before trial the number of homicide counts. Homicide could include murder or manslaughter.

Kalina was arraigned Monday before District Judge Wally Scott on the homicide and related charges. She was returned to Berks County Prison without bail.

If she does not manage a mental illness defense, this could go very badly for her.

Following her Aug. 9 arrest, Kalina was linked to the deaths by DNA evidence conducted at National Medical Services, Willow Grove, Montgomery County, Adams said.

Dr. Neil A. Hoffman, a forensic pathologist, reported that the deaths were violent, caused by asphyxia, poisoning or neglect.

Over the course of the years, she moved, taking the remains with her. (Somewhat similar to the Renee Bowman case in Maryland, she moved her dead adoptees bodies repeatedly)

In an interview with police on Aug. 9, Kalina said the family moved in April 2008 to Court Street from a house on Raymond Street in Muhlenberg Township.

At the time of the move, Kalina told police, three containers of human remains were moved from the Raymond Street house and placed in a closet in the Court Street apartment.

She said they lived in Muhlenberg Township from 1997 to 2003.

This article is particularly illuminating. Allow me to quote at length,

Kalina admitted that she is an alcoholic.

Kalina told police that she was upset the night they found the remains in the apartment closet.

Jeffrey Kalina quoted his wife as saying: “I don’t know where to go. I can’t find peace there. I can’t find peace anymore.

“I’m concerned I’m being framed.”

The investigation began July 29, when Elizabeth Kalina called Reading police at 5 a.m. to report that she found human remains in a red cooler in a storage closet.

Patrol officers responded and looked at the remains. They told Elizabeth and her father the remains were not human.

The father and daughter then threw them in the trash.

At 9 that night, Jeffrey Kalina notified police again, saying he and his daughter had found two more plastic containers.

During a search of the Court Street apartment, police found three containers, including one filled to the top with cement.

The following day, police searched the trash bin outside the building for the remains that had been in the first container. The remains had already been taken to the landfill.

On Aug. 5, police searched the apartment again and recovered another set of bones in a plastic bag.

Police also found a letter that Kalina had written to her boyfriend informing him that she gave birth to a girl on Oct. 22, 2003, in St. Joseph Medical Center, then gave the baby to the Diocese of Allentown Catholic Social Agency for adoption.

Hospital records showed that Kalina had a normal delivery.

On Aug. 6, police went to the Conestoga Landfill in New Morgan and found the red cooler and one human bone.

After locating the five sets of remains, police interviewed Jeffrey Kalina.

He said his wife had been employed for 14 years as a home-care aide for the elderly by Interim Healthcare, Wyomissing.

Employment records did not indicate that Kalina was pregnant or had taken time off to have children.

Jeffrey Kalina said the remains were in a closet since the family moved to the Court Street apartment in 2008. He said his wife told him and his daughter never to go into the closet.

Which brings us to yet another possible clue, and yet another dead child in the course of Kalina’s personal history,

Kalina and her husband also had a son, Andrew, who died June 9, 2000, at age 13 of positional asphyxiation, Hess said.

The son suffered from cerebral palsy, a debilitating disease that rendered Andrew bed-bound.

Earlier this month her hearing was waved.

Kalina is charged with an umbrella charge of criminal homicide, but prosecutors will provide specific charges when Kalina is arraigned in Berks County Court before Judge Linda K.M. Ludgate in December.

Those charges could include first- and third-degree murder and voluntary and involuntary manslaughter.

“We were prepared and ready for the hearing,” District Attorney John T. Adams said. “The defense acknowledged that we could prove the charges for court.”

Kalina’s lawyer, Assistant Public Defender Holly Feeney, decided to waive the hearing after meeting with First Assistant District Attorney M. Theresa Johnson and Assistant District Attorney Adrian Shchuka to discuss evidence.

Prosecutors said Kalina’s daughter, Elizabeth, 19, would have testified during the hearing before District Judge Wally Scott that she found the remains in plastic containers in a closet in the family apartment in July.

Kalina has been in the county prison since Aug. 9, when she was initially charged with abuse of corpse.

The charges were upgraded to homicide after a 21/2-month investigation.

She claims she did not kill the infants.

Kalina has denied killing her babies. She told her husband, “I am concerned I’m being framed.”

She told her boyfriend that when her stomach enlarged it was because she had cysts on her fallopian tubes.

Dr. Neil A. Hoffman, a Reading Hospital forensic pathologist, ruled the deaths homicides. He said they were caused by violence, including asphyxia, poisoning or neglect.

Kalina is in the county jail without bail.

Her formal arraignment is set for December 14. (See video on this piece.)

Women like Kalina are simply highly unlikely to utilize a “safe haven” law. No amount of additional funding for advertising such would have changed this outcome.

Pennsylvania’s baby dump law enacted in February of 2003 allows infants up to 28 days old be legally abandoned, yet clearly, these were five kids that the law did nothing for.

No amount of reminders by the state even through the time period Kalina was going through these pregnancies made a bit of difference.

I have long argued that there are some number of women for whom neonatacide or infanticide are simply some completely other thought process, one that may or may not be rooted in postpartum psychosis or extreme denial.

Rather than treating such cases as the severe mental breaks they sometimes represent, baby dump advocates insist they utilize the legalized abandonment schemes OR face harsh jail penalities offering nothing other than a false dichotomy.

For some number of women, these behaviors represent extreme mental health problems and a genuine need for medical treatment, not imprisonment nor the “no name, no shame, no blame” just make it all go away mythology the dump advocates push.

This one’s almost too convoluted to even try to blog.

I’m not even going to attempt to summarize it as this case is ALL about the details. So instead see,

FDLE: Grandma in baby-sale case wanted to cheat daughter

and

Mom also arrested in baby-selling plot

as but two of the many articles, news reports, and by now mountain of international coverage one could try to use as a starting place.

This is one of those cases where you read a few paragraphs and then have to insert “but wait, it gets weirder,there’s more” only to read down a few paragraphs further, and have to say it all over again.

But wait, it gets weirder, there’s more,

Skiver, who said she had a happy childhood with her adoptive parents, said she is taking steps now to try to adopt the baby boy, who is in state custody.

Apparently undeterred by the attempted baby sale in the midst of all this, Skiver still wants what she wanted from the outset, to adopt the kid.

But wait, it gets weirder, there’s more

She said she grew up knowing the story of her own adoption as told by her parents. Skiver said Bigbee overheard her adoptive mother lamenting in a cafe that she could not have more children. An hour later, Skiver said, Bigbee showed up at her adoptive mother’s workplace with infant Skiver in tow and said, “Here, you want a baby? Have mine.”

During the course of the nine months it took to finalize the adoption, Skiver said, Bigbee pressured her adoptive parents for money and got a total of about $30,000 from them.

“She would show up at their house, at their work. If you don’t give me more money, you know, I need to buy a car,” Skiver said on the radio show. “They were scared to death she would take me back.”

But wait, it gets weirder, there’s more

Skiver said Bigbee was pregnant with another child by the time the adoption was finalized. She said she knows she has a brother through Bigbee, but doesn’t know where he is.

Seriously.

Just set up your google alerts and pop some popcorn.

It only gets weirder from here.

Miami, 1927

The Miami Herald has done yet another strong piece on the fate of the Cole babies. See:

The Cole babies: Years later, they search for identity: Illegally adopted at birth in Miami, a group of men and women set out to find their true identities. Instead, they found each other.

Those termed “Cole Babies” were children born in Miami between 1927 and 1963 whose black market “adoption” placements were handled by Katherine M. Cole, Ruby Sutera, or Ephrain Suarez, (The Suarez Clinic.)

This latest article features the plight of a number of the Cole “adoptees”, such as Cyn Bird, a late discovery adoptee (or LDA) , who learned at age 46 that she was not merely “adopted”, but “adopted” illegally through the Cole operation.

In what authorities call one of the most haunting, widespread cases of illegal adoptions in Florida history, Cole reportedly placed more than 1,000 babies, most without legal documentation, out of her two-story Southwest Eighth Street clinic from the 1930s to the 1960s. She died in 1981, leaving no records and without ever admitting the full scale of the shadowy operation that created three generations of Cole babies struggling to piece together their identities. For most, the discovery was triggered by a revelation and a birth certificate on which Cole listed the adoptive parents as the birth parents.

“She absolutely played God,” said Josette Marquess, a retired Florida adoption official who shepherded dozens of Cole babies through mostly fruitless state searches for family. “We have no official record of their adoptions — like they never happened — which makes it nearly impossible to help these folks find their birth parents.”

The discovery of this vintage Miami mystery has come in waves: In the 1950s, as part of a federal investigation into black-market baby adoptions. In the early 1990s, as some Cole babies reached adulthood and began asking the questions.

Now, a third Internet-fueled push is unfolding.

Precisely that lack of information is binding together  a new community.

Along the way, the Cole babies found each other.

Through websites, Facebook pages, registries, forums and e-mail exchanges, they built a special community bound by the unknowns and the peculiar deeds of “Granny Doc” Cole.

The article also focuses upon the quest for health information and the needs of the aging population of the Cole babies, as well as the realities of waking up one day to realize everything one thought they knew about their family medical history was a lie hidden by the legal fiction of the “adoption” and the family silence.

Lightner found out he was adopted as he was researching what he believed to be his mother’s family history. His aunt told him the truth.

“It was like listening to a record player that skips, over and over,” said Lightner, a husband and father. “She told me that my mother was older and they paid $200 for me. I should have gotten a few hints when I was growing up, but I didn’t feel like I was adopted.”

And then the realization began to sink in. He called his doctor.

“Everything we thought we knew about my health history, we don’t anymore.”

As I’ve pointed out several times before though, (see here and here as but two examples) family medical histories are ultimately interpersonal matters related to consent and genuine medical privacy not directly tied to record access restoration work (as the state cannot grant one access to their mother and father’s medical history, only members of one’s family or the parents themselves can chose whether to divulge that information or not.)

The article goes on to explain how searches by the Cole babies just as with many other adopted people follow patterns as the adoptees themselves have children, age, those that adopted them begin to die and they find out about their adoptive status, often through papers left behind, and begin to reach other important milestones in their lives.

Cole left behind a world of questions, unearthed a dozen years after her death when a Cole baby named Carole Landis Baker became the first adoptee to publicly search for her birth mother. The story of her quest, published in The Miami Herald on June 6, 1993, under the headline Dark Secrets, ended with more questions than answers.

Baker never found her birth mother, but dozens of other Cole babies came forward and at least three found birth parents.

Some Cole babies held a reunion in Coral Gables in January 1994 to celebrate the kinship that had formed as they searched for their roots.

Like the first waves, the Cole babies now coming forward live all over the United States — some in Florida, some learning as 40-somethings that they had been adopted, often as their adoptive parents were dead or dying.

Those that bought the children themselves were sometimes in their own form of hiding, keeping the secrets and trying to ensure unpleasant questions were avoided.

Adoptive parents still alive have been reluctant to reveal details. In Bird’s case, her mother denied she was adopted for years before her confession. She told Bird she had lived in fear for years that someone would knock on the door and take away her baby girl.

Lightner remembers being sent to a British boarding school not long after he asked why he didn’t have red hair like his father.

As time went by and the Cole story came to light it is possible, if not altogether likely that some “adopters”/baby buyers simply destroyed any remaining paperwork and decided never to tell the “adoptee” in question rather than confront the truth, as after all, the “adopters”understand the implications of how this information would reflect on them as well.

Now decades later the black market saga of the Cole babies holds vital lessons for today’s “adopters” and would-be-adopters all too willing to participate in baby buying schemes.

Many of these lifetimes worth of lies are starting to show cracks, and no matter how much one tries to bury the truth, there are often relatives or others still willing to let the “adoptee” know what really happened.

Today we read about the Cole babies, but ten or twenty years from now, we’ll be reading similar kinds of things about children “adopted” out of Guatemala.

For three decades, East Coast couples ventured to what was then the western edge of Miami, middle-class whites who, for the most part, could not conceive but had cash and were willing to pay $25 to $2,500 or more for a baby.

The birth mothers were mostly from South Florida, unwed, broke and looking for a way to discreetly start over. Their expenses were paid and secrets held by the adoptive parents.

The popular doctor brought the parties together, with no red tape, no records, no court hearings, no questions. And no answers for the adoptees who would later search for clues.

Cole housed pregnant women and girls in apartments and houses clustered around the clinic at 4725 SW Eighth St.

Cole, who began practicing in 1927, was arrested five times between 1943 and 1967 — once for manslaughter, twice for attempted abortion, once for unlawful possession of barbiturates and once for failure to file a birth certificate. She was cleared of all charges but one, attempted abortion, and served less than a year in jail.

But to so many local families of the time, the accusations seemed not to matter. Cole had legitimately delivered generations of babies for a half-century.

Search and reunion are of course again, in the interpersonal realm and separate from the civil rights effort to ensure the states restore access of original birth certificates to (legally obtained) adoptees. Black Market babies are more often than not simply not in the state’s files at all.

But Florida, like many states has set up an official to offer help with that most interpersonal of tasks.

When a Cole case crosses their desk it’s easy to recognize the hallmarks immediately.

The Cole babies’ stories may start in Miami but most wind up in Tallahassee with Marquess, the recently retired director of the Florida Adoption Reunion Agency.

For two decades, Marquess had been the state’s only adult adoption services official, keeper of a collection of 3×5 index cards listing birth and adoptive parents in Florida adoptions from 1944 to 1980. Few Cole babies were in the files.

“Over the years, I would get all these calls from Cole babies. Their information wasn’t here as it was supposed to be so I would have them send me a copy of the birth certificate,” she said.

She would know immediately if they were Cole babies: “In 98 percent of the cases, she handwrote out the birth certificates in bright red ink.”

Then she had to break the disappointing news: “It was hard to hear their voices, and you know in reality you probably wouldn’t be able to help,” she said. “They deserve closure.”

But for many Cole babies, the yearning to know more has been left unfulfilled.

This article is merely the latest the paper’s ongoing efforts at providing coverage on the Cole babies, here are a few older articles you can search for, for example:

• “Searching for Birth Parents” March 19, 1993
• “Dark Secrets” June 6, 1993
• “Old Memories New Clues Search by ‘Cole Baby’ Starts to Yield Results” June 27, 1993
• “‘Cole Babies’ Search For Past” July 6, 1993
• “Adoptees Search for Clues to Pasts Erased by Doctor” August 9, 1993
• “Hugs, Kisses End 48-year Separation” September 12, 1993
• “Tears Underline Words at Broward Reunion Mother Meets Only Child After 55 Years” October 24, 1993
• “For Cole Babies, A Secret Told is not a Mystery Resolved” December 26, 1993

Unlike local media in some cities with major black market merchants, the Miami Herald has done a remarkable job of bringing new details to light and bringing the hidden history forward, and supporting the efforts of the “adoptees” to reconnect and make their realities known.

But Katherine Cole’s business was hardly the exception.

Katherine Cole was simply the Miami broker who fit into a broader pattern of some of the other more notable black market baby farmers and brokers here in North America such as Lenora Fielding, Thomas Hicks, Bessie Bernard, Jerome Niles, Georgia Tann, Ruby Hightower, Gertrude Pitkanen, Mary Townsend Glassen, Lila Gladys and William Young, etc.

This page for example, Black Market Adoption, has done a nice round up of some very basic articles as but one possible starting point.

You can read more about the Cole babies on various online registries set up to try to help facilitate reunions, or on facebook pages.

But agian, as no records were kept most of these “adoptees” and their original families simply hit brick walls when attempting to reconnect.

That’s the very nature of the Black Market.

Today, adoptees from all but 6 states are still barred from accessing their state confiscated original birth certificates.

I have no interest in reinventing the wheel.

So I just scanned this Bastard Nation flyer from the back of my copy of the Basic Bastard.

‘Nuff said.

There has been a lot of news out of Ireland as of late pertaining to adoptions that I haven’t gotten to blogging (Against Child Trafficking’s Ireland page has lots of coverage), but today I’m just going to make a short post about this latest call for an Inquiry into the Magdalene Laundries/Asylums.

These institutions around the world, including the United States that enslaved women and sold their children into adoptions first began in Dublin in 1767, with the last of them in the Republic of Ireland finally closing its doors in 1996.

I’ve barely touched on the subject in my blogging in that it’s a dauntingly huge, and in many ways simply beyond words, while simultaneously being book worthy. (Fortunately, others have already taken on  that task.)

(Though Violet Feng’s short piece, The Magdalene Laundry: A Life of Servitude Behind Convent Walls provides sort of a Cliff Notes version. It was written many years ago, long before most of the unmarked graves of women “inmates” and infants were found.)

There are horrors sometimes simply to big to blog.

Thus my brief post that serves as an introduction of sorts,

Remembering the victims of the “Magdalene Laundries”

That said, there are renewed efforts calling for forcing open the records and demands reparations be paid to the survivors.

See today’s article,

Call for inquiry into Magdalene laundries

THE IRISH Human Rights Commission (IHRC) has called on the Government to set up a statutory inquiry into treatment of women and girls in Magdalene laundries. It also said financial redress should be available to survivors.

While these efforts are internal to Ireland, the Madalene Asylums also operated in the United States, Canada, and around the world.

But to date, you’d certainly never see language such as this applied to women who suffered these brutalities here in the States:

Speaking during the adjournment debate in the Dáil last night, Mr Kitt said he strongly supported the commission’s stance. Survivors “should receive an apology from the State” and a distinct redress scheme for them “should be established”, he said. “The survivors of the Bethany Home should be treated in the same way.” He asked the Conference of the Religious in Ireland (Cori) and the four religious congregations that operated the laundries to meet the Justice For Magdalenes group “to deal with the issues of records, compensation and other related matters”.

Last June, the Justice for Magdalenes group asked the commission to inquire into treatment of women and girls in Magdalene laundries. The commission agreed to do so, and to examine the human rights issues arising.

The principal findings by the commission’s inquiry, on which it based its recommendations yesterday, were that “for those girls and women who entered Magdalene laundries following a court process, there was clear State involvement in their entry to the laundries”.

It found questions arose “as to whether the State’s obligations to guard against arbitrary detention were met in the absence of information on whether and how girls and women under court processes resided in and left the laundries”. It found the State may have breached the 1930 Forced Labour Convention and Article 4 of the European Convention on Human Rights. Of the Magdalene laundry in Drumcondra, Dublin, it said: “The burial, exhumation and cremation of known and unknown women from a Magdalene laundry in 1993 at High Park raises serious questions for the State in the absence of detailed legislation governing the area.”

Olive Braiden, of the commission, said: “We are dealing with a small and vulnerable group of women who the Government admitted as far back as 2001 were victims of abuse.” Dr Manning said: “The State cannot abdicate from its responsibilities in relation to the treatment of women and girls in the Magdalene laundries.”

Here in America, in the adoption and female confinement industry more generally, the institutions and individual perpetrators hope to escape justice by simply waiting long enough for their victims to die. Or hoping to die personally, long before the victims are able to force justice be done (if ever).

With the deaths of their victims any hope of justice, and often memory of the crimes themselves dies along with them.

Prof James Smith of the Justice for Magdalenes group said “the Government must move beyond its ‘deny ’til they die’ policy.”

Maeve O’Rourke, co-author of the group’s submission to the commission, said the State “must convince the church to acknowledge its part in this scandal, and to open up its records”. It should also call on the church “to pay its share of compensation to survivors”.

There are many resources online where one can learn more, but I strongly urge readers to click across to  Justice for Magdalenes.

Blogs such as this have been staying up to date on the efforts to gain an Inquiry and contain a fair amount of video testimony from survivors.

Needless to say, I add my voice to so many others demanding a full Inquiry, the records be opened, and restitution be paid to survivors and the families of those who endured this church and state constructed living hell, globally.

Any inquiry that results in Ireland would be nothing more than a long overdue start.

But in the end, nothing can truly even begin to address the lives lost, nor the conditions these women were imprisoned within, nor the loss of so many children, often passed via adoption into families deemed suitably “faithful” over the past 229 years.

As I promised, a few of my posts this month will be used to point to other blogger’s important work .

Tonight’s post will be brief, but the links herein will all be well worth your time.

1. For starters, Kerry at Niels over on Pound Pup Legacy have written one of the more important posts I’ve seen in a long time. I consider this a MUST READ piece-

Why the Hague Convention needs revision

Far beyond a discussion of reworking the Hague Convention and the Intercountry Adoption Act of 2000, this piece is a well written post about much of the basic history of inter-country adoption, baby brokering, and the pressures that are inherent to the system that make child trafficking simply the logical outcome.

For so short a post, it’s a marvelous overview, and basic Bastard history anyone working in this field should be aware of.

While I personally remain unconvinced that reform efforts to these tools can actually stem the tide, particularly in light of the problems inherent to for example, the Hague Convention itself, it is important to continually remind the community and Ambassador Jacobs personally, that the Convention is not working when it comes to ending child trafficking and that more to the point, regardless of how it might get tweeked at some future date, the problems with the Convention are inherent to it’s very nature.

Another key reason to spend some time with the PPL post is the important documentation of the supply vs. demand aspect of their post. They detail how the ongoing demand for children has outweighed the number of children made available to the adoption process through news reports dating back to the 1880’s.

Again, this is a very important post and I hope it will be widely circulated.

2. Up next, 73adoptee’s post:

The Critical Difference Between Foster And Infant Adoption

A vital read in light of how National Adoption Month began as an effort to focus on placing Foster kids and has rapidly devolved down into the adoption industry hawking infant adoptions (or reworking the foster system into yet another stream of infant adoptions, complete with the incentives and tax credits for newborns couples were aiming to get their hands on anyway.)

3. By way of yet another angle on the Foster Care clusterfuck, also from this week,  Lori Trevino writes about what it can be like to be a foster kid with a baby of your own taken by the state for purposes of adoption:

How to Steal A Foster Child’s Baby – 101

Despite the high pregnancy rates among foster care girls, few people do any follow up to see what happens to them, and whether or not they are actually enabled/allowed to keep their children.

Trevino’s post cracks the door open just enough to catch a glimpse of the process by which minors still in the system can have their parental rights stripped.

As the state acts in loco parentis for these girls, decisions simply get made for them, their voices considered irrelevant more often than not.

Few people think of foster kid girls as Mothers who have lost children to adoption themselves, but sure enough, here we’re fortunate enough to hear directly from one.

4. Turning to another blogging Mother, Robin wrote an eloquent piece on the expectations of gratitude from both Mothers and Bastards in adoption.

The Burden of Gratitude

She dissects the demand for gratitude both interpersonally,

I often hear paeans of praise and gratitude from adoptees that go beyond the normal expressions of love and respect for parents. The very nature of adoption, a child for the childless or for a home, places the responsibility on the shoulders of an infant, from day one of placement, for the emotional well being of the adopters. As the adoptee grows, so does that sense of obligation promulgated by the mythology.

and more broadly, across society, particularly from those with no direct ties to adoption itself,

It would be one thing if it were only the adopters who expected this, but the average Joe and Jane on the street, unaffected, personally, by adoption, seem to expect it as well. Popular culture expects gratitude from the mother and the adoptee along with a lot of other things and manages to exaggerate the horrors of abortion, inflate the numbers of so-called “dumpster babies” and, sadly, thinks that Safe Havens are the best thing since the paper napkin.

5. For my fifth and final link of the night, be sure to click across to Bastardette’s

Betty Anderson: A Little Clip from Peyton Place

Any self-respecting Bastard should be familiar with Grace Metalious’s Peyton Place.

Marley is of course working with a clip from the TVs series, which I am not as familiar with, (but clearly need to remedy that situation!)

The book, and later media iterations both considered  “scandalous” at the time and a key shaper of attitudes and popular culture from the period, deserves a place in any Bastard timeline.

Allison MacKenzie, as a fictional character, deserves her own place in the Fictionalized Bastard’s Hall of Fame.

November is the time of year when Bastards and (original) Families get it with both barrels.

Those who prefer the “adoption” language take up every square inch of media real estate with National Adoption Month. (What began with a focus on foster kids and has shifted towards the adoption industry’s marketing of infant adoptions) and its spawn, such as the wretched National Adoption Awareness Month and efferts overseas such as the UK’s National Adoption Week.

Meanwhile, over in the realm of the theologically based adoption movement, it’s all “orphans” all the time.

Yesterday for example, was the church based evangelical adoption marketing program quaintly titled “Orphan Sunday.”

It seeks to drive up demand among lay couples churchwide to either “hunger for” or impulse shop for “orphans” as part of a christian movement growth strategy.

As I’ve said many times before, the means by which to grow a movement are relatively limited:

• high internal to the group birth rate (and desperately attempt to keep as many “in” as possible over their lifetimes)
• gain converts (which christian evangelists readily admit is high investment for low returns, particularly once a target reaches jr. high school or older)
• and/or get a hold of someone elses’ kids, which in this American context means both foster and adoption.

Naturally, along with these come other enabling subculture hindrance taboos complete with generated phobias such a:

• preventing or eschewing contraceptive use
• rejection of the morning after pill
• tribal efforts to intercept any information that may interfere with both conception (such as sexual knowledge and understanding)  and pregnancy continuation (likely health risks, etc)
• and of course, abortion deterrence at every level

“Orphan Sunday” marketing efforts then fit into that broader framework.

It is an annual event when the very concept of the world’s so called “orphans” being not only the church’s “responsibility” (not governments, nor secular alternatives) but actually being the church’s god granted entitlement already, and thus kids are portrayed as merely waiting for the church to “come & get ’em.”

Entire ministries have been built off these core concepts, to the point that yes, there are those who receive their weekly paycheck and groceries as a result of selling churches and churchgoers on the notion of collecting other people’s children from around the world.

Along with that come video producers, ever on the lookout for human misery and wide eyed children who are photogenic, and their ilk, along with christian adoption agencies always at the ready to set up a marketing materials table out in the vestibule.

Also central to these events is the idea of getting teens and children of the congregations involved in an effort to shape their fundamental attitudes towards adoption, pregnancy, other people’s children around the world, evangelism, and voting habits at a young age.

In case churchgoers just couldn’t get enough of those adorable starving children photos, today, then was World Orphans Day, whose mission statement is perhaps a bit more explicitly politically focused, aiming at getting governments on board.

See the following excerpt:

Only a large scale and sustainable political, social and moral awakening and movement by global governments, NGO’s and religious groups can address this.

As I said, it’s all orphan everything, all the time.

Why?

Because “orphans” (unlike “Bastards”) are theologically useful.

“Bastards” the to biblically biased, can mean anything from “illigitimate children” to “children produced as a result of having sex with those of other tribes”, but no matter the nuances of the interpretation,  sooner or later, those who base their lives around the book run headlong into Deuteronomy 23:2,

A bastard shall not enter into the congregation of the Lord; even to his tenth generation shall he not enter into the congregation of the Lord.

Which of course comes after the section on how those with various male genital injuries are likewise, not welcome.

The Brick Testament has not portrayed our Bastard specific verse, but their visual portrayal of  Deuteronomy 23:1 certainly covers our situation as well:

Simply put, if we’re “Bastards,” the “not welcome” sign should ultimately go out were these people ever actually chose to live out what their book actually says.

I’ve joked in the past about printing up “exempt” cards to hand out to overzealous evangelists, who by and large have never actually bothered to think about the implications of the various proscribed classes listed  in Deuteronomy.

What part of “Not so fast, go read your book, I’m a Bastard, and therefore not allowed in!” do they so consistently fail to understand?

“Orphans” on the other hand, serve as nothing short of a biblical mandate.

You want to get the crowds riled up, just mention the word “orphan.” All the more so if you have those in any given church dealing with infertility issues of their own.

Not unlike Disney, the book relies on “orphans” as plot devices at almost every turn. We’re remarkably useful.

Bastardette just did a post yesterday covering some of the nuances of certain theological uses of orphans, see:

God’s Heart Adoption: An Adoption Theology Cheat Sheet

Those who want to play the “Orphan” game have plenty of verses to chose from.

They tend to quickly step over inconvenient verses like Exodus 22:22

Do not take advantage of a widow or an orphan.

Or Exodus 22:24:

My anger will be aroused, and I will kill you with the sword; your wives will become widows and your children fatherless.

Or other not dissimilar verses about ensuring there be “justice” for the orphan (see Exodus 24:17):

Do not deprive the alien or the fatherless of justice, or take the cloak of the widow as a pledge.

Or the even more strongly worded Exodus 27:19:

Cursed is the man who withholds justice from the alien, the fatherless or the widow.

(to pull just a couple I happened to have handy)

and instead, jump headlong into sermon notes and resources pushing adoption (link opens a pdf) in the modern American interpretation of the word complete with sealed records and identity forfeiture.

See, we’re simply too useful, to let reality intrude.

I’ve written before (in this case, in relation to adoptions from Vietnam) about the magical number inflation these orphan evangelists engage in.

How they conflate lay ideas of what an “orphan” must mean for churchgoer mobilization purposes, with the actual legal definition that pertains to intercountry adoptions, thus ensuring kids with surviving parents or other family often willing to take them in, suddenly get rebranded as “orphans” to feed that newly generated market demand:

…terminology such as “orphan” in international adoptionland does not necessarily refer to ‘a child whose parents are dead’ or ‘a child bereft of parents.’ “Orphan” in relation to international adoption law has a very specific meaning.

Children adopted internationally after being designated “orphans” often have one or both parents still alive (and yes, in some cases even still seeking them, as often parents are lured into signing paperwork and leaving their children at ‘orphanages’ with promises of it ‘just being for a short duration’, perhaps until the parent has more money to care for the child.)

While the idea of a child whose parents are now dead tends to be the non-technical/non-legal definition in lay or common use, “orphan” as relates to international adoption has a very specific technical meaning embedded in international law in relation to the U.S. Immigration and Nationality Act and a set of criteria laid out in its definition of an “orphan.”(WAY too huge to lay out here, instead use this search tool of the document, searching on the term “orphan.” “Sec. 1101. Definitions” contains the technical definition of “orphan” for purposes of international adoption.)

“Orphan” is not the only linguistic stumbling block, Look here for a definition of how “Abandonment” is defined in relation to the USCIS Guidebook for international adoption and how that begins to pose a new set of issues in relation to Vietnamese adoptions. (The entire guidebook is well worth glancing through.)

The 145 million children worldwide “orphaned or displaced” number that evangelicals fling around so casually as justification for anything they might want to do next “for the sake of the orphans” must also be viewed in full context.

It’s from the U.N.’s 2008 ESTIMATE based on 2007 numbers.

Specifically, it comes from The U.N’s “The State of the World’s Children” report. Here’s a link to the executive summary (link opens a PDF.)

As an aside, isn’t it hysterically funny to watch wingnuts who otherwise reject, demonize, often outright hate the U.N., viewing their efforts in outright competition with the U.N. for access to kids, then turn to the U.N. for such when they need “big numbers”?

All the more so in that UNICEF’s position on adoption can hardly be considered supportive of any notion of the adoption free-for-all so many christian ministries salivate at the thought of.

But again, what criteria has the United Nations used to generate those numbers?

See the way the U. N. describes what their estimate number constitutes:

children have lost one or both parents due to all causes

Similarly, also see another of the U.N.’s reports from that same year: specifically see footnote 1 on page 13 of The Global HIV Challenge: 2008 Report on the Global AIDS Epidemic (link opens a PDF):

Contrary to traditional usage, UNAIDS uses “orphan” to describe a child who has lost either one or both parents; the organization uses the terms “maternal orphan”, “paternal orphan”, and “double orphan” to describe a child who has lost its mother, father, or both parents, respectively.

So what then are the “orphans” in this number?

In some cases, those numbers can simply represent kids who lost a single parent.

We’re not talking about 145 million kids with no parents, or ” in need” of new parents.

Quite often, we’re talking about kids with one parent, just  more often than not living in poverty.

These are viewed as exploitable people, deemed worthy of little more than having their children taken and provided via the adoption market to “good christian, heterosexual, two parent, wealthy American homes” instead.

Leave it to an evangelist to inflate their numbers, using kids in poverty as a justification to mobilize modern American largely suburban churchgoers.

The mythical “orphan crisis” is built upon a lie.

A misuse of statistics in an effort to generate adoption demand, and a desperately desired spike in the now crumbling inter-country adoption market.

As I wrote just this past week:

The 2004 peak of 22,990 has now been nearly cut in half over the past six years.

and

This has left the adoption industry scrambling, consolidating, engaging in scams and fraud, and pushing “bargain basement” adoptions from African countries such as Ethiopia and Uganda, essentially a “two for the price of one” steal compared to prices from before the adoption market crash.

Agencies are being squeezed out as the desperate race to make kids available to the adoption process folds in on itself.

There those who stand to gain by inflating these numbers, both the adoption industry and the christian movement growth efforts. More often than not the institutions themselves, individual agencies and the like represent both under a single roof.

When the American government then pushes adoption as both domestic and international policy, over and over again, it ends up pushing what is essentially a theological stance and theologically aligned institutions.

You want genuine Justice for the orphan?

Let kids grow up within their own families, keep their identities intact, and refuse strip mine pregnant women, or Mothers and Fathers of their children. Refuse to participate in the global trafficking in children.

Lest (the believers among you) find yourselves “cursed.”

Or, at least your names cursed among Bastards and their Families.

Meet Jennifer Haynes, born in India, she was  adopted at age 7 by an American, Edward Hancox.

She was brought to the United States by two unknown adults who accompanied her on the overseas flight.

At the time of the adoption, the agency that handled her case Americans for International Aid and Adoption (AIAA) failed to complete the necessary paperwork formalities. Despite the incomplete paperwork and adoption process, she was still able to be taken from India and  enter the U.S..

Haynes was adopted out of the now defunct Kuanyin Charitable Trust.

Pound Pup Legacy maintains a profile on her case and  has an archive of articles relating to it, and lists Wide Horizons for Children (WHFC), the (same agency Angelina Jolie utilized) as Jennifer’s placement agency.

Once in America, Hancox abused her.

Two years after being brought to the U.S. her new “parent” disrupted the “adoption” and “gave” her away to another couple from Michigan.

After being abused again in her second American “home”, she passed into the American Foster Care system and through a series of 50 foster homes, before eventually being left to the streets.

Having survived her “childhood” such as it was, she eventually found love, married, and began a family of her own.

But after being convicted twice for possession of cocaine, and finishing her jail sentence,  the US board of immigration appeals “abruptly deported” her from Chicago once the Indian government accepted her repatriation in 2008.

She, like so many other undocumented immigrants found herself on the wrong end of the “Illegal Immigration Reform and Immigrant Responsibility Act,” anti-immigrant legislation that then president Bill Clinton had signed in the aftermath of the world trade center bombing. It has the effect of triggering deportation of  those without the documentation U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement demands in the aftermath of a drug conviction among other crimes.

But even her repatriation to India raises questions as her lawyer argued later before the court in India,

Advocate Pradeep Havnur, Jennifer’s lawyer, said she was sent back on a travel document which was a “mere slip of paper” and she does not have either her passport of the United States nor of India. He questioned how the Indian government permitted her to enter the country.

She described what the process looked like from her perspective:

“Till then I thought I was very much an American but when the immigration officials saw my papers, it came to light that the documentation process for my US citizenship was not complete. I was put in a plane and next thing I knew, I was being sent to India. That was July 2, ironically, also my wedding anniversary…”

Early in 2009, she sought action from the Bombay High Court against Americans for International Aid and Adoption for both the failure to complete her adoption process and their failure to ensure her well being in the 50 foster homes she passed through, (an experience she described in court as “traumatic.”)

The petition, while alleging abuse at the hands of her adoptive father and subsequent foster homes, has also questioned the role of the American agency which facilitated the inter-country adoption and had given the Indian court a solemn undertaking that Jennifer would be taken care of in her adopted home.

She wants the HC to get CARA to deregister or ban the Americans for International Aid and Adoptions and similar other agencies which are involved in inter-country adoptions.

By July 2009, an inquiry had been requested:

The Central Adoption Resources Authority (CARA) has said that it has asked the Maharashtra government to conduct an inquiry and send a report on certain points in the case of an `alleged’ fraudulent adoption process carried out by an American agency 20 years ago.

The U.S. was involved in the process by then:

CARA deputy director Jagannath Patil in his report has said that CARA has communicated with the central agency in the US. He has also asked the Maharashtra government to conduct an inquiry and is awaiting the report.

The court had asked CARA to submit its report after Haynes’ advocate Pradeep Havnur had argued that the entire adoption process was questionable. Patil said that CARA has asked the central authority of USA on adoption matters. It has asked the authority to provide details on how Jennifer could not be given citizenship and possible efforts on her rehabilitation. “CARA will be able to form an opinion only after receiving reports from these quarters,” Patil said.

Haynes, who said she does not have proper documents, is also seeking action against the Americans for International Aid and Adoption (AIAA) which processed her adoption papers. Havnur said that her stay in the US was jeopardised because of an incorrect adoption process in violation of the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child, 1989 and the Hague Convention on Protection of Children and Cooperation in Inter-Country Adoption.

Patil revealed that according to the communication received from AIAA, it had monitored Haynes’ placement for a period of three years. According to the agency, it reported all alternative placements to the court in India and Indian Council of Social Welfare in the case of Jennifer. The agency took legal custody of her, brought her to Michigan and placed her in a foster home when there was disruption in her adoption.

Other articles, here for example, detail some of the abuses she endured.

Jennifer’s journey, spanning over fifty foster homes, practically destroyed what was left of her childhood. “I remember bits and pieces. Like him (first foster father) giving me too much affection. But the abuse really started with the second home. The abuse was directed towards not only me but other children as well,” she recounts.

Something of her frustration was conveyed when she spoke on Newshour on Wednesday (March 17). “I got sent from home to home, no family and no love I was abused by all the families. Then I finally got the love, I got married, and had two children. And now I am taken away from them. Everyday I am without my children, everyday I struggle, and I sit at home with no documents, no nothing to get away. And it hurts. I blame everybody, I blame the whole system of India, for accepting me back.,” she said.

Jennifer is only one victim of hundreds who suffer due to the lack of adequate laws on inter-country adoption in this country. India also needs better implementation of existing laws. Meanwhile the number of reported cases of adoption of Indian children by foreign nationals has been steadily increasing. In 2001 there were 573 cases while shot up to 984 in 2007. Children are voiceless, vulnerable, and they are not votebanks. Perhaps that is why it seems so easy to rob these innocents of their childhood.

The same article from March 2010 also makes note of the U.S. government’s “assurance” it would look into the case.

Action assured TIMES NOW brought Jennifer’s plight to light with the US government who has now assured to look into the case. After hearing of TIMES NOW’s investigation, MoS for Child Welfare, Krishna Tirath, has promised strong action against adoption rackets such as the ones TIMES NOW has exposed. The minister has promised strong action against adoption rackets responsible for the fate of children like Jennifer Haynes. Krishna Tirath said the minsitry will take action if something illegal is taking place in adoption agencies.

To date she’s still waiting for any sign of movement on that front.

Her husband and two children Kadafi ( 7), and Kanassa (6) now living with a realtive, remain in Michigan. She is unable to even visit them. Her contact with them now is by telephone.

She has been left without papers or passports from either country.

Earlier this year she had again turned to the Indian courts to help her find her Indian family.

An exasperated Haynes said: “More than anything else, I want to go back to my children. But now that I am here in India I want to know something about myself, my family, my mother. I don’t want to go back to the US empty-handed.”

That process offered her little,  but just as a small number of adoptes eventually manage, a work around was found, only to run headlong into still more tragic news.

See The Secret is Out – Jennifer was Trafficked as a Child which I will quote at length:

The approximately 700 pages of documents that I received in response to the Freedom of Information Request filed with USCIS on Jennifer Haynes’ behalf have turned out to be a gold mine of information. The biggest nugget of them all was the Indian baptismal certificate that we found buried among all the other paperwork. The certificate contained the names of Jennifer’s biological mother and father and as a result thereof she has been able to find her family!! Unfortunately for Jennifer, her mother died in 2006 before Jennifer was deported to India and before they could be reunited. Before she had the chance to meet just one more time with the daughter that we now know was sold out from under her.

As the result of the information on the baptismal certificate, Jennifer met up with her long-lost brother, and learned from him that her biological mother originally placed her at an orphanage so that she could receive the education, food and shelter that she was too poor to afford. She also learned that her mother never intended to give her up, but that when she came back for Jennifer a short while later Jennifer had already been “sent” to the US to be adopted. As traumatic as that must have been for her, thankfully her mother died without ever learning that Jennifer had in fact been given to a couple that abused her and then gave her up only 9 months later to another family who also abused her. She was also spared the knowledge that Jennifer was thereafter shunted around to dozens of foster care families before finally being deported back to India because her immigration formalities were not completed. From Jennifer’s brother we also learned that her father never recovered from the shock of having lost his daughter and unfortunately became an alcoholic as the result of this emotional trauma.

Although we do not yet have any proof, it is our firm belief that Jennifer was, indeed, trafficked to the United States. In other words, that she was sold like chattel. Nothing else can explain away so many of the facts that we have uncovered in these documents. For example, the owner of the orphanage to whom Jennifer had been entrusted by her mother, appeared in court and testified that Jennifer had been abandoned and had no family – clearly a lie. And then she also appeared before the court as the “attorney” for the prospective adoptive father. In other words, Clarice D’Souza took it upon herself to decide that Jennifer should be sent to the US, lied to the court in order to obtain the requisite order for Jennifer to leave India, and then “appeared” as the adoptive father and told the court that “he” would abide by all the applicable obligations to Jennifer if he was allowed to take her to the US. Indeed, there is absolutely no evidence that the adoptive father ever traveled to India or ever even met Jennifer, let alone Clarice D’Souza who vouched for his suitability as an adoptive father. And to top it all off, Jennifer was actually flown into the United States by two unknown adults, hired by the orphanage for the sole purpose of accompanying her to the United States and turning her over to her adoptive father.

These are all the classic hallmarks of child trafficking. Those of us familiar with a number of these cases have seen it all before:

• a family too poor to care for their child, but never intending to give them up, being convinced to pass the child off to an “orphanage” ‘just for the time being’, or ‘to help them through economically’
• promises that the child will gain an ‘education’ if left to the institution’s care (an all too common excuse utilized to pry children away from parents by such institutions)
• when the family returns for their child she has already been shipped abroad without consent
• the paperwork is incomplete, yet the export goes forward
• immigration formalities were never completed yet she is still slipped out of India and into the U.S.
• the lie that she had been abandoned
• the personal involvement of Clarice D’Souza, appearing before the court as the “attorney” for the would-be-adoptive father, making promises on his behalf, and vouching for him
• the middlemen delivering her to the U.S. paid for by the “orphanage”

None of this is new. In fact, such are simply far too common.

Even her reconnection with her Indian family has left her with little, other than a desire to see her family once again.

Despite her exile from her family and children, Jennifer hasn’t given up hope, or the fight. After a year long search in India, she managed to locate and contact her brother Christopher in January this year. Christopher, 24, lives in Ambernath. But in the reunion there was no drama, no emotion. “I felt nothing. Nothing hurts anymore. I only think of my kids”, Haynes said. Chris knows that, though he has just discovered Jennifer after so many years, he has to let her go again. “Any brother in my place who cares about his sister, would tell her, go back to your husband and kids,” he says.

Her family back in the United States endures this forced separation as well, see Jennifer’s kids want their mother back.

Now, TIMES NOW has tracked her children in Chicago and they have just one wish — to be reunited with their mother. For over two years, Jennifer Haynes has been living alone in Mumbai.

Jennifer’s only demand is to go back home and be with her children. She says, “Everyday I am without my children. Everyday I struggle, sit at home with nothing to do. All this definitely hurts me.”

Following her story, TIMES NOW went to meet her children back in Chicago. Six year old Kadafi and five year old Kassana live with their grandmother, while their father i.e. Jennifer’s husband is away studying.

The kids have not seen their mother in close to two years, ever since she was deported and thrown out because the Adoption Agency — Americans for International Aid and Adoption — never bothered to get her paperwork right

…the children, who do not understand these legalities, just want their mother back. Kassana says, “I want mummy back. We miss her and love her.”

Today, Jennifer is a woman trapped between two countries, left to pleading with President Obama via a letter submitted to the US consulate in Mumbai for help.

See Deported from Chicago, she waits for Barack Obama.

In the letter, she states in no uncertain terms,

“Until last year I believed that I was a US citizen. Now I realise that I was a victim of child-trafficking, sexual abuse and exploitation.”

“Never did I think I was not an American citizen until I was arrested for a minor drug charge and sent immediately for deportation. Your country which had promised me so much hope, instead treated me like an object to be discarded like damaged goods,”

Speaking to president Obama directly, she asks,

“Can you please help me?”

“Now I am an American without a country; a lost child who was sent away from my home, my family and my children.”

All of which finally brings us up to today’s latest article, Sans home and identity: A story from the US:

Among the many looking forward to American President Barack Obama’s visit toIndia was an anxious Jennifer Edgell Haynes. She has no interest in Indo-US relations. All she wants is to be reunited with her family in Michigan.

In an open letter addressed to the US president, which has been delivered to the office of the US consulate general at Lincoln House on November 2, this 28-year-old mother of two, sketches the shocking tale of an inter-country adoption gone wrong.

Sadly, horrendous as  Jennifer’s situation is this is not some “personal problem.”

Her case merely exposes the pre-existing problems with the very system itself.

Haynes says her problems with being deported to her “home” country are similar to most adopted children. “I cannot relate to life in India. I have no family here. I cannot even get a job because I have no identity papers here. The last two years have been about moving from place to place and making ends meet with whatever little money I get doing some odd jobs. Where do I go?”.

Activist Arun Dohle says Haynes’s harrowing tale brings to the fore the dangers of inter-country adoption. Anjali Pawar, director of the NGO Sakhi, is supporting Haynes in her fight for justice. She says, “Her case reveals that the adoptive families did not do the needful to complete the formalities for an American citizenship after she was taken there. This entire adoption process needs to be examined.” Pawar adds, “Ultimately, the government will have to focus on in-country adoptions.”

Haynes, meanwhile, prays the US president’s visit might end her run of ill-luck.

There has been a great deal written about the problems with the 1996 laws, and court cases and challenges have abounded.

But adoptees, particularly trafficked adoptees, many of whom never had the slightest indication they were anything other than American citizens find themselves in a very special legal nightmare reserved just for them under these draconian laws.

Against Child Trafficking (as you can probably tell via my links throughout this piece) has been working on Jennifer’s case:

Jennifer has two children aged 5 & 6 (apparently US Citizens) who are living with her mother in law in the US. This being one of the worst punishment that a Human Being is made to suffer, that Jennifer, a Mother of 2 minor children cannot enter the country US, when her own minor children as US Citizens.

Jennifer’s papers are in possession of ACT. The research done by ACT, their Attorneys, it is evident that the Indian Authorities as well as the US Authorities have been unjust to Jennifer as well as her 2 minor kids, by mechanically deporting her from US and having accepted her in India as any ordinary illegal expatriate.

ACT is supporting Jennifer in Petitioning the Courts, against the Adoption Agencies in India and in the US as well as the Authorities. ACT with their expert Attorneys in India and US, in working out modalities seeking legal intervention and assistance finding ways to send Jennifer back to the US, reunite with her children and claim compensation and damages.

ACT welcomes donations to support their important work on Jennifer’s case (Click here.)

I’ve written a little about the deportation cases before.

See I’ve got your *REAL* fake birth certificate right here, wingnut! for example, in which I marked the rise in numbers of deportations under the Bush administration.

Wingnuts push for adoption constantly, yet do nothing in the face of Bastard deportations.

Apparently their take on “family values” includes deporting Bastards.

Pound Pup Legacy has been tracking cases like Jennifers’ for some time now, see both the PPL overview on adoptee deportations and the case studies archive of both deportations and cases in process.

Also be sure to see the tragic archive of articles on the case of Joao Herbert.

After being deported back to Brazil,

In May of 2004, Herbert was shot and killed in the industrial city of Campinas, 60 miles northwest of Sao Paolo.

It’s (the industry declared) “National Adoption Awareness Month” again.

We Bastards and (original) families have little choice but to be “aware” of adoption and our adopted status every day of the year,  but it’s long overdue we bring some of our kind of “awareness” to the industry’s adoption marketing attempts.

Thus for the month of November, those of us writing about some of the cold hard realities of adoption will be pulling together pieces of OUR broader narrative over the course of the month.

Consider it a sane alternative to the cotton candy, rainbows, and unicorns the industry will be shoveling down every media pipe they can get their talking heads into all month long.

Plenty of us will be pointing at one another’s important work and writings throughout the month, some featuring guest bloggers, others using their blogs to link across to solid pieces by other adoption reality supportive writers.

On twitter, a number of us will be gathering our posts together under a single hashtag, by adding #NAdoptAM to some of our posts.

(Hint- keep an eye on the #NAdoptAM search results over the course of the month to read some of the body of work produced.)

Along those lines, I’ve added and will be adding a #NAdoptAM tag to all my posts this month to gather them together in a single place.

Leaving it to the adoption industry or even adopters to dictate the terms adoption is discussed in is unconscionable.

We are adoption.

We live adoption every day of our lives.

Those willing to look beyond the industry’s teddy bears, balloons, and gotcha day videos will find some of the more unpleasant adoption realities in places such as #NAdoptAM.

By way of a few very basic suggestions of what you can do this month to serve as a counterpoint to the sealed records status quo:

1. Start by getting well grounded in terms of your own thinking.

Bastard Nation‘s booklet, The Basic Bastard, while a bit dated in some places, still contains the core arguments of the Bastard civil and human rights politic. Also see the BN FAQ, particularly in relation to the important distinctions between search and reunion and unconditional records access restoration.

If you’re not confident or well grounded in some of these nuances, and prepared to refute some of the typical nonsense flung at us when we do speak out, maybe November for you is more about setting aside some time to delve into an education process or making personal connections with others who have been in these battles before, who demand nothing less than full equality.

2. For others who are ready, November is a time to speak and act.

A few possible suggestions, in no particular order:

• Write letters to the editor
• comment on articles
• blog
• read and educate yourself
• tweet
• tag and hashtag it
• get your voice and perspective into the broader conversation across the net and in person, particularly with those in your social circles
• consciousness raise
• work with others locally, and globally but be sure such efforts are grounded in a position or document similar to CALOPEN’s No Veto Resolution from the get go
• educate
• do radio and television interviews
• help bring foster kids’ voices and experiences to the fore
• meet with your representatives, work with them to introduce and pass pure unrestricted restoration of access to our records bills

November is no time to stay silent and let the industry control all discourse on the subject..

Let your words and actions speak loud and clear this November.

If people want to talk adoption, they need to start at the demand for nothing less than the restoration of full human/civil/identity rights of all adopted people.

Let your voice be heard.

Use it or lose it.