I had hoped to get the Mississippi articles up this weekend, but as I’m still working with some of the pieces, I finish off the week with just a small post centering on IVF and tribalism.

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Earlier this month Robert Edwards won the 2010 Nobel Prize in medicine see In vitro pioneer wins Nobel Prize in medicine:

Edwards, an 85-year-old professor emeritus at the University of Cambridge, developed IVF along with Patrick Steptoe, who died in 1988. Together, they learned how to remove a woman’s developing eggs from her ovaries, fertilize them with sperm in a lab and then implant them back into the womb.

Their work led to the birth of the first “test-tube” baby, Louise Brown, who was born in Britain on July 25, 1978, setting off a revolution in fertility treatment.

“Approximately 4 million individuals have been born thanks to IVF,” the medicine prize committee in Stockholm said in its citation.

IVF has also been in the headlines this week as a result of an embryo frozen 19 years ago being implanted and brought to term.

The media have taken to propagandistically mis-labeling embryos left over after a couple undergo their own IVF process “leftover life forms.” See for example, Baby born from embryo frozen 19 years

A healthy baby born in Norfolk, Va., in May from an embryo cryopreserved for 19 years is raising questions about leftover life forms, bioethicists say.

The embryo, donated by an anonymous patient at the Jones Institute for Reproductive Medicine after she gave birth to a son via in vitro fertilization, was implanted into a 42-year-old recipient 19 years later who gave birth to that May baby boy, The (Norfolk) Virginian-Pilot reported Sunday.

Both boys, brothers born of two different families through IVF, decades apart may be the oldest case of this kind, the previous record being 13 years.

While these may at first glance seem somewhat tangential to adoption, Nightlight Christian Adoptions has developed what they have termed their “Snowflakes Embryo Adoption & Donation Program” as a direct result of their theological stance and seeing a niche market they could work (what they are falsely labeling “adoption”, but with pregnancy and birth.)

The donation of these leftover embryos, often less viable, or more likely to have long term health issues than those embryos selected by the original couple for their IVF courses is a far cry from anything most people would recognize as “adoption.”

By Nightlight’s own admission no states have laws governing what they falsely term “embryo adoption,” it is, put simply, a legal fiction.

They are operating in an area by and large unregulated and without any clarity when it comes to legal status.

A realm that they themselves made up.

But by appropriating the term “adoption,” and doing their own “homestudies” in multiple states, they hope to avoid government eventually getting around to building genuine regulations pertaining to their particular business.

They are clearly hoping to slide in under existing “adoption” law instead.

It is our hope that instead of creating a new set of laws, the current laws for adoption will simply be expanded to include embryos.

Back in 2006, I wrote an intial piece, Stem-Cell Veto, Snowflake kids, and Christian Eugenics, about the “snowflakes” and how federal and state laws were essentially making other options for left over embryos such as  donation for stem cell or other forms of medical research all but impossible in some states.

Due to that closing off other options, couples utilizing IVF have been forced down legal chutes in certain states, such that their leftovers cannot be destroyed, and upon thawing are legally required to be implanted in a woman’s uterus. (See Louisianna.)

If the initial couple has no further desire to implant another, and balks at the prospect of expensive long term storage, there are a limited set of options.

Some remaining cryogenically preserved embryos will not survive the freezing and/or thawing process.

Others will be intentionally disposed of.

Still others could be transferred to and implanted in another woman who is pre-screened by the Christian agencies. Of those attempts, some will succeed, others will fail.

Or, the embryos can be donated for research purposes: stem cell research.

If states or the federal government decide to close off any subset of those alternatives, more and more couples are pushed towards that third prospect.

Waiting to catch those embryos is a christian movement growth effort.

This modern, christian eugenic movement I speak of is not rooted in notions of “race,” but in a different form of tribalism, one Mike and I have sometimes termed the “tribe of the fish.”

Determinations between who is “fit” or “unfit” depend more upon that tribal allegiance and willingness to consistently participate in social rituals than any facet of biology or arbitrary label affixed. (The American Eugenic movement was always, often by its own admission, rooted in a number of arbitrary definitions and labels.)

Thus on the receiving end (to the eyes of christian agencies at least) should not be just any old couple, only couples deemed to have the appropriate “spiritual home environment.”

As I wrote at the time:

These resultant kids are primarily the products of the Christian adoption industry, which sometimes includes in thier most casual materials, requirements such as a “constructive, wholesome, spiritual home environment” of the prospective non-biological couple – all code for a household of the fully-committed Christian kind.

Bush, some churches, and many in the Christian adoption industry consider this not merely the individual goals and aspirations of couples involved in this process, but a matter of national policy, the desired outcome, and the only destination of what they perceive as America’s embryo surplus. That’s why the children were such a critically important piece of the set design today. No, they’re not just cute, no, they’re not merely individual decisions of how to deal with the surplus in individual families’ reproductive lives. No, these are the living embodiments of the opposite end of the spectrum of possibilities from stem cell research. And thus, they believe, it’s a matter of national policy; because there are only but so many cryogenically preserved embryos, and this is what they and Bush want done with them.

Further down in the piece, I elaborated:

The Bush administration, many churches, and agencies in the christian adoption industry want to build what is essentially a funnel: a multipronged narrowing of the options, down to the one, whenever possible. The one option, that is, that leads to christian movement growth, by eugenically doling out embryos as rewards to “godly families” and withholding them from “unfit families”, Queers for example.

Through the courts, the pro-natalists are desperately seeking to establish personhood and rights be conveyed upon these cryogenically preserved embryos. For example, see cases such as this one.

This agenda is also being pushed via “wrongful death” suits against IVF clinics, alleging that destruction of the embryos amounts to the clinics and storage facilities “killing”. This is but an extention of the prexisting false frame they’ve worked on for decades now, of “abortion as murder”, and clinic workers in the abortion context as “murderers”.

Other legal fronts involve the confiscation of personal biological material. Under what circumstances are you not considered the owner of your own genetic material and under what premises can it be taken from you? Cases along these lines are going to ultimately set precidents reguarding the frozen embryos.

Restrictions on the destruction of embryos is another front. There are many efforts underway working to make destruction impossible.

Despite the piece having been written over 4 years ago, I find it’s held up very well over time, sadly as true today as the day it was written.

But with an ever grow populace of “snowflakes” to be used as props next time around.

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As for the people produced via IVF and their human/civil/identity rights? They face a number of overlapping problems with the genuine adoptee community. They also face concerns uniquely their own (for example what happens when you realize you have potentially hundreds of siblings from your father who donated sperm?)

Confessions of a Cryokid is one of any number of very useful starting points when it comes to listening directly to those “artificially created bundles of joy.” She’s compiled an incredibly useful set of links to explore these complexities as well.

For some time now, I’ve been tracking and just barely beginning to write about the ongoing situation pertaining to First Nations children and the child “welfare” system.

The situation in Iowa is something I’ve written about before, see First Nations peoples continue to decry the ongoing stealing of their children for adoption. There has been an ongoing activism campaign by Native Peoples around this issue for years there.

In the past month or so there has been some new coverage and important new developments.

Testimony was given to the recently created Iowa Commission on Native American Affairs during a two-day meeting at Four Directions Community Center in Sioux City, Iowa as part of the lead in to a bill that is being drafted for the 2011 legislative session.

Stephanie Woodward’s article from last month  Moving forward on child welfare issues, and Iowa Commission Takes on Child-Welfare Morass (over on the dreadful HuffPo) should both simply be read in their entirety as they provide a solid backgrounder and lots of important details.

This from the “Moving forward” piece perhaps sums the situation up best:

LaMere described the child welfare system as a “minefield” and stressed the problem’s pervasiveness. “Almost all our area families are touched. Hardly a day goes by at Four Directions when someone doesn’t contact us to say they’ve lost parental rights.”

I’m not going to even try to start pulling any further quotes out of the two pieces, just go read them.

The DesMoines Register also had a piece earlier this week, Iowa panel crafts bill addressing American Indian parental rights.

A state commission plans to introduce a bill during the 2011 legislative session that would provide a pathway to restore parental rights to Native American parents who have lost children through Iowa’s child-welfare system.

The proposal comes after a number of native families and advocates again voiced dissatisfaction with the state’s high rate of removal of Indian children during a two-day hearing in September before the Iowa Commission on Native American Affairs.

The state has for years had a severe disproportion of Native American children removed from homes in and near Sioux City, home to the state’s largest Indian population. The issue gained new attention after an article on the commission summit was published last week in Indian Country Today and Wednesday on the Huffington Post website.

The bill being drafted for consideration is modeled after one passed in Illinois.

It would provide a process for parents to regain ties with children after their rights have been terminated, provided “they clean up their act,” said Rachel Scott, spokeswoman for Iowa’s Department of Human Rights. Parents could appeal to have their parental rights restored if children had not already been adopted.

Therein of course, lies the key, if the child has not already been adopted.

Makes one wonder just how quickly First Nations childrens’ adoptions are going to be handled in Iowa from here on in.

As always, the onus is being put on the parents to “clean up their act” rather than the state to explain why it’s circumventing and terminating so many Native families parental rights in the first place.

When a state’s Department of Human Rights is down to chiding Families to “clean up their act” one really has to wonder just whose rights they’re looking after?

We’ll have to wait and see what the legislation looks like when it’s finally presented, but label me skeptical.

Finally, also see this piece, Four Directions Community Center extends its reach, about the Community Center itself and its annual Memorial March to Honor Our Lost Children that I mentioned back in my earlier post.

Four Directions’ major annual event is the Memorial March to Honor Our Lost Children, held each year on the day before Thanksgiving. Walkers proceed from South Sioux City, Neb., across a bridge over the Missouri River to Sioux City, Iowa, calling attention to Native children caught in the child-welfare system, including several who died while placed with foster or adoptive families.

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Recent events at Four Directions included a two-day meeting of the Iowa Commission on Native American Affairs, a group of gubernatorial appointees that includes Yellowbank. The subject of the first day was child welfare and featured a training session by Indian Child Welfare Act specialist Allison Lasley, Meskwaki, who explained ICWA provisions for commissioners and invited guests, including Iowa human rights director Preston Daniels, a representative of the governor’s office, and members of the Native American Unit of the state’s department of human services.

By way of somewhat of a continuation of the discussion on my last post, Florida, Queer Adoptions, and the reek of George A. Rekers & a cast of cronies, I decided to pick up O Solo Mama‘s comments and write a post in response (as it was genuinely going to take a post to respond.)

Many of my own linguistic assumptions, definitions, and how I view myself in relation to “adoption reform movement(s)” are all things that I had not previously fully spelled out before now.

As I’ve said from the beginning of this blogging, this is a continual process of coming in in the middle and having to back up back out to what I really mean when I say such and thus. Hopefully this post will add some clarification.

I’ll quote portions of her comments thusly, then respond:

I am so glad you posted this and I agree with your conclusions. There should be a campaign for gay couples to adopt gay youth from foster care–the understanding and mentoring that could be achieved would be exceptional.

Actually, there have been a lot of efforts to do just that. (I’m barely going to scratch the surface here in these links.)

This is an issue VERY near and dear to my heart,  not only born out of some of my own growing up experiences, but also in that in the early 90’s back in my Queer Nation days I had a very dear friend who was in and out of local shelters and homelessness.

He was Queer, and underage, and had bounced around inside the foster pinball machine enough to have a graduate level education from the school of hard knocks.  He died of AIDS long before he reached 25.

I’m not saying that a Queer foster family would have made all the difference, all I’m saying is that the series of het foster homes who heaped additional shit upon his head certainly did.

Ok, so to answer your “there should be”, here at least are a few links worth exploring.

This article from a few years back out of Texas, Gay foster families sought makes mention of some of the various cities that have actively recruited Queer foster parents, particularly for Queer youth.

Child Welfare League of America Press has published resources like Lesbian And Gay Foster And Adoptive Parents: Recruiting, Assessing, And Supporting an Untapped Resource for Children And Youth by Gerald P. Mallon. Near the end of the book the chapter “Affirming Policies from National Organizations” is particularly useful. Of course the book is primarily simply talking about Queer parents for any foster kid.

You can find a number of places and projects where Queer foster kids are speaking about their own lives, Breaking the Silence: LGBTQ Foster Youth Tell Their Stories, for example, or even facebook groups for sharing resource links like this one, Queer and Trans Foster Youth Resources.

Then there are projects like the Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual and Transgender Community Center in New York’s LGBT Foster Care Project which is more about training agencies to become culturally “competent” when it comes to both the Queer youth they serve and Queers who are providing foster homes. As well as more general lists of resources for Queer Foster kids like this out of California.

Obviously, there’s still a whole hell of a lot left to do, though. See this resource sheet for Homeless LGBT Youth and LGBT Youth in Foster Care for example.

As I said, these are just a few quick examples.

Programs for Queer youth, shelters, physical spaces, like what We Need Queer Youth Space in Seattle are working towards, hotlines, Queer foster or mentor programs, and obviously, as these last few weeks have made so abundantly clear, safe schools, anti-bullying, and suicide prevention programs, Youth rights more generally (see organizations like the National Youth Rights Association), etc,  all of these matter and are pieces of the puzzle. No one piece is the silver bullet, but together they begin to form a web of a safety net. It’s not going catch every kid, but each of these pieces make some very key differences in the lives of kids.

Also, I wish the gay community would become more aware of adoption issues generally, including the built-in hazards of pre-birth matching and corruption in inter-country adoption.

I think it requires more than an awareness of certain problems in the system or what you term ” built-in hazards.”

I think it involves gaining an understanding that the system itself has inherent problems intrinsic to it,  and that those problems are systemic and cannot be negated or avoided like your average road hazard.

But I haven’t written that post yet. It’s still percolating, and I’ll leave it at that.

But what I like most about your post is the connection you draw between “pro-family” elements, adoption, and discrimination.

Actually my point wasn’t that there are connections between distinct entities, my point was that there are times and places wherein these are simply one and the same.  They are EXACTLY the same individuals and organizations.

As for even the pretense of “pro-family” I think the two cases I referenced in my original post make it abundantly clear, these wingnuts are about nothing short of tearing these families apart. Which is why I don’t use the term even ironically.

Gay men and lesbians are not the enemies of the adoption reform movement.

I’m going to have to parse that apart, as there’s a lot in that single sentence.

Firstly, when I use “Queer”, I’m not merely discussing “gay men and lesbians.”

Speaking personally, for example, I’m Bisexual. The way I utilize “Queer” is in the Queer Nation political and sexual sense, as opposed to the “I don’t like labels, so I’ll use Queer as a catch all”, sense.

Back in my QN days, it certainly referred to Lesbians, Bis, Gays, Trans, asexual, Leather and kink, fetishists, and any number of those marginalized for their sexuality. Yes, we were primarily talking about GLBT, BUT importantly, we were also making space for those who in opposite gendered relationships who were still “queered” societally.

Secondly, I don’t consider myself or my blog part of any “adoption reform movement.”

I would tend to speak to it more generally in terms of the human/identity/civil rights of those who have been adopted (as well as those who have “lost” children to adoption.)

Thirdly, you are correct in that Queers are not intrinsically opponents of those rights.

Some of us after all are are the Bastards or parents ourselves.

But there most certainly are some Queers who either chose to be part of the problem intentionally, or who end up part of the problem with nothing but the best intentions on their parts.

This is both a contemporary problem and an historical one. (Georgia Tann‘s odd relationship, adoptive and otherwise with Ann Atwood Hollinsworth is but one example. More recently, modern day Queers supporting the NJ ACLU, makes another example, as it’s adamantly opposing records access restoration to adult Bastards.)

Mainly, I’d say Queers, particularly those with no relationship to adoption at all, have a lot of adoption landscape they kind of need to get up on, in order to understand why Bastards and parents sometimes yes, have seen certain Queer individuals as set in opposition to our most basic human rights. There’s a perception, and it’s not always wrong. But it’s certainly not universal, and it requires a great deal of intense dialog in that this history and these modern stances ARE webs of complexity.

Can I understand why in a culture that made it exceptionally difficult for a woman to leave an inheritance to her lover adoption became this legal bridge that made certain things possible? Of course I can. But can people also get their heads around the idea that far from some Lesbian heroine Tann left a string of dead babies in her wake? I certainly hope so.

But in the here and now, can contemporary Queers get their heads around the possibility that the child they’re adopting who is being presented as an “orphan” may be nothing more than a kidnapped child off the street? And do they understand how their adoption dollars can end up supporting such?

Until we’re able to get through some of those tough conversations, sadly, yes, there are times and places wherein today’s Queers can and do end up feeding the beast. That has very real repercussions. The kind of consequences no amount of LGBT adoption “ethics” conferences can make better.

Yet so often I detect more than whiff of homophobia in blogs that are critical of adoption–”hey, they can’t have’em, maybe God just doesn’t want them to” or “you know, family isn’t just who the hell you make it up to be from the people around you.”

All too true. I see such all the time.

Just because one is critical of adoption as currently practiced, that hardly makes one any notion of “enlightened” or off the continuum of common everyday bigotry.

Actually, for queers tossed out of their own natural families, that is EXACTLY what family may be.

This is a very key insight, I’m glad you brought it up.

“Queer families, “”Leather Families”, “Chosen Families”, “AIDS Families” all of these make up some of the core structures of our broader Queer community.

There are many communities that have their own equivalents , Sci-fi fandom for example has many such fannish Families or households that may have nothing to do with blood relations.

Particularly for those who have faced rejection from their families of origin, those we chose to surround ourselves with and let into our lives are in many cases far closer than any biological ties.

“Family” for many of us very deliberately is precisely what we make of it.

These constructed families are every bit as valid, if not actually closer than many families of origin.

The key, though, in relation to adoptionland is that these Families are constructed by the consent of the individuals, by those old enough to make those decisions.

Adoption is state constructed, and done to individuals who often have no say or are too young to speak on behalf of their own interests.

Reducing adoption cannot come at the cost of discrimination. I’m always amazed when that line of thinking is defended.

I find the term “reducing adoption” has a number of assumptions inherent to it, things that again, I have not really addressed in terms of any kind of set “goal.” But again, I think this comes back to “adoption reform movement” to which I simply don’t consider myself a part.

As for the rest, I’ll simply quote part of the conclusion of my previous post:

…so long as the institution itself exists, I believe barring any any class of people purely on the basis of prejudice and lies is simply wrong.

I believe that sums my feelings on the matter up pretty well.

Thank you for seeing through it (not that I expected you to do otherwise).

It’s not hard when you live as I do, on the borderlines with feet in multiple communities as I do. Many of the Queer Bastard conversations I have end up having a flavour not altogether distinct from the Bisexual conversations I end up having.

I occupy a space of “both/and,” which I suppose means I end up talking to a lot of people about angles they haven’t seen before.

Which I suppose leads me into your postscript, as I also oftentimes occupy that “both/and” when it comes to Butch and Femme identities.

(Pulling the pictures in Question for clarity’s sake in this next portion.)

PS: I wrote about the butch couple a few years ago (unfortunately, I can’t pull it now).

Not finding it in a couple of quick searches, perhaps you wrote about it on some other page?

I always felt they were being unfairly discriminated against too, by those who would point to the pretty blondes as the real couple in question.

Which has a great deal to do with why I worded my piece thusly:

certain people feel the need to resort to all out lies/ playing to homophobic fears and projections about butch Dykes.

I’m not going to go into writing a whole book here, but the topic of butch and femme identities in relation to Dyke adoption and wingnut perceptions thereof is something someone could easily go write a book about (if they haven’t already.)

I’ll try to put together just a few paragraphs on the topic, and encourage readers to go off and do their homework in relation to butch and femme identity and then postulate for themselves how such could begin to entwine with adoption issues and projected fears by the wingnut class.

To me, and others like me, it matters not one whit whether the actual couple in question is the one on the right or the left, (although I’ve certainly a special place in my heart for certain Butches!) other than the fact that the picture on the left was used politically to enhance a constituencies’ fears about the actual couple on the right.

So long as all four people pictured are actually real women who love one another and not photo-shopped creations or stunt evangelicals in for an afternoon photo shoot, I’m good. (I haven’t had the time to actually research the back story on the picture on the left yet.)

BUT for that certain constituency, groups like the The Florida Family Policy Council have essentially primed the pump with homophobic fears and projections about butch Dykes.

To their perception, femme Dykes are still people they can relate to one some level. They still embrace some pop perception of “womanliness” that wingnuts find relatable,  if anything, they come to symbolize all things “womanly” just times two. (Let alone the projected sexual desires at the notion of two, count ’em two women! Regardless of the reality that odds are, they probably wouldn’t be sexually interested at all in the one doing the projecting.)

In any case, femme is still considered some level of ‘in bounds.’ Those external may project all the usual “she just needs a REAL MAN to show her…” crap, but the bottom line remains, femme Dykes are still considered somewhere on the scale of “womanliness.” They are still considered sexually desirable, and they are still considered capable of mothering.

Butch Dykes, on the other hand, are considered nothing short of monsters: women who have rejected “womanliness.”

One is far less likely to see that usual projected “she just needs a REAL MAN to show her…” crap in that the man doing the projecting would then feel somehow too close to having sex with what he considers another “not-quite” man, i.e. it brings up all his male based homophobia in ways that femme Dykes don’t.

Butch Dykes then are not only not considered anywhere on the scale of “womanliness” they are now simply relegated to “otherliness” or “wrong.” They are generally not considered sexually desirable by wingnut men, and they are viewed of being completely incapable of not merely mothering, but also of fathering.

Thus the picture on the left brings up every last fear you could ever possibly imagine, it gets translated out to “two not women/monsters who want to -what? attempt to- ‘mother’ a child, and not just any child, a child the state is intentionally placing in their care.”

This is practically guaranteed to drive wingnuts even further nuts.

And to raise wingnut anger against them, because now they’re ‘not women,’ ‘not men’ and not even considered human. They are considered a ‘mockery of manhood’, or ‘scarier still’ a replacement to fatherhood. Once wingnuts start feeling replaced, while getting their ears filled with ‘unnatural’ or ‘against nature!’ I think we all begin to understand some of what can come next, and some of the emotions some of these groups are playing with.

Butch dykes are viewed as gender traitors, transgressors, and as rejecting “proper roles for women.”

How that then begins to relate to adoption and foster care, is not a trivial matter. The intentional lie of utilizing this picture to drive fury says a very great deal about Florida Family Policy Council and Focus on the Family, they are not above resorting to all out lies to stimulate hate.

If what one hears when they hear two Lesbians wanting to adopt is nothing more than ‘mother x 2’ they lose. But if they are able to shock their own people out of that perception and into ‘inhuman monsters want children!’ they can push their troops to action. Now all they need are some pitchforks and torches.

Rough-looking couples may make fine parents. One simply wouldn’t know unless one talked to them.

“Rough-looking”

<Sigh.>

Ok, where do I even begin? Here perhaps?

I’m about to say precisely what you probably figured I was going to say next, you might want to spend some time listening to Butch Dykes themselves.

Blognote-

I’m still working with the Mississippi data, so I don’t have that post ready to go this evening.

Instead, I’ll go on and write about the big news out of Florida and then hopefully come back to the second Mississippi post later on this weekend.

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So Tuesday’s major news was that the Florida Department of Children and Families (DCF) has decided it is not going to appeal the Third District court ruling.

DCF won’t appeal overturn of gay adoption ban

Florida’s gay adoption ban won’t be enforced anywhere in the state after the Department of Children and Families decided Tuesday not to appeal the ban’s overturn to the state Supreme Court.The only way the case stays alive is if Attorney General Bill McCollum separately decides to appeal to the Supreme Court to keep the ban in place. He would have to do so without the support of the child welfare agency, which is changing its forms so adoptive parents aren’t asked if they’re gay.

If McCollum doesn’t appeal, it will end the three-decade old ban that was considered the strictest in the country. The state’s 3rd District Court of Appeal last month upheld a 2008 ruling by a Miami-Dade judge, who found “no rational basis” for the ban when she approved the adoption of two young brothers by Martin Gill and his male partner.

Also see DCF won’t appeal ruling against Florida’s gay-adoption law

Florida child welfare administrators will not appeal last month’s ruling that tossed out Florida’s controversial gay-adoption law.

George Sheldon, secretary of the Department of Children & Families, announced Tuesday his agency will not appeal a ruling by the Third District Court of Appeal that declared the 33-year-old law unconstitutional. The ruling involved two former foster children adopted by Frank Martin Gill, an openly gay North Miami man who took custody of the boys under DCF’s authorization.

“It’s clear that the District Court of Appeal decision is of statewide application, and it will be binding on all trial courts across the state,” Sheldon said.

As of last week, the state had exhausted the time to challenge the Gill adoption, and so, regardless of the law’s status, the two children will remain Gill’s adoptive children, Sheldon said.

Governor Charlie Crist has also vowed not to appeal. See Florida Gov. and agency won’t appeal court adoption ruling.

What course McCollum ultimately decides to take remains to be seen:

McCollum’s communications director, Ryan Wiggins, said in an e-mail October 12, “We appreciate [DCF’s] announcement, and look forward to a conversation with DCF about what the next actions will be.” By law, McCollum has until October 22 to appeal.

McCollum has been criticized by LGBT rights groups and others for paying clinical psychologist Dr. George A. Rekers more than $120,000 to testify in the trial court that children do best with a mother and a father. The appeals court upheld the lower court’s finding that Rekers’ opinions “were not valid from a scientific point of view.” (Rekers was later found traveling with a gay male escort who claimed Rekers himself was gay, although Rekers has denied it.) The Miami Herald reported in June that it had obtained records showing that McCollum hired Rekers despite repeated objections from DCF.

McCollum told the Florida Baptist Witness in August, “I don’t believe in gay adoption”—but Orlando Sentinel columnist Mike Thomas reported that in May, when he had asked McCollum if he favored taking the boys from Gill, McCollum mentioned a gay campaign aide who had adopted children and said, “Let’s leave it at that.”

Rekers has been on my radar for a long time, and should be on Bastards’ lists of notable usual suspects as well.

His work against gay adoption dovetails nicely with his position as former “scientific adviser” to the infamous rabidly anti-Gay NARTH, or National Association for Research & Therapy of Homosexuality.

Another notable facet of his resume is being a founder of the Family Research Council (married- hetero) adoption marketers and co-publishers of such drek as “Birth Mother, Good Mother” along with the National Council for Adoption.

Rekers is also part of the fake pediatricians group, American College of Pediatricians, created by NARTH and the Liberty Counsel as their wingnut front group alternative to the American Academy of Pediatrics. (see Anti-Gay Liberty Counsel Peddles Fake Anti-Gay Pediatricians Group.)

But wouldn’t you just know it, when he’s not busy being the darling of the wingnut right, Baptist Minister Rekers apparently like to treat himself to male prostitutes.

The Miami New Times reporter Brandon K. Thorp managed to snap this lovely snapshot of George Rekers and with a “special friend” coming home from their trip together at Miami International Airport back in May.  The full article broke the news, Christian right leader George Rekers takes vacation with “rent boy.”

On April 13, the “rent boy” (whom we’ll call Lucien) arrived at Miami International Airport on Iberian Airlines Flight 6123, after a ten-day, fully subsidized trip to Europe. He was soon followed out of customs by an old man with an atavistic mustache and a desperate blond comb-over, pushing an overburdened baggage cart.

That man was George Alan Rekers, of North Miami — the callboy’s client and, as it happens, one of America’s most prominent anti-gay activists. Rekers, a Baptist minister who is a leading scholar for the Christian right, left the terminal with his gay escort, looking a bit discomfited when a picture of the two was snapped with a hot-pink digital camera.

To say this has caused “a bit of a stir” would be a vast understatement. If nothing else, it led to his resignation from NARTH.

But as the KNS article makes clear, the Gill case is not a stand alone and there are other rumblings on the horizon:

Despite the DCF’s decision not to appeal the Gill case, Follick said it has not yet determined whether to drop its appeal in the case of Vanessa Alenier, a lesbian who in January was allowed to adopt the infant cousin for whom she was a permanent guardian. The Third District court heard arguments last month.

Alenier’s lawyer, Alan Mishael, said he does not yet know how the Gill decision will impact his client’s case, which has been argued on different grounds. Gill’s attorneys argued that the adoption ban violated the principle of equal protection—that all are equal before the law. Mishael is arguing that it goes against a state prohibition on “special laws” telling judges how to rule in adoption cases, violates the separation of powers between government branches, and is a bill of attainder—legislative punishment of a defined group without a judicial trial.

Judge Cope, who wrote the opinion in the Gill case, is one of the members of the three-judge panel that will decide the Alenier case.

Mishael also noted that McCollum did not appeal rulings that had granted adoptions to Mishael’s client Wayne LaRue Smith and to Robert Lamarche, both gay men.

DCF, said Follick, did not appeal those cases because the men were already permanent guardians, and the children were not being adopted directly out of state care. McCollum’s office did not respond by press time as to why McCollum did not appeal on his own, however.

The Florida Family Policy Council, an affiliate of Focus on the Family has been up to their usual smarmy ratfucking in relation to this case as well. Quoting the Queerty piece:

In notifying its mailing list about the “arrogant judicial activism,” the FFPC included a photo of the pair (at left) to show supporters just how repulsed they should be by the adoption case. Except that’s not the adoptive couple; that’s them, on the right.

Apparently, when all else fails, certain people feel the need to resort to all out lies/ playing to homophobic fears and projections about butch Dykes.

While the usual suspects may try to pitch a fit, resorting to fake photos and  utilizing the usual “activist judges” trope, a closer look at the judges is certainly well worth the look:

None of the three Third Circuit judges who ruled unanimously to overturn the ban could be accused of liberal bias. Gerald B. Cope, Jr. was appointed by Republican Governor Bob Martinez in 1988. Vance E. Salter and Frank A. Shepherd were each appointed by Governor Crist. (Crist was a Republican before switching to Independent in order to run for the U.S. Senate.)

Salter was also honored by Pope John Paul II for his charitable service. And Shepherd was appointed to a position in the Environmental Protection Agency by President Reagan in 1981. He has also held senior positions in the conservative/libertarian Pacific Legal Foundation and James Madison Institute.

By way of reaction, in the short term, a small band of wingnut religious supporters of such unconstitutional discrimination are already mounting their campaign to demand McCollum appeal the ruling in an attempt to maintain the ban.

See Group seeks reinstatement of gay adoption ban

Oneal Dozier and others who argue that living in a same sex household encourages children to be gay want Bill McCollum to file an appeal in opposition to the district court of appeals’ ruling. “They deserve to grow up desiring mates of the opposite sex, and not of the same sex,” said Dozier, who rallied with supporters of the ban Thursday. “The environment would take them over.”

If the Attorney General doesn’t file an appeal by October 22nd, the September ruling will stand. “It’s not quite over yet,” said Gill, who lives with his partner and has been fighting to keep his sons for years. “We have one more hurdle, and that is the Attorney General’s Office, and, really, it can’t be over until the Attorney General also gives us the assurance that they are not going to appeal.”

Naturally, “Oneal Dozier” is of course in actuality, South Florida pastor Rev. O’Neal Dozier.

See Rev. O’Neal Dozier Protests Lifting Gay Adoption Ban: Fears Kids Will Be Forced to Be Gay which I’ll quote at length:

Unsurprisingly, some homophobes aren’t happy about it. South Florida pastor Rev. O’Neal Dozier this morning held a rally against lifting the ban and says he thinks it will lead to children being forced to be gay. Dozier isn’t a lone loon; he’s quite prominent and a former Jeb Bush appointee.

Here’s the money shot of CBS4’s report on the protest Dozier held this morning outside a Fort Lauderdale office of the Department of Children and Families:

The Rev. ONeal Dozier told CBS4’s Ted Scouten that while he has no science to back it up, he fears children raised by gay parents will become gay, which is something gay rights groups call backward thinking.

“See, gays are not born, one is either made gay, forced to be a gay, or one selects that particular lifestyle,” according to Rev. Dozier.

This isn’t the first time Dozier has spoken out about homosexuality.

“Why is it one of the paramount of sins?” he’s quoted as saying about homosexuality by New Times Broward Palm Beach in 2003. “Well, it is a very bad kind of sin because it really hurts society in so many ways.” God, however, found a way to punish the homosexuals through HIV-AIDS, he says. “It is a type of judgment for such a sin as this one, homosexuality.”

Homosexuality isn’t the only topic he pushes buttons on.

He was firmly opposed to Hillary Clinton’s 2008 presidential campaign simply because she was a woman. He worried it would embolden feminists and terrorists, and tear families apart.

He has also claimed America is at war with the entire religion of Islam.

Not only is Dozier pastor of the Worldwide Christian Center of Pompano Beach, but also he has close links to the Bush family.

He was invited to the White House to offer advice to the president during George W. Bush’s term.

He was also appointed twice by former Gov. Jeb Bush to the 17th Judicial Nominating Commission. Jeb, however, ended up pushing Dozier to resign after he made the comments about Islam.

You can find video of his “forced to be gay” rant via the local CBS affiliate, Group Protests Overturning Of Gay Adoption Ban.

Dozier isn’t just all worked up about Queer adoptions, he’s an adoption marketer pushing adoption to christians within churches as a means to christian adoption movement growth and specifically church growth via the One Church One Child ministry.

In 2005 Governor Bush appointed Rev. Dozier to the Board of Directors of the adoption program, One Church, One Child of Florida, Inc.

To put it bluntly, he and the OCOC program are in direct competition with Queer couples for kids in foster care.

It should come to no one’s surprise then, that he is utilizing every avenue open to him to ensure that supply of kids is made available to his ideal candidates as far as adoptive families goes, and that all other families, families he considers nothing less than a competing ideology for the hearts and minds of kids, must be nothing short of barred by the state from being able to adopt.

Florida, of course, is notorious for the cozy relationship between evangelical churches and the state when it comes to child welfare.

On the church’s website Dozier brags of both his connections to politicians, particularly the Bush family and his keynotes at multiple Reclaiming America for Christ conferences (Mike and I attended several as part of our oppositional research.)

In 2005 and 2006, the Reverend was under contract as a panelist on NPR’s News and Notes Roundtable hosted by Emmy-award winning journalist, Ed Gordon.  Dr. Dozier was a keynote speaker at the Reclaiming America for Christ 2003 and 2005 conferences hosted by Dr. D. James Kennedy and the Coral Ridge Presbyterian Church in Ft. Lauderdale.  In April of 2009, Dr. Dozier was appointed to the Board of Directors of the Christian Coalition of Florida.  In November of 2009, Broward Right to Life honored Rev. Dozier with the Bart T. Heffernan Guardian of Life Award for over two decades of strong advocacy for the protection of the unborn by preaching against abortion from the pulpit and rallying against abortion on the streets and in the media.  Rev. Dozier continues to do numerous radio and television interviews across the nation, discussing political and social issues of the day.  His weekly radio broadcast, “Teaching that Changes Lives,” can be heard weekly on WAFG 90.3, GraceFM, the radio station founded by Dr. D. James Kennedy.  Rev. Dozier is a member of the Broward Republican Executive Committee (BREC).

When he’s not whining about Queers “forcing” their foster kids to become gay, or receiving awards from anti-abortion fanatics,  Dozier and his buddies are out and about passing out Chick tracts against Islam. See Black Ministers Preach Against ‘Evil’ New Mosque: Coalition To Distribute Comic Strip Booklet About ‘Islamic Fascism’ and the link within the piece to the associated slideshow with images of the tract itself.

Sure enough, the Chick tract in question is “Allah had no son.”

Longer term, the possibility of a statewide ballot measure looms:

Equality Florida, the state’s largest LGBT rights group, said on its Web site that the decision not to appeal the Gill case was a “tremendous victory,” but added, “The same anti-gay forces who pushed for Florida’s marriage amendment in 2008 will likely try to put a return of the adoption ban up for a statewide vote [in] 2012.”

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My personal take on all this, writing as a Queer Bastard?

Well, beyond the details of the persona and political pitfalls of the swamps of Florida,  there are the real issues at stake here.

Anyone who’s been reading along on my blog over any length of time knows how highly critical of adoption as currently practiced I am.

That said, so long as the institution itself exists, I believe barring any any class of people purely on the basis of prejudice and lies is simply wrong.

It would be nice if Queers could step back for a minute and get a broader look at the landscape of things like inter-country adoption and what they support when they support such, but when it comes to the foster system? I think first and foremost, Queers along with everyone else need to grapple with some of the issues that arise there too.

But there are other circumstances as well. Particularly older kids some of whom are Queer themselves. I find those cases in particular far less problematic.

Over and over again, what I consistently find is that many of the same groups and individuals opposing my basic human rights as a Bastard, are also the exact same groups and individuals opposing my basic human rights as a Queer.

Examples like George Rekers and ONeal Dozier personally embody such, more than making my point for me.

Queers need to understand the broader picture that those who oppose their ability to raise children ALSO oppose the human rights of Bastards and work against us.

Likewise, Bastards need to understand the broader picture that those who oppose our human rights, also oppose the ability of Queers to raise children at all, deeming them “unfit” to be parents, and working to ensure that only those they deem” fit”, heterosexual, married, preferably christian are enabled, indeed even subsidized by the state to gain access to and raise children made available via state programs.

Fortunately, with poster weasels like (seemingly) het, married, christians along the lines of Mr. Rekers as examples (what with the  running off to Europe with Rent boys and all) those who oppose all our rights tend to wear their hypocrisy on their sleeves.

Photo: Justin Lewis, WTVA

Yesterday evening around 6pm, a recently born Hispanic baby boy was discovered, wrapped in a blanket and latched into a car seat left off at the Houston, Mississippi Salvation Army donations area.

Abandoned newborn found in Houston (see video in right sidebar)

Most things left at the back of the Salvation Army are used TVs, old VHS tapes, or unused clothing, but on Tuesday evening someone dropped off an unfortunate first.

“When I came into work today I didn’t expect to hear that a baby was left here where we receive our donations at,” says Anita Boyd of the Salvation Army. “I was pretty much in shock.”

As the boy was found with what may have been after birth still on him, this was, shall we say, most likely not a hospital birth:

Authorities say the baby found right here was in good warm condition, but signs showed it couldn’t have be more than a couple of days old.

“It still had after birth on it,” says Deputy Adam Harmon of the Chickasaw County Sheriff’s Department.

“There was blood up under the neck and ear canal. The hair was matted just a little bit with maybe some afterbirth, so the baby hadn’t been cleaned up real well.”

(Houston is in the in Northeastern portion of the state, about a two and a half hour drive Southeast of Memphis, TN and roughly a 3 hour drive west of Birmingham, AL.)

The child’s parents are currently being sought by local authorities.

As the boy was not legally abandoned through the “safe haven” program, whoever left him will not have an affirmative defense against charges of abandonment.

Houston Town Marshal Billy Voyles said,

while newborns can be legally dropped off at local police departments, fire departments or hospitals, it is illegal to abandon any child.“This is a felony and we are working this case hard to find out who did this,” said Voyles. “If anyone has any information about this case or knows of someone who might have had this baby, we are asking them to call 911.”

Voyles said the situation could have turned out different.

“It was cold last night” said Voyles. “If that baby had been left out and we found him this morning, things could have been a lot different.”

No other mention of the mother, let alone her health, after potentially secretly giving birth is made.

Women, and mothers to the legalized abandonment schemes, represent little more than a set of rights to be terminated before an adoption could be processed.

Mississippi was one of the early set of states to jump on the legalized child abandonment bandwagon, its “safe haven” scheme being signed into law back in 2001.

Texas, under then Governor George W. Bush, was the first state to legalize child abandonment in 1999. With a single stroke of his pen, he undid generations work and developments in social welfare and “best practices,” magically transforming child abandonment from something to be avoided and a social scourge to be worked against, into an act that was now not merely legalized with the state’s blessing, but something to be “educated” about how to go about doing in the best possible way!

Social policy that was all but unthinkable just a mere 11 years ago has become American social policy in all 50 states and the District of Columbia in the blink of an eye.

We have become the United States of Child Abandonment.

The laws were often rushed through after a sudden “rash” of child abandonment cases, accompanied with much ‘but if you don’t pass the legislation MORE children will DIE! histrionics, always portraying the alternative to legalizing child abandonment as WORSE and the baby dump schemes as a panacea that would make child abandonment just go away.

When child abandonments didn’t stop after the legislation passed, dump law advocates changed their song to just needing “more money to educate” about the laws, while of course, providing positions, organizations, and access to public school captive audiences for them and their buddies.

Despite the efforts of many child welfare individuals and organizations, as well as the efforts of many adoptees themselves, these laws were rammed through in this field where statistics are all but impossible to come by*.

Which is why it continues to be important, now almost ten years after the fact to come back and carefully assess the mess such efforts have left in their wake.

Mississippi’s version of the law has always been a bit more telltale than your average legalized child abandonment scheme in that adoption agencies were  added right alongside hospitals as baby intake points.

The Mississippi baby dump law allows anyone to leave a kid up to three days old with EMS providers, or an employee at  hospitals that operate an ER, or adoption agencies licensed by the Department of Human Services (thereby perhaps cutting out the middle man? Because let’s face it, the dump laws not only have their origins in the adoption industry, but are ultimately about increasing the supply of newborns available to the adoption process.)

Now after almost a decade of legalized child abandonment in Mississippi, kids are still being abandoned, just well outside the “safe haven” program.

Some found alive and well cared for like the Houston baby, but others of them, like this boy found dead earlier this summer Sheriff: Baby Found In Suitcase Was Born Alive At Home. Be sure to see the video that goes with the piece as in it we hear the all too common refrain, would-be-adopters are practically lined up around the block waiting for a kid, when an abandoned kid ends up dead, they’re portrayed as the ones being deprived.

Child abandonment in other parts of the world is understood to be tangled up in a knot of social and psychological issues:

• poverty
• immigration and fear of deportation
• domestic violence
• underage parenting
• already parenting multiple children
• cultural and individual shame
• desperation
• fear of rejection
• dissociation

to name just a few.

These are merely the tip of the iceberg.

Here in America, child abandonment  is treated as a form of false binary

• either one uses the legalized child abandonment programs (which strip parental rights and in many cases the child’s identity) but it affords the “affirmative defense” against prosecution (though prosecutions in some jurisdictions are still certainly possible)
• or they abandon outside the program and are instantly branded criminals and potential murderesses (or murders)

No acknowledgement of the complexities involved or the societal infrastructures or mental health services necessary to support these families is made.

If one has come to the point of abandoning a child, it’s either avail yourself of the legalized abandonment system (and) or criminal charges, your “choice”.

Neither of which even begin to address the root issues that drove said person or persons to the act of child abandonment.

If anything, all too often the baby dump schemes become nothing more than a “new and improved” means by which to heap condemnation upon those who abandon outside the program. They are chided “You could have used the program we set up for you, there’s simply no excuse! Shame on you!”

It remains to be empirically documented, but there is a genuine possibility that some of these women (as it’s primarily women being punished) are actually receiving harsher penalties now that the dump laws have passed than they did prior, as the courts feel the dump laws were created as some kind of “pressure valve” and when those who abandon “choose” not to use them they are deemed all the more ‘guilty!’

There is of course, that a third or middle way, which would require effort and resources, wherein child abandonment would not be legalized by the state, but structural and genuine support could be given.

American society recognizes other extra legal acts more as “cries for help” or circumstances under which services rather than jail time are warranted. But child abandonment remains this all or nothing binary of a “non-bureaucratic placement” entry into the adoption system via the “safe haven/baby Moses laws” or a one way ticket to jail.

Perhaps that’s because this is viewed not merely as a women’s crime, but of the very act of women negating “women’s essentialist nature.” After all, what could be a greater crime in a hypernatalist culture such as modern day America than a woman perceived to be rejecting her “maternal instincts?”

It doesn’t matter that the perception is so often completely at odds with the details of the realities women who abandon face.

The United States has legalized child abandonment in just over a decade.

It helps the self congratulatory moralizers (who could !NEVER even imagine! abandoning a child themselves) sleep at night, having sorted the child abandoners who they still view as potential murderesses, but who “chose not to murder today” apart from the ‘monsters’ who they get so worked up about.

Of course, to their minds, there’s no such thing as a “good” child abandoner, (not even the ones who use their hideous program,) there are merely “murderesses” and those who provide an adoption “silver lining” to other “waiting couples.”

The only real answer is of course, far more complicated.

Repealing and fully dismantling the legalized child abandonment schemes and treating child abandonment with the attention it deserves. That means providing acknowledgement that  no matter how hard ‘we’ try, child abandonment is simply not something ‘we’ will ever be able to control. There will always be some number of child abandonments.

But what is under ‘our’ control are two things,

• how we treat and work with those who have resorted to such
• and what little ‘preventative care’ that actually can make a difference: fighting poverty, ensuring immigrants are not marginalized particularly in access to health care, working against domestic violence, ensuring access to mental health care and other support structures such as childcare, etc.

Those absolutely set upon abandoning, obviously will. How society treats them after the fact matters very deeply.

But there are other child abandonments that may well be preventable.

From what we do know about those who abandon, when we actually take the time to listen, we learn that sometimes it’s the “small” but important things, things like consistent, high quality, low cost or free child care, genuine protection from those who physically abuse, or simply knowing at the end of the month that there will be enough can make all the difference.

Creating those structural changes is non-trivial.

Of course that would mean rolling up one’s sleeves and actually getting to work, rather than throwing some piece of  “sav-a-baybee” legislation at the problem and them jailing anyone who falls outside the “appropriate way” to abandon a baby.

And to date, the American track record on that ain’t so hot.

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*we’ll see what I can get written for tomorrow

At a time when overall inter-country adoptions here in the US have been declining, cheaper adoptions from Ethiopia have become an exploding new center of the market.

Just six years ago, at the peak of international adoption, there were 284 Ethiopian children among the 22,990 foreign kids adopted by Americans. For the 2010 fiscal year, the State Department projects there will be about 2,500 adoptions from Ethiopia out of fewer than 11,000 overall — and Ethiopia is on the verge of overtaking China as the top source country.

This despite the ongoing evidence of fraud and corruption in the Ethiopian adoption system.

The number of inter-country adoptions of kids bound for the US has decreased by more than half, but the Ethiopian adoption market has exploded for Americans alone more than 8-fold.

See my earlier posts:

• Several of the Australian Broadcasting Corporation’s recent pieces relating to Ethiopian adoptions
• Ten days into March, and already 2 Alerts (Nepal and Swaziland) and a Notice on Ethiopia from the State Department
• Slate’s “The Orphan Trade- A look at Families Affected by Corrupt International Adoptions”

My post about the Australian Broadcasting Corporations’ Ethiopian adoption exposes are particularly pertinent in that they highlight the role of Australia’s representative in Ethiopia:

Instead of providing any form of a ’safeguard’, the ABC has obtained a document in which:

A parent of an adopted child implicates Australia’s representative in Ethiopia in the child trafficking racket.

As well as also highlighting  the role of Joint Council of International Children’s Services (or JCICS,  here in the US) former president Tomilee Harding with Christian World Adoption Agency which lies at the core of many of the ABC reports.

I also make mention of JCICS’s decision to not release it’s own report pertaining to fraud in Ethiopia. As I wrote at the time:

Those of you who have been following along on my twitter, have likely seen a number of articles I’ve been pulling relating to the Ethiopian mess, such as this misnamed piece, Adoption watchdog suppresses Ethiopia findings.  Horribly misnamed, in that the Joint Council of International Children’s Services, or JCICS is anything but a “watchdog” group, it is an adoption industry trade lobby.

Core to it’s very function is to fight off industry regulation by falsely positioning itself as an advocate working on behalf of children. The industry cannot, by definition, “watchdog” itself.

As I mentioned on my Twitter, how bad has it gotten? Apparently bad enough for the industry trade lobby to suppress its own report on how bad its gotten.

The Schuster Institute for Investigative Journalism at Brandeis University has been doing ongoing work on child trafficking and corruption in inter-country adoptions.

Their global map profiling various countries roles in the adoption trade page on Ethiopia brings together quite the profile, with important details such as the realignment towards collecting younger healthy kids to meet growing adopter demand that we’ve seen in country after country as they become more popular adoption destinations:

Change in demographic profile of the children being adopted:

• from the older children orphaned by their parents’ AIDS, TB, malaria, or other illnesses (the profile of the orphaned children already in the Ethiopian child welfare system); and
• to healthy young children (who often turn out to have been solicited for the birth families specifically for the adoption trade).
  • In 2009, according to the DHS Yearbook of Immigration Statistics Table 12 [http://www.dhs.gov/xlibrary/assets/statistics/yearbook/2009/table12d.xls], of the 2,221 orphan visas from Ethiopia issued by the US, nearly two-fifths—835—were for infants under one year of age, who are statistically less likely to be orphaned. Another two-fifths, or 850, were between the ages of one and four years. Only 536 were five or older, the ages of children most likely to be in need of new families, according to UNAIDS and UNICEF statistics.

Their full Ethiopia profile page forms a critically important background to the kind of climate Ethiopian adoptions are taking place within, as well as a centralized resource listing a number of recent articles discussing “irregularities” in Ethiopian adoptions.

Maybe American would-be-adopters simply need a refresher course in the orphan manufacturing chain (link opens a PDF.)

Or then again, maybe they’re just fine with buying fraudulently obtained children.

Lest anyone think it’s merely Bastards and Parents criticizing the number of kids being processed via the adoption industry and the less than stellar track record in terms of long term outcomes, I wanted to highlight a bit of criticism from adopters themselves, (if in a non-American context.)

Adoption UK, a group run by and for adopters has released a new report out today concerning the state of adoption in Wales.

I strongly oppose a number of the recommendations in the report relating to the the attempt to slide attachment quackery (also be sure to see A search for survivors)  into basic qualifications as I view the attachment industry and personalities inherent to it as nothing less than human rights violations, an ongoing hazard to Bastards’ life and health. Many of these so called “therapists” are simply criminals and child torturers with nothing short of an adoptee body count to show for their vile “work.”

But I did want to highlight two aspects of the report that Americans may not otherwise hear about, the massive failure rate (often marked by returning the child to public care) of the adoptions in the study and the basic lack of services, particularly mental health services to adoptees themselves (as well as their adopters.)

By Adoption UK’s tabulations, at least 1 in 5 adoptions eventually “breakdown,” though the actual numbers may be much higher:

Wales manager Ann Bell, who is both an adoptee and an adoptive parent, said the number of adoptive family break-ups could be as high as one-in-three but statistics kept by Wales’ 22 councils were not collated by the assembly government.

She said: “We feel that the assembly government needs to be pulling that data together and really learning from that data.

Let that really sink in, this is a report and comment to the BBC by adopters themselves, stating plainly that perhaps as many as one third of these adoptions will come to a quiet end within a matter of years.

These less than stellar “adoption outcomes” are being swept under the rug as no one is even tasked with tracking them.

In the U.K. just as the U.S., we are left with a fundamental lack of data collection and tabulation (emphasis mine):

The charity Adoption UK said care professionals were not learning from the “unacceptable” level of breakdowns because no overall record was kept.

Once the fuss and hubbub of “gotcha day” has passed, there is little to no tracking on what happens years down the line.

All of which is set against the backdrop of of an increasing number of adoptions in Wales:

Adoption UK said its report comes as the number of adoptions in Wales rose from 212 in 2008 to 256 in 2009.

As no one is formally tasked with tracking the failure rate, let alone what happens to the kids after an adoption “breakdown,” the popular perception remains that of the nonstop drumbeat for ever more adoptions, families traveling abroad to collect their purchases, all teddy bears and smiles, with any failures quietly sliding out the back door un-noted and unnoticed.

This article, Adoption services failing vulnerable children, approaches the same report from a perspective more rooted in the needs of the kids themselves:

Services for adopted children are not supporting them properly, according to a report out today.

it continues:

The study found that some local authorities are failing to respond to the needs of adopted children, and that schools’ attitudes can be dismissive.

Essential services are also limited – in one case a family was told to wait five years before requesting help from Children and Adolescent Mental Health Services.

The full Adoption UK report can be found here, Support Needs of Adoptive Families in Wales.

Just bear in mind as you read it, attachment quackery junk “therapies” are front and center in the core recommendations, such “therapies” represent nothing less than violations of adoptee’s human rights and should be opposed by all who genuinely care about the well being, human rights, and political realities of adopted people.

My last two posts have been important “Basic Building Blocks Posts” (BBBPs) that serve as backgrounder information to bear in mind as one looks at foster care-adoption financial incentives.

• “Foster-adopt” as a case study in the problems of adoption language & information hiding (BBBP part 1)
• When discussing Foster-Adopt, these are some Foster realities to bear in mind (BBBP part 2)

In them, I’ve discussed both

• How newborns and infants particularly those passing through the baby dump/ “safe haven” or “baby Moses” schemes can be counted by the states in their foster-adopt totals even as the newborns can go directly into prospective adoptive families  in a process not dissimilar to other newborn adoptions but for additional layers such as the the foster-adopt bonuses states receive as a result of tabulating the adoptions this way.
• How the fatally flawed “Adoption and Safe Families Act” has had the effect of severing parental rights and making additional kids available to the foster-adoption process as any child spending 15 of their last 22 months in foster care triggers the required action of child welfare authorities having to file for termination of parental rights (there is some leeway built into the process, but the law has created a built in trigger) this despite the fact that 70% of kids in foster care will spent an average length of time of somewhere between 1 and 23 months in the foster system.

The (mostly) mandatory triggers have had disastrous results of parents in prison for example, who have endured the termination of their parental rights at more than double the rate of the years before the law passed.

The effects on other families, such as those whose kids end up in foster care as a result of a parent in military service for example, remains to be seen.

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With all this in mind, tonight’s brief post will be about this latest round of  federal dollars being used as incentives to the states pushing through adoptions out of foster care.

Back in mid-September, HHS announced the federal awards to the states & Puerto Rico for their performance in clearing out their foster care rolls via adoptions in 2009.

The bonus checks came to 39 million dollars.

When I speak of adoption as simply federal priority and policy at this point, programs like this are precisely what I mean.

States receive $4,000 for every child adopted beyond their best year’s total, plus a payment of $8,000 for every child age 9 and older and $4,000 for every special needs child adopted above the respective baselines. The year 2007 is the baseline.

Put simply, states receive cash bonuses for every child they move off the foster care rolls and into adoptions. A single child can be worth up to $12,000 in bonuses to the states.

(Older kids are of course, far more difficult to find potential adoptive families for, so new sources of much more marketable newborn foster kids such as the baby dump programs then become invaluable to the states.)

On the face of it, the notion of finding permanency for kids in the system may sound like a laudable goal, particularly as one of the primary adoption outcomes for kids in foster care are adoptions by other relatives, but as I pointed out in my first backgrounder post there are other trends growing, hidden under some of that same language.

I’m specifically, discussing kids who would not have had their family ties severed, but for the time tables artificially constructed and imposed under new laws like the A&SFA, or kids who never would have entered the foster system in the first place, but for states constructing their legalized child abandonment schemes. Both of these circumstances create new foster-adopt candidates where before, these kids simply were not available to the foster-adopt process at all.

Kids in foster care having their family ties severed due to artificially imposed timetables of what some in Washington think are appropriate lengths of time for any kid to be in foster care  would otherwise simply remain in care  longer. While that may sound like a disaster to someone in Washington not familiar with any given child’s case, it may actually be a more positive outcome through the eyes of a child waiting for their mother to get out of prison or who is in a foster home with their sibling and doesn’t want to see their parents’ parental rights cut and their siblings passed along into adoptions far from one another, perhaps never to be heard from again.

Kids passing into the legalized abandonment schemes might otherwise remain with their mothers or parents, go to relatives, or eventually go into a traditional adoption with at least some form of the social/family/medical history left intact.

While states may view foster care as a horrible “evil,” for some families it’s a necessary pause or even safety net that can actually help families ultimately remain together in the long run.

Odd as it may seem to be writing any form of defense of an institution like foster care, there are times and circumstances under which it can actually form the better alternative.

Such should be decided case by case, family by family, not with top down quotas set by politicians or states looking at their financial inflow and outlays.

When a child is in foster care, they retain their name, their family history and at least the prospect of either reuniting or entering some other branch of their existing family tree.

Adoption, on the other hand, with strangers at least is often about breaking those ties.

The child, even an older child, often gets a new name. If they were part of a sibling group but were adopted separately those ties may or may not be maintained. The “new family” may become distressed or upset by any mention of ‘what came before,’ thus new adoptees learn quickly to keep the realities of their earlier lives tamped down, a private and personal thing, not discussed within the adoptive household context.

State and Federal governments may view every adoptive placement as some form of victory, but for the kids and families themselves that lie behind those statistics and checks, the story can be a lot more complicated.

Obviously, I’m only focusing on these two circumstances as useful studies, but there are other means by which kids are being made available to the process as well.

So, how much do all these $4,000s and $8,000s add up to over the course of a year for the states? For some states, millions.

In the case of  Texas the nation’s leader at scraping kids out of the foster system, just a little under 7 and a half million for 2009.

FY 2010 Adoption Incentive Awards

Based on FY 2009 Earning Year

State	Award
Alabama	$1,477,397
Alaska	$719,213
Arizona	$584,582
Arkansas	$1,360,481
California	$0
Colorado	$0
Connecticut	$520,809
Delaware	$102,745
Dist of Columbia	$0
Florida	$5,718,271
Georgia	$364,921
Hawaii	$187,775
Idaho	$1,147,906
Illinois	$155,888
Indiana	$1,360,481
Iowa	$0
Kansas	$531,438
Kentucky	$1,371,110
Louisiana	$1,006,189
Maine	$113,373
Maryland	$173,603
Massachusetts	$0
Michigan	$3,511,033
Minnesota	$446,408
Mississippi	$38,972
Missouri	$510,180
Montana	$0
Nebraska	$637,726
Nevada	$467,665
New Hampshire	$49,601
New Jersey	$0
New Mexico	$658,983
New York	$0
North Carolina	$1,077,048
North Dakota	$0
Ohio	$0
Oklahoma	$1,204,593
Oregon	$637,726
Pennsylvania	$2,175,353
Rhode Island	$198,403
South Carolina	$655,440
South Dakota	$60,230
Tennessee	$0
Texas	$7,468,475
Utah	$432,236
Vermont	$0
Virginia	$14,172
Washington	$0
West Virginia	$1,030,990
Wisconsin	$276,348
Wyoming	$49,601
Puerto Rico	$382,635

Kids may be deemed “priceless,” but when it comes to outlays for foster care and  federal subsidies for foster-adopt, they’re just lines on the budget.

What that means to the kids and their families themselves is all too often, simply ignored.

This is a second Basic Building Blocks type of post covering some core backgrounder material about the realities of Foster care to bear in mind when looking at federal subsidies and tax credit schemes.

See part 1, “Foster-adopt” as a case study in the problems of adoption language & information hiding (BBBP part 1) for some other key basics to bear in mind.

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For starters, all stats aside, spend some time listening to those who have lived it.  The Foster Care Alumni of America and their chapters across the country as well as individuals who have experienced the Foster care system are the real experts.

(As I mentioned in my last post, I also passed through the Foster system very quickly as an infant myself, but I have no memory of, and almost no records pertaining to that brief period of my life.)

From there, as far as statistics go, to provide just several very basic overviews, see:

• National Facts About Children in Foster Care from the Foster Care Alumni of America page
• Foster Care Statistics from the U.S. HHS Child Welfare Information Gateway
• US HHS Administration for Children and Families Statistics and Research Adoption and Foster Care
• National Resource Center for Permanency and Family Connections at the Hunter College of Social Work state by state fact sheets

IL’s DCFS has a typical state FAQ for commonly asked questions pertaining to Foster Parenting that can also be helpful, as but one of many such similar.

More recently, adding new pressures on those in the system and parental rights (as well as siblings ability to remain together etc. ) has been the addition of laws like the “Adoption and Safe Families Act” that went into effect in 1997. It has been widely criticized both within the Bastard community and by those who advocate on behalf of parents ability to retain their parental rights.

It has had numerous effects upon children in foster care, not the least of which being the setting of time frames for almost mandatory terminations of parental rights, (thereby increasing the number of children made available to the adoption process.)

See this article, A Tangle of Problems Links Prison, Foster Care as but one of many examples criticizing the effects of the law on some of the most vulnerable of parents in terms of defending and retaining their parental rights:

The hurdles facing imprisoned parents grew higher in the late 1990s with the federal Adoption and Safe Families Act. If a child has spent 15 of the previous 22 months in foster care, the law requires that child welfare authorities file for termination of the birth parent’s rights. The aim is to set a time period so the child can find “permanency” instead of foster care — generally, either reunification with the birth parent or adoption by another family.

Though child welfare agencies can make limited exceptions to the timetable based on family circumstances, the law has tightened pressure on parents to defend their custodial rights. Meanwhile, state policies make no specific exemptions for incarcerated parents, whose sentences typically exceed the time line. According to research led by Columbia University law professor Philip Genty, in the years following the act’s passage — 1997 to 2002 — termination proceedings for incarcerated parents more than doubled.

Obviously, the national restructuring push to move kids out of Foster Care and into adoptions has come with financial incentives and penalties in a carrot and stick like sets of policies, but I’ll be addressing some of those incentives further in my next post.

I’ve often mentioned how blogging here on Baby Love Child comes up against certain difficulties tied to how this so often amounts to some version of “coming in in the middle.”

In order to write a piece, I must first back up and try to lay out some of the inherent assumptions and pieces of information crucial to getting to what it is I’m really trying to write about. These next two posts, then, are a result of having to write a few core pieces that later posts will inherently rely upon.

Prior to writing about some of the latest subsidies and adoption bonuses coming from the government, I needed to first kind of put together two sort of  basic building blocks posts (BBBPs) that contain some of what I consider to be bedrock when looking at those expenditures.

In this “part 1” I want to focus on the imprecise nature of some of the language being used and some of the assumptions conjured up by such as adoption language and the assumptions that can arise as a result of such are core problems in trying to write about so many of these topics.

It’s not merely that we don’t have enough words for the complexities all being lumped together under a single turn of phrase, it’s that we don’t even have a word in the English language for that lack of words to deal with those complexities. Thus it becomes critical to tease apart pieces of terminology in an effort to explain what it is one really means.

I’ve already written about how legal definitions of words like “orphan” in inter-country adoptions often have absolutely nothing to do with the lay assumptions words like “orphan” conjure up.

But what about words like “adoptions out of foster care?”

Again, such are more often than not assumed to be some kind of universal form of altruistic action.

As if on cue, the listener’s heart warms and the word “awwww” is almost audible, it’s practically a Pavlovian response at this point, what with the shopping mall photolisting displays, community events (see my post How not to spend a Sat. afternoon: wiffle ball, face painting, “waiting children”, and the local bomb squad for example,) race car child marketing, and local TV news spotlights on kids made available to the adoption process. (No one gives a second thought to the privacy issues involved for the kids themselves.)

The images internally summoned are almost always those of an older child, “in dire need of a home, a family,” that has likely “bounced around the system for years.” More often that not the assumption is that of a non-“caucasian” child, the kids “left over”, the kids “no one else wanted.” Any adopter willing to take on such should be up for sainthood, right?

Not so fast.

These days, an “adoption of out foster care” may also be nothing more than merely another path to a state incentivized,  subsidized, and tax credited infant adoption of just another “white” newborn.

While other kids do languish in the system for years, (some 20,000-30,000 of them aging out every year, never reunited, never adopted, nearly half of them ending up homeless on the streets) “white” newborns are also coming through the foster-adopt system with all the monetary benefits to would-be-adopters and societal cache “foster-adopt” otherwise entails.

A child in foster care simply means their parents do not have custody and the state has made provisions to care for the child that a transfer of guardianship has taken place and if the child is available for adoption that transfer of guardianship could be made permanent .

Some parents may come to later regain custody of their children, others may sign away or have their parental rights stripped from them, but a newborn or baby-dumped abandonee may be in the foster system just as much as any of the older kids one all too often assumes to be “the foster kids.”

“Adoption” may mean adoption by other family members, such as grandparents adopting their grandchild. Or adoption by others already a part of the child’s life, such as a friend of a friend or a coach.

But it can also mean adoption by total strangers with no preexisting connection to the child.

This is what we have to start talking about, particularly in terms of the kids passing through the state legalized child abandonment, or so called “safe haven” or “baby Moses” schemes. As most of these baby dump programs legally mandated to only accept very young children, when these kids enter the foster system, they may be newborns or extremely young infants. They too, can be compiled into those foster-adopt statistics, but clearly are not the same as a kid who has been waiting for more than a decade.

When using any of these terms, it can be important to actually parse out what one actually means.

More often than not, the language simply breaks and the realities of what lies behind the “average age” statistics begin to hide certain realities taking place at both ends of the scale, both baby-dump newborns and aging out adults.

Utilizing “one size fits all” broken language then, can serve a purpose of hiding critically important information in plain sight. Newborn adoptions out of the foster system can be right there, right under one’s nose but completely hidden in the statistics.

Some baby dump laws are set up such that the termination of parental rights comes later after first going through a hearing. Other states have set themselves up such that the act of abandoning the child itself becomes almost a de facto termination of parental rights, such that parents end up from that point forward having to petition to regain their rights. This fast tracks the kids for adoption.

Simply put, in light of such legal developments, foster-adopt ain’t what it used to be, but our broken language hasn’t changed to fit with the times.

I have somewhat of a personal stake in some of this on multiple levels. To name just one, I was a foster-adopt kid, but I was in a foster home only very briefly before being placed with my eventual adoptive parents.  Once placed, (as is normative,) there was a period of adjustment prior to the adoption finalization. The key being, I was in my eventual adopters’ home long before I was six months old, (what with being a “white” newborn and all.) Yet when I say I was adopted out of a foster situation, that comes laden with all the assumptions everyone consistently makes about kids in foster care.

Both in the late 1960’s and now, let me assure you, (speaking generally here) “white” newborns hardly have wait around for long.

Then there are programs such as the baby dump mess being marketed directly to vulnerable populations and the linguistic implications to the consequences of such.

Due to these laws origins, coming out of the adoption industry as they did, both as an effort to increase the supply of available infants to adoption and as a means by which to undermine the growing adoptee civil rights movement, we are beginning to see a new set of foster-adopt kids, those I’ve affectionately termed the dumplings. They are those deliberately legally abandoned, passed on to the foster system, and ideally passed through the foster-adopt system, on into families looking to adopt a newborn.

We need new language to even begin to speak coherently about these newly constructed legal realities.

When one starts looking at for example, Judges doing large number of adoptions clearing kids out of the foster system what some of us are finding more and more of are “white” infants if not outright newborns, who were “in the foster system” for a mere blink of an eye. Foster-adoption adopters basically getting the kid almost at birth, receiving all the subsidies and cache for doing a “foster adopt” but in reality, this being nothing more than yet another path to a (healthy?) “white” newborn adoption.

When foster-adopt becomes just another means by which “white” infant adoptions can be shoved through the system, this time with everyone cheering it on and assuming such is purely an altruistic gesture, it’s the kids who ultimately lose.

States get credit and outright federal subsidies for clearing kids out of their foster care stats via adoption, Judges get to do media friendly mass adoption days, adopters get their newborns, and it seems so many of those involved in the process gets their proverbial pats on the back, if not government checks.

Meanwhile, parental rights and families ties are being severed, young kids are being made available to the adoption process, and older, less desirable and less marketable kids age out and graduate to homelessness, one study for example, found “Three out of ten of the United States homeless are former foster children.”

The realities for kids in the system and aging out are pretty grim. to name just a few:

• Foster kids both in the system and after they’ve aged out, are at much higher risk of death and suicide and unemployment, marginal employment and incarceration
• Foster kids have been used as human guinea pigs in clinical HIV experimental drug testing
• Another study of foster care alumni found that up to 80 percent are doing poorly with a quarter to a third of former foster children at or below the poverty line
• And only a minuscule percentage of them will every earn any kind of college degree:

In a study conducted in Philadelphia by Johns Hopkins University it was found that; among high school students who are in foster care, have been abused and neglected, or receive out of home placement by the courts, the probability of dropping out of school is greater than 75%.

56% completed high school compared to 82% of the general population, although an additional 29% of former foster children received a G.E.D. and an additional 5% of the general population.

42.7% completed some education beyond high school.

20.6% completed any degree or certificate beyond high school 16.1% completed a vocational degree; 21.9% for those over 25.

1.8% complete a bachelors degree, 2.7% for over 25, the completion rate for the general population in the same age group is 24%, a sizable difference.

These are the kids being left behind while those self congratulatory pasts on the back are being passed around.

Government subsidies originally designed to get kids adopted out of foster care are not going towards those who will eventually age out, they’re ending up in the pockets of those cherry picking infants and newborns out of the foster system.

Why is that?

Simple, the exact same terminology is being used for kids in both circumstances.

If what was intended was to provide financial incentives to provide permanency for kids who have waited for years, legislation needs to be crafted to say exactly that.

But so long as the the imprecise and “one size fits all” language is the way we speak of these issues, those who are able to use the system to get what they would have otherwise paid top dollar for will instead receive subsidies for doing what they would have done anyway, and the kids most in need will continue to fall off the edge.

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Those gaining from the broken system the way it now stands have no interest in building terminology and policies that more accurately reflect what’s actually happening.

If changes are going to come, they’re going to have to be constructed by those of us convinced that dealing with the realities actually matters. Once constructed, the educational process on the back end of that would be a monumental task, all the more so in that some of those in position to implement those changes have no interest in seeing those changes occur.