Lost children: Why they should stay in Haiti

The high price of foreign adoption is corrupting – meaning parents may be getting `paper orphans’

By Nicole Baute

There is no fool like the one who wants to be fooled.

Professor David Smolin wrote those words in 2005 referring to adoptive parents in the Western world. Eager to believe they are saving orphaned children from poverty, he wrote, they are easily fooled into accepting laundered children from the developing world.

He knows first-hand how such a thing could happen.

In 1998, Smolin, who teaches at Samford University’s Cumberland School of Law , and his wife, Desiree, adopted two girls from India who did not take kindly to joining their large American family in Birmingham, Ala. “They had a very, very difficult time from the very moment that they arrived,” Desiree Smolin says.

The sisters, roughly 10 and 12 years old, had been living in a hostel – what most North Americans would recognize as an orphanage – in the state of Andhra Pradesh, India, until their adoption. But they were not orphans.

It was not until 2004, after a series of scandals halted adoption in that part of India, that the Smolins were able to confirm the story their adopted daughters had told them six weeks after their arrival – that their parents had sent them to a hostel for an education, and they had been adopted out, without their consent.

For the last several years, the Smolins have been researching international adoption to try to figure out whether their case was a tragic fluke, akin to an airplane crash, or whether there are systemic problems within the inter-country adoption system that make it inherently vulnerable to corruption and abuse.

“The answer has unfortunately been it is systemic,” Desiree Smolin says.

David Smolin argues that children have been commodified and often made into “paper orphans.” In one scenario, poor parents send the children to live in a hostel or orphanage to receive food, care and education; in others, developing world recruiters use false statements or money to separate kids from their parents, or persuade them to relinquish a child to repay a debt. Sometimes extended family members or strangers simply take them. Other times lost children are taken in and little effort is made to find their families.

The children in orphanages in many countries (including potentially Haiti, UNICEF warns) are not necessarily parentless children, orphans in the Western understanding of the word.

“Our assumptions are all off,” Desiree Smolin says. “We assume that every child in an orphanage is an orphan.”

There are opportunities throughout the expensive adoption process for recruiters, adoption agencies, orphanages, officials and attorneys to pocket thousands of dollars – and unless we limit the amount of money Westerners can spend on foreign adoption, the financial incentive will continue to fuel corruption, David Smolin argues.

“When my wife and I first began talking about this we got very negative reactions, overwhelmingly,” David Smolin says. But he says that has changed in more recent years, with well-publicized scandals in countries such as Cambodia and Guatemala and fewer foreign adoptees coming into the U.S. since 2004, when the figure peaked at 22,884.

And the media have indeed started paying attention.

In 2008, E.J. Graff published an often-cited award-winning investigative piece in Foreign Policy called “The Lie We Love,” describing international adoption as a corrupt industry driven by poverty and Western demand.

And just last fall, for example, the L.A. Times reported that instead of levying fines for failing to comply with one-child policies in some rural parts of China, officials were snatching babies for adoption, turning a $3,000 per child profit in the process.

COULD THE international adoption system be inherently flawed? The idea is understandably unsettling for people in Canada, a country that saw 1,908 international adoptions in 2008 – and in the past two weeks, has ushered two planeloads of Haitian orphans into the arms of Canadian families.

In 1993, Canada became a part of the Hague Convention on inter-country adoption, which was formed to better protect children from abuse and trafficking. Although it has a lengthy adoption approval process, Haiti is not a part of the Hague Convention.

Because of stricter regulation in many countries, it became more difficult for Canadians to adopt from abroad; between 2003 and 2006 the numbers dropped. They have since been edging back up.

Karen Shadd, a spokesperson for Citizenship and Immigration, says adoption can be a lengthy process because of the need to ensure children are not being trafficked. “It’s really not red tape … the best interests of the child come first and we have to ensure that everything has been done, that the children have been legitimately placed for adoption,” she says.

Even the system’s skeptics and critics will say international adoption can be a good alternative for poor children in poor countries – if governments, parents and adoption agencies are vigilant.

The threat of trafficking for the purposes of adoption or prostitution becomes much graver during disasters like the current one in Haiti, which has left thousands of children orphaned or unaccompanied. Even before the earthquake, trafficking and kidnapping of children was a problem in the Western hemisphere’s poorest country, and the post-quake chaos has reportedly made things worse.

In one case, a Canadian pastor told reporters that a man offered to sell him a little Haitian boy for $50. He refused.

Concern for the children’s well being led Canadia and the U.S. to expedite adoptions already underway – Canada has welcomed 76 children and counting.

But it is not a time for haste. The Haitian government has since decided that the prime minister must sign off on every child that leaves the country. The U.S. government has asked its citizens for patience.

“We’ve heard quite a few who have suggested, `Why don’t we just bring these children out (of Haiti) until things are better?’” says Patrick McCormick, an emergency communications officer with UNICEF. “Our problem with that is that it makes the whole registration, tracing process difficult to impossible, if they’re kind of gone.”

McCormick says UNICEF supports the decision to fast-track adoptions that were already approved, provided the paperwork is in order. But he says: “Now, post-earthquake, just because there is this disaster there’s no reason to take any short cuts.”

Sandra Scarth, president of the Adoption Council of Canada, agrees that the inter-country adoption system is flawed. She signed the Hague Convention as a non-governmental representative – and says, like the Smolins, that because it does not place a financial limit on adoption fees, tragedies will continue.

“I think until there is some agreement that no more than the actual cost plus a reasonable compensation for people doing the work (is allowed), I think we will continue to see people rush from one country to the next country,” she says. “Then practices will be poor, they will then close that country down and start over.”

KAREN DUBINSKY, a history professor at Queen’s University with a 10-year-old son adopted from Guatemala, says the corruption in international adoption is a symptom of systemic poverty.

“Global poverty and political economy creates desperate people,” says Dubinsky, whose book Babies Without Borders: Adoption and Migration Across the Americas, is due this spring. “One desperate person might snatch the child out of the arms of another desperate person, or one desperate mother might make her own set of decisions about needing to relinquish her child. I don’t think it’s adoption that creates that stuff – I think adoption responds to it, and it sometimes doesn’t respond all that well.”

Dubinsky says we must not assume that orphaned children in impoverished countries are isolated and alone – as if they live in cabbage patches, like the popular dolls of the ’80s.

“When I see the imagery that comes through, sometimes in the media and certainly the imagery of adoption agencies, it’s always children alone,” Dubinsky says. “Children aren’t alone. They may or may not have parents, but they have communities and they have extended family and they’re not waiting for Western people to rescue them.”

Dubinsky believes international adoption can indeed be done ethically. She knows her son wasn’t stolen – she has met his biological mother and his foster family in Guatemala. She believes that in the “good” adoption scenario, we must respect the mother’s decision to relinquish her child, whatever her reasons might be.

There is a lot of potential loss involved in international adoption, says Rachel Wegner, a board member on the international policy advocacy team of Ethica, a not-for-profit dedicated to ethical adoption. “There’s a loss of culture, there’s a loss of family and there’s also a loss of friends and support networks the child has developed in the orphanage.”

In an ideal world, Wegner says, foreign adoption would be the last resort for children – they would ideally be placed with extended family members first, and then in domestic placements to unrelated caregivers.

“Our fear in a lot of this is that those two steps are skipped.”

Desiree Smolin puts it in starker terms. “I’ll give you an analogy,” she says. “Amputations are sometimes necessary, but you don’t want every doctor that you see when you go in with your toe hurting, you don’t want an amputation.”

You need a doctor, she says, who is careful enough to know when the amputation is needed and when it isn’t.

Link to article:
http://www.thestar.com/news/insight/article/758229–lost-children-why-they-should-stay-in-haiti

Posted on February 9, 2010 at 12:53 pm, by admin

Gordon Brown to apologise for Britain’s ’shameful’ child migration policies

Britain is to join Australia in issuing an official apology for the “shameful” export of tens of thousands of children to Commonwealth countries with the promise of a better life, only for many of them to end up abused and neglected.

By Richard Alleyne

In what Ed Balls, the children secretary, described as “stain on our society” the child migrant programmes saw poor, orphaned and illegitimate children sent to Australia, Canada and other former colonies until as recently as the late 1960s, often without the knowledge of their families.

Many ended up in institutions, many suffered abuse and neglect and many others were used as “slave labour” on farms.

Now after years of campaigning from pressure groups, Gordon Brown has agreed to meet with representatives of the surviving children before making a formal apology next year.

Mr Balls said the apology would be “symbolically very important”.

“I think it is important that we say to the children who are now adults and older people and to their offspring that this is something that we look back on in shame,” he said.

“It would never happen today. But I think it is right that as a society when we look back and see things which we now know were morally wrong, that we are willing to say we’re sorry.”

The government has estimated that a total of 150,000 British children may have been shipped abroad under a variety of programs that operated between the early 19th century and 1967.

A 2001 Australian report said that between 6,000 and 30,000 children from Britain and Malta, often taken from unmarried mothers or impoverished families, were sent alone to Australia as migrants during the 20th century.

Some of the children were told, wrongly, that they were orphans.

The migration was intended to stop the children being a burden on the British state while supplying the receiving countries with potential workers.

A 1998 British parliamentary inquiry noted that “a further motive was racist: the importation of ‘good white stock’ was seen as a desirable policy objective in the developing British Colonies”.

Mr Balls said that while an apology would not “take away the suffering” it was important to the victims to admit it was wrong and to make sure lessons are learnt.

He said the government was talking to the victims’ organisation to work out how to frame the apology.

“These were children who were shipped out of the country, often without their parents even knowing, went on to be labourers thousands and thousands of miles away, suffered physical and sometimes sexual abuse as well and it was something that was sanctioned by government and that is no way to treat children,” he said,

“I think there have been discussions going on for some months about how to do this but to be honest it’s a matter of shame for our country and countries around the world that this terrible policy happened for so many years and decades and was actually government policy.”

The issue of the UK child migrants was investigated in 1998 by the Commons health select committee, a process which led to the Department of Health drawing up guidance for families to trace those sent away.

Kevin Barron, the chairman, said Mr Brown wrote to him over the weekend to confirm he would issue an apology in the new year.

The Prime Minister told him “the time is now right” for the UK government to apologise for the “misguided policies” of previous governments.

However some survivors felt the apology was too little too late.

Harold Haig, the secretary of the International Child Migrants Association, said he was appalled that the Australian apology has come before any British apology.

“Gordon Brown should hang his head in shame,” he said.

“He is allowing the country that we were deported to to apologise before the country where we were born. It is an absolute disgrace. He should hang his head in shame.”

Link to article:
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/uknews/6575200/Gordon-Brown-to-apologise-for-Britains-shameful-child-migration-policies.html

Posted on February 9, 2010 at 12:43 pm, by admin

How social services are paid bonuses to snatch babies for adoption

By SUE REID

For a mother, there can be no greater horror than having a baby snatched away by the State at birth.

The women to whom it has happened say their lives are ruined for ever – and goodness knows what longterm effect it has on the child.

Most never recover from this trauma.

Imagine a baby growing in your body for nine months, imagine going through the emotion of bringing it into the world, only to have social workers seize the newborn, sometimes within minutes of its first cry and often on the flimsiest of excuses.

Yet this disturbing scenario is played out every day.

The number of babies under one month old being taken into care for adoption is now running at almost four a day (a 300 per cent increase over a decade).

In total, 75 children of all ages are being removed from their parents every week before being handed over to new families.

Some of these may have been willingly given up for adoption, but critics of the Government’s policy are convinced that the vast majority are taken by force.

Time and again, the mothers say they are innocent of any wrongdoing.

Of course, there are people who are not fit to be parents and it is the duty of any responsible State to protect their children.

But over the five years since I began investigating the scandal of forced adoptions, I have found a deeply secretive system which is too often biased against basically decent families.

I have been told of routine dishonesty by social workers and questionable evidence given by doctors which has wrongly condemned mothers.

Meanwhile, millions of pounds of taxpayers’ money has been given to councils to encourage them to meet high Government targets on child adoptions.

Under New Labour policy, Tony Blair changed targets in 2000 to raise the number of children being adopted by 50 per cent to 5,400 a year.

The annual tally has now reached almost 4,000 in England and Wales – four times higher than in France, which has a similar-sized population.

Blair promised millions of pounds to councils that achieved the targets and some have already received more than £2million each in rewards for successful adoptions.

Figures recently released by the Department for Local Government and Community Cohesion show that two councils – Essex and Kent – were offered more than £2million “bonuses” over three years to encourage additional adoptions.

Four others – Norfolk, Gloucestershire, Cheshire and Hampshire – were promised an extra £1million.

This sweeping shake-up was designed for all the right reasons: to get difficult-to-place older children in care homes allocated to new parents.

But the reforms didn’t work. Encouraged by the promise of extra cash, social workers began to earmark babies and cute toddlers who were most easy to place in adoptive homes, leaving the more difficultto-place older children in care.

As a result, the number of over-sevens adopted has plummeted by half.

Critics – including family solicitors, MPs and midwives as well as the wronged families – report cases where young children are selected, even before birth, by social workers in order to win the bonuses.

More chillingly, parents have been told by social workers they must lose their children because, at some time in the future, they might abuse them.

One mother’s son was adopted on the grounds that there was a chance she might shout at him when he was older.

In Scotland, where there are no official targets, adoptions are a fraction of the number south of the border, even allowing for the smaller population.

What’s more, the obsessive secrecy of the system means that the public only occasionally gets an inkling of the human tragedy now unfolding across the country.

For at the heart of this adoption system are the family courts, whose hearings are conducted behind closed doors in order to protect the identity of the children involved.

Yet this secrecy threatens the centuries-old tradition of Britain’s legal system – the principle that people are innocent until proven guilty beyond all reasonable doubt.

From the moment a mother is first accused of being incapable as a parent – a decision nearly always made by a social worker or doctor – the system is pitted against her.

There are no juries in family courts, only a lone judge or trio of magistrates who make decisions based on the balance of probability.

Crucially, the courts’ culture of secrecy means that if a social worker lies or fabricates notes or a medical expert giving evidence makes a mistake, no one finds out and there is no retribution.

Only the workings of the homeland security service, MI5, are guarded more closely than those of the family courts.

From the time a child is named on a social services care order until the day they are adopted, the parents are breaking the law – a crime punishable by imprisonment – if they tell anyone what is happening to their family.

Anything from a chat with a neighbour to a letter sent to a friend can land them in jail.

And many have found themselves sent to prison for breaching court orders by talking about their case.

As High Court judge Mr Justice Munby told MPs last year: “It seems quite indefensible that there should be no access by the media, and no access by the public, to what is going on in courts where judges are, day by day, taking people’s children away.”

However, it is not only secretive and publicly unscrutinised family courts that are creating an injustice in our adoption system.

There is a more worrying factor involved. Look at the official figures. Why are they so high? Is it really true that more mothers are becoming potential killers or abusers?

Or are the financial bonuses offered to councils fuelling the astonishing rise in forced adoptions?

John Hemming, a Liberal Democrat MP campaigning to change the adoption system, said yesterday: “I have evidence that 1,000 children are wrongly being seized from their birth parents each year even though they have not been harmed in any way.

“The targets are dangerous and lead to social workers being over-eager.

“The system’s secrecy hides any wrongdoing. One has to ask if a mother is expected to have problems looking after her baby, why doesn’t the State help her instead of taking her child away?”

The MP’s concerns are echoed by the Association for Improvements in the Maternity Services (AIMS), a body which advises new mothers.

Spokeswoman Beverley Beech insists: “Babies are being removed from their mothers by social workers using any excuse.

“We strongly suspect this is because newborns and toddlers are more easily found homes than older children. They are a marketable commodity.

“I know of social workers making up stories about innocent mothers simply to ensure their babies are put up for adoption.

“Suitable babies are even being earmarked when they are still in the womb.

“One baby was forcibly removed in the maternity ward by social workers before the mother had even finished the birth process and produced the placenta.”

Her words may be emotive. But are they true? Six months ago, I wrote an article about a young couple – who must remain anonymous because of family court law – fighting for the return of their three-year-old daughter.

She was taken within weeks of birth and is about to be adopted.

Astonishingly, a judge has issued a Draconian order gagging them from revealing anything, to anyone at all, which could identify their daughter until her 18th birthday in 2022.

Immediately after the article was published, I heard from 35 families whose children were forcibly removed.

The letters and e-mails continue to arrive – coming from a wide range of families across the social classes (including from a castle in the heart of England).

An e-mail from one father said: “Please, please help, NOW. We are about to lose our son . . . in court tomorrow for final disposals hearing before he is taken for adoption … we have done nothing wrong.”

Another father calling himself “James” rang to say his wife’s baby was one of eight seized by social workers from hospital maternity units in one small part of North-East England during one fortnight last summer.

A Welsh man complained that his grandson of three weeks was earmarked for forcible adoption by social workers.

The mother, a 21-year-old with a mild learning disorder, was told she might, just might, get post-natal depression and neglect her son.

To her great distress, her baby was put in the care of Monmouthshire social services within minutes of birth.

The grandfather said: “Our entire extended family – which includes two nurses, a qualified nanny and a police officer – have offered to help care for the baby.

“I believe my grandson has been targeted for adoption since he was in the womb.”

A Worcestershire woman told how her daughter’s baby was snatched away by three police officers and two social workers who came to the door of her house.

The girl has now been adopted.

The mother’s failure? She was said to be too young to cope.

Yet – a little over a year later – she had another baby, a boy, whom she was allowed to keep, in the same home and with the same partner.

Why on earth did she have to lose her little girl?

The grandmother emotionally explained: “All the family came forward to offer to help look after my granddaughter, and all of them were told they were not good enough.

“The social worker told us to forget her. He said: ‘She is water under the bridge.’

“We think they wanted her for adoption from the beginning.”

No wonder she, and thousands of other parents, want a shake-up of the heart-breakingly cruel adoption system which has ripped apart so many families – and which continues to do so.

Like to article:
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-511609/How-social-services-paid-bonuses-snatch-babies-adoption.html

Posted on February 9, 2010 at 12:43 pm, by admin

Adoptees can find Mom, but not Dad

From the Toronto Star By Nicole Baute
December 10, 2009

When Ontario opened its adoption records on June 1, adult adoptees yearning for information about their birth parents applied in droves.

But as the replies came back, it became clear something was missing: the names of their fathers.

Out of all 250,000 Ontario adoption registrations, less than 10 per cent have fathers’ names on them, according to the Ministry of Government Services.

Ruth Rideout was devastated by the omission.

The 61-year-old adoptee received her statement of birth in October and found the father’s section of the form blank, with a line drawn through it.

“He is half of my biological makeup and I need to know if there are any illnesses, conditions,” she says.

Rideout’s birth mother recently died, at 81. Although she has since met her birth mother’s family, they do not know who her father was.

It turns out legislation prohibited her mother from naming him.

Until the mid-1980s, an unmarried woman could not put her baby’s father’s name on the statement of birth unless she and the father made a statutory declaration that he be named, according to the Vital Statistics Act. The child was “illegitimate,” a word that was not removed from the act until 1981.

But when unmarried women filled out the father’s section anyway, it seems the information was removed – whited out, blacked out or covered up.

A Waterloo man, John S., who did not want his last name published, received his statement of birth from 1955. The information on the “husband” side of the form was blacked out, line by line. An accompanying letter from ServiceOntario explains that his father’s information was removed because, in 1955, the Vital Statistics Act did not allow it to be included.

Mothers interviewed by the Star say they remember putting the names of their children’s fathers on birth registration forms they filled out in hospitals many years ago. In some cases, the fathers were present at the time of birth, or signed a declaration of paternity and other identifying documents during the adoption process.

Now, they feel betrayed.

Karen Lynn distinctly remembers writing her son’s father’s name on his birth registration in the hospital in 1963, when she was 19. She recalls fussing over how to spell his second middle name – was it Lawrence or Laurence? She settled on Lawrence.

Lynn is the president of the Canadian Council of Natural Mothers and a member of the coordinating committee for the Coalition for Open Adoption Records. She says she expected many fathers’ names to be missing from records, because unmarried women were discouraged from naming them.

But she was shocked to learn, as records trickled in, that names had been removed.

Lynn reunited with her son in 1999, but for her this is a matter of principle. “You expect that the document you signed is going to be kept intact,” she says.

Michael Prue, the community and social services critic for the Ontario NDP, says unmarried women were told not to name a father. “Young women were discouraged, and it was because of shame and everything else,” he says. Summing up the attitude then, he says: “You’re not married, the child doesn’t have a father, leave that blank.”

Yes, he says, some names could have been scratched out. “Some people 30 or 40 or 50 years ago may have thought that was the right thing to do. A lot has changed.”

Leslie Wagner received a copy of her son’s statement of live birth, which she filled out at the Toronto Western Hospital in June 1982. The record is in her 17-year-old handwriting, but it appears to have been doctored: the father section looks like it has been replaced with a blank version of the same section.

Catherine Cunningham (her maiden name) says her son’s father was by her side in the hospital in November 1981. She was sure he was named on the birth registration – and he later signed an acknowledgment of parentage with the Ministry of Community and Social Services. But his name isn’t on the statement of birth. “Should my son request his original birth certificate, his first instinct will be that I did not know who his father was, which is unsettling to say the least, and completely not true,” she says.

As far as they know, none of the people in this story has been affected by a nondisclosure veto.

The mothers have questions about their records. “Who altered them?” Wagner asks. “We still haven’t got a clear answer around who had the authority to alter that.”

Adoptees such as Rideout will have a difficult time finding their fathers if their mothers cannot or will not help them – or if they have changed their names or died.

Rideout says staff at Family and Children’s Services of Waterloo Region have confirmed in emails that her father’s name is on three of their documents, but say they cannot share it with her.

She knows her father was a German Canadian Lutheran truck driver from the Kitchener area and that he would be 84 if he is still alive today. Without his name, she will have a hard time finding him.

Valerie Andrews is executive director of Origins Canada, a support group for people separated by adoption. She says the missing fathers illustrate how poorly mothers were treated in the past. “I think it shows quite clearly that the so-called `unwed mother’ was someone without rights (or) status in our society,” she says.

Today, a father does not have to make a statutory declaration to be included on the statement of birth, but he and the mother have to sign the form. So even today, if the father is not involved at birth, his name will not be on his child’s records.

Lynn realizes there are concerns about men being held financially liable for children they did not father. But today, a simple DNA test can determine paternity, she points out. She finds the assumption that women would lie about or not know who fathered their baby insulting.

“Are we trying to protect the 0.1 per cent of men who may have been accused and they aren’t the father, or are we trying to serve the best interests of the child?”

Lynn says fathers’ rights have also been violated. If a father of a child given up for adoption is not listed on the statement of birth, he probably won’t be able to see the file. “They can apply, but they won’t get it, because they weren’t named.”

Link to article:
http://www.thestar.com/living/article/736964–adoptees-can-find-mom-but-not-dad

Posted on December 30, 2009 at 4:12 pm, by admin

Building a Baby, With Few Ground Rules

From the New York Times by STEPHANIE SAUL

Unable to have a baby of her own, Amy Kehoe became her own general
contractor to manufacture one. For Ms. Kehoe and her husband, Scott,
the idea seemed like their best hope after years of infertility.

Working mostly over the Internet, Ms. Kehoe handpicked the egg donor,
a pre-med student at the University of Michigan. From the Web site of
California Cryobank, she chose the anonymous sperm donor, an athletic
man with a 4.0 high school grade-point average.

On another Web site, surromomsonline.com, Ms. Kehoe found a
gestational carrier who would deliver her baby.

Finally, she hired the fertility clinic, IVF Michigan, which put
together her creation last December.

“We paid for the egg, the sperm, the in vitro fertilization,” Ms.
Kehoe said as she showed off baby pictures at her home near Grand
Rapids, Mich. “They wouldn’t be here if it weren’t for us.”

On July 28, the Kehoes announced the arrival of twins, Ethan and
Bridget, at University Hospital in Ann Arbor. Overjoyed, they took
the babies home on Aug. 3 and prepared for a welcoming by their large
extended family.

A month later, a police officer supervised as the Kehoes relinquished
the swaddled infants in the driveway.

Bridget and Ethan are now in the custody of the surrogate who gave
birth to them, Laschell Baker of Ypsilanti, Mich. Ms. Baker had
obtained a court order to retrieve them after learning that Ms. Kehoe
was being treated for mental illness.

“I couldn’t see living the rest of my life worrying and wondering
what had happened, or what if she hadn’t taken her medicine, or what
if she relapsed,” said Ms. Baker, who has four children of her own.

Now, she and her husband, Paul, plan to raise the twins.

The creation of Ethan and Bridget tested the boundaries of the field
known as third-party reproduction, in which more than two people
collaborate to have a baby. Five parties were involved: the egg
donor, the sperm donor, Ms. Baker and the Kehoes. And two separate
middlemen brokered the egg and sperm.

About 750 babies are born each year in this country through
gestational surrogacy, and twice that many surrogacies are attempted.
Most are less complicated than the arrangement that resulted in the
birth of Ethan and Bridget.

But as the dispute over the Michigan twins reveals, surrogacy
arrangements that go badly can have profound implications,
particularly for the children. Surrogacy is largely without
regulation, with no authority deciding who may obtain babies through
surrogacy or who may serve as a surrogate, according to interviews
and court records.

Instead, surrogacy is controlled mainly by fertility doctors, who
determine which arrangements are carried out and also earn money by
performing the procedures. And while some agencies that coordinate
surrogacies and some clinics that carry them out strictly adhere to
guidelines, others do not, the interviews and records show.

The lax atmosphere means that it is now essentially possible to order
up a baby, creating an emerging commercial market for surrogate
babies that raises vexing ethical questions.

In some cases, parents must go through adoption proceedings to gain
legal custody of the children. But even in those situations, the
normal adoption review process is upended. In surrogacy, prospective
parents with no genetic link often create their own baby first, then
ask for legal approval, potentially leaving judges with little
alternative. Some states allow prebirth orders that place the
parents’ names on the birth certificates without any screening.

When disputes arise after the babies are born, the outcome can vary
from state to state. In California, considered a friendly state for
surrogacy, courts have upheld the validity of surrogacy contracts,
meaning that the people who hire surrogates are very likely to keep
the babies if a dispute arises.

But a statute in Michigan, where Ethan and Bridget were born, holds
that surrogacy is contrary to public policy and that surrogacy
agreements are unenforceable, giving the woman who gives birth a
strong case if she decides to keep the babies.

A handful of other states have similar laws, according to an analysis
by the Center for American Progress, a liberal research group.

About 10 states have laws that allow for surrogacy but impose
restrictions; several of those states require at least one parent to
have a genetic relationship to the baby. But the majority of states
are silent on surrogacy, according to the analysis. Legal uncertainty
in some states means that babies are sometimes left in limbo, their
parentage left up to courts.

“When they go bad, it’s so sad,” said Mitzi Heineman, the Michigan
broker who supplied Ms. Kehoe’s donor eggs. “You feel sorry for the
baby. Who are the baby’s parents?”

Four-year-old twin girls in Union City, N.J., have lived under such
uncertainty. Their short lives have included two tours in the foster
care system.

New Jersey child welfare officials alleged earlier this year that the
girls were neglected by Stephen Melinger, 62, who arranged their
birth almost five years ago. In July, a New Jersey judge exonerated
Mr. Melinger of those accusations. But the Supreme Court in Indiana,
where the girls were born, recently ruled that his adoption of the
twins was improperly executed and must be redone.

Fewer problems arise when the prospective parents have a genetic link
to the offspring, lawyers who have handled such cases say.
Gestational surrogacy frequently involves couples who can produce
their own eggs and sperm, but in which the female partner cannot
carry a baby.

Doctors say that when surrogacy arrangements go smoothly, they are
very rewarding.

“It’s been unbelievably satisfying seeing these families grow that
otherwise wouldn’t have,” said Dr. James Goldfarb, director of
fertility services at the Cleveland Clinic and president of the
Society for Assisted Reproductive Technology. Dr. Goldfarb was
involved in one of the world’s first gestational surrogacies in 1986.
Today, the Cleveland Clinic takes part in 8 to 10 such arrangements a
year, he said.

But even less complex arrangements can lead to legal challenges. In
another case in New Jersey, a woman agreed to be a surrogate for her
brother and his male partner, who donated sperm. But the three are
now playing tug of war over 3-year-old twin girls. The woman is
seeking custody and a declaration that she is the mother, even though
she did not supply the eggs. Lawyers in both New Jersey cases asked
that the children’s names be withheld for reasons of privacy.

The New Jersey physician who performed the procedure, Dr. Susan
Treiser, did not require psychological screening and waived what is
commonly a prerequisite for being a surrogate — that she must have
given birth to her own child.

Ms. Baker, the surrogate in Michigan, says the fertility clinic where
she was impregnated failed to perform psychological screening of the
Kehoes, which is recommended by professional societies. Such
screening, she believes, might have prevented her from going through
with the pregnancy.

Partly in hopes of standardizing the disparate laws governing
surrogacy, the American Bar Association has developed a model act for
state legislatures. Judges across the country have said they need
guidance to sort out complex legal issues posed by reproductive
technology. One section of the proposal says that when prospective
parents have no genetic link to the babies, surrogacies would require
preapproval by a court in a process that would include a home study.

Lawyers who handle surrogacy arrangements say those cases represent
only 5 percent of surrogacy cases, but they are the riskiest.

George J. Annas, a bioethicist who is chairman of the health law
program at Boston University, said, “This is the main problem with
commercialization, seeing children as a consumer product.”

“This is especially true when there is no genetic connection with the
child,” he said. “It really does treat children like commodities.
Like pets.”

Brokers and Fees

It was a pet — a pet bird — that transformed the birth of the
Melinger twins from a private transaction into a public controversy.

Employees at Methodist Hospital in Indianapolis became alarmed when
the man who had commissioned their creation, Stephen Melinger, took
his pet bird to the neonatal intensive care unit where they were
hospitalized. It was among several things that raised concerns about
Mr. Melinger’s ability to care for the two girls, according to court
documents.

When Mr. Melinger, a single man who taught elementary school in Union
City, decided he wanted a child, he enlisted the help of an agency
called Surrogate Mothers in Monrovia, Ind.

The American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists has adopted a
set of guidelines for surrogacy arrangements. Among its
recommendations are that surrogacy be handled by nonprofit agencies.
Currently it is largely for-profit and can be very lucrative.

Between brokers, legal and medical expenses and surrogate fees, a
successful surrogacy can cost prospective parents $80,000 to
$120,000. About an estimated 100 agencies advertise themselves as
surrogacy brokers.

“People can get into this business easily,” said Charles P. Kindregan
Jr., a professor at Suffolk University Law School who was co-chairman
of the American Bar Association committee that drafted the model
legislation.

Surrogate Mothers, one of the older agencies, advertises on its Web
site that it can arrange surrogacies for under $50,000.

On April 8, 2005, the twins intended for Mr. Melinger were born in
Indianapolis to a surrogate mother from South Carolina. The girls
were 9 weeks premature and weighed only 3 pounds each.

Steve Litz, a lawyer who runs Surrogate Mothers, filed a petition on
behalf of Mr. Melinger seeking to adopt the twins, identified in
court papers as the “infants H.” According to court documents, the
petition identified Mr. Melinger as an Indiana resident, born in
Indiana and employed as a teacher.

The woman who carried the children was giving up her rights to them.
She had listed Mr. Melinger as “father” on the birth certificate.

The private adoption was on track to be granted, almost as a
perfunctory matter. But hospital employees became concerned by Mr.
Melinger’s eccentric behavior.

On one day, he arrived at the intensive care unit carrying his pet
bird, which posed a risk of infection. Mr. Melinger testified that
his bird was not near the babies because he had stayed in the office
area. Yet on a separate visit, hospital workers said he had gone into
the intensive care unit with bird feces on his clothing.

The hospital staff was also worried about what they considered Mr.
Melinger’s unrealistic plan for taking the babies home. He hoped to
make the 12-hour drive from Indianapolis to Union City in his car,
alone, with the two premature infants strapped in car seats.

Hospital workers asked Indiana’s child welfare agency to investigate.

After learning of the investigation and the possibilities that there
would be difficulties in getting Mr. Melinger’s adoption approved,
Mr. Litz filed another motion on his client’s behalf, calling the
children “hard to place” because their mother was African-American,
he said, making the girls biracial.

It is easier for out-of-state residents, like Mr. Melinger, to adopt
“hard to place” children. But it was not true that the girls were
biracial. The surrogate mother was African-American, but the babies
she had carried grew from eggs from a white donor. The twins were white.

It was merely one of the assertions in papers filed on Mr. Melinger’s
behalf by Mr. Litz that turned out to be false, according to the
Indiana Supreme Court.

“An earlier representation that Mr. Melinger was a sperm donor
likewise turned out not to be true,” the court said, so the children
were not his biological offspring.

In addition, Mr. Melinger was not born in Indiana, but New York. The
Indiana residence he claimed was a hotel room.

A lower court had criticized the submissions for “lack of candor.”

In an e-mail message, Mr. Litz denied that he had misled the courts.
“I have never knowingly made a misrepresentation to a judge in my
life,” he said. Mr. Melinger declined to be interviewed.

As the case moved forward amid a swirl of Indiana news reports, the
girls were placed in foster care. Mr. Melinger continued his fight to
adopt the girls, finally prevailing in 2006. Mr. Melinger returned to
New Jersey with the girls, but the Indiana Department of Child
Services appealed the adoption to the Indiana Supreme Court.

The appeal was still pending in January when the girls had another
encounter with the child welfare system, according to records
disclosed by Mr. Melinger’s lawyer, Anthony Carbone of Jersey City.

It began as a simple family outing to a park in January.

A woman who saw Mr. Melinger with his children complained to the
police that the girls were dirty and inappropriately dressed for cold
weather, the records show.

One was wearing a pink coat, a skirt, ankle socks and black shoes.
The other was wearing pajamas, a yellow coat and sneakers with no
socks. Mr. Melinger later said that it had been a particularly warm
winter day and that he had taken extra clothes for the girls.

The complaint prompted a review by the New Jersey Department of Youth
and Family Services, which sent a worker the next day to Mr.
Melinger’s apartment in Union City.

When a caseworker arrived “she noticed a strong smell of urine in the
apartment,” according to a court document. Mr. Melinger later said
that the girls were not completely toilet trained and had accidents,
and that he tried to clean up after them as best he could.

The home was “particularly dirty,” the caseworker said, with
inadequate clean clothes for the twins. Department workers also said
the children’s pediatrician, Dr. Pearl Cenon, had concerns about
their care and had considered contacting the agency. The girls were
removed from Mr. Melinger’s custody.

But in a hearing last summer, a parade of witnesses came to Mr.
Melinger’s defense. They included Dr. Cenon, who denied being
concerned about the girls and testified that Mr. Melinger was an
excellent father.

In July, Judge Bernadette N. DeCastro of New Jersey Superior Court
ruled that the Department of Youth and Family Services had failed to
prove its claim against Mr. Melinger. The girls had already been
returned to his custody in April.

Meanwhile, the Indiana Supreme Court had also ruled.

In a decision issued in April and reaffirmed in October, the court
said the adoption of the 4-year-old twins must be repeated. Among
missing elements in the original adoption, the Supreme Court said,
was a letter from New Jersey authorities stating that the placement
was in the twins’ best interest.

The Indiana court said that as the case continued, the girls would be
allowed to remain with Mr. Melinger. Frances Watson, a professor at
the Indiana University School of Law in Indianapolis who briefly
served as the appointed legal representative of the children, said
the case provided a stark example of what the state’s adoption laws
attempted to prevent.

“You should not be able to come from out of state on some contract
and order up some babies and then go about your business,” Ms. Watson
said.

Barriers to Adoption

On July 11, 2004, Donald W. Robinson, a Manhattan accountant, boarded
the Norwegian Dawn cruise ship with his partner, Sean Hollingsworth.

The departure from New York was the maiden voyage of the “Rosie”
cruises, named after the entertainer Rosie O’Donnell, which cater to
gay men and lesbians and their families.

The cruise was also the genesis of a major surrogacy dispute.

As the 1,600 passengers sailed from New York to Florida and the
Bahamas, one of the speakers was Dr. Treiser, the fertility specialist.

The weeklong cruise was an excellent way to promote her clinic, IVF
New Jersey, to an important surrogacy niche market: gay partners who
might want to become parents.

The shift from traditional surrogacy, in which women carry their own
biological children after artificial insemination, to gestational
surrogacy, as well as the wide availability of donor eggs, has opened
the possibility of parenthood to a variety of people who cannot have
children of their own.

In Manhattan, the Lesbian, Gay Bisexual & Transgender Community
Centersponsors monthly seminars on having families through surrogacy.
The well-attended sessions often feature speakers with children born
through surrogacy arrangements.

In many of those cases, one of the male partners donates sperm that
is used, along with a donor egg, to impregnate a surrogate.

Many of the people who have children through surrogates would have
had difficulty adopting because of sexual orientation, marital status
or age. Some foreign countries place upper age limits on adoptive
parents. And birth mothers giving up their children in the United
States often hand-pick the adoptive parents of their children.

“The default position for young birth moms tends to be a mother and a
father in a stable relationship and a white picket fence around the
yard,” said David C. Cole, a Dallas lawyer with Little Flower
Adoptions, which also handles surrogacy arrangements.

After Dr. Treiser’s speech, Mr. Robinson and Mr. Hollingsworth
approached her to discuss their plans for having a child through
surrogacy.

As Dr. Treiser remembered during a deposition, they wanted to use Mr.
Hollingsworth’s sperm and an egg from Mr. Robinson’s sister, Angelia
Gail Robinson, a resident of Texas. That way, both Mr. Robinson and
Mr. Hollingsworth would have genetic ties to the child.

But testing later revealed that Ms. Robinson, already in her 40s,
could not produce viable eggs. Instead, the couple decided to use
another egg donor. Ms. Robinson agreed to serve as the gestational
carrier and intended to play a role in the life of the baby.

“She was going to be the doting aunt and live close by,” Dr. Treiser
testified in a deposition.

Ms. Robinson sold her home in Texas and went to work in her brother’s
Manhattan accounting office.

As the agreement proceeded, there were several things that should
have waved cautionary flags. Foremost among them was that Ms.
Robinson did not have her own children.

A previous birth provides proof that a surrogate can deliver a baby
without medical complications, fertility doctors said. And it gives
assurance that the surrogate understands the biological and emotional
implications of pregnancy and childbirth.

“If a surrogate has not had a baby before, we won’t use her,” said
Dr. Goldfarb of the Cleveland Clinic.

In an interview, Dr. Treiser said she made an exception because Ms.
Robinson was carrying a child for her sibling and expressed no
interest in children of her own.

In a deposition, Dr. Treiser said that she offered Ms. Robinson
psychological screening, but that it was declined.

As her pregnancy progressed, Ms. Robinson now says, fissures
developed in her relationship with her brother. At the same time, she
says in court papers, she began to bond with the twins she was carrying.

It turned out to be an extremely difficult pregnancy that ended on
Oct. 4, 2006, when Ms. Robinson was rushed to the hospital suffering
from pre-eclampsia, a pregnancy-induced condition that includes
extremely high blood pressure.

In March 2007, after Mr. Robinson and Mr. Hollingsworth had custody
of the children for five months, she filed papers for custody of the
children in family court in Jersey City, where the men live. The two
were married in California in September 2008, and Mr. Robinson has
taken his spouse’s name.

Ms. Robinson has also asked to be declared the legal mother of the
children. Her lawyer, Harold J. Cassidy of Shrewsbury, N.J., has
cited the Baby M decision two decades ago, in which the New Jersey
Supreme Court upheld the maternal rights of Mary Beth Whitehead, who
delivered her own biological child for another couple after
artificial insemination with the man’s sperm. Mr. Cassidy also
represented Ms. Whitehead.

The court ruled that even though Ms. Whitehead had agreed to a
payment of $10,000 for the service, “There are, in a civilized
society, some things that money cannot buy.”

Unlike Ms. Whitehead, Ms. Robinson has no genetic relationship to the
girls. But as the case continues, the family court has temporarily
awarded Ms. Robinson three days a week of parenting time, according
to records. The girls are shuttled back and forth between Ms.
Robinson’s frame house in Keansburg, N.J., and the home of their father.

Their fate may be determined by a trial as early as April.

Charges of Betrayal

Ethan and Bridget, the babies born in Michigan, are propped in their
car seats in a booth at Stoney Creek Koney Island, a diner in a strip
mall in Ypsilanti. They are out for breakfast with the woman who gave
birth to them, Laschell Baker, and her husband, Paul.

The Bakers have picked out new names for them. They are calling the
boy Peyton and the girl Dani. As soon as they can spare $320, they
will file papers for legal name changes. It is a way to leave the
past behind.

Someday, though, the twins will know all about what happened. “I’ll
tell them the truth,” Ms. Baker said.

For Ms. Baker, 35, they are babies No. 8 and 9. In addition to her
four children, she has delivered three other surrogate babies,
including another set of twins. Her previous surrogacy arrangements
went smoothly, and the children are with the family who requested them.

Ms. Baker said she had been vilified by the national community of
professional surrogates, who chat regularly online. The Internet
community is mad at her, siding mostly with the Kehoes. They even
collected money for legal funds for the Kehoes, who say they were
betrayed by Ms. Baker.

“They don’t want anything to do with me,” Ms. Baker said. “I’m the
bad apple that ruins the name of surrogacy.”

But, she says, this is not a story about a surrogate who changed her
mind.

“My husband and I would not do something like this unless we thought
it was given to us to do,” Ms Baker said. “My belief is that God
placed this on my heart for a reason.”

In the fall of 2007, Ms. Baker advertised in surromomsonline.com
saying she would carry a baby for a Christian couple.

Amy Kehoe saw it and was delighted to find that Ms. Baker lived only
two hours away.

Ms. Baker said she chose the Kehoes for the same reason. “I picked
them because I wanted a couple that was local so they could enjoy the
whole pregnancy with me,” she said.

They traded e-mail messages and phone calls and met for dinner before
agreeing to go forward with the surrogacy.

Under Michigan’s law, commercial surrogacy is punishable by five
years in prison and a $50,000 fine. Ms. Baker said she did not carry
the children for money and was reimbursed only for actual expenses
like doctor’s appointments. Neither she nor the Kehoes have disclosed
exactly how much that was.

Ms. Baker said she was the one who recommended Dr. Jonathan Ayers of
IVF Michigan for fertility services. Dr. Ayers was involved in her
two previous surrogate pregnancies.

She has generally praised Dr. Ayers, but says the failed arrangement
might have been avoided if IVF Michigan had required psychological
screening.

A nurse at IVF Michigan said Dr. Ayers would not comment on his
clinic’s policies because of patient privacy laws.

On Tuesday, July 28, the babies were born by Caesarean section. The
following Monday, in court in Ann Arbor, Ms. Baker said she first
learned of Ms. Kehoe’s psychiatric history.

During a hearing to transfer guardianship to the Kehoes, Scott Kehoe
said his wife had paranoid schizophrenia. Ms. Kehoe’s psychiatrist
listed the diagnosis as a “psychotic disorder not otherwise
specified.” Ms. Kehoe takes an antipsychotic to control her symptoms.

Before her diagnosis in 2001, Ms. Kehoe told the judge, she had self-
medicated, and that was the reason for her arrest on charges of
cocaine use and driving under the influence.

Adoption experts said that mental illness was not a bar to adoption
if the illness was under control and the patient went to doctor’s
appointments and took medications. And Ms. Kehoe’s psychiatrist wrote
a letter saying she would be a good mother because her disease had
been fully controlled for eight years and she currently had no symptoms.

Ms. Baker, however, said she was stunned at the disclosure of Ms.
Kehoe’s mental illness, which she believes she should have known in
advance. And she became concerned that Ms. Kehoe might relapse and be
unable to take care of the twins.

“I’m not going to be the one that’s going to feel guilty if something
happens,” Ms. Baker said.

Ms. Kehoe said Ms. Baker’s decision made no sense in light of her
doctor’s statement and other letters of strong support. “Does she
really think she knows better than a psychiatrist who has known me
for nine years?” Ms. Kehoe said.

Instead, she says, Ms. Baker “legally stole our babies from us.”

Because Michigan law states that surrogacy contracts are void and
unenforceable, it was an easy matter for Ms. Baker to go to court and
have the Kehoes’ guardianship rescinded.

Last month, Amy and Scott Kehoe made a decision.

“We are stopping the fight to get our babies back,” Ms. Kehoe wrote
in an e-mail message. “The reason is because of the slow court
system, and because of the terrible Michigan laws. JUSTICE DOES NOT
PREVAIL in this case due to Michigan laws.”

Ms. Kehoe still has hope, though. It is stored in a tank of liquid
nitrogen at IVF Michigan. The tank contains 20 frozen embryos made
from the eggs and sperm she bought.

Link to article:
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/12/13/us/13surrogacy.html?_r=2

Posted on December 29, 2009 at 8:46 pm, by admin

Ontario Opens its Old Adoption Records – Surprise! No Dads!

From Men’s News Daily By Robert Franklin, Esq.
Saturday, December 19, 2009

Back on June 1st of this year, the province of Ontario opened all its old adoption records so that adoptees could locate their birth parents if they wanted. Read about it here (Toronto Star, 12/10/09). And, to no one’s great surprise, a lot of them did want to find their biological fathers and mothers. But once the records were opened, it turned out there was a catch for children of unmarried mothers; adoptees could learn who their mother was, but not their father.

That’s partly because the law, up until 1986, forbade listing the father’s name on birth registries or adoption papers for children of unmarried mothers unless both mother and father demanded it. So only some 10% of those documents identify a father. Indeed, many mothers to this day remember writing in the father’s name, only to have it removed. Hospital and adoption personnel throughout the 40s, 50s, 60s, etc., were told to discourage identifying fathers.

Amazingly enough, when a woman who gave birth wasn’t married, the law considered that there was no father. One observer described the attitude this way:

“You’re not married, the child doesn’t have a father, leave that blank.”

“You’re not married, the child doesn’t have a father.” Huh? We’ve progressed a bit since then, but perhaps only a bit. More amazing still is the fact that it seems that now, even if a father’s name does appear on the old documents, provincial personnel are still prohibited from divulging it.

If you’re wondering what legitimate purpose is being furthered by obliterating all traces of the fathers of adoptees, I’m with you. And if anyone figures it out, let me know. The detriments to the practice are obvious. The first is that adoptees need to know their biological parents for medical reasons. Countless illnesses and medical conditions have hereditary components, knowledge of which is necessary to adoptees and their doctors. Adoptees who can’t identify their fathers can’t know that vital information. Second, a lot of adoptees want to know their biological parents. It’s a very common phenomenon. For a government to thwart that kinship urge seems punitive and serves no apparent purpose.

Third, differentiating in law between mothers and fathers is clearly sexist and anti-dad. What exact reason is there for a state to identify for an adoptee his/her mother but not the father? I would argue that the practice hearkens back to times when it was assumed that a woman who was pregnant but unmarried must have been, in some way, forced into sex against her will. Literature is full of scenes of heartless “wolves” “ruining” innocent maidens. The feminist idea that women were sexual beings, fully capable of consenting to and even avidly participating in sex, had not yet grabbed the popular imagination, much less made its way into law.

Most of this is a bell that can’t be unrung. Most of these adoptions occurred years ago and were carried out in the context of the times. They had different understandings about illegitimacy and adoption than we do today. Asi es la vida.

But denying adoptees knowledge of their paternity when that information does exist carries the same anti-dad prejudice into the present day.

Link to Article:
http://mensnewsdaily.com/glennsacks/2009/12/19/ontario-opens-its-old-adoption-records-surprise-no-dads/

Posted on December 29, 2009 at 8:43 pm, by admin

Taking babies from mothers in prison punishes the children

By Linda Korbin / straight.com

The Alouette Correctional Centre, located in the Fraser Valley, is the only separate women’s prison in B.C. and is where more than 150 women are serving time or awaiting trial. Most have been jailed for relatively minor offences, and three-quarters of them serve sentences of less than three months. Until last year, the Alouette Mother-Baby program provided an option for new mothers to keep their babies with them until their release from custody. Between 2004 and 2008, 12 women gave birth and nine chose to keep their babies with them. When the province made the decision to close the Mother-Baby program in 2008, people predictably lined up on both sides.

Those in support of the program cited the importance of early maternal attachment, the deleterious consequences of sending a baby into the foster care system, and the evidence of improved morale and wellbeing among the mothers, which resulted in better outcomes for them and their children. Those against the resumption of the program referred to the need for these women to accept the consequences of their behavior, including the penalty of losing their children. After all, why should an innocent baby have to start life in jail?

So who is being “punished” by the cancellation of the program? The experts on early childhood development will tell you unequivocally it is the children. We know that separating babies from their mothers can lead to long-term problems for children, from attachment issues to emotional disorders. Social workers see these children down the road—as do psychologists, physicians, and corrections officers. They are the kids who have been shuffled between friends and relatives, moved into foster care, and are often “lost” to their mothers who leave prison and find themselves without the financial or emotional supports to regain custody. This doesn’t have to be.

The first assumption that must be challenged is whether a new mother needs to be incarcerated at all. Given the minor nature of the crime that brought them to Alouette, are there other options for them? The Elizabeth Fry Society, which has for 65 years worked with women and youth involved in the criminal justice system, is working with B.C. Corrections to seek out alternatives that would allow mothers to serve their sentence in the community and continue to raise their child. Such alternatives would benefit not only new mothers, but mothers of older children. According to Elizabeth Fry, two-thirds of jailed women are mothers and two-thirds are the sole caregiver to their child. Contrast this with incarcerated fathers. Few are the sole caregivers—a recent U.S. study reported that 90 percent of children whose fathers were incarcerated lived with their mothers.

Every day babies are born to mothers living in precarious circumstances—women who are living in poverty, who are victims of abuse, who are misusing drugs and alcohol, who are involved in crime—and whose babies face a rocky future.

Removing these babies from their mothers would seem, at first glance, the “right” thing to do. However, our experience tells us otherwise. A more effective response is to create conditions that enable mothers to keep their children and raise them in a safe and healthy environment.

In our less than perfect world, approaches rooted in reality and based on the philosophy of harm reduction are having the most success. One example is the work being done with pregnant women struggling with addiction. The integrated programs of the Sheway maternity clinic in Vancouver’s Downtown eastside and the FIR (Families in Recovery) Square at B.C. Women’s Hospital have been successful in improving the health status of newborns, decreasing substance use by mothers, and allowing more mothers to go home safely with their babies. Consulting physician Dr. Ron Abrahams notes that “the babies and moms that come through this program are demonstrating to us, through our long-term followup, that given the opportunity to bond together in the newborn period, they do indeed go on to be healthy and emotionally stable”.

The Mother-Baby program at the Alouette Correctional Centre is also based on harm reduction principles. Social workers know that the best start a newborn can have is by bonding with its mother. The B.C. Association of Social Workers strongly supports the reinstatement of this program.

Linda Korbin is the executive director of the B.C. Association of Social Workers

Link to article:

http://www.straight.com/article-206120/linda-korbin-taking-babies-mothers-prison-punishes-children

Posted on December 17, 2009 at 4:11 pm, by admin

First mothers; Being reunited has brought with it both indescribable happiness and terrible grief

Lara Bradley/The Sudbury Star
Lifestyles – Monday, November 20, 2006

Editor’s note: This is the second part of the First Mothers. The first part ran last Monday.

A reunion with their babies was a long time in coming.

Both Esther Tardif and Mary (she didn’t want to give her name on the grounds that it would hurt her son’s adoptive family) surrendered their sons up for adoption during the late 1960s. Like most of the unwed pregnant women of the time, it was never a matter of making a real decision to give up their children. Without any form of government financial assistance or support from their families, they were steered firmly into doing the “right thing” by social workers as well as by those who ran homes for unwed mothers. They were told that if they really loved their babies they would do what was best for the child.

Both women did go on to marry. Mary had three children and Tardif a daughter with the father of her son. Despite what social workers had told them about forgetting their babies, that was an impossibility. Birthdays of the babies they had lost were times of great personal sorrow. A sadness they couldn’t really share with others so ingrained was the idea this was to be kept secret.

In the intervening years they would search the faces of children and then adults for a looking for a resemblance.

“The constant looking can drive you crazy,” said Tardif. “You have to stop after a while.”

In 1989, Tardif found out about the Adoption Discloser Register. Immediately she registered her name, hoping her son would one day seek her out.

“I waited for 12 years,” she said.

“I sat there for 19 years. I prayed everyday he would find me,” said Mary, who had registered in the early 1980s.

Both of their sons were 35 years old, with families of their own, when they went looking for their first mothers.

When Mary found out that her son wanted to meet with her, “the shock was so great I literally fell down weeping.” She had broken the news to her older children already that she surrendered a child for adoption as a 16 year old. But now Mary had to tell her youngest. He fell back on his bed when he heard the news. She worried that her children would hate her. They didn’t.

Both women describe their reunions with the sons they had lost at the happiest moment of their lives. Their greatest fear, that their sons would hate them, was not realized and they are slowly building relationships with their first borns and their families.

“I wanted my son in my life,” said Tardif.

Both count themselves fortunate their children were adopted into such good homes.

“It’s a blessing to know that he was adopted into such a warm and loving family,” Tardif said.

The adopted mother of her son gave Tardif photos of him at different ages. Now mounted in chronological sequence, it’s clear the pictures are more precious than gold to her.

Mary also has photos of herself with her son. There’s no denying the resemblance – with only 16 years between them, they look more like brother and sister.

The mothers talk about other similarities that run deeper that bone structure -shared gestures, interests and even character traits they’ve noticed in their sons.

But it’s not quite been the ride into the sunset that you might imagine. Meeting the baby they last saw through the nursery window, now a tall, handsome man has brought with it both indescribable happiness and terrible grief.

“We realized the extent of our loss,” said Tardif.

“I cried for five months. Day and night,” said Mary.

“It’s the most incredible of emotions. All that wait and worrying,” Tardif said.

For about two years following her reunification Mary couldn’t concentrate on work; at times it felt like almost split in two, like part of her was floating above people’s heads. At one point, distraught she went to the Children’s Aid Society looking for counselling. This was the organization that had urged her to put her child up for adoption. But it had no help for her now.

The Sudbury Adoption Support Group has provided to cope with the grief and this dizzying sense of loss. They wish that Sudbury had counsellors who specialize in adoption issues and reunions.

Christine Lachaine is a certified adoption counsellor specializing in adoption issues, as well as reunions.

Unfortunately, she’s based out of Ottawa. A psychotherapist, she went on to get further training on Carlini Institute, based out of B.C. on adoption issues. There are not many in her field and not much available in the way of research on the trauma mothers experience when giving up a child to adoption.

Lachaine explained that psychology students such as herself receive about 7.95 minutes of instruction on adoption issues compared to 76.82 minutes on schizophrenia. And yet adoption touches the lives of so many.

An adoptee herself, Lachaine finds it “mind blowing” that there is so little specialized help for those involved in the adoption triangle.

Many of the mothers she’s counselled are in a state of post-traumatic stress.

“A lot of it has to do with the secrecy, of having repressed so much,” she said. “It’s disenfranchised grief. Not being able to publicly mourn.”

Remember, these mothers were told to return home and tell no one. Pretend it didn’t happen.

They talk to her about the sensation of “splitting themselves” into two of experiencing grief, anger, guilt, depression and having this horrible “empty feeling.”

Many of the women she’s counselled never had any other children “as a way of punishing themselves,” she said.

Consider too that for many of the women, their families turned on them at what represented their greatest moment of need; a fundamental betrayal of trust from which many don’t recover.

“It destroys them,” Lachaine said.

The idea that the women shouldn’t be allowed to see or hold their infants came from a notion of not allowing bonding to take place.

“We now know that bonding starts in utero, that you can’t break that bond,” she said.

Some of the women were tricked into giving up their babies. They signed papers they thought gave them access to counselling but they were really signing away their children. Others lost their babies in what turned out to be black market adoptions.

“There needs to be more awareness and more education on these issues,” she said. “These people are living a life of trauma and they need help.”

BILL 183

A CHANGING SOCIAL SITUATION

SOURCES OF HELP

The Adoption Information Disclosure Act, 2005, was passed last year, but will take nearly another year to be fully implemented. The act will allow more open access to adoption records for adult adoptees and birth parents. The changes will be applied retroactively and apply to all adoptees whose adoptions were registered in Ontario. It will allow:

An adopted person who is 18 years old or older to obtain a copy of their original birth record and adoption order. The adoptee would be able to learn their original name at birth. These documents may also provide identifying information about birth parents.

A birth parent to obtain the information contained in the birth registration and the adoption order of the child they gave up for adoption, once that child reaches 19 years of age. These documents may provide identifying information on the adoptee including their name after adoption. Any information about the adoptive parents would be removed.

A birth parent or adoptee who does not wish to be contacted to put a “no contact” notice on their record. The individual requesting the “no contact” notice would be asked to voluntarily provide family and medical history and a brief statement about his or her reasons for filing a “no contact” notice.

Sanctions for violation of a “no contact” notice up to $50,000 for an individual or up to $250,000 for a corporation.

Birth parents and adoptees to apply to the Child and Family Services Review Board to prevent disclosure of identifying information where there are concerns for personal safety.

Birth control: The sale of contraception became legal in Canada in 1969. However, as historian Doug Owram noted: “gaining access to the Pill in the face of medical practitioners was, in some communities, more difficult than buying LSD.”

Abortion: That same year, the Criminal Code of Canada was amended to allow therapeutic abortions.

Financial support: In 1969 Quebec instituted social aid to mothers. Soon after each province followed suit.

Social mores: By the mid-1970s they weren’t being called unwed mothers anymore but rather “single mothers.”

Fewer couples available: There were fewer couples in the 25-40 year age range because of the low birthrate during the Great Depression of the 1930s. This caused the social work community to rethink its push for adoption.

Changing statistics: In Ontario maternity homes, 45-75 per cent of the residents decided to keep their babies in 1976, compared to 10-25 per cent a decade earlier. By 1982, 84 per cent of unmarried girls in Canada were leaving the hospitals with their babies.

Posted on December 17, 2009 at 4:09 pm, by admin

First Mothers

The emotional toil and punishment young girls went through when they became pregnant

By Lara Bradley/The Sudbury Star
Lifestyles – Monday, November 13, 2006

They never “gave up” their babies. They surrendered them.

Between the two expressions is a gaping hole of difference.

November is adoption awareness month. For birth mothers, or first mothers as many preferred to be called, who surrendered their children during a time when unwed mothers were automatically assumed to be unfit mothers, it’s a time to reflect on their loss.

For most of the women, it was never a matter of making the decision to give up their children. Without any form of government financial assistance or support from their families, they were steered firmly into doing the “right thing” by social workers, as well as by those who ran homes for unwed mothers.

“There were no options,” said Esther Tardif. “If there was welfare, I didn’t know about it.”

“That I gave him up is a fraud,” said Mary. “I didn’t give him up. People don’t understand the heartache.”

Tardif and Mary (she didn’t want to give her name on the grounds that it would hurt her son’s adoptive family) sat down with The Sudbury Star to talk about adoption issues. While wanting to present a positive story on reunions that will potentially become possible when Bill 183 is fully implemented next year, as well as the existence of the Sudbury Adoption Support Group, their own stories unfolded bit by bit. What the women experienced in the late 1960s can not ever be characterized as positive.

“We are all told: We would forget our babies. If we truly loved them, then we would give them up for adoption. Our next child would replace our first. How any woman could tell that to another, I’ll never know,” said Mary.

If they kept their child, they were reminded that “no man would ever want us,” said Mary.

Social workers also drove home the idea the child, born out of wedlock, would be stigmatized in the community, called names. Just thinking about those names still causes the women such pain.

“You were made to feel such shame,” she said.

“It was such a permanent solution for a temporary problem,” Tardif said.

The women never forgot their babies and other children they bore, although loved and treasured, didn’t replace the one they had lost. They still worried and yearned for that first born child.

“Us first moms didn’t ever get over the loss of our children to adoption – just learned to cope with it,” said Tariff.

Tardif came to Sudbury as a teenager to learn how to be an X-ray technologist. From a big farming family a couple hours away, she described herself as “really naive, really sheltered.”

She became pregnant in 1968. That was the end of her studies. When her situation became apparent, Tardif was quickly shown the door.

“There was such a stigma to it,” she said. “Can you imagine that now?”

Because she lived so far away from home there was no need to send her away to a home for unwed mothers. Instead she kept to herself, alone in her apartment for months.

After she had the baby, she was denied seeing him.

“I had for beg for a peek,” she said.

Tardif found out later that he spent three weeks in foster care before adoptive parents were found for him.

“Once we signed, the door was slammed shut,” said Tardif.

Because she was only 19 when she had the baby, her parents also had to sign documents with the Children’s Aid Society. They told her sisters, when they left home, not to do as Esther had done.

Another unbearable moment came at the court-house.

“The Crown attorney was very cruel,” she said. “He told me: ‘I bet any money you’re going to be here in a year.’ ”

There was no question of Tardif returning to her family after the baby was born. Out of funds, she had to quickly look for work.

unwed mothers

The Second World War had been a kinder time for those who bore children out of wedlock with both jobs and daycare available to women. But when the men returned, the women went back to the home and to the social expectations of their gender. Where society might have turned a blind eye to a pregnant woman whose “husband” had been killed in battle, by the 1950s took a very harsh view of pregnancy out of wedlock. In Gone to An Aunt’s, author Anne Petrie chronicles her own experience and that of other girls who surrendered their children, as well as the climate of the times.

“Unwed mothers should be punished and they should be punished by taking their children away.” said Dr. Marion Hilliard of Women’s College Hospital, in a Daily Telegraph article of November 1956.

Trouble was a lot of sex, unprotected sex, was going on. In 1953, Alfred Kinsey discovered that half of unmarried white middle class women (the group he studied) had had premarital sex. However, birth control was only available to the married.

“You had to show your marriage licence to your doctor,” said Tardif. Where in the past, some evangelical groups had tried to support husband-less mothers, beginning in the mid-1950s there was a strong push to get these women to give their babies up for adoption. While theoretically women were given a choice, it was made clear there was really only one answer.

As review of maternity homes in Metropolitan Toronto, in 1960, reiterated this position:

“Social workers and others serving unmarried mothers have arrived, as a result of experience, at the conviction that adoption is the best plan for most illegitimate children as well as for most unmarried mothers.”

There was also a ready supply of couples eager to take these children.

In Unmarried Mothers (1961), sociologist Clark Vincent commented on an emerging pattern:

“We predict that if the demand for adoptable infants continues to exceed the supply … unwed mothers will be ‘punished’ by having their children taken from them right after birth. A policy like this would not be … labeled explicitly as ‘punishment’ … it would be implemented through such labels … as ’scientific findings’, ‘the best interests of the child’, ‘rehabilitation of the unwed mother.’ ”

sent away

Mary was 16 years old when she became pregnant in 1967. Her boyfriend had been pressuring her for months to have sex before she gave in. She became pregnant after the first time.

“A lot of men simply walked away. That’s what happened with me. It was all the girl’s responsibility,” she said.

Her family sent her away to a home for unwed mothers in Scarborough and then later to stay with another family member. Like many young women of her generation, she disappeared for a year.

“I was sent away so nobody would know. Everybody in the town knew,” she said.

Mary was told she had shamed her family, shamed her community and shamed her church. One of the things that continues to trouble her was the assumption that everyone else’s feelings were so much more important than her own. She was the invisible one in this equation.

“We couldn’t go to high school. It was like we were abandoned by society,” she said.

Mary remembers that two girls did decide to keep their babies. The other girls were told not to talk to them because they had made such a selfish decision.

When the pregnant unwed women went into labour they were kept separate from the married women in the hospital.

“We were told we would upset the married women,” she said.

Mary kept silent as she struggled with labour, left alone in a small room. She did cry out when minutes after getting birth the nurse began to roughly manipulate her to get the after-birth out.

“‘You’re hurting me,’ I told her. She punched me in the stomach as hard as she could and then leaned in close. Real quiet she said: ‘You’re getting the pain you deserve.’ ”

After begging and begging, she briefly got to hold her son.

“Just think of the power the doctors and nurses and social workers had over you,” she said. “Holding my son is something I’ll never forget.”

Days later she walked out of the hospital back to the home for unwed mothers. While she walked she begged God to take her. She remember getting inside, planting herself by the window.

“I watched to see who would take my baby. I’ve been watching ever since.”

She returned home a zombie.

“There was no support, no counselling. Society was cruel and inhumane. No one ever spoke to you about your loss,” Mary said.

SUPPORT

Posted on December 17, 2009 at 4:04 pm, by admin