Recently in Adoption News Category

The rise of corporeal punishment theory is a troubling cultural phenomenon which really takes us back to the dark ages of unquestioned rule by authority. The link between spanking and conservative Christianity is insulting to the vast majority of believers who do not condone religiously inspired child abuse. It also creates a strange affinity between Catholicism—where child sex abuse has run rampant for years—and evangelicalism—where beating children has seemingly become the God-given norm; the Catholics get the sex and the Evangelicals get the hide. Where can a godly child find religion without loosing their heart and soul?

This is not to say that only Catholics and only Evangelicals have institutionalized child abuse. Anywhere children gather, pedophiles and child molesters are sure to roam. This should come as no secret to anyone. It is the indoctrination of these beliefs, however, which is most disturbing.

Last year, the Pope stated in his Christmas address to cardinals that “in the 1970’s pedophilia was theorized [by the church] as something fully in conformity with man and even with children.”

At first I considered this an unbelievable and outrageous statement so far beyond the norm and offered as an absurd justification for child sex abuse. Now I’m not so sure.

On Sunday, the New York Times ran a story entitled Preaching Virtue of Spanking, Even as Deaths Fuel Debate. The piece reviews the teachings of Michael Pearl, an evangelical Christian minister whose fast selling publications advocate systematic use of “the rod” to teach toddlers to submit to authority. The methods, seen as common sense by some grateful parents and as horrific by others, are modeled, Mr. Pearl is fond of saying, on “the same principles the Amish use to train their stubborn mules.”

According to the New York Times:

Debate over the Pearls’ teachings, first seen on Christian Web sites, gained new intensity after the death of a third child, all allegedly at the hands of parents who kept the Pearls’ book, “To Train Up a Child,” in their homes. On Sept. 29, the parents were charged with homicide by abuse.

More than 670,000 copies of the Pearls’ self-published book are in circulation, and it is especially popular among Christian home-schoolers, who praise it in their magazines and on their Web sites. The Pearls provide instructions on using a switch from as early as six months to discourage misbehavior and describe how to make use of implements for hitting on the arms, legs or back, including a quarter-inch flexible plumbing line that, Mr. Pearl notes, “can be rolled up and carried in your pocket.”

The furor in part reflects societal disagreements over corporal punishment, which conservative Christians say is called for in the Bible and which many Americans consider reasonable up to a point, even as many parents and pediatricians reject it. The issue flared recently when a video was posted online of a Texas judge whipping his daughter.

Sadly, adopted children are frequently fatal victims of the Pearls’ teachings. The New York Times highlights three such cases. There are undoubtedly many more.

Which brings me back to the Pope. If taken at face value and believed as absolute truth, misguided ill-intentioned “theories” (especially those theories which are backed by G-d) can have devastating consequences for children. Add to the mix internationally adopted children and pathological parents, and the result is often abuse, exploitation and death.

The belief, so frankly expressed by the Pope, that abuse is somehow “natural” or that “it’s good for them,” is a classic method of normalizing and rationalizing physical and sexual abuse. This is exactly how pedophiles and child molesters groom their victims. These dogmatic beliefs—whether Catholic, Evangelical or pedophilogical—are one in the same; justification and rationalization of systematic child abuse and exploitation.

Just ask Rita Swan, whose pioneering work to eliminate religion-based medical neglect (which often leads to death), has brought her into conflict with the powerful but marginal Christian Science religion. Rita, a former Christian Science adherent, founded CHILD after she lost her own only child to a routine illness which Christian Science prayers failed to cure.

Why is it acceptable to be easily outraged by a Pedophile’s Guide to Love and Pleasure while To Train Up a Child engenders thoughtful analysis and scholarly debate (even legal justification like this "academic" article in the Akron Law Review). After all, both were for sale on Amazon along with the sexually graphic book by Peter Sotos celebrating Masha Allen’s abuse and exploitation as the world’s first child porn star.

There are dozens of Facebook groups for parents who "spank," along with pictures and techniques. There are many more sites, both overt and covert, offering how-tos on child sex abuse and child pornography.

In today’s op-ed entitled The Molester Next Door, columnist Frank Bruni writes:

The longest, most exhaustively researched article I ever wrote for a newspaper or magazine was about a child molester who had sexually abused a little boy living down the street. The abuse went on for more than two years, beginning when the boy was 10.

This molester had a job. A house. A wife. Two kids of his own. And he gained access to his victim not through brute force but through patience, play and gifts: help with his homework, computer games, a new bike. To neighborhood observers, including the victim’s parents, the molester’s attentiveness passed for kindness, at least for a while. A molester’s behavior very often does.

This is something that has come up repeatedly over decades—I wrote that article back in 1991, for The Detroit Free Press—but that remains tough to accept: the predator to watch out for is less likely to don a trench coat and lurk behind a bush than to wear a clerical collar and stand near the altar or to hold a stopwatch and walk the sidelines. And he (or, for that matter, she) works with children as a function of being drawn to them for reasons beyond their welfare.

Amen Frank Bruni. Of course we know this troubling fact (at least if you’ve been reading this blog for any period of time), but over and over again we choose to ignore it. It is the same thinking that allows us to accept what the Pope revealed or what the Pearls espouse. Write it down and it has power. Explain it away and people accept it. Enshrine it in a belief system and it’s unstoppable.

Without lawyers they can count on (at least in Colorado), peers they can turn to (at least in school), and fair and timely redress in the criminal court system (restitution denied), all children—and especially child victims—face an uncertain fate and treacherous future. Maybe the little girl with the knife has the right idea after all. Now all she needs is someone like the NRA to come to her rescue!

One of the many things I lobbied for in Washington, DC was a refundable adoption tax credit aimed specifically at foster care adoption. It was opposed for many years as being "too expensive" and a "risky proposition" which would lead to the elimination of the non-refundable tax credit for foreign adoptions claimed by wealthy white adoptive parents.

Among the many provisions of the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (P.L. 111-148) of 2010 was an expansion of the tax credit for adopting parents. A new factsheet from the Internal Revenue Service, Six Things to Know About the Expanded Adoption Tax Credit, provides details about the necessary steps for adoptive parents to take to claim the tax credit.

P.L. 111-148 increased the tax credit from $10,000 to as much as $13,170. In addition, the credit, which was originally set to expire at the end of 2010, was extended through the end of 2011. Another new provision finally allows refunds when the tax credit results in a negative balance in taxes owed for the year; previously the credit was nonrefundable.

The factsheet also lists the forms and documentation that are required to process a claim for the credit. Links to an Adoption Benefits FAQs, the required form, and instructions are included. There also are links to short videos in English and Spanish that provide an overview of the new credit.

The factsheet is available here on the IRS website.

Today's New York Times discusses the use of adoption as an act of war in Argentina during the dictatorship of the 1970s when the nation’s top military leaders engaged in a systematic plan to steal babies from perceived enemies of the government.

BUENOS AIRES — Victoria Montenegro recalls a childhood filled with chilling dinnertime discussions. Lt. Col. Hernán Tetzlaff, the head of the family, would recount military operations he had taken part in where “subversives” had been tortured or killed. The discussions often ended with his “slamming his gun on the table,” she said.

It took an incessant search by a human rights group, a DNA match and almost a decade of overcoming denial for Ms. Montenegro, 35, to realize that Colonel Tetzlaff was, in fact, not her father — nor the hero he portrayed himself to be.

Instead, he was the man responsible for murdering her real parents and illegally taking her as his own child, she said.

He confessed to her what he had done in 2000, Ms. Montenegro said. But it was not until she testified at a trial here last spring that she finally came to grips with her past, shedding once and for all the name that Colonel Tetzlaff and his wife had given her — María Sol — after falsifying her birth records.

The trial, in the final phase of hearing testimony, could prove for the first time that the nation’s top military leaders engaged in a systematic plan to steal babies from perceived enemies of the government.

In a new twist to an old adage, "if you can't kill them, adopt them!" Unfortunately for many of these adopted children, their parents were killed and their identities destroyed.

Read the entire story here on the New York Times website.

From today's New York Times, a followup to their August article on international adoption trafficking.

But many parents saw China as the cleanest of international adoption choices. Its population-control policy, which limited many families to one child, drove couples to abandon subsequent children or to give up daughters in hopes of bearing sons to inherit their property and take care of them in old age. China had what adoptive parents in America wanted: a supply of healthy children in need of families.

As Mr. Mayer reasoned, “If anything, the number of children needing an adoptive home was so huge that it outstripped the number of people who could ever come.”

This narrative was first challenged in 2005, when Chinese and foreign news media reported that government officials and employees of an orphanage in Hunan had sold at least 100 children to other orphanages, which provided them to foreign adoptive parents.

Mr. Mayer was not aware of this report or the few others that followed. Though he knew many other adoptive families, and was active in a group called Families With Children From China — Greater New York, no one had ever talked about abduction or baby-selling.

“I didn’t even think that existed in China,” he said.

Again he paused.

“This comes up and you say, holy cow, it’s even more complicated than you thought.”

Read the entire article here.

I first wrote about the disturbing case of adoptive parent Judith Leekin back in 2008. Now new details of that case are emerging which share shocking similarities to Masha Allen's second adoption. According to the New York Times:

More than 30 years ago, a Queens foster mother was investigated and cited for scalding a boy in her care. But despite that finding, the city did nothing in the decades that followed to prevent the woman, Judith Leekin, from carrying out one of the most brazen and disturbing child welfare schemes in recent memory.

The failure of child welfare officials to bar Ms. Leekin from the system after that 1980 episode is one of the most striking revelations in new court reports filed in a Brooklyn lawsuit. Ms. Leekin was arrested in 2007; the authorities determined she had adopted 11 disabled New York foster children using aliases, then moved to Florida, where she subjected them to years of abuse — all the while collecting $1.68 million in subsidies from New York City until 2007.

The 1980 episode, for example, occurred at Ms. Leekin’s home on 226th Street in Laurelton, Queens, the reports show. When Ms. Leekin later adopted 11 children under four aliases over an eight-year period, she listed the same address; it was never cross-checked, the reports say.

The documents include a deposition by Ms. Leekin, taken in a Fort Lauderdale prison, in which she suggests a possible motive for her use of false identities: her concern that she would be linked to the 1980 abuse episode.

In court documents, they depict Ms. Leekin as a sophisticated serial criminal whose extraordinary scheme fooled varied professionals and could not have been foreseen or detected, given the practices and capabilities of the time.

In a jailhouse deposition in October, she came across as defensive and combative as she admitted hitting children as punishment, the 184-page transcript shows. She acknowledged being the subject of the early abuse report, and conceded she “probably” later used aliases out of concern that the earlier episode would have otherwise surfaced.

But she said that as she began adopting children under aliases — “Anne Marie Williams,” “Cheryl Graham,” “Michelle Wells” and “Eastlyn Giraud” — she was never asked for her passport, birth certificate or any other form of identification.

“Yes, I did some wrong things, sir, but they didn’t do their investigation,” she said, adding she had been made “a scapegoat.”

“They had references. Did they check out the references? No,” Ms. Leekin said. “You convicted me. You sentenced me. And now you want to come here to get a deposition from me, for what? The city has to take some kind of responsibility.”

Throughout the process, Ms. Leekin offered conflicting or false responses when asked about her employment history, income, education, assets and religion.

Mr. Safarik, the other plaintiff’s expert, wrote: “Had the defendants simply verified the self-reported information, her lies would have been uncovered.”

Read the entire story here.

From today's New York Times:

The abduction of children is a continuing problem in China, where a lingering preference for boys coupled with strict controls on the number of births have helped create a lucrative black market in children. Just last week, the police announced that they had rescued 89 babies from child traffickers, and the deputy director of the Public Security Ministry assailed what he called the practice of “buying and selling children in this country.”

But parents in Longhui say that in their case, it was local government officials who treated babies as a source of revenue, routinely imposing fines of $1,000 or more — five times as much as an average local family’s yearly income. If parents could not pay the fines, the babies were illegally taken from their families and often put up for adoption by foreigners, another big source of revenue.

The powers handed to local officials under national family planning regulations remain excessive and ripe for exploitation.

“The larger issue is that the one-child policy is so extreme that it emboldened local officials to act so inhumanely,” said Wang Feng, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution who directs the Brookings-Tsinghua Center for Public Policy in Beijing.

The scandal also has renewed questions about whether Americans and other foreigners have adopted Chinese children who were falsely depicted as abandoned or orphaned. At least one American adoption agency organized adoptions from the government-run Shaoyang orphanage.

Lillian Zhang, the director of China Adoption With Love, based in Boston, said by telephone last month that the agency had found adoptive parents in 2006 for six Shaoyang children — all girls, all renamed Shao, after the city. The Chinese authorities certified in each case that the child was eligible for adoption, she said, and her agency cannot now independently investigate their backgrounds without a specific request backed by evidence.

“I’m an adoption agency, not a policeman,” Ms. Zhang said.

The Shaoyang welfare agency’s orphanage is required to post a notice of each newly received child for 60 days in Hunan Daily, a newspaper delivered only to subscribers in Longhui County. Unclaimed children are renamed with the surname Shao and approved for adoption. Foreign parents who adopt must donate about $5,400 to the orphanage.

Reports that family planning officials stole children, beat parents, forcibly sterilized mothers and destroyed families’ homes sowed a quiet terror through parts of Longhui County in the first half of the past decade. The casualties of that terror remain suffused with heartbreak and rage years later.

Read the entire story here.

The IRS recently posted new language regarding eligibility for adoption assistance or subsidy agreements. The IRS clarified the documentation required for claiming the Federal Adoption Tax Credit for special needs adoptions. The official language indicates that Adoption Assistance or Subsidy Agreements are acceptable documentation of special needs. Visit the IRS website to learn more.

According to Voice for Adoption, the Federal Adoption Tax Credit is now refundable. The Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (Public Law 111-148) made significant, short term, changes to the adoption tax credit. The credit per-child is now $13,170 for adoptions finalized in 2010. It also made the tax credit refundable. This means that families can claim a refund even if they owe no taxes. Families who adopt a child with special needs from foster care can claim the credit without needing to incur or document expenses. Visit VOA's website for further information.

Using a strategy pioneered by my law firm in this 2006 lawsuit against JCIS and NCFA-certified World Child International Adoption Agency, five couples recently filed a federal Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organization (RICO) claim against Main Street Adoption Services, based in (where else - the epicenter of bad adoptions) Lancaster, Pennsylvania.

The plaintiffs claim the international adoption agency that promised each a baby from Guatemala scammed them in a "bait and switch" scheme. They accuse the agency and three individuals of conspiring with one another "for the illegal purpose of committing fraudulent adoptions through a bait and switch scheme, an adoption scheme that offered illusory promises."

Between 2007 and 2008, the prospective parents spent up to $25,000 apiece for adoptions that were never finalized completed. The couples suffered humiliation, outrage, indignation, sleepless nights, and severe emotional distress.

In each case, the agency promised the couples a Guatemalan child and in each case, things went wrong even after the couples traveled to Guatemala to meet the children.

The suit demands the adoption agency pay each couple triple the amount of their losses as well as cover court costs and damages of more than $75,000.

The attorney representing the adoptive parents is a well-known champion of using RICO in fraudulent adoption cases, Joni M. Fixel of Okemos, Michigan.

A copy of the complaint is here.

The AP reported here that "gay rights groups are urging Illinois lawmakers not to let Catholic adoption agencies turn away gay couples," arguing "agencies that get state money to care for children should not be allowed to reject anyone who would be a good parent." When Illinois' gay civil unions law takes effect next month, Catholic adoption agencies "may face lawsuits or lose state funding" if they turn away gay couples. Groups including The Civil Rights Agenda and Equality Illinois are pushing for a law allowing "them to refuse to place children with gay couples on religious grounds."

After his toilet seat cover and pet rock ventures failed, Long Island attorney Kevin Cohen turned to another get rich quick business - adoptions. Cohen is accused of stealing $323,750 from 12 families and trying to take money from another family through a scheme involving non-existent birth mothers, forged documents and the impersonation of a bank employee and a personal reference.

While Cohen was passionate about adoption, as an adoptee himself, "his true passion was money," said Nassau County Assistant District Attorney Andrew Garbarino who filed a 69 count indictment against the jailed former attorney.

Garbarino described the process by which he said Cohen strung along couples desperate to adopt a child.

"Every piece of information he offered to clients was a piece of bait," the prosecutor said.

Cohen would always find clients through referrals from friends or relatives, which, Garbarino said, gave him instant credibility. He told clients he only wanted "a modest fee" because he was planning to get out of adoption law, but he said he was putting money for birth mothers' health expenses in escrow accounts, according to Garbarino.

He forged test results and sonograms to lead clients along, working at the Roslyn Public Library to avoid having evidence on his computer hard drive, Garbarino said.

When Cohen passed along test results, the names of the non-existent birth mothers were redacted ostensibly because of privacy laws. As the supposed due date approached, Cohen would say the date had been pushed back and, finally, that the mother had backed out, the prosecutor said.

He would play on clients' emotions, for instance, telling a gay couple that the birth mother wanted gay parents for her child, the prosecutor said. Garbarino added that Cohen even resorted to impersonation, once posing as a bank employee and once as a reference for himself.

Sounds like Jeannene Smith and Families Thru International Adoption has some competition. Unlike Smith and her cohorts, Cohen is facing 15 years in prison.

Excerpts from this article tell it all:

On Jan. 12, a devastating earthquake toppled Haiti’s capital and set off an international adoption bonanza in which some safeguards meant to protect children were ignored.

Leading the way was the Obama administration, which responded to the crisis, and to the pleas of prospective adoptive parents and the lawmakers assisting them, by lifting visa requirements for children in the process of being adopted by Americans.

Although initially planned as a short-term, small-scale evacuation, the rescue effort quickly evolved into a baby lift unlike anything since the Vietnam War. It went on for months; fell briefly under the cloud of scandal involving 10 Baptist missionaries who improperly took custody of 33 children; ignited tensions between the United States and child protection organizations; and swept up about 1,150 Haitian children, more than were adopted by American families in the previous three years, according to interviews with government officials, adoption agencies and child advocacy groups.

Under a sparingly used immigration program, called humanitarian parole, adoptions were expedited regardless of whether children were in peril, and without the screening required to make sure they had not been improperly separated from their relatives or placed in homes that could not adequately care for them.

Some Haitian orphanages were nearly emptied, even though they had not been affected by the quake or licensed to handle adoptions. Children were released without legal documents showing they were orphans and without regard for evidence suggesting fraud. In at least one case, two siblings were evacuated even though American authorities had determined through DNA tests that the man who had given them to an orphanage was not a relative.

In other cases, children were given to families who had not been screened or to families who no longer wanted them.

The results are playing out across the country. At least 12 children, brought here without being formally matched with new families, have spent months in a Pennsylvania juvenile care center while Red Cross officials try to determine their fate. An unknown number of children whose prospective parents have backed out of their adoptions are in foster care. While the authorities said they knew of only a handful of such cases, adoption agents said they had heard about as many as 20, including that of an 8-year-old girl who was bounced from an orphanage in Haiti to a home in Ithaca, N.Y., to a juvenile care center in Queens after the psychologist who had petitioned to adopt her decided she could not raise a young child.

Dozens of children, approaching the age of 16 or older, are too old to win legal permanent status as adoptees, prompting lawmakers in Congress to consider raising the age limit to 18.

Meanwhile, other children face years of legal limbo because they have arrived with so little proof of who they are, how they got here and why they have been placed for adoption that state courts are balking at completing their adoptions.

All I can say is THANK GOD for the white man adopting all them colored babies. The white man's burden sure hasn't gotten any easier after all these years. When will the world finally understand.

Read the entire article here one the New York Times website.

This unusual international adoption case, which was recently decided by New York's highest court, has far-reaching implications for current and future best-practices as well as important policy implications. In L.M.B. v. E.R.J., 2010 NY Slip Op 1345; 14 N.Y.3d 100 (February 16, 2010), the New York Court of Appeals was called upon to untangle a New York adoption by ERJ (mother) and a Cambodian adoption by LMB (father). Each adoptive parent, who were never married to one another, claimed to be the child's only legal parent.

The child, Doe, was found abandoned in Cambodia and brought to New York by ERJ for medical treatment. Subsequently ERJ and her boyfriend, LMB, decided that they would both adopt Doe. Both ERJ and LMB erroneously believed that Cambodian children could not be adopted in the United States. It was decided that LMB (who because he had been born in Trinidad and could reclaim Trinidadian citizenship) would adopt Doe in Trinidad and Tobago. Once that adoption was finalized, ERJ would adopt Doe in New York.

As part of this plan, Cambodia issued a “document” to LMB in June 2004 which, according to the translation submitted by LMB, was entitled “ADOPTION CERTIFICATE” and stated that LMB “is allowed to adopt” Doe. The Trinidadian adoption plan never materialized. ERJ then decided she could adopt Doe in New York. LMB asked Cambodia to “relinquish” the permission he was given to adopt Doe and ERJ obtained a “certificate” like the one which was originally given to LMB.

In January 2006, ERJ filed a petition to adopt Doe in New York but did not give LMB notice of the adoption.This adoption was granted in June 2006. In August 2006, LMB discovered this adoption and moved to vacate. In the meantime the Cambodian government issued documents affirming ERJ's right to adopt and nullifying LMB's.

The lower court declared the New York adoption invalid because the 2004 Cambodian action was actually an adoption of Doe by LMB, not just permission to adopt. Based on the facts and expert testimony, the court agreed with LMB that he was Doe's father and that his parental rights had never been relinquished or extinguished. Therefore, ERJ could not adopt Doe in New York without notice to and consent from LMB.

On appeal, ERJ argued that New York should not give comity to the Cambodian adoption and claimed that LMB was not Doe's father under New York law. The Court of Appeals explained that foreign adoptions are generally recognized unless there are truly compelling reasons not to, like cases in which “enforcement . . . is shocking to the prevailing moral sense.” Because there were no compelling reasons not to recognize his Cambodian adoption of Doe, LMB's adoption would be recognized by New York.

Interestingly, the Court of Appeals raised an argument ERJ failed to make. In 2004, Doe and LMB were living in New York, not Cambodia, and Doe had very little, if any, prospect of ever returning to Cambodia. Thus, in 2004 New York had as much legal interest in who should adopt Doe as Cambodia. ERJ's fatal error was ignoring the premise that Cambodia's position on the status of it own citizen was at least entitled to some recognition in New York.

Once the Cambodian adoption was given effect however, LMB's subsequent surrender of his parental rights was governed by New York, not Cambodian law. Since LBM's surrender of his parental rights was improper under New York law, it was declared void. The Court held that “when New York parents have acquired, by virtue of a foreign country adoption, parental rights that are recognized in New York, those rights can no longer depend on the vagaries of a foreign country's law”.

[The court gave no weight to ERJ's “act of state” argument and rejected her “best interest of the child” argument by pointing out that the child's best interest do not “automatically” validate an “otherwise illegal adoption” and the father's rights cannot be ignored because a court thinks the child should be adopted by someone else.]

This opinion bears close reading reading because the issues are sure to appear again in different factual and legal situations. The most important principle to remember is that once a foreign adoption is finalized, the law of the state where the child resides controls all future legal decision-making about that child. Adoptive parents will not be allowed to return to the country where the adoption was originally finalized to make any changes concerning the child's custody, guardianship or legal parents. What the Court did not decide is what would happen if the original foreign decree was illegal, invalid or procured by fraud or corruption. That issue will have to wait for another day which will surely come soon.

Guest analysis by Harvey Schweitzer, Esq.

Mr. Schweitzer is a lawyer whose practice in Washington D.C. and Maryland focuses on legal matters pertaining to children and the provision of services to children including foster care, child abuse and neglect, adoption,custody and mandatory reporting. He is the co-author of Foster Care Law: A Primer. Contact him at harvey@schweitzerlaw.net or go to www.schweitzerlaw.net