Reinstating Parental Rights

Not all children whose parents' parental rights have been terminated by a court end up with a new family. In fact, many youth never achieve permanency, but instead remain in some kind of out-of-home care until they age out of the foster care system. In a new journal article, "Reinstating Parental Rights: Another Path to Permanency?", authors Susan Getman and Steve Christian explore the option of reuniting these youth with their birth parents. In a handful of States, State law permits the parents' parental rights to be restored; in other States, the path to legal ...

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Complex Data Gathering Results in State Adoption Totals

A publication from Child Welfare Information Gateway now available online provides estimates of total adoption numbers for the 50 States, the District of Columbia, and Puerto Rico. How Many Children Were Adopted in 2007-2008? was developed with assistance from Gene Flango, Ph.D., of the National Center for State Courts and offers key findings on the numbers of public, intercountry, and other adoptions as well as data sources and cautionary notes. This publication, which will be updated periodically, provides a single source of recent statistical information on the ...

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Corporeal Punishment for the Masses

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. ...

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Foster Care Adoption Benefits – The Adoption Tax Credit

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 ...

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Adopting Your Enemies’ Children

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 “slamm...

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International Adoption: it’s even more complicated than you thought

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 ...

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Echos of the Masha Allen case play out in a New York courtroom

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 ...

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