ASFA Failure – Only 71 Interstate Adoptions Last Year

This just in from blogger Jeff Katz of the Huffington Post: The simple fact is that it is virtually impossible to adopt a foster child across state lines in the United States. In the most recent year for which we have data, states reported that only 71 children in the entire country were adopted from foster care across state lines by non-relatives. Why is interstate adoption so rare? The primary reason is that we do not have a national adoption system. Instead, we have 50 different child welfare systems, each with its own process for adoption eligibility, recruitment, ...

Birdman Adoptive Father Stephen Melinger Back in the News

Look who's back! Was it adoption for love? Child trafficking via surrogacy? Or something else? The bizarre case of birdman Stephen Melinger is back in the news, this time in a New York Times article on the perils and pitfalls of surrogacy. Do check out this story in the Times, but just remember from Melinger to womb outsourcing, snowflake adoptions and sperm donor introductions for lesbians, this blog gave you the scoop first.

Corrupting International Adoption

An interesting article about the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act [FCPA] made me think about international adoption agencies and their criminal liability under this federal law. According to the article FCPA, which was enacted in 1977, prohibits bribery of foreign officials. The authors offer this sage advice: In this climate of increased enforcement, it is imperative that firms doing business in foreign markets, both currently and in the future, become familiar with the FCPA. Both the anti-bribery and books-and-records provisions present significant issues for any company ...

Birdman’s Fradulent Adoption of Surrogate Twins Invalidated

Just one more example of how individuals intent on exploiting children are leveraging technology: maybe it was the bird in his pocket or his tattered clothes which were covered with avian feces, but when a 58 year old man arrived at an Indianapolis hospital to pick up his twin medically fragile girls, nurses were concerned that he did not seem to know how to care for the children and planned to drive them back to New Jersey by himself. The girls, Karen and Kathy Melinger, were born in 2005 from a South Carolina surrogate using a sperm donor and delivered in an Indiana ...