What do these two have to do with one other?
Mega foster families and serial adopter familier were already mentioned here today. An exemplary link of this phenomenon is Mega-families bring 'it takes a village' to life. What was even more striking than the article itself, was a blue side box on the left, which stated:
More on foreign adoptions
Adoption is never easy, but with international adoption, parents also tiptoe outside the U.S. legal system. Agencies may charge exorbitant rates, and are largely unaccountable for complications, warns adoption activist Mary Lib Mooney (www.theadoptionguide.com). Mooney, for instance, once paid thousands of dollars to adopt a Russian boy, only to see the adoption fall through. Romania officially stopped adoptions in June of 2001, leaving families in limbo. The Immigration and Naturalization Service halted Cambodian adoptions in December, suspecting that kids were stolen and sold.
Another hazard: Children may have medical problems that foreign orphanages paper over. The Parent Network for the Post-Institutionalized Child (PNPIC) warns that heavy pollution often leads to birth defects among Ukrainian kids, and that lead poisoning remains a problem in China. A 1999 report in Adoption/Medical News noted that an alarmingly high percentage of Russian kids suffer from fetal alcohol syndrome.
And though some parents don't mind dealing with physical handicaps, children in orphanages are often abused or neglected. The resulting problems can strain the most loving parents.
"People feel it's God's calling to adopt when they see four kids on TV," Mooney says, "but the truth of the matter is, any kid that comes from an institution has special needs. So you have to ask: Are you prepared to parent a special needs child?"
"Americans can be very poor consumers of adoption services," agrees Thais Tepper of PNPIC. "They don't demand answers to the right questions."
It's 2002, when USA TODAY posted the article, which was mainly about mega families adopting. It did touch upon the subject of international adoption, which USA TODAY rightly called foreign adoptions, but that was not the main theme. So why such an informative section? Who asks for things like that? Who pays for that?
It still amazes me how the adoption industry is always capable of generating their own established critics. In this block, Mary Mooney is cited as being an "adoption activist" at other times Ethica's Trish Maskew is quoted in the media, or Evan B Donalson's Adam Pertman. With the most cited critical voices being from within the industry, the bounderies of that criticism are determined by that industry.
Of course the boxed information section contains all the triggers, there is hazard, there is PCPIC, which has a really long full name, so it must be impressive, there are birth defects, there is abuse and neglect, there is lead poising and the percentages are alarmingly high. Just when it all sounds very difficult and hard, yet oh the suffering... Just then, God gets slipped in, and though canalized by Mooney's "truth of the matter", His presence and the linkage to consumers in American give it all the right patriotic touch to rather encourage than discourage international adoption.
What all that has to do with the price of eggs, I don't know.
Comments
"The hills are alive, with the sound of Mooney....!"
It takes a village, eh? It seems to have taken an entire ecconomic movement to seduce entire countries into terminiating parental rights, so children can be sold to strangers, all in the name of some greater belief.... [$$$$$$$$$$$$$$]
Nestled in the middle of that Hillary-esqe news-story, a very telling truth reveals itself:
Ah yes, can you see the ol' slick-willy seducing bleeding hearts who want to "save poor orphan children" and "create larger familes with stronger family values"... yet who is benefitting most from all of this? I believe this is the one area no career-politician is going to mess-with, because anyone within the inner-circle knows, messing with international adoption is messing with a government's economy. [What
fool in politicsPublic Servant doesn't know which side his bread is buttered?] Think about it: separate church and state so church cares for the community, and state benefits from taxes and salaries. All those who support this scheme (with safe-criticisms noted when appropriate...)...what do they get out of the adoption-deal? Job-security?This makes me wander back to the news-article mentioned above: If the village is raising the children, who needs paid government officials?
The only people who get screwed are those who have been used and abused -- or shunned-- by a church, or ignored by the state. So basically, that means, once again, unwed-mothers are facing no support or protection, because that's in the best (most profiting) interest of both church AND politics.