Liberal Hypocrisy in Adoption

When I began working on adoption policy, after a lengthy career focused on government reform and oversight in other areas, I expected that the same folks who ensured responsible policy development on issues like civil rights, the environment, smoking, and animal protection would be heroes in the fight to protect abused, neglected, exploited, and abandoned children in the US and around the world. Yet, days into what has become a life’s work, I was stunned to discover that, in fact, adoption lacks any meaningful regulatory framework at all – whether domestic infant, foster care, or international adoption – to ensure oversight and appropriate accountability.

What I discovered instead were billions of US tax dollars poured into a domestic child welfare system filled with children neglected by the very people who should have been protecting them. Children died due to system negligence, but few real penalties existed to ensure accountability or to deter bad practice. Children to whom millions of dollars in entitlement benefits were assigned were “lost” in the system, while third parties – whether states or private providers – captured funds intended for their health care, educations, or other pressing needs.

Children legally free for adoption with fit and willing adoptive parents remained system bounded for decades due to the perverse financial incentives states had to have to keep them in care, as each child was a “profit center” bringing various state and federal supports that would disappear if the child left the system for permanent adoptive homes. Even when birth families argued for adoption, if you were a child in foster care with an adoption plan, you were a hostage.

The private domestic adoption system was not much better. Relying on a patchwork of state laws, rather than be governed by strict federal rules, adoption agencies and attorneys across the country ignored the rights of birth parents; coerced vulnerable families to give up children they wanted to keep; misled adoptive parents about the medical and family histories of children; allowed predators and other inappropriate people to adopt; and charged increasingly exorbitant fees, sometimes actually exporting American children to other countries where they could make even more money.  (more...)

Liberal Hypocrisy in Adoption

H/T to English Manif