Hillary wrong on adoption, but Trump/Pence ticket threatens women's rights

                            --Courtesy of Lisa Roberts

Adoption came up last night in the second debate between Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump as she spoke of her 30 years in public life. After noting that eight million kids every year have health insurance because of her work to create the Children’s Health Insurance Program, she said:  "Hundreds of thousands of kids now have a chance to be adopted because I worked to change our adoption and foster care system."

Ouch, we collectively sighed. The law that she helped push through Congress in 1997, the so-called Adoption and Safe Families Act (ASFA), was passed to address what child welfare experts claimed were the failings of an approach that kept families together. The claims were that children were kept in, or returned to, precarious family situations where the children were in actual danger of being injured or killed. The new law urged a get-tough approach to parents. 

The overall effect was to sometimes take children from mothers and families when unnecessary, and make it impossible for
them to get the children back. They disappeared into the system. Some were adopted; many were not but simply aged out of the system with no family, no resources, no place to go. They sometimes end up knocking on your door selling magazine subscriptions in a scam that gives them little money, as one did recently at Lorraine's house. 

Jane

You won't read about this at the Wikipedia page about ASFA, which appears to have been written by advocates of foster care, child welfare workers and adoption agencies, and is biased towards promoting adoption. 

Yet according to the National Coalition for Child Protection Reform, backers of ASFA claimed that it made exceptions (i.e. child removal and permanent foster care) only for "extreme cases" of child endangerment, but, in fact, "the law is filled with broad, vague 'catch-all' clauses that effectively make reasonable efforts" on family reunification optional. With few exceptions, the law also orders states to "seek termination of parental rights whenever a child has been in foster care for 15 of the previous 22 months--even if the child should not have been taken away in the first place. The overarching message to states was to stop doing much to keep families--largely mothers and their children--together. 

Lorraine

LITTLE FOR FAMILY PRESERVATION

The law assumed that foster homes would empty and the children would go to loving adoptive homes. Federal financing played a huge role since funds to help families in need was capped--while foster-care funds and subsidies to adoptive families were unlimited. Little is spent on family preservation.

The result has been tragic. Children were placed in foster care who could have stayed in their own homes, resulting in children placed with bad foster parents because there was a shortage of foster homes, period. Children remained in foster homes as legal orphans after they were "freed for adoption" because no one wanted them. Small increases in adoptions occur until 2000, but overall, the average annual increase in adoptions attributable to ASFA equals less than 2.5 percent of the number of children in foster care. But this is a faulty positive because that number is outweighed the increasing number of children coming into foster care because so many more children are taken from their families in the first place. 

Any death attributable to an unsafe family situation and "known to the system" is attributed to a family-preservation bent on the part of some supposedly lax social worker and an overtaxed child-welfare system. But what is ignored is the fact that real family preservation programs actually have a better track record for safety than foster care. 

Certainly the rise in drug use of the 70s and 80s contributed to the push to remove children from unsafe homes. Yet we also note note that making more more children available for adoption happened at the same time as a precipitous drop in the number of infants available to be adopted. Changes of social attitudes toward single mothers and legal abortion was coupled with a huge rise of the number of people who want to adopt. But not just any child would do. Infants, preferably a white infants, are the desired commodity, not a child or adolescent of color who comes with a troubled past, and who may have been bouncing around the foster-care system for a while. So children languish in foster care and age out, even if their own families have gotten their act together and could have happily absorbed them back into the family well before that happens. It's a noxious system, different but not unlike the social engineering policy of closed-adoption that ensnared millions of women and their babies from the forties to the eighties. Closed adoption today and altered birth certificates continue the damage to this day. 

NOT A FOUNDATION FOR CHILD-WELFARE POLICY

Adoption always will be necessary in some situations for some children. But their birth certificates should never be altered, which is why we favor a policy of permanent custody, a policy that would ensure an individual's place in the family, but not rewrite his history or make it impossible for him to find his original family one day. Yet such a fine tuning of the system is no more than a wisp on the horizon. Today adoption is firmly implanted in the public mind as the answer for a host of problems, from untimely pregnancies to homes that may be unsafe only temporarily. Yes, children need to be removed from dangerous home situations. Adoption is a blessing for some children, but should not be the foundation of child-welfare policy. Hillary is uninformed about the enormous and true impact of adoption on both mothers and children. She is wrong for promoting adoption as a primary remedy for child abuse and neglect. We are well aware of the lifelong devastating effect of losing a child to adoption, no matter how that happens. 

While we criticize Hillary for not considering the overarching effect of the Adoption and Safe Families Act, we still chose her over Donald Trump and his vice presidential candidate, Mike Pence. Not only are they almost certainly not interested in altering the course of ASFA, Pence himself has bragged that his home state, Indiana, is the most pro-adoption state in the country. He sees "adoption not abortion" as the answer to any untimely pregnancy. He signed a controversial anti-abortion law that banned abortions if sought for a host of reasons, including diagnosis of a genetic disorder. The law criminalized fetal-tissue transfer, vital to research for understanding the Zika virus, as well as other diseases. The law also demanded that women view their fetal ultrasound shortly before having an abortion--a requirement that should be spelled: punishment. A federal judge blocked this law and its myriad restrictions and punishments, but Pence's position on any of it appears not to have changed. Has the man never heard of separation of church and state, an underpinning of our Constitution?  

As a member of Congress, and later as Indiana governor, Pence gutted Planned Parenthood funding in his state, which caused several clinics to close. According to Media Matters, this caused an outbreak of HIV in one town because the lack of funding to the only HIV testing center available to many residents. 

What I'm reading now

Donald Trump has pledged to appoint judges to the Supreme Court that will do their best to roll back Roe v. Wade, which is already effectively happening in some states as clinics are forced to comply with a continuing rise in absurd regulations, such as the width of their hallways. He once said to Chris Matthews of MSNBC that he, Trump, believed women as well as their doctors ought to be punished for abortion. Like many of his positions, that one has flown, but it further indicates how a woman's right to choose under a Trump/Prence presidency would be under attack.

ROE V. WADE IMPERILED UNDER TRUMP/PENCE

Since Rove v. Wade made abortion legal  in 1973, whole generations of women and men have been born who do not remember a time before one could get a legal abortion. They do not have friends who almost died trying to terminate a pregnancy, or were raped by the doctors just before they performed one. They do not understand the fear of pregnancy without recourse. Consequently abortion as an issue has hardly risen above lukewarm in this campaign. That is a pity, because choice for women--or the availability of a clinic that provides abortion--could be taken away. Of a Trump/Pence administration, Pence has stated, "We’ll see Roe v. Wade consigned to the ash heap of history where it belongs."

Despite Hillary's uninformed support of the Adoption and Safe Families Act, and its unintended consequence of taking children from too many mothers, there is no real contest between who would be better for the health and wellbeing of women and children. We know she believes in insuring men, women and children with health care. 

The Trump/Pence ticket would promote and encourage infant adoption, and take us back to the era when abortion was illegal. With their plans of cutting taxes, it is absurd to think that there would be talk of funds for helping indigent and young women keep their babies. Hillary may be wrong on family preservation versus adoption, but she does not threaten on a woman's right to chose and promote "adoption not abortion." It is our prerogative to educate her. We start here.--lorraine and jane

_______________________________________

SOURCES

National Coalition for Child Protection Reform

SETTING THE RECORD STRAIGHTABOUT RECENT CHILD WELFARE HISTORY 

The Wikipedia page on ASFA appears to have been written by  Who's surprised? Not us. 

The Primal Wound: Understanding the Adopted Child
by Nancy Verrier
One of the long time bibles of many adopted individuals, though controversial to some for its claim that adoption imprints a primal, lasting stamp on an individual.

An Affair with My Mother: A Story of Adoption, Secrecy and Love
by Caitriona Palmer
Reunited with her birth mother, Palmer writes of their relationship, which her mother keeps secret from the rest of the family. LD promises to review this soon!

Homegoing: A novel
by Yaa Gyasi
Three hundred years in Ghana and the slave trade. Two sisters, born of the same mother but born in different villages, in vastly different situations. One thread of the novel traces one sister's descendants in Ghana, the other traces the lives of the descendants who end up in the slave trade in America. That these children are separated from their mothers and fathers is a matter of course.