New Research Highlights Challenges of Adoptees

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New research highlights challenges of adoptees in Israel
By RUTH EGLASH
04/2010
http://www.jpost.com/Israel/Article.aspx?id=174208

Many have sense that "anyone could be my mother" due to small size of population, says sociologist.
Israel’s small population and its cultural diversity provide a unique set of challenges for women who were adopted here as babies, a ground-breaking new research project published earlier this month has revealed.

According to the project’s author, sociologist Dr. Hila Haelyon, a lecturer of family studies in the Department of Behavioral Sciences at the College of Management and Academic Studies (COMAS) in Rishon Lezion, one of the main difficulties facing adoptees in Israel stems from the country’s intimate population – 7.5 million, with 5,726,000 Jews. This leaves adoptees with a permanent sense that their biological parents are close and that “anyone could be my mother.”

“The ethnic groups and divisions are also very clear in Israeli society,” Haelyon, who will present her findings for the first time Thursday at a conference at COMAS, told The Jerusalem Post in an interview Wednesday.

“One of the big questions in Israel is always ‘Where are you from?’ or ‘What are your family’s roots?’” said the mother of four, herself adopted here as a baby. “When asked that question, I’m always faced with the dilemma of telling people that I belong to my adoptive family’s roots, which are not really my own roots, or telling a total stranger the private detail that I am adopted.”

Haelyon, who says she has been researching this topic for much of her adult life, carried out a quantitative study, interviewing some 20 women who had been adopted here as babies under the age of one. She questioned them in detail about their childhoods and adult lives, focusing on those who had already entered into motherhood and their sentiments toward building their own biological family.

“I decided to focus on the motherhood, because from my own personal experience, I found that the most reflective moment in an adopted woman’s life is when she becomes a mother herself,” said Haelyon, whose book The Adoptees: Experiences of Women Adopted in Israel was published by Pardes a few weeks ago.

“However, many of the women I interviewed told me that they’d had reflections like this their entire lives, from when they were tiny children until they themselves became mothers,” she said.

Among the issues raised by many of the women were feelings of abandonment, of not belonging anywhere, of being physically different from their adopted families, and of arousing suspicion among neighbors and peers over exactly who they were.

“It was important for me to allow the women to speak for themselves,” said Haelyon, who believes this is the first time such social research on adopted children has been published in Israel, as opposed to clinical research, where experts and doctors analyze the process.


“This research allows us, for the first time, to understand the lives of adopted women and how they view the world,” she continued. “Many people speak on their behalf, and they have very little opportunity to speak out for themselves. Many times they keep their feelings silent, afraid that this will only highlight the fact that they are different from their adopted family and the peers around them. Speaking out about it makes them once again feel like an outsider.”

In her research, Haelyon also noted that once they reach motherhood, women adopted as babies become very overprotective of their own children.

“One woman I interviewed told me how she slept in the car the first night after bringing her baby home because she thought that if something went wrong, she wanted to be ready to take the baby back to the hospital,” recounted Haelyon. “They are either very afraid someone will take their babies away from them, or they want to prove that they can do a better job than the mothers who gave them away for adoption.”

Although the number of babies adopted each year in Israel is fairly small, between 100 and 120 on average, Haelyon said that more than 500 people put in requests to adopt children each year, and the waiting lists for local adoption were very lengthy.

"Birthmothers Day" - An Adoptee's Perspective

"Birthmothers Day" - An Adoptee's Perspective
Anne Patterson

Of all the most condescending insulting visions of adopters and baby brokers, the day called "Birthmothers Day" would win the prize for ignorance and disregard.

While the traditional adoptee has had to live with a blind invisibility about our issues of loss and grief this celebration takes the whole thing to the largest level of illusion.

Adopted adults have lost their mothers, their fathers, their families, their names, their heritage, their history, the rights to who they were when they were born, their birth certificates, and their identities. It is quite a long list of losses, and one's that should never be ignored.

The expectation for adoptees to swallow their pain at the expression of their true feelings to keep adopters happy has been very damaging. Few adoptees are allowed to express their true feelings of loss and grief at being separated from their mothers and natural families.

Birthmothers Day Celebrations is not only a total disregard for our feelings of sorrow but an overt exploitation of our pain. Not only now do we have to ignore our pain in adoption but the perversion of celebrating it is the expectation.

I would never expect any mother who surrendered a child to adoption to celebrate that loss. I would further never expect any adopted adult or adopted child to ever celebrate their loss either.

In researching what some call "Birthmothers Day Celebrations", it occurred to me who would be stupid enough and cruel enough to ever expect anyone to celebrate the loss and separations that occur in adoption. It didn't take me long it know that this three ring circus of celebrations was in itself both devised, orchestrated and planned by baby brokers and adopters. According to them, this celebration is a way of recognizing natural mothers.

If they valued natural mothers, and moreover those who have been separated from their natural mothers, then "Birth Mothers Day" would not exist. The presumption that we adoptees need a separate day to think of our mothers is shocking.

Most adopted adults have spent years both mourning, dreaming, fantasizing, grieving, hoping and trying to come to terms with our separations and loss in adoption. Our birthdays are of course the day of the most intimate connections to our mothers - whether they are shadows of what we hope to find, or real as in we have found and reunited with them this day is a day of reality, and deep feelings be we in contact with our natural mothers or not.

Mothers day, recognized holidays and other regular days are also days that cannot change that we are adopted. We think of our natural mothers on all kinds of days. To designate a special day and to be told that this is the day to "celebrate" adoption by others is sick.

This celebration is an in your face slap to natural mothers who are seen as not being worthy enough to be thought of, loved or cherished on what a normal society calls "Mothers Day". It is a coercive measure to dismantle the meaning of natural mothers and to give them a lower status while perpetuating the pedestal worship of adopters at their expense. What is even more damaging though is that adopted adults are supposed to participate in this. How dare a group of adopters and baby brokers tell me or anyone else what to think of our mothers, when to think of them, or to boldly be expected to celebrate our loss?

Birthmothers Day Celebration Day - It is a day of cruel expectations, illusions and manipulation. Its goal is to promote the oppression and exploitation of other women so that baby brokers can sell their children. It is sick, twisted and highly offensive to me as an adult adoptee.

It is bad enough to have feelings of being not good enough. But to think of my mother or any mother celebrating their separation from their child is very cruel. How painful it would have felt to me to know my mother celebrated this loss. It would have if anything told me that she did not love me and she was happy to not be able to raise me. That would have turned into feelings of self-hatred and no self worth.

How sick and damaging it is to children to have this type of thing going on. It would be up there with divorce day celebrations and/or celebrating diseases and other tragedies.

Shame on those who participate, orchestrate and promote this bizarre parody of truth.

I personally and professionally decry all days called "Birthmothers Day Celebrations". Neither my mother who surrendered me to adoption nor I would wish to celebrate.

If we created "Infertility Celebration Day" I bet the brokers might be offended. Maybe that is what I will do: bake a cake and celebrate another person's pain?? Where is humanity going when such cruel orchestrations exist?

Copyright 2002 © Anne Patterson


Anne Patterson is a reunited adopted person and professional private investigator. She has 11 years experience and a 95.4% success rate in reuniting families separated by adoption. Visit her website at http://www3.sympatico.ca/searches

"Non-Profit" Adoption Agencies?

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Nonprofit Adoption Agencies Often Profit Someone Other Than Children, Families
AJC investigation: Big portions of agency budgets go to top executives

The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
April 26, 2010, by Alan Judd

By law, private adoption agencies in Georgia are supposed to operate as nonprofit organizations.

The law, however, doesn’t preclude big salaries for the agencies’ executives, or self-dealing by their corporate officers or high overhead costs that don’t benefit the children the groups are supposed to help.

For many private adoption and foster care agencies, nonprofit status in the child protection business leaves plenty of room for lucrative rewards, according to an investigation by The Atlanta Journal-Constitution.

The newspaper’s review of federal tax returns and other public documents found numerous examples where top executives’ compensation accounted for one-fourth to one-third of agencies’ budgets. In many instances, administrative costs exceeded expenses on direct services for children.

For example, Faithbridge Foster Care Inc., in Alpharetta, spent $293,311 in 2008, according to the tax return it filed for that year with the Internal Revenue Service. It paid its executive director $70,325. It spent another $4,200 to rent a building the director owns (on an annual basis, the rent payments would total $16,800). It paid $40,971 to rent office space from a company belonging to the chairman of its board.

Altogether in 2008, the agency devoted almost 40 percent of its budget to its top officers.

Another agency, Dayton, Ohio-based Phoenix Homes Inc., which operates a branch in Snellville, paid $1.8 million in 2008 to a management company belonging to the nonprofit’s president. Phoenix also paid its president about $200,000 in salary and other compensation. A vice president who also works for his boss’s management firm collected $117,000 in salary from the nonprofit.

Families First Inc. of Atlanta paid six employees more than $100,000 each in 2008, according to tax documents. It also paid about $32,000 to a board member’s company for investment services; meanwhile, the value of the portfolio the firm managed for the agency dropped by almost $1.1 million.

Many executives of adoption and foster care agencies say government budget cuts and fewer charitable contributions have left them strapped for money. Financial troubles recently forced the Catholic Diocese of Savannah to announce it would close St. Mary’s Home, which has housed foster children since 1875.

The agencies’ finances — especially concerning how they spend, rather than raise, money — is a touchy topic for many nonprofit executives. Most of those contacted recently declined to discuss the matter.

A lack of industry standards and government rules enable people running such agencies to spend freely for their own benefit, said Pablo Eisenberg, a senior fellow at Georgetown University’s Center for Public and Nonprofit Leadership.

“What you’re finding is certainly the trend in nonprofits,” Eisenberg said. “An increasing number of people are pushing for a kind of free market in nonprofits.”

He described directors who don’t challenge excessive spending as “totally incompetent.”

“There’s no accountability,” Eisenberg said. “There are no guidelines by the IRS, even on self-dealing. It’s just appalling.”


Big salaries, overhead

For many agencies, the free market approach especially applies to executive salaries.

For example, Chinese Children Adoption International, which has an Atlanta office, paid its top two officers — who are married to each other — a total of about $410,000 in 2006, the latest year for which its tax returns are available. The total budget for the agency, headquartered in Centennial, Colo., was $5.2 million.

Similarly, in 2007, Open Door Adoption Agency Inc. of Thomasville paid a total of $201,000 to its two top executives, also a husband and wife, out of a $1.2 million budget.

Some agencies devote significant portions of their budgets just for one executive’s salary. For instance, Alpharetta-based AAA Partners in Adoption Inc. told the IRS that its executive director’s total compensation for 2008 was $107,747 — one-fourth of all its expenses that year.

The adoption and foster care agency Bethany Christian Services, based in Grand Rapids, Mich., with offices in Atlanta and Columbus, paid 72 employees at least $50,000 in 2007, according to its tax returns. The chief executive earned $169,000, while the agency’s vice president collected $178,000.

Bethany had a total budget of $9.1 million. However, $7.2 million, or almost four of every five dollars, went to management expenses. Another $1.2 million covered fund-raising costs — far more than the $694,000 that went to programs that directly served children.

The agency put more into employee pension plans than into children’s services.

Bethany collected $803,225 from the Georgia Department of Human Services for supervising foster children in 2009, state records show. The state money covers administrative costs as well as direct services to children.

Faithbridge, where the executive director and the board chairman received 40 percent of all spending, received about $75,000 from the state in 2008. The agency said in tax documents that the public money helped offset $145,969 in expenses for placing foster children. In its tax documents, the agency said it “partnered” with state agencies to “provide foster homes for children and return children home to extended families.”

Bill Hancock, the agency’s executive director, did not respond to messages requesting an interview.

Faithbridge disclosed to the IRS its dealings with its officers. But it generally avoids public scrutiny.

“The organization,” Faithbridge says in tax documents, “does not make its governing documents, conflict of interest policy and financial statements available to the public.”


Dimmed outlook

For many agencies, especially those that rely on public money, the financial outlook has dimmed.

The state has cut payments to many agencies because of deep budget shortfalls. Consequently, some organizations say they are struggling to survive.

For eight years, Morningstar Treatment Services based its annual budget on state payments to house 58 children in its Youth Estate group home near Brunswick. But now the state pays only for 48 children, and Morningstar is “taking a $60,000 to $70,000 hit a month,” said Barry Kerr, the agency’s chief executive officer.

“I don’t think there’s an administrator you could interview who would not say it’s not having a significant impact,” he said.

Morningstar spends relatively little on fund-raising — $186,000 of a $10 million budget in 2008. Executive salaries also trail those at many other agencies; Kerr’s salary and expense reimbursement totaled $115,000 in 2008. The only self-dealing the agency reported to the IRS involved the payment of $51,304 to a consulting firm owned by a Morningstar employee.

As public money becomes scarcer, some agencies have tried to get more private funding. For instance, The Bridge, a group home in northwest Atlanta, has increased its reliance on private donors to an amount equal to one-fourth of its annual budget, said Tom Russell, the agency’s chief executive officer.

Even so, only about 5 percent of its spending goes into fund-raising efforts.

By contrast, Georgia Agape Inc., an Atlanta foster care and adoption agency, spent $273,000 on fund-raising in 2008, or 17 percent of its total budget — even though it relies heavily on government appropriations.


This is the final installment in a four-part series on the regulation of privately operated adoption and foster care agencies in Georgia.


For today’s article, The Atlanta Journal-Constitution examined federal income tax returns for most of the 336 private foster care and adoption agencies licensed in Georgia. Federal law allows public inspection of nonprofits’ tax returns. Most of those documents are available free online from organizations such as the Foundation Center (www.
foundationcenter.org) or GuideStar (www.guidestar.org).


Find this article at:
http://www.ajc.com/news/nonprofit-adoption-agencies-often-493623.html

Vital Records: The Debate on Adoptee Rights

Truth in Advertising?

Here's a new booklet geared towards recruitment of young mothers to relinquish their babies for adoption. You can "click" on the title of this post to read more "heroic" babble being fed to young, vulnerable mothers. As a product of this industry, I am appalled that advertising in the adoption "market" is even legal, but since it is, what happened to the ethical standard of "truth in advertising"?

Not to mention accountability to the professional standards of non-directive and non-coercive counseling?

Adoption agencies and attorneys are not required to adhere to any of these. They spout unbalanced and one-sided facts/stats/information about adoption and fail to provide proven research and information available regarding life-long issues affecting both "birthmothers" and adoptees. Why doesn't this comic book include such important information such as "The Primal Wound" or even "Twenty Things Adopted Kids Wish Their Parents Knew" when they advertise how wonderful the adoption "option" is for all involved? Because it may adversely affect the mother's decision, that is why, and that would affect their numbers, their bottom line, their industry of supply/demand.

Adoption is far too serious to be sold in a comic book to young mothers for the agenda of exploiting them and their babies.

This is one of those days I'm having a hard time catching up with my feelings.

My husband and I lived on the same street as a family with six kids for several years. Their parents were both drug addicted and the children endured a lot. Three of the girls lived temporarily in a children's home we suggested to the parents during a particularly hard time, but then moved back home after the family dynamics became a little more stable.
As time has passed all these children have grown into young adults with children of their own. We grew close to them over all these years and still stay in touch.

It has been heartbreaking to see them endure so much as children and try so hard to "make it" as adults with very little education, resources or emotional support and coping skills. They are great "kids" with big hearts, but they struggle so much.

Anyway, I went to a court hearing today with the youngest boy (now 25) regarding "permanency" for his children who have been living with a foster family for the past seven months. This young man loves his children dearly. The situation involved the children's mother, who is now in jail, sadly. I know this young father would never hurt his children. He doesn't have the resources for a decent attorney and is getting no help whatsoever from child welfare. He doesn't understand the process and even though he thinks he is doing everything they ask to regain contact with his children, their reports say otherwise.

The foster mother is adament against any form of "openness" in contact and wants to adopt the children with no agreement for them to ever have contact with their father again. It breaks my heart as an adoptee. To see the subtle and not so subtle sneers and attitudes coming from this foster family towards this young father, and to know that his children may grow up feeling disdain towards him (and hence, towards themselves) because of the attitude oozing from the home they are reared in.

Sitting in that courtroom today after also experiencing the last few days of contacting the case worker and attorney and being treated rudely myself, as an advocate, I feel conflicting emotions regarding the whole "system" of child welfare and adoption (now very much intertwined because of federal incentives to states for every child adopted into "permanency" as quickly as possible).

I'm beginning to believe that advocates may truly have a point when they argue these issues as intricately related to "social class" and "poverty", with the "rich" using the court and legal systems to take children of the poor. I know there are many, many instances of child abuse and neglect which call for a child's removal from their home. But I also experienced the attitudes of many "professionals" involved today. It was sickening.

While waiting for our court time, in walked a tribe of a family all decked out in their Sunday best, matching coats and ties for the boys, and frilly dresses for the girls. They would give the Von Traps a run for their money, no joke. The stair-step toddler girls were the "show" of the waiting room. All eyes were on them, the "Belles of the ball" as they toddled around performing for everyone. Yet as soon as those darling "little dolls" decided to invade the mother's diaper bag, they got an immediate hand slap and firm reprimand, "SISTER, there is NOTHING in there for you, PUT IT BACK NOW!" Wow, a triggering reminder of what we adoptees hear our entire lives. Especially when we start snooping around for our identities, birth certificates, and buried emotions. My heart went out to these tiny adoptees.

The finalization of the youngest's adoption was being celebrated in big style for sure. What worried me most was a comment made by the grandmother. She was proudly telling someone about the fact these little girls now have "yet another" baby sister and that they were "already working on getting her as well". I have no idea what the situation is. But as an adoptee sitting in this waiting room and seeing the pain of "birth" family pitted against "entitlement" attitudes of adopting parents, I literally wanted to puke. I saw this young father watch these little girls play, with tears in his eyes thinking about his own two daughters whom he hasn't seen in months. In fact, here it is eleven o'clock in the evening and I'm still trying to process it all.
Not only that, I'm only "hitting the highlights" of what I saw, felt, and experienced today. There are many details I've left out, simply because it is too overwhelming.

I think what baffles me most is the utter and complete ignorance and disrespect for the children involved. (Who certainly don't remain children, except in the eyes of the law). The "deer in the headlights" looks we STILL GET when adoptees try to voice the injustice and pain caused by archaic sealed records laws and prevailing attitudes in adoption.

I was just posting pictures on Facebook of me and my son having wonderful times with my natural father, who I have been reunited with for 20 years now. I tried to encourage this young father today with that. That his children will always wonder and wish and hope. When they become adults, they will most likely search for him and grieve for the years lost. I pray that they will not have to wait until adulthood to begin this process. I pray the Judge will see the importance of openness and issue decisions that will help these children begin to heal now, for all their sakes.

Questioning International Adoptions

Questioning International Adoptions
By LISA BELKIN
April 12, 2010

There seems to be plenty of blame to go around in the sad and sobering tale of Justin Hansen (Artyom Savelyev), who landed unaccompanied in his native Russia last week, sent back by his adoptive mother and grandmother, who describe the boy as psychologically damaged and say they can no longer care for him.

Some would place all that blame on Torry Hansen and her mother, Nancy, for not trying hard enough, for not seeking help with Justin, for not doing due diligence before adopting a child from a country whose orphanages have a history of troubles, for putting a 7-year-old on an 11-hour flight all alone.

Others blame the boy, or more specifically, his threatening and violent behavior. And the Russian system, too, is under fire, for its history of subjecting orphans to conditions that breed emotional disorders and for keeping facts from adoptive parents.

We certainly don’t know all the facts in this case. We may never know them, because some are unknowable and some might have been deliberately withheld. And that, says Michele Goodwin, is the crux of the problem. A professor of law and medicine at the University of Minnesota, she is the author of the new book “Baby Markets: Money and the New Politics of Creating Families,” which turns a questioning eye on the world of international adoption. It is a system ripe for abuse and exploitation, she writes in a guest blog today, and the result can be cases that end as Artyom’s has — or worse.

International Adoption — A Market in Babies?
Michele Goodwin

More than 30 years ago, Elisabeth Landes and Prof. Richard Posner, now a federal appellate court judge, warned that there was “a considerable amount of baby selling” happening in the United States. Not surprisingly, this daunting assessment attracted strident criticism. Lawyers, social workers and others claimed that the article, which became euphemistically known as the “baby-selling article,” overstated the case and surmised that what they observed were necessary transaction fees attached to adoptions and nothing more. But the article’s observation sheds light on the case of Justin Hansen, the little boy who was adopted by an American woman and then returned to a Russian orphanage last week.

The case of Justin and his adoption by an American woman living with her mother has caused considerable controversy and evoked scrutiny from many countries. Some commentators claim that the boy simply had attachment disorder and that his adoptive grandmother, Nancy Hansen, and mother, Torry Hansen, should have tried harder with therapy. Others are sympathetic with the Hansens, who claim that the boy was violent, often had tantrums and threatened to burn down their home.

But this case is far more complicated than what many people understand. International adoptions have become a cottage industry. Americans are the leading importers of children through adoption. As the American demand for children from abroad has grown, the supply has been provided by a range of agencies — some legitimate and others quite questionable. At the same time, the costs and special transaction fees associated with international adoptions have risen.

In effect, the dynamics of law and economics are at play, with the costs of adopting children from abroad rising each year. Some critics of international adoption point out that adoption has become a cottage industry, where children are exploited and sometimes are not truly surrendered for adoption.

David Smolin, a law professor, counts himself as being in this unusual space. When he arranged to adopt two girls from India in the late ’90s, he believed that his new daughters were orphaned. After they arrived, he soon discovered that the girls were never surrendered for adoption, but were basically trafficked — stolen from their mother. In addition, the most painful part for his daughters was that the agency lied about their ages. As it turned out, they were older than the documents claimed they were.

But Smolin’s case is not unique. Other families face similar traumas and uncomfortable revelations. Maria Melichar of Mayer, Minn., spent $30,000 to adopt two girls from India, Komal and her sister, Shallu. After they arrived, the girls, who had been described as ages 12 and 11 respectively, had difficulty adjusting to their new American surroundings. Komal was often violent and angry. The family soon learned why, but not before spending tens of thousands of dollars and expending considerable energy to support their new daughters. In a shocking revelation, the parents learned that their new daughters were actually 21 and 15.

Everyone had been exploited; the girls and the Minnesota couple. In that case, too, the girls were sent back home.

Adoption fraud makes international adoptions a far more complicated zone. For decades, psychologists and others have described the tensions and unhappiness that children experience after their placement as “attachment disorder.” Surely in many cases they are right. But there are times when the label does not apply and can be misleading. This is compounded by language barriers; Americans adopt children from Russia, China, Korea, Guatemala and other countries without any language proficiencies in their children’s native tongues and therefore cannot communicate effectively.

Conflating all cases of adoptees not adapting well as “attachment disorder” obscures the fact that agencies and orphanages with very murky practices have rapidly developed in places like Russia, Guatemala, India, and other countries — to ship kids to the United States because it is profitable.

For children stolen from their parents, or trafficked for some other reason, the anxiety displayed may be because they feel victimized, not rescued from their circumstances. In fact, Guatemala, a country that ranks among the top four in the number of children sent to the United States for adoption, recently clamped down out of fear that children were being stolen from their parents, exploited in sex rings and trafficked for their organs. This was a powerful statement coming from a nation where one child for every hundred ends up in a United States home.

The case of Justin Hansen and his would-be American family highlights contemporary fault lines in international adoptions. Sometimes not all adoptions are exactly what they appear to be.

Michele Goodwin is the Everett Fraser professor of law and a professor of medicine at the University of Minnesota. She is the author of “Baby Markets: Money and the New Politics of Creating Families.”