Adoption Storyline on “ER”

Once a regular watcher of the NBC drama ER, I’ve gradually cut off almost all television watching. But I may have a reason to start watching ER again—purely for professional reasons, of course. No, I’m not going to medical school. ER is in the middle of an adoption storyline. This season’s new Chief of Emergency Medicine (played by Angela Bassett) and her husband Russell (played by Courtney Vance) have decided to take a chance on loving a child again after the devastating loss of their five-year-old son to a fast-killing leukemia, which we see in flashbacks. Banfield, 40 at the … Continue reading →

Lifetime Movie about Foster Care airs Saturday

Tomorrow night (Saturday February 28), the cable channel Lifetime will air an original movie about the foster care system, and more specifically about the dilemma of one teen, raised in foster care (and sometimes abused there), about to turn 18 and “age out” of the system. The teen’s name is America, which is also the title of the movie. I have written a past blog, detailing how teens in foster care are usually literally turned out on the streets on their 18th birthday. Often still in high school, it is a nearly insurmountable task to pay for an apartment, work, … Continue reading →

Safe Haven Law Being Used to Abandon Older Children, not Babies for Adoption

The governor of Nebraska has called the state legislature back to a special session to deal with unintended repercussions of Nebraska’s Safe Haven law, which took effect this past summer. The consequence of the law that legislators probably never intended is the abandonment of older children and teenagers by their parents. Thirty-four of the 35 children abandoned under the law have been over the age of five. All 50 U.S. states now have some form of safe haven law, sometimes called a “Baby Moses law“, allowing a baby to be left at a hospital, police or fire station, or similar … Continue reading →

Adoption Nightmares

Many Americans remember the “Baby Jessica” case. In 1993, the U.S. Supreme Court let stand a Michigan Supreme Court decision to return a child to her birth father (who was by then married to her birth mother) after two and a half years with adoptive parents who had cared for her since very soon after her birth. The case caused outrage across the country. Media accounts railed against the courts for failing to consider the best interests of the child by taking into account the trauma a move would cause her. The birth parents were portrayed as irresponsible and selfish … Continue reading →

Will Changing Attitudes Toward Disabilities Affect the Future of International Adoption in China?

My last blog featured another profile of an elite athlete who was adopted—Jessica Tatiana Long, who was adopted from a Russian orphanage at 13 months of age, and had her legs amputated below the knee when she was 18 months old. She competed last week in The Paralympic Games in Beijing. These Games have brought changes to China, in both infrastructure and attitudes toward the disabled. Last May I wrote a blog about Chinese people applying to adopt earthquake orphans. This also represented a big change. Traditional beliefs in many parts of China included the importance of a pure bloodline, … Continue reading →

Could Education Have Prevented This Week’s Tragedy?

Yesterday I wrote a blog on a tragedy which recently came to light in the Midwest—a 19-year-old gave birth at home, said she had difficulty breast-feeding her baby, didn’t go to a hospital because she didn’t have health insurance, so she just did nothing although she knew the child would die without eating. The young woman, Indra Book, is in jail. Facts of the case are conflicted. One fact I didn’t know yesterday was that Book was apparently told she was five months pregnancy in June. If this is true, the August birth meant that the baby was quite premature … Continue reading →

What Will Really Happen to Adoption in China, Post-Quake?

The Chinese government says it is drafting plans for adoptions of quake orphans, and phones at local Civil Affairs Bureaus are ringing off the hook. One Western newspaper even estimated that there are more Chinese calling about adopting than there are orphans. It remains to be seen what will happen. Do Chinese parents calling about adoption today still see it as offering to foster children, or do they truly understand adoption as making a child a permanent part of your family tree? Perhaps they do. Perhaps the restrictions on bearing children have left more people wanting to love more children … Continue reading →

Is Adoption the Best Option for Earthquake Orphans? –the Disagreement

The Chinese government says it is drafting plans for adoptions of children orphaned by the massive earthquake on May 12. However, perhaps surprisingly to Americans, not all Chinese are in favor of this. This earthquake is being compared to the 1976 quake which killed over 240,000 people in Hepei Province. The quake is referred to as the “Tangshan Quake” for the area in which it was centered. Su Yuopo, whom the Chinese paper “People’s Daily” identified as a “quake reconstruction specialist”, has studied orphans of the 1976 quake throughout the years. He told the People’s Daily that most of them … Continue reading →

A Family of Twenty

Every so often you read a story about extremely large families, who by birth or adoption have more than a dozen children. I myself remember reading The Family Nobody Wanted when I was in second grade. I think I was moving toward adoption even then. The Seattle Times recently published a long article by a reporter from the Tri-City Herald about a family in Richland, Washington who has adopted fourteen children. They also have six biological children, one of whom still lives at home. That makes for a household of seventeen people. Mike and Julee Feder say that originally they … Continue reading →

Warning from the U.S. Embassy in Vietnam, and, What is an Orphan?

The U.S. Embassy in Hanoi, Vietnam, recently issued a statement urging parents considering adopting from Vietnam to be very careful in choosing their “adoption service provider”. The U.S. Embassy has been increasingly denying orphan petitions and U.S. visa applications because of irregularities in adoption cases brought to it. The statement did not say what any of these irregularities were. The wording “an adoption service provider” leads me to believe that the Embassy refers to adoptions arranged through attorneys or adoption facilitators rather than through social welfare agencies. I would always be more skeptical about this kind of adoption, although in … Continue reading →