Hair New Era

The factors that cause this stress, I would be willing to bet, are also linked to the reasons so many African American children later end up living in foster care instead of in their biological family homes. I'm amazed with the courage of people like Trisha (see my previous post), who are struggling under an inept welfare system in this economy and yet still manage to provide for their kids.

It seems to me that small non-profit organizations like Birthing Project have a better impact overall than large federal programs like welfare. They are more individual. Maybe we're afraid that if welfare goes way, those programs won't have the resources that big tax-funded federal programs will, and therefore some people will fall through the cracks. But don't they anyway?

(For example, Dorothy Roberts, in her book Shattered Bonds: The Color of Child Welfare, writes about how social service agencies and government policy tend to tear apart low-income minority families by removing children at an alarming rate and putting them in foster care, instead of focusing on reunification. Which is just backward. Adoption should not effectively cause a bio family breakdown, it should be the last resort.)

And, furthermore, it's intrusive to have the government own information about you that you can't access as an adoptee--namely, your birth certificate and information on biological family, health, etc.

So I was excited to see an article about adoption, "The Welfare State Kills Children," on The Freeman site, expecting a well-articulated libertarian rant about faulty government intervention in adoption. Which it was, to an extent, but it left much to be desired. Writer James Payne focuses on the government's negligence in allowing Renee Bowman, who severely neglected and abused her 3 adopted daughters, to adopt, but then decries the impediments to adoption many good potential adoptive families face. True, there's tons of policy and red tape. (My parents waited a whopping seven years to adopt me!) Adoptive parents are highly screened, as they should be. And yes, the government failed big time with Renee Bowman.

But in advocating better/faster adoption processes and privatization, Payne ignores the possibility that the reason the kids are in foster care in the first place might be the real issue of concern. That putting a kid in the foster care system costs tax payers ten to eleven times more than putting money toward helping the biological family if poverty is the issue, which it often is. (Now of course for some kids adoption is the best option.) As happens with most mainstream media, the issue is seen from an adoptive-parent perspective. Reporters don't always know to look behind the issue.

Payne suggests adoptions be handled by private agencies. Sure, this can often be a better process, and Payne believes that bad practices would be naturally eliminated because adoptive families would not patronize those bad agencies. (This is what I love about libertarians--they're so hopeful!) But private adoption still doesn't quite leave the government out of the transaction--in most states still, the government owns the sealed records and the child's birth certificate. When we turn it all over to a business model, the power would lie with adoptive parents, as they're the paying customers. But yet with a "largely unregulated" system that he suggests there's the risk of child trafficking, which happens all over the world and even in our US of A. There are many risks of any option. Which ones are we willing to take? 

We need to educate the public about ALL the issues of adoption so we can join forces with libertarians like James Payne, who I suspect would fight with us for unsealed birth certificates.