Adoption in Pakistan

This is an interesting article on adoptions in Pakistan.

Adoption: Demand for abandoned babies far outstrips supply

By Samia Saleem

Published: December 1, 2011

524570 The Edhi Centre says that applications have to be processed carefully as there are fake cases. DESIGN: SHEHREZAD MAHER

KARACHI: 

Every month, at least one or two babies rescued from garbage dumps or the Edhi Centre’s cradles arrive at its head office near Sarrafa Bazaar in Boulton Market. But while they may have been abandoned by their biological parents, plenty of other couples are lining up to give them a home. In fact, demand far outstrips supply.

The Edhi Centre, which has earned a reputation of being the most reliable philanthropic organisation in the country, has thousands of pending adoption applications, some of which have come from abroad. Bilquis Bano Edhi, who is in charge of the adoption process, puts the number of such forms in the range of 6,000 to 7,000.

She told The Express Tribune that since they set up the centre in 1951, about 19,600 babies have been given to foster parents. But though more and more people are abandoning their babies, there are still not enough to meet adoption demands. “Most of them do not even survive the stage where they can be given for adoption as they are premature,” Bilquis Edhi pointed out.

About 80% of these unwanted babies are girls because of the persistent perception in Pakistani society that this sex is a burden. Thus, the adoption form clearly states that if you want a baby boy, you will have to wait longer.

The process for adoption takes place through the Edhi’s head office in Karachi and can take from two to twelve months. “You have to be really careful who you hand over a child to as there are a lot of fakers,” said Edhi. Potential foster parents are first sifted out and then a team from the organisation visits their house.

The criteria for the selection of the parents is extremely stringent and inflexible. “I won’t give babies to a couple in which the husband is too dominating, where I see that the mother is getting no respect or where the parents are too poor to afford the cost of upbringing,” she said.

Over the years, Edhi has become pundit of the adoption process. There are couples who plead for a baby and want to present the child to their families as their own. Some women who feign pregnancy also plead for a newborn baby so that they can tell their husbands and their families that they have given birth to that child. “I never give babies to such people because when the truth is unveiled, it can devastate the entire family, including the child,” she said.

Babies are only given to couples who are well-off and happily married. But even then, some bitter experiences with these types have taught Bano Edhi to be extra cautious. About two years ago, a doctor and her husband came to adopt a baby and were immediately given a baby girl as their profile was stronger than that of the other applicants. But later it was discovered that the doctor had sold the baby. “I have become extremely careful since then,” said Bano Edhi.

There are 13 conditions for adopting a child. The first one is that the decision of the chairman, Bilquis Edhi, cannot be challenged. The details of the biological parents and adoptive parents are kept extremely secret. The law in Pakistan does not allow adoption – only ‘kifala’ is permitted in which monetary and emotional care can be given to the child, but not obligations or rights. An abandoned baby has no legal identity and the state does not register such a child as a citizen. (A petition has been filed recently to challenge this).

Adopting through Edhi is therefore ‘closed adoption’ (confidential or secret adoption), whereby the record of the biological parent is kept confidential and the child is given the name of the adoptive parent. Most of the abandoned babies are found with slips which mention the name and the religion of the baby.

The Underground Illegal Abduction and Sale of Spanish Infants

I seriously can't even believe this article.

Spain Confronts Decades of Pain Over Lost Babies
By RAPHAEL MINDER
Published: July 6, 2011

SEVILLE, Spain — Prodded by grieving parents, Spanish judges are investigating hundreds of charges that infants were abducted and sold for adoption over a 40-year period. What may have begun as political retaliation for leftist families during the dictatorship of Gen. Francisco Franco appears to have mutated into a trafficking business in which doctors, nurses and even nuns colluded with criminal networks.

Dolores Díaz Cerpa said she was carrying twins in 1973, but the hospital said she delivered only a girl. Lawsuits have been filed to learn the truth.

The cases, which could eventually run into the thousands, are jolting a country still shaken by the spoken and unspoken terrors of Spain’s 1936-39 Civil War and Franco’s rule. Last week, 78-year-old Concepción Rodrigo Romero joined the rapidly growing ranks of Spanish parents who are turning to the courts to uncover the fates of their babies.

Mrs. Rodrigo Romero, a former seamstress, gave birth, prematurely, in 1971. A doctor in a Seville hospital told her that she had had a son, who was small but “fine and capable of getting a lot bigger,” she recalled in an interview.

The doctor never reappeared, and she never saw her baby again. Two days later, another doctor at the hospital told her husband that the baby had been sent to another hospital for further checks, but had died there.

The second hospital had taken care of the burial, the doctor said, and the body lay in Seville’s San Fernando cemetery, in an unmarked grave.

“Deep inside, I’ve always known that my son was stolen from me,” Mrs. Rodrigo Romero said.

Spain’s judiciary was forced into action after Anadir, an association formed to represent people searching for missing children or parents, filed its first complaints in late January. Attorney General Cándido Conde-Pumpido announced on June 18 that 849 cases were being examined, adding that 162 already could be classified as criminal proceedings because of evidence pointing to abductions.

The statute of limitations on most of the suspected crimes has expired, prompting lawyers to discuss whether a special statute can be adopted. In 2008, Baltasar Garzón, Spain’s most internationally renowned judge, extended an investigation into allegations of crimes during the Franco era to examine whether Franco had ordered thousands of babies taken from women who had supported his republican opponents in the civil war.

The cases of disappeared infants stretch from 1950 to 1990, continuing well after Franco’s death in 1975. It is not known whether government officials played any role.

Mr. Conde-Pumpido, who said it was impossible to estimate how many more cases would surface, also suggested for the first time that organized crime “networks” had been involved. He gave no details, saying only that he did not believe that “one single organization” had masterminded all the abductions.

Antonio Barroso, the president of Anadir, said he believed that over time Spain became a hub for gangs operating an international trade, with many newborns sold into adoption overseas.

The possibility of such an operation is one of many unanswered questions posed by the searing journey of long-silent parents and children in recent months.

Mr. Barroso, 42, founded Anadir last year, after being told by a friend that they were both adopted. He took DNA samples from the woman he had always known as his mother and confronted her after tests showed that his sample and hers were not a match. She admitted paying a nun for a baby and misleading her son about his birth for decades.

Mr. Barroso said he had since tracked down the nun, who had worked in a maternity ward. His own lawsuit — against the nun and other hospital staff members — has yet to be heard in court, and he is still searching for his real parents.

According to Anadir, a handful of adopted people have managed to find their parents, but so far most have preferred to remain anonymous. To help with legal matters, Anadir and other similar associations that have sprung up as the list of plaintiffs grows are trying to recruit lawyers willing to work on a pro bono basis.

Last month, the first cemetery exhumations took place in La Línea de la Concepción, after allegations that newborns had been buried there. Madrid’s regional attorney’s office has said that it would require medical staff members, including nuns who worked as nurses, to testify in court about the whereabouts of some children who were born during the 40-year period under investigation.

As in Mr. Barroso’s case, a few nuns have confessed to selling children, but without suggesting that they were part of a criminal network. The Roman Catholic Church has had no comment.

A Madrid company has built up a DNA data bank from about 700 people since January. Yet even with DNA testing, prosecutors face a struggle to search common graves for the remains of babies supposedly buried there. Medical records often prove to be incomplete or contradictory.

Flawed records are central to the complaint filed by Dolores Díaz Cerpa, who alleges that her newborn was abducted in 1973. Mrs. Díaz Cerpa had been told by a doctor that she was carrying twins. She gave birth to a daughter, but a nurse denied that she had carried another fetus.

Always suspecting a lie, and after hearing about other parents who were searching for stolen newborns, she asked the hospital for another copy of her daughter’s birth record. Instead, she received a record for a boy.

“The hospital suggested this was just an old administrative error, but nobody can convince me that I haven’t sadly been right for decades,” Mrs. Díaz Cerpa said.

Some couples, like Joaquín Sáez Naranjo and Manuela Sánchez Cintado of Seville, are pursuing multiple lawsuits. They lost two babies in suspicious circumstances, in 1972 and then in 1985.

In the 1985 case, Mrs. Sánchez Cintado said that doctors performed a sonogram, and that she was congratulated for carrying a boy. After giving birth, she was informed that the newborn had been sent to a special ward to deal with “a small problem.” Her husband was separately told that his baby daughter had died.

“I was going to have a boy and somebody switched him for a dead daughter,” a visibly shaken Mrs. Sánchez Cintado recalled. “This was as ridiculous a story as if the doctor had told me that I had broken my elbow and then started operating on my wrist.”

Like other parents, Mr. Sáez Naranjo said that he now deeply regretted having accepted a doctor’s advice that it would be best for him and his wife not to deal with the shock of seeing the dead baby’s body. Instead, he went to Seville’s San Fernando cemetery for the burial of “a bundle of cloth” in a common grave.

Last week, he was back at the cemetery, only to be told by staff members that the remains in that grave had been moved a decade ago to an unspecified location.

In separate interviews, some grieving parents said they allowed hospitals to handle the burials because their own insurance policies did not cover such costs. Others also said they were too naïve or uneducated to challenge medical workers, despite their suspicions.

During the Franco regime and in its immediate aftermath, “you simply didn’t challenge what an official told you,” said María Luisa Puro Rodríguez, a former tobacco factory worker who claims that her newborn was abducted in 1976 from a Malaga hospital. “We now thankfully live in a society where it is normal to question what we hear,” she said. “I’ve learned this bitter lesson and am now ready to fight all the way to find out what actually happened.”

Stress Can Shorten Telomeres in Childhood

Children in orphanages have chromosome changes that could affect future health.

Marian Turner

The shortened telomeres found in Romanian orphans could lead to health problems later in life.Image by © BOGDAN CRISTEL/Reuters/Corbis

A long-term study of children from Romanian orphanages suggests that the effects of childhood stress could be visible in their DNA as they grow up.

Children who spent their early years in state-run Romanian orphanages have shorter telomeres than children who grew up in foster care, according to a study published today inMolecular Psychiatry¹. Telomeres are buffer regions of non-coding DNA at the ends of chromosomes that prevent the loss of protein-coding DNA when cells divide. Telomeres get slightly shorter each time a chromosome replicates during cell division, but stress can also cause them to shorten. Shorter telomeres are associated with a raft of diseases in adults from diabetes to dementia.

The study is part of the Bucharest Early Intervention Project, a programme started in 2000 by US researchers who aimed to compare the health and development of Romanian children brought up in the stressful environment of an orphanage with those in foster families, where they receive more individual attention and a better quality of care.

When the study began, state orphanages were still common in Romania, and a foster care system was established specifically for this project. The study focused on 136 orphanage children aged between 6 and 30 months, half of whom were randomly assigned to foster families. The other half remained in orphanages.

The researchers obtained DNA samples from the children when they were between 6 and 10 years old, and measured the length of their telomeres. They found that the longer the children had spent in the orphanage in early childhood - before the age of four and half - the shorter their telomeres.

"It shows that being in institutional care affects children right down to the molecular level," says clinical psychiatrist Stacy Drury of Tulane University in New Orleans, Louisiana, one of the lead authors on the study.

Newborn field

Other studies have found short telomeres in adults who said they had experienced childhood psychological stress^2,3, but telomere biology in children is still a new field. Drury and her team cannot yet make any comparisons with the telomeres of non-institutionalized children because "we don't yet have a normative template for telomere length in young children", explains paediatrician and senior study author Charles Nelson of Harvard Medical School and the Children's Hospital in Boston. Drury, Nelson and their colleagues are currently measuring telomere length in children who experienced less stress in early childhood.

The team says that many aspects of a child's health can improve if they are moved from institutional care to a family environment. But could this extend to children regrowing their telomeres? Although telomeres usually shorten with age, they can lengthen through the action of an enzyme called telomerase.

Iiris Hovatta of the Research Program of Molecular Neurology at the University of Helsinki, who was not involved in the Romanian study, suggests that shortened telomeres might not be permanent. "Studies in adults have shown that telomere length in some individuals increases over time, and this tends to occur in those people who have shorter telomeres to begin with," says Hovatta.

Telomeres and health

We might soon know. Drury and her colleagues last week received funding from the US National Institutes of Health to do a follow-up study of the Romanian children as they turn 12. It could be that the orphanage environment led to epigenetic programming — chemical, rather than sequence, changes to DNA — that has caused the children's telomeres to continue to shorten at a faster rate than normal, or their telomeres may even have lengthened again, say the authors.

The follow-up study might also help to answer the question of whether shorter telomeres are a cause or an effect of poor health. The researchers have cognitive and physical health records from the children from multiple ages and are analysing whether children from the two groups differ in terms of mental development and physical health. They will soon be able to compare these medical histories to their telomere lengths as 12-year olds.

"Stress is hard to define", says Drury. "These data might show us if telomere length can be used as a fundamental biomarker for all of the cumulative factors that we call adverse experiences." 

• References

  1. Drury, S. S. et al. Mol. Psychiatr. advance online publication doi:10.1038/mp.2011.53 (2011).
  2. Kananen, L. et al. PLoS ONE 5, e10826 (2010).
  3. Tyrka, A. R. et al. Biol Psychiatr. 67, 531-534 (2010).

Raising Katie

What adopting a white girl taught a black family about race in the Obama era.

by Tony Dokoupil

Several pairs of eyes follow the girl as she pedals around the playground in an affluent suburb of Baltimore. But it isn't the redheaded fourth grader who seems to have moms and dads of the jungle gym nervous on this recent Saturday morning. It's the African-American man—six feet tall, bearded and wearing a gray hooded sweatshirt—watching the girl's every move. Approaching from behind, he grabs the back of her bicycle seat as she wobbles to a stop. "Nice riding," he says, as the fair-skinned girl turns to him, beaming. "Thanks, Daddy," she replies. The onlookers are clearly flummoxed.

As a black father and adopted white daughter, Mark Riding and Katie O'Dea-Smith are a sight at best surprising, and at worst so perplexing that people feel compelled to respond. Like the time at a Pocono Mountains flea market when Riding scolded Katie, attracting so many sharp glares that he and his wife, Terri, 37, and also African-American, thought "we might be lynched." And the time when well-intentioned shoppers followed Mark and Katie out of the mall to make sure she wasn't being kidnapped. Or when would-be heroes come up to Katie in the cereal aisle and ask, "Are you OK?"—even though Terri is standing right there.

Is it racism? The Ridings tend to think so, and it's hard to blame them. To shadow them for a day, as I recently did, is to feel the unease, notice the negative attention and realize that the same note of fear isn't in the air when they attend to their two biological children, who are 2 and 5 years old. It's fashionable to say that the election of Barack Obama has brought the dawn of a post-racial America. In the past few months alone, The Atlantic Monthly has declared "the end of white America," The Washington Post has profiled the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People's struggle for relevance in a changing world, and National Public Radio has led discussions questioning the necessity of the annual Black History Month. Perhaps not surprising, most white and black Americans no longer cite racism as a major social problem, according to recent polls.

But the Ridings' experience runs counter to these popular notions of harmony. And adoption between races is particularly fraught. So-called transracial adoptions have surged since 1994, when the Multiethnic Placement Act reversed decades of outright racial matching by banning discrimination against adoptive families on the basis of race. But the growth has been all one-sided. The number of white families adopting outside their race is growing and is now in the thousands, while cases like Katie's—of a black family adopting a nonblack child—remain frozen at near zero.

Decades after the racial integration of offices, buses and water fountains, persistent double standards mean that African-American parents are still largely viewed with unease as caretakers of any children other than their own—or those they are paid to look after. As Yale historian Matthew Frye Jacobson has asked: "Why is it that in the United States, a white woman can have black children but a black woman cannot have white children?"

That question hit home for the Ridings in 2003, when Terri's mother, Phyllis Smith, agreed to take in Katie, then 3, on a temporary basis. A retired social worker, Phyllis had long been giving needy children a home—and Katie was one of the hardest cases. The child of a local prostitute, her toddler tantrums were so disturbing that foster families simply refused to keep her. Twelve homes later, Katie was still being passed around. Phyllis was in many ways an unlikely savior. The former president of the Baltimore chapter of the National Association of Black Social Workers, she joined her colleagues in condemning the adoption of black children by white families as "cultural genocide"—a position she still holds in theory, if not in practice. She couldn't say no to the "charming, energetic" girl who ended up on her front doorstep.

Last November, after a grueling adoption process—"[adoption officials] pushed the envelope on every issue," says Mark—little Irish-Catholic Katie O'Dea, as pale as a communion wafer, became Katie O'Dea-Smith: a formally adopted member of the African-American Riding-Smith family. (Phyllis is her legal guardian, but Mark and Terri were also vetted as legal surrogates for Phyllis.)

To be sure, it's an unconventional arrangement. Katie spends weekdays with Phyllis, her legal guardian. But Mark and Terri, who live around the corner, are her de facto parents, too. They help out during the week, and welcome Katie over on weekends and holidays. As for titles: Katie calls Phyllis "Mommy" and Terri "Sister," since technically it's true. Mark has always been "Daddy" or "Mark."

"Let me just put it out there," says Mark, a 38-year-old private-school admissions director with an appealing blend of megaphone voice and fearless opinion, especially when it comes to his family. "I've never felt more self-consciously black than while holding our little white girl's hand in public." He used to write off the negative attention as innocent curiosity. But after a half-decade of rude comments and revealing faux pas—like the time his school's guidance counselor called Katie a "foster child" in her presence—he now fights the ignorance with a question of his own: why didn't a white family step up to take Katie?

Riding's challenge hints at a persistent social problem. "No country in the world has made more progress toward combating overt racism than [the United States]," says David Schneider, a Rice University psychologist and the author of "The Psychology of Stereotyping." "But the most popular stereotype of black people is still that they're violent. And for a lot of people, not even racist people, the sight of a white child with a black parent just sets off alarm signals."

Part of the reason for the adoptive imbalance comes down to numbers, and the fact that people tend to want children of their own race. African-Americans represent almost one third of the 510,000 children in foster care, so black parents have a relatively high chance of ending up with a same-race child. (Not so for would-be adoptive white parents who prefer the rarest thing of all in the foster-care system: a healthy white baby.) But the dearth of black families with nonblack children also has painful historical roots. Economic hardship and centuries of poisonous belief in the so-called civilizing effects of white culture upon other races have familiarized Americans with the concept of white stewardship of other ethnicities, rather than the reverse.

The result is not only discomfort among whites at the thought of nonwhites raising their offspring; African-Americans can also be wary when one of their own is a parent to a child outside their race. Just ask Dallas Cowboys All-Pro linebacker DeMarcus Ware and his wife, Taniqua, who faced a barrage of criticism after adopting a nonblack baby last February. When The New York Times sports page ran a photo of the shirtless new father with what appeared to be a white baby in his arms (and didn't mention race in the accompanying story), it sent a slow shock wave through the African-American community, pitting supporters who celebrated the couple's joy after three painful miscarriages against critics who branded the Wares "self-race-hating individuals" for ignoring the disproportionate number of blacks in foster care. The baby, now their daughter, Marley, is in fact Hispanic. "Do you mean to tell me that the Wares couldn't have found a little black baby to adopt?" snarled one blogger on the Daily Voice, an online African-American newspaper.

For the relatively few black families that do adopt non-African-American children, and the adoptive children themselves, the experience can be confusing. "I hadn't realized how often we talked about white people at home," says Mark. "I hadn't realized that dinnertime stories were often told with reference to the race of the players, or that I often used racial stereotypes, as in the news only cares about some missing spring-break girl because she is blonde.'"

Katie, too, has sometimes struggled with her unusual situation, and how outsiders perceive it. When she's not drawing, swimming or pining after teen heartthrob Zac Efron, she's often dealing with normal kid teasing with a nasty edge. "They'll ignore me or yell at me because I have a black family," she says. Most of her friends are black, although her school is primarily white. And Terri has noticed something else: Katie is uncomfortable identifying people by their race.

Is she racially confused? Should her parents be worried? Opinions vary in the larger debate about whether race is a legitimate consideration in adoption. At present, agencies that receive public funding are forbidden from taking race into account when screening potential parents. They are also banned from asking parents to reflect on their readiness to deal with race-related issues, or from requiring them to undergo sensitivity training. But a well-meaning policy intended to ensure colorblindness appears to be backfiring. According to a study published last year by the Evan B. Donaldson Adoption Institute, transracial parents are often ill equipped to raise children who are themselves unprepared for the world's racial realities.

Now lawmakers may rejoin the charged race-adoption debate. Later this year the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights, an independent federal think tank, is expected to publish a summary of expert testimony on adoption law—much of which will ask Congress to reinstate race as a salient consideration in all cases. The testimony, from the Evan B. Donaldson institute and others, will also suggest initiatives currently banned or poorly executed under existing policies, including racial training for parents and intensifying efforts to recruit more black adoptive families.

Would such measures be a step back for Obama's post-racial America? It's hard to tell. The Ridings, for their part, are taking Katie's racial training into their own hands. They send her to a mixed-race school, and mixed-race summer camps, celebrate St. Patrick's Day with gusto and buy Irish knickknacks, like a "Kiss Me I'm Irish" T shirt and a mug with Katie's O'Dea family crest emblazoned on it. But they worry it won't be enough. "All else being equal, I think she should be with people who look like her," says Mark. "It's not fair that she's got to grow up feeling different when she's going to feel different anyway. She wears glasses, her voice is a bit squeaky, and on top of that she has to deal with the fact that her mother is 70 and black."

But even if Katie feels different now, the Riding-Smiths have given her both a stable home and a familiarity with two ethnic worlds that will surely serve her well as she grows up in a country that is increasingly blended. And it may be that hers will be the first truly post-racial generation.

Find the original article here.

Court backs decision to bar Christian foster couple

Original article can be found here. Obviously, I'm less familiar with the British legal system, but while I agree that there are many reasons why some people should not foster children, it seems to me that this is a slippery slope.  Hopefully the High Court feels they are adequately equipped to determine where the line on safe beliefs for foster parents is.

Mr and Mrs Johns said they could not tell a child homosexuality was an acceptable lifestyle

A decision to bar a Christian couple from fostering children because of their views on homosexuality has been backed at the High Court.

Eunice and Owen Johns, 62 and 65, of Derby, said the city council did not want them to become foster carers because of their traditional views.

The couple said they were "doomed not to be approved" because of their views.

The Pentecostal Christian couple had applied to Derby City Council to be respite carers.

'Loving home'
The court heard the couple withdrew their application after a social worker expressed concerns when they said they could not tell a child a homosexual lifestyle was acceptable.

Lord Justice Munby and Mr Justice Beatson ruled that laws protecting people from discrimination because of their sexual orientation "should take precedence" over the right not to be discriminated against on religious grounds.


“All we were not willing to do was to tell a small child that the practice of homosexuality was a good thing” - Eunice Johns

The Johns are considering an appeal.

Derby City Council said previously its first duty was to the children in its care, some of whom were very vulnerable.

Speaking outside the court in London, Mrs Johns said: "All we wanted was to offer a loving home to a child in need. We have a good track record as foster parents.

"We have been excluded because we have moral opinions based on our faith and we feel sidelined because we are Christians with normal, mainstream, Christian views on sexual ethics.

"We are prepared to love and accept any child. All we were not willing to do was to tell a small child that the practice of homosexuality was a good thing."

'Harmful to children'
The couple cared for about 15 children in the 1990s.

Ben Summerskill, chief executive of Stonewall, the lesbian, gay and bisexual charity, said: "Thankfully, Mr and Mrs Johns' out-dated views aren't just out of step with the majority of people in modern Britain, but those of many Christians too.

"If you wish to be involved in the delivery of a public service, you should be prepared to provide it fairly to anyone."

The Christian Legal Centre reacted to the ruling with dismay and warned that "fostering by Christians is now in doubt".

The organisation said the judgment "sends out the clear message that orthodox Christian ethical beliefs are potentially harmful to children and that Christian parents with mainstream Christian views are not suitable to be considered as potential foster parents".

Guest View: Don't push foster youths out the door

A new article found here. College is the new high school, let's support AB 12 and give these kids a little support. You don't dump teenagers at bus stops.


Guest View: Don't push foster youths out the door
By Miriam Aroni Krinsky
San Gabriel Valley Tribune
Posted:09/19/2010 07:04:01 AM PDT
`On my 18th birthday, my (foster parent) literally dropped me off at a bus station with my worldly possessions packed in a duffle bag. I felt like a ship lost at sea with no destination, no gas, and no motivation."

The above cry for help is far too common among youth who age out of our foster care system.

Few of us would turn our teenaged child out on the street with no place to sleep, no job, minimal life skills, no savings, and no plan for adulthood. Few of us would abandon our 18 year-old with no adult support and nowhere to turn when the challenges of independent living set in. Yet for our most vulnerable youth - the abused and neglected children we bring into foster care - these scenarios are the norm.

Every year more than 1,000 teenagers age out of Los Angeles County's foster care system and come face to face with the challenges of adulthood completely alone. Without the anchor of a family, former foster youth disproportionately join the ranks of the homeless, incarcerated and unemployed. Indeed, recent studies recount that former foster youth are 10 times more likely to be arrested than similarly situated youth and that one in four who age out of foster care will end up in jail within the first two years after leaving care. This incarceration doesn't come cheap: The average price for a year in prison is $35,587, and this figure doesn't even begin to account for the human toll and loss of potential.

Sitting on the governor's desk is a chance to address this dismal record and chart a better path for teenagers in foster care. AB 12 - legislation that received overwhelming bipartisan support in the Legislature - would permit young Californians in the foster care system to continue receiving support until age 21. This support will stabilize their housing, provide a cushion for higher education and/or beginning a career.

While some may question investing in foster youth in the face of a multi-billion dollar deficit, AB 12 would result in no net cost to the state because it draws down new federal money. As a result of the recently enacted federal Fostering Connections to Success Act, the federal government will for the first time support state efforts to extend foster care services and oversight up to age 21; federal money will match every dollar our state invests in supporting foster youth beyond age 18. Moreover, provisions in AB 12 will result in new savings for our state of $60 million annually by converting a formerly state-funded relative guardianship program into a federally-funded initiative.

A few states have extended foster care support beyond age 18 and their results are conclusive - youth who were allowed to remain in foster care beyond age 18 were twice as likely to be working toward completion of a high school diploma, three times more likely to be enrolled in college, 65 percent less likely to have been arrested and 54 percent less likely to have been incarcerated.

So AB 12 is the humane approach but it's also is a fiscally sound bill. It is a rare glimmer of basic common sense in a legislative year too often marked by chaos and dysfunction.

Not surprisingly, AB 12 has received wide bipartisan support. The 51-member California Child Welfare Council, co-chaired by Supreme Court Justice Carlos Moreno and HHS Secretary Kim Belsh , unanimously recommended expanding support for youth in foster care to age 21.

Let us hope that the governor joins the chorus of bipartisan leaders in our state who have underscored the need to invest in, rather than abandon, our most vulnerable children.The governor should sign the bill before yet another generation of foster youth find themselves ill prepared for adulthood, alone and adrift.

Los Angeles resident Miriam Aroni Krinsky is a member of the California Blue Ribbon Commission on Foster Care and also serves as a lecturer at the UCLA School of Public Affairs.

Denmark Parliament Approves Equal Adoption rights

Denmark parliament approves equal adoption rights
By PinkNews.co.uk Staff Writer • March 18, 2009 - 11:32


Denmark joins other Nordic countries in allowing gay joint adoption

A majority vote in parliament yesterday will see the introduction of a bill giving equal adoption rights for civil partners and straight married couples in Denmark.

The Copenhagen Post reports that the proposal, from Civil Centre Party founder Simon Emil Ammitzbøll, grants partners registered in civil unions the right to adopt unrelated children both domestically and internationally.

Currently, gays and lesbians can adopt individually in the country and couples can adopt their partner's existing children. The bill will grant same-sex couples the right to adopt jointly, in line with straight married couples.

Other Nordic countries such as Iceland, Norway and Sweden already allow same-sex couples to adopt jointly.

According to figures from 2007, 103 out of 712 step-child adoptions were from couples in civil partnerships.

Most adoptions involving unrelated children tend to take place abroad, making it difficult for Danish same-sex couples to do so, as many countries will not allow homosexual adoption.

Anti-Abortionists Target Black Women

Though many of us prefer not to think about it, the issue of abortion is directly tied to the issues surrounding adoption, and it's always been an issue I've had deep personal feelings about. I respect your right to be on either side of the argument, but I thought I'd share something I came across that offended me on so many levels. Whatever your feelings are, I'm appalled that anyone thought this was the way to handle it. I'm stunned anyone allowed this to go up, much less that anyone thought this was a good idea.

I can't believe there are still people who believe that birth control was invented to "eliminate minorities."

Here's a link to the original article.

And a link to a picture of the billboard itself. Someone obviously spent some money on it.

Controversial Ga. billboards link abortion, race

By ERRIN HAINES (AP) – 2 days ago

ATLANTA — The message on dozens of billboards across the city is provocative: Black children are an "endangered species."

The eyebrow-raising ads featuring a young black child are an effort by the anti-abortion movement to use race to rally support within the black community. The reaction from black leaders has been mixed, but the "Too Many Aborted" campaign, which so far is unique to only Georgia, is drawing support from other anti-abortion groups across the country.

"It's ingenious," said the Rev. Johnny Hunter, national director of the Life Education and Resource Network, a North Carolina-based anti-abortion group aimed at African-Americans that operates in 27 states. "This campaign is in your face, and nobody can ignore it."

The billboards went up last week in Atlanta and urge black women to "get outraged."

The effort is sponsored by Georgia Right to Life, which also is pushing legislation that aims to ban abortions based on race.

Black women accounted for the majority of abortions in Georgia in 2006, even though blacks make up just a third of state population, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

Nationally, black women were more than three times as likely to get an abortion in 2006 compared with white women, according to the CDC.

"I think it's necessary," Cheryl Sullenger, senior policy adviser for Operation Rescue, said of the billboard campaign. "Abortion in the black community is at epidemic proportions. They're not really aware of what's actually going on. If it shocks people ... it should be shocking."

Anti-abortion advocates say the procedure has always been linked to race. They claim Planned Parenthood founder Margaret Sanger wanted to eradicate minorities by putting birth control clinics in their neighborhoods, a charge Planned Parenthood denies.

"The language in the billboard is using messages of fear and shame to target women of color," said Leola Reis, a spokeswoman for Planned Parenthood of Georgia. "If we want to reduce the number of abortions and unintended pregnancies, we need to work as a community to make sure we get quality affordable health care services to as many women and men as possible."

In 2008, Issues4Life, a California-based group working to end abortion in the black community, lobbied Congress to stop funding Planned Parenthood, calling black abortions "the Darfur of America."

Pro-Life Action League Executive Director Eric Scheidler said a race-based strategy for anti-abortion activists has gotten a fresh zeal, especially in the wake of the historic election of the country's first black president, Barack Obama, who supports abortion rights.

"He's really out of step with the rest of black America," Scheidler said. "That might be part of what may be shifting here and why a campaign like this is appropriate, to kind of wake up that disconnect."

Abortion rights advocates are disturbed. Spelman College professor Beverly Guy-Sheftall called the strategy a gimmick.

"To use racist arguments to try to bait black people to get them to be anti-abortion is just disgusting," said Guy-Sheftall, who teaches women's history and feminist thought at the historically black women's college.

"These one-issue approaches that are not about saving the black family or black children, it's just a big distraction," she said. "Many black people don't know who Margaret Sanger is and could care less."