Chinese Officials Seized and Sold Babies, Parents Say

Link to original article here. 

By SHARON LaFRANIERE

Published: August 4, 2011

LONGHUI COUNTY, China — Many parents and grandparents in this mountainous region of terraced rice and sweet potato fields have long known to grab their babies and find the nearest hiding place whenever family planning officials show up. Too many infants, they say, have been snatched by officials, never to be seen again.

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Xiong Chao at Play

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At least 16 children were seized in Longhui County.

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But Yuan Xinquan was caught by surprise one December morning in 2005. Then a new father at the age of 19, Mr. Yuan was holding his 52-day-old daughter at a bus stop when a half-dozen men sprang from a white government van and demanded his marriage certificate.

He did not have one. Both he and his daughter’s mother were below the legal age for marriage.

Nor did he have 6,000 renminbi, then about $745, to pay the fine he said they demanded if he wanted to keep his child. He was left with a plastic bag holding her baby clothes and some powdered formula.

“They are pirates,” he said last month in an interview at his home, a half-hour trek up a narrow mountain path between terraced rice paddies.

Nearly six years later, he said, he still hopes to relay a message to his daughter: “Please come home as soon as possible.”

Mr. Yuan’s daughter was among at least 16 children who were seized by family planning officials between 1999 and late 2006 in Longhui County, an impoverished rural area in Hunan, a southern Chinese province, parents, grandparents and other residents said in interviews last month.

The abduction of children is a continuing problem in China, where a lingering preference for boys coupled with strict controls on the number of births have helped create a lucrative black market in children. Just last week, the police announced that they had rescued 89 babies from child traffickers, and the deputy director of the Public Security Ministry assailed what he called the practice of “buying and selling children in this country.”

But parents in Longhui say that in their case, it was local government officials who treated babies as a source of revenue, routinely imposing fines of $1,000 or more — five times as much as an average local family’s yearly income. If parents could not pay the fines, the babies were illegally taken from their families and often put up for adoption by foreigners, another big source of revenue.

The practice in Longhui came to an end in 2006, parents said, only after an 8-month-old boy fell from the second-floor balcony of a local family planning office as officials tried to pluck him from his mother’s arms.

Despite a few news reports outside the Chinese mainland about government-sanctioned kidnappings in Longhui and other regions, China’s state-controlled media ignored or suppressed the news until this May, when Caixin, an intrepid Chinese magazine well known for unusually bold investigations, reported the abductions and prompted an official inquiry.

Zeng Dingbao, who leads the Inspection Bureau in Shaoyang, the city that administers Longhui County, has promised a diligent investigation. But signs point to a whitewash. In June, he told People’s Daily Online, the Web version of the Communist Party’s official newspaper, that the situation “really isn’t the way the media reported it to be, with infants being bought and sold.”

Rather than helping trace and recover seized children, parents say, the authorities are punishing those who speak out. Two of the most vocal fathers were detained for 15 days in Shaoyang on charges of soliciting prostitutes at a brothel. Released last month, the two men, Yang Libing, 47, and Zhou Yinghe, 34, said they had been entrapped.

Mr. Yang said he was constantly followed by government minders. Mr. Zhou said the village party secretary had warned him to stop talking to reporters about the abduction of his 3-month-old daughter in March 2003 or face more punishment. “They are like organized criminals,” Mr. Zhou said.

China’s family planning policies, while among the strictest in the world, ban the confiscation of children from parents who exceed birth quotas, and abuses on the scale of those in Shaoyang are far less common today than they once were. Even so, critics say the powers handed to local officials under national family planning regulations remain excessive and ripe for exploitation.

“The larger issue is that the one-child policy is so extreme that it emboldened local officials to act so inhumanely,” said Wang Feng, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution who directs the Brookings-Tsinghua Center for Public Policy in Beijing.

The scandal also has renewed questions about whether Americans and other foreigners have adopted Chinese children who were falsely depicted as abandoned or orphaned. At least one American adoption agency organized adoptions from the government-run Shaoyang orphanage.

Lillian Zhang, the director of China Adoption With Love, based in Boston, said by telephone last month that the agency had found adoptive parents in 2006 for six Shaoyang children — all girls, all renamed Shao, after the city. The Chinese authorities certified in each case that the child was eligible for adoption, she said, and her agency cannot now independently investigate their backgrounds without a specific request backed by evidence.

“I’m an adoption agency, not a policeman,” Ms. Zhang said.

The Shaoyang welfare agency’s orphanage is required to post a notice of each newly received child for 60 days in Hunan Daily, a newspaper delivered only to subscribers in Longhui County. Unclaimed children are renamed with the surname Shao and approved for adoption. Foreign parents who adopt must donate about $5,400 to the orphanage.

Reports that family planning officials stole children, beat parents, forcibly sterilized mothers and destroyed families’ homes sowed a quiet terror through parts of Longhui County in the first half of the past decade. The casualties of that terror remain suffused with heartbreak and rage years later.

Yang Libing, one of the two fathers accused of soliciting prostitutes, said he was a migrant worker in the southern city of Shenzhen when his firstborn, Yang Ling, was stolen from his parents’ home in May 2005 when she was 9 months old.

Family planning officials apparently spotted Yang Ling’s clothes hung to dry outside the family’s mud-brick home. Her grandmother tried to hide her in a pigsty, but the grandfather, Yang Qinzheng, a Communist Party member and a former soldier, bade her to come out.

“I don’t disobey,” he said last month. “I do what the officials say.”

Yang Ling’s parents had not registered their marriage. To keep the baby, the officials said, the elder Mr. Yang would have to pay nearly $1,000, on the spot. Otherwise, they said, he would have to sign away the girl with a false affidavit stating that he was not her biological grandfather.

“I was totally outraged,” he said, but “I did not have the courage to resist. They do not play by the rules.” He signed the document.

Yang Libing discovered the loss of his daughter during his monthly telephone call home from a pay phone on a Shenzhen street. “Is she behaving?” he asked cheerily. The answer, he said, made him physically sick.

After racing home, he said, he begged family planning officials to let him pay the fine. They said it was too late. When he protested, he said, a group of more than 10 men beat him. Afterward, the office director offered a compromise: although their daughter was gone forever, the Yangs would be allowed to conceive two more children.

“I can’t even describe my hatred of those family planning officials,” Mr. Yang said. “I hate them to my bones. I wonder if they are parents, too. Why don’t they treat us as humans?”

Asked whether he was still searching for his daughter, he replied: “Of course! This is not a chicken. This is not a dog. This is my child.”

Hu Shelian, 46, another anguished victim, gave birth to a second daughter in 1998. Even though family planning specialists said couples in her area were allowed a second child if the first was a girl, she said family planning officials broke her windows and took her television as punishment.

After she had a third daughter the following year, they levied a whopping fine of nearly $5,000. When she pleaded poverty, she said, four officials snatched her newborn from her arms, muscled her into a car and drove her to the county hospital for a forced tubal ligation. Her baby disappeared into the bowels of the Shaoyang orphanage.

Xiong Chao escaped that fate. Villagers say he was the last baby that officials tried to snatch, and one of the few returned home.

Now, six years later, his 63-year-old grandmother, Dai Yulin, patiently scrawls blue and white chalk numerals on her concrete wall hoping — in vain — that Chao will learn them.

“He has been to primary school for a whole year,” she said, “and he still cannot recognize one and two.”

Nearby is the tiny, dark room where, she said, she tried and failed in September 2006 to hide Chao from family planning officials. He was 8 months old, her son’s second child. Officials demanded nearly $1,000, then took him away when she could not pay.

His mother, Du Chunhua, rushed to the family planning office to protest.

There, as she struggled with two officials on the second-floor balcony, she said, the baby slipped from her grasp and fell more than 10 feet, to the pavement below.

Later, she said, as the baby lay in a coma in the hospital, his forehead permanently misshapen, officials offered a deal: they would forget about the fine as long as the family covered the medical bills for Chao.

Also, they said, the Xiongs could keep him.

Edy Yin, Shao Heng and Shi Da contributed research from Beijing.

A version of this article appeared in print on August 5, 2011, on page A1 of the New York edition with the headline: Officials in China Seized Infants for Black Market, Parents Say.

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".

Stephen Colbert

is a funny man. (Too bad politics aren't always hilarious.)

PostSecret

More adoption related cards from one of my favorite sites: PostSecret