Kristin Chenoweth on Being Adopted

Kristin Chenoweth Opens Up About Her Adoption

With DNA Testing, Suddenly They Are Family

By RACHEL L. SWARNS

Published: January 23, 2012

ST. LOUIS — Growing up, Khrys Vaughan always believed that she had inherited her looks and mannerisms from her father, and that her appreciation for tradition and old-fashioned gentility stemmed from her parents’ Southern roots. But those facets of her self-image crumbled when she was told, at age 42, that she had been adopted.

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Erin McCracken for The New York Times

Khrys Vaughan, left, of St. Louis and her cousin Jennifer Grigsby of Somerset, Ky., meeting for the first time last week.

She began searching for her origins, only to find out that her adoption records had been sealed, a common practice in the 1960s. Then Mrs. Vaughan stumbled across an ad from a DNA testing company offering to help people who had been adopted find clues to their ancestry and connections to blood relatives.

About five weeks after shipping off two tiny vials of her cells from a swab of her cheek, Mrs. Vaughan received an e-mail informing her that her bloodlines extended to France, Romania and West Africa. She was also given the names and e-mail addresses of a dozen distant cousins. This month, she drove 208 miles from her hometown here to Evansville, Ind., to meet her third cousin, the first relative to respond to her e-mails. Mrs. Vaughan is black and her cousin is white, and they have yet to find their common ancestor. But Mrs. Vaughan says that does not matter.

“Somebody is related to me in this world,” she said. “Somebody out there has my blood. I can look at her and say, ‘This is my family.’ ”

A growing number of adoptees, now in the thousands, are turning to DNA testing companies in hopes of piecing together the puzzles of their beginnings. Some long to learn whether their family trees first bloomed in Ireland or Italy, Europe or South America. Others want to know whether they are genetically predisposed to developing diabetes, cancer or other diseases. Most adoptees are hungry for information that will lead to their birth parents, but some are also expanding their conception of family as they embrace a far-flung constellation of second, third and fourth cousins.

Some DNA testing companies have been stepping up their efforts to reach out to this community over the past several years, posting advertisements on adoption message boards and testimonials on their Web sites. Adoptees and some groups that serve them are also spreading the word. “There has never been a better time to establish your biological identity,” says the Web site of Adoption.com, which promotes its efforts to unite adoptees and blood relatives.

Genetic testing has surged in popularity over the last decade, as the cost of analyzing cell samples has dropped and as Americans have grown more interested in learning about their heritage. As a result, some companies have amassed enough DNA samples that they can offer to help adoptees identify their kin, bringing hope to people born in an era when adoption records were routinely sealed, leaving few paper trails to follow.

Several companies provide tests that can confirm whether adoptees are related to individuals they already know. Others cast a wider net by plugging DNA results into databases that contain tens of thousands of genetic samples, provided mostly by people searching for their ancestral roots. The tests detect genetic markers that reveal whether people share a common ancestor or relative.

Some experts on adoption and genetics have criticized ancestry and genealogy testing companies, saying they are, at times, connecting people whose genetic links are tenuous — in effect stretching the definition of a relative. Nevertheless, the growing popularity of the tests, combined with social media sites that connect people day to day, has given some adoptees a sense of family that feels tangible, intimate and immediate.

Within minutes of receiving the names of her distant relatives, Mrs. Vaughan, a freelance project manager, was admiring their photographs on Facebook. Another adoptee who found family through DNA testing, Kathy Borgmann, a 49-year-old corn farmer in New Palestine, Ind., exchanged e-mails with cousins who delighted her by saying, “Welcome to the family.”

Alan Bogner of Olympia, Wash., felt such kinship with his newly discovered second and third cousins that he attended their family reunion in Iowa. He learned, among other things, that many of them were also tall — he is 6-foot-5 — and that they shared his liberal politics.

“It sounds so baloney, but they’re just so much like me,” said Mr. Bogner, 54, who works for the governor’s office.

The tests have their limitations. The price of testing can range from $99 to more than $500, putting them out of reach for some people. Company officials also caution that it is much more common to find second and third cousins than birth parents or siblings. Neil Schwartzman of Montreal struck gold when his test connected him with his sister — “I was gob-smacked,” he recalled — but such cases are not typical.

Company officials say the odds are improving, though, as more people pay for tests and add their DNA to the pool of potential matches. Two testing companies — Family Tree DNA and 23andMe — have databases that contain samples from 350,000 and 125,000 people, respectively, and their executives say those numbers are rising. In recent years, about 9,000 of their customers have identified themselves as adoptees, company officials say, but they believe the actual number is larger since not everyone shares their reasons for testing.

For somebody looking for a match, “maybe there’s no one in the database today, but in two years a first cousin might be there,” said Anne Wojcicki, the chief executive of 23andMe.

DNA testing companies, which compete for customers, do not pool their databases, so people often submit samples to more than one.

Not everyone is hoping to find new relatives. Some adoptees who have found genetic matches have been rebuffed by their distant kin. Most people take genealogical DNA tests to fill gaps in their family trees, not to find new members of their clans. Mr. Bogner said several cousins identified through DNA testing stopped communicating once they learned he was adopted. “It was horribly disappointing,” he said.

Elizabeth Bartholet, an expert on adoption at Harvard Law School, said the proliferation of testing highlights the need for broader access to adoption records. In the meantime, she says, adoptees would be better served by nurturing the relationships they already have.

But Mrs. Vaughan, who is now 44, said her newfound relatives have filled a void in her life. Her adoptive father died when she was 9, and she had found comfort over the years knowing that she shared his smile. “I was crying because I wasn’t Daddy’s little girl,” said Mrs. Vaughan, describing the day that her adoptive mother finally told her the truth. “I needed to find my place in the world.”

She sent out her first e-mail to a cousin identified by Family Tree DNA in March. It landed in the inbox of Jennifer Grigsby, a research analyst from Somerset, Ky., who read it with astonishment. Mrs. Grigsby had taken a DNA test to learn more about her lineage. “I wasn’t looking for a new relationship,” she said. But when the two women started talking, “there was like an instant connection,” said Mrs. Grigsby, 37.

They started exchanging e-mails and Facebook messages every week, and calling once or twice a month. A few weeks ago, they decided to meet in Evansville, midway between their homes. But three days before their get-together, Mrs. Vaughan learned the identity of her birth mother. The courts had determined that her mother had died in 2005, which meant that her name could finally be released. The discovery led her to four sisters.

Mrs. Grigsby offered to cancel their plans so Mrs. Vaughan could connect with her siblings. But Mrs. Vaughan would have nothing of it. Last week, she drove more than three hours to see the first blood relative who had embraced her as family. “Finally!” she said when they met, and she hugged her third cousin as if she would never let go.

How Ethiopia's Adoption Industry Dupes Families and Bullies Activists

How Ethiopia's Adoption Industry Dupes Families and Bullies Activists

By Kathryn Joyce

As the "searchers" who track down adopted children's histories increasingly uncover stories of fraud, corruption, and worse, these specialists are facing threats and even violence

Two biological sisters, ages 4 and 6 and adopted in Ethiopia, listen to the singing of the national anthem during a U.S. naturalization ceremony / AP

In 2008, a 38-year old Oklahoma nurse whom I'll call Kelly adopted an eight-year old girl, "Mary," from Ethiopia. It was the second adoption for Kelly, following one from Guatemala. She'd sought out a child from Ethiopia in the hopes of avoiding some of the ethical problems of adopting from Guatemala: widespread stories of birthmothers coerced to give up their babies and even payments and abductions at the hands of brokers procuring adoptees for unwitting U.S. parents. Now, even after using a reputable agency in Ethiopia, Kelly has come to believe that Mary never should have been placed for adoption. She came to this determination after hiring what's known as an adoption searcher.

Adoption searchers -- specialized independent researchers working in a unique field that few outside the community of adoptive parents even know exists -- track down the birth families of children adopted from other counties. In Ethiopia, searching has arisen in response to a dramatic boom in international adoptions from the country in recent years. In 2010, Ethiopia accounted for nearly a quarter of all international adoptions to the U.S. The number of Ethiopian children adopted into foreign families in the U.S., Canada, and Europe has risen from just a few hundred several years ago to several thousand last year. The increase has been so rapid -- and, for some, so lucrative -- that some locals have said adoption was "becoming the new export industry for our country."

That increase has also brought stories of corruption, child trafficking, and fraud. Parents began to publicize the stories their adopted children told them when they learned English: that they had parents and families at home, who sometimes thought they were going to the U.S. to receive an education and then return. Media investigations have found evidence that adoption agencies had recruited children from intact families. Ethiopia's government found that some children's paperwork had been doctored to list children who had been relinquished by living parents as orphans instead, which allowed the agencies to avoid lengthy court vetting procedures.

"Her entire paperwork, except for a couple of names, was completely falsified," Kelly said. Mary's paperwork listed her as two years younger than she was; it said she had one older sister when she in fact had two younger sisters; and, most importantly, it said her mother had died years ago. "One day I said to Mary, 'You know how your paperwork says you were five and you're really seven?" Kelly recalled. "It also says that your mom's dead.' And she goes, 'My mom's not dead.' She was adamant that her mother wasn't dead, and in fact she wasn't. Her mom is alive and it took our searcher just two days to find her."

Kelly, through a friend who'd also adopted from Ethiopia, hired a searcher. She sent copies of all her paperwork and waited for him to make the nine-hour drive from the capital, Addis Ababa, to the northern region from which Mary had been adopted.

The searcher determined Mary's real birth date, that her birth family and mother were OK with the adoption, and also collected some photos as well as information about Mary's background. Kelly is planning to take Mary back to visit her family in March.

"I wanted to verify that she hadn't been stolen. I searched with the intention of sending her back to Ethiopia if I found out she'd been stolen," said Kelly.

Kelly doesn't believe her agency knowingly falsified the information. As with many cases of fraud or corruption in Ethiopia's adoption program, it seems that the story was changed at the local level, long before the adoption proceeded to the country's federal courts and oversight agencies. Mary's grandfather, who had often been her main caregiver, relinquished the child while her mother was working elsewhere in Ethiopia; something that was only possible because he and several witnessed claimed that the mother had died.

"I can't imagine the weight that was on her," Kelly said of Mary's recollection of her home in Ethiopia. "After I told her the paperwork said her mom was dead, she thought maybe she was dead and nobody told her. So it was huge for her to know she was right, that her mother was alive. I was lucky she remembered and was strong enough to stick with her story."

SEARCHING

This summer, I accompanied a young Ethiopian searcher I'll call Samuel on a birth family interview: a trek deep into the rural countryside of Ethiopia's Southern Nations, Nationalities, and People's Region (SNNPR), the province of origin for many Ethiopian children adopted to the West, to locate the family of a toddler-age girl adopted to Canada.

Starting in the southern town of Sodo, we took a 12-mile drive through rural roads that were so bad it took over an hour: first over deeply-potted dirt throughways, cutting across expanses of grazing land, then off-road until we arrived at a hamlet so small and remote it might have been impossible to find without a guide. But even this village -- a handful of houses and an HIV clinic -- was not our destination. We took a dirt path through the backcountry, but our Land Ranger got stuck in deep trenches of mud. A handful of local children emerged shyly from the bordering fields and led us, on foot, the last half mile up to a solitary mud-walled house surrounded by lush gardens and neatly fenced in with stripped tree branches.

When we arrived, only a toddler boy stood in the front yard, naked below the waist. But the spectacle of several travelers carrying tripod and camera quickly drew nearly 30 neighboring children and adults, who watched solemnly while Samuel framed shots of the exterior of the house. The birthmother Samuel sought to interview, a widow in her early 40s with seven other children still at home, was called from a neighbor's house to host her unexpected guests. She smilingly obliged without question when Samuel and his colleagues explained that they'd come to film for several hours at the request of her daughter's new adoptive parents. Sitting in a chair in the fields behind her house, her fingertips pressed together and her eyes cast down, she answered dozens of questions about her background, her remaining children, and the circumstances of her husband's death, which had prompted the adoption.

Michael Tsegaye 

FULL SCREEN

Taxis and donkeys vie for space on a busy street in Sodo, a city in the Southern Nations Nationalities and People's Region, where many Ethiopian adoptees come from.

For several years, Samuel, a soft-spoken filmmaker from Addis Ababa in his mid-20s, has traveled deep into Ethiopia's countryside to locate the remaining parents, brothers, sisters, and neighbors of Ethiopian children adopted to the U.S. and Europe. For a moderate fee -- around $600, including travel and lodging expenses for a two or three person crew -- he would create a DVD of interviews with family members and a brief glimpse of the country the child came from. He started doing this work for a prominent U.S. adoption agency then later moved on to independent production, working from a script of 60 to 70 questions he'd compile with the adoptive family to ask of whatever closest relative or neighbor could be found.

But, in the past several years, it's become increasingly difficult to find a searcher in Ethiopia. Tasked with determining whether an adopted child is a "manufactured orphan," searchers have faced intense intimidation in Ethiopia as its adoption system boomed and then came under international scrutiny. It took months to find adoptive families willing to share the name or contact information for searchers they had used. The first several times I emailed or called Samuel, he responded with trepidation, confirming with me repeatedly that I was not associated with any adoption agencies working in Ethiopia and that I wouldn't pass on his name or information to any agencies.

He had good reason to be cautious. In August 2010, Samuel was jailed for 41 days in the northern Ethiopian province of Tigray, which shares a hostile border with neighboring Eritrea. He had traveled to the region to film two birth family interviews, one of which Samuel says he did pro bono out of his respect for the family, which had adopted an HIV-positive child. When Samuel met the birth sister of one of the children whose story he was tracking, the local director of a U.S. adoption agency came along, and began accusing Samuel of giving the agency a bad name. (Out of fear of further repercussions, Samuel requested that the agency not be named.) Shortly thereafter, Samuel and his crew were arrested. While in jail, he was told that the arrest was made at the request of the agency, which had accused him of performing illegal adoptions and of filming the "bad side" of Ethiopia to sell to the Eritrean government. An employee of the agency was also arrested -- it's still not clear why -- as well as three of Samuel's friends and a translator.

Although his jailers treated him as a serious criminal, in time, with the help of U.S. adoptive families, Samuel's case reached the attention of the U.S. and federal Ethiopian governments. Families who had adopted through the agency raised thousands of dollars for bail and led a letter-writing campaign that spurred the Ethiopian ambassador to the U.S., at the consulate in Los Angeles, to get involved.

Lisa Veleff Day, a Portland, Maine, mother to two Ethiopian children, participated in the campaign. A number of families in Portland have adopted from Ethiopia, and several had turned to Samuel to help uncover their children's backgrounds -- often after they became suspicious of the stories their agencies had told them. Veleff Day did not hire Samuel -- she was able to find information about her children through a member of their birth family with ties to Portland -- but she had used the same agency that was behind his jailing and had come to doubt their ethics. During one of the last steps of her adoption -- an appointment with the U.S. embassy in Addis Ababa to secure a visa -- the agency's country representative coached her to say that her children's birth parents were dead. The representative threatened Veleff Day that the adoption would fall through if she did not.

"Right before we went into the embassy, we were told that there were certain things we needed to say. We were being coached. We were supposed to say that both of these parents were dead. We knew that not to be true. They were telling us to lie," says Veleff Day. "He said if you don't say these things, there will be questions and you won't be able to leave with the kids. We really felt like we were over a barrel, so we did what they said. I'm not proud of that, but they waited this long to coach us, because otherwise we wouldn't have felt as compelled to do what they said."

"Not only had [Samuel] been arrested," recalled Veleff Day, "but the family member, the uncle of a child adopted by friends of ours, was arrested when he started bringing food and water to him. The agency used scare tactics: you talk to this guy, and you might be arrested too."

While Samuel typically finds little more than discrepancies in the children's ages -- younger children are widely considered more attractive to adoptive families -- sometimes he finds that birth families receive no word about their children despite agency promises for updates. One birth family was not even aware their child had been sent to America. Sometimes, Samuel says, birth families are complicit in these falsehoods, making stories they think are more conducive to getting their children adopted.

"People are promoting adoption to foreigners and the birth families were fooled by some adoption advocates," Samuel said. "They got the wrong information about adoption: that if you send this child, you will get some money from the adoptive parents and you'll be someone great."

The contradictions unearthed by searchers in recent years have damaged the reputations of adoption agencies in Ethiopia. Agencies, some adoptive parents claim, have retaliated against searchers, with legal action, jail time, and even death threats.

A PERFECT STORM

Karen Smith-Rotabi, an inter-country adoption scholar at the Virginia Commonwealth University, has found that after previous "hotspot" adoption countries such as Guatemala closed down -- widespread ethical problems, from coercion to outright kidnapping led the country's adoption authority to suspend the program pending reforms -- Ethiopia became "a perfect storm for an emerging adoption industry." Its short waiting periods and high availability of very young children made it attractive to international adoption agencies. Some agencies accused of deeply unethical behavior in Guatemala are widely thought by international adoption experts to have moved their operations to Ethiopia.

"As Guatemala's adoption industry ground to a halt at the end of 2007, many American adoption agencies began setting up new adoption programs in Ethiopia," says Erin Siegal, author of the book Finding Fernanda, an investigation of corruption in adoption cases from Guatemala. Ethiopia, which is not a signatory to the Hague Adoption Convention, a standard for international adoption practices, gave an opportunity to agencies unable to win Hague accreditation. In some cases, Siegal says, it seemed to save the businesses of agencies in financial trouble after Guatemala shut down.

"The fundamental issue in Ethiopia is extreme poverty, and that the birth family's idea of adoption is different than ours," Smith-Rotabi said. "Ethiopians don't have that conception of a clean break from one family to another. Some really think that their child is going to get an education and they'll see them again. You have a very sophisticated, legalistic society communicating with a very poor, traditional one."

When people see birth families benefitting from their choice to relinquish their child, she said, that can have a contagious effect in these communities. "It takes over a whole village very quickly. It's very dangerous stuff, playing with people's poverty, emotions, and needs in a way that's really quite profound."

"Parents, especially from rural areas, still believe that they are sending their children so they can get money," said Mehari Maru, a human rights lawyer in Ethiopia whom the Ethiopian government invited to propose an institutional framework for international adoption. "They are not told what adoption means, that they will have other parents. They think about the money they will get and their children's welfare."

"Much of the potential for abuse through non-regulation is at a local level," said Doug Webb, Chief of Section for Adolescent Development, Protection, and HIV/AIDS at UNICEF Ethiopia, which is working closely with the Ethiopian government to establish a more comprehensive domestic child welfare system in the country. "A lot of the arrangements and paperwork that makes things appear differently than they are happens at the local level, out there in the bush with brokers, agents, officials, and policemen. Once the paperwork reaches the federal level, in some cases, the opportunity for abuse may have already been taken."

Smith-Rotabi warned that Ethiopia must learn from other countries that have seen sharp rises in adoption. In Guatemala, adoption corruption eventually came to have what she called "hidden structures of organized crime," with critics facing so much intimidation that many hired bodyguards. In one case, she says, a scholar researching adoption there disappeared completely and is presumed dead.

Ethiopia's federal government is working to address problems in the country's adoption system. But the adoption industry has become so lucrative and so strong, especially in rural parts of the country, that many people who've raised questions about the process say they've faced intimidation and harassment from the industry.

'CAN'T DO INDEPENDENT RESEARCH'

In 2009, Arun Dohle, a researcher for the non-profit Against Child Trafficking (ACT), traveled to Ethiopia to investigate 25 adoptions handled by the Dutch agency Wereldkinderen Child Welfare Association. The research was commissioned by the agency but, when Dohle's findings led to him being "put out" of the country, ACT published the report independently under the title "Fruits of Ethiopia, Intercountry Adoption: The Rights of the Child, or the 'Harvesting' of Children?"

"We were seriously threatened by the orphanage directors and by the local representative of the agency we were working with as well," Dohle said. "We got a letter from Ethiopian orphanages saying we were involved in illegal adoptions. The social worker [I was working with] was accused of damaging the image of Ethiopia. It proves you can't do independent research." He added, "Of course [the research] was actually legal, but they were dropping high-up names of politicians."

In his research, Dohle found that a majority of the 25 cases included clear ethical concerns. These included living and easily-identified parents listed as dead or unknown, agency or orphanage representatives giving false information on court documents, parents relinquishing children in the stated hopes of receiving support from adoptive families, and orphanages recruiting children directly from intact families. He recorded testimony stating that some child recruiters are salaried employees of orphanages and work to collect children from villages, health centers, and other places families visit. He also found, much as Smith-Rotabi later suggested to me, that Ethiopian families don't have the same understanding of adoption that Western agencies do.

The report explains that research came "to an abrupt end" when a local representative of the agency learned of Dohle's research and "threatened to report the researcher to the Ethiopian immigration or police."

Officials from two orphanages that Dohle had identified as problematic (both of which have since been closed by the Ethiopian government), Bethezatha Children's Home Association and Gelegela Integrated Orphans and Destitute Family Support Association, sent a letter to Wereldkinderen accusing him of engaging in illegal adoptions; of "terrorizing the families of children who have been placed in the Netherlands" by claiming that children are being sold for compensation, for organ harvesting, or for experimental HIV medication testing (his report made none of these claims); and of taking birth families hostage during interviews. "These situations have proven to be rather problematic to our operations," the letter stated. It demanded that all Wereldkinderen adoptions be investigated, claiming that the investigation impugned not only the orphanages in question but the government of Ethiopia as well.

A NEW ADOPTION LANDSCAPE

The adoption landscape is changing rapidly in Ethiopia. Amid mounting evidence of fraud and ethical problems, the Ethiopian government announced in March that it was putting the brakes on its international adoption program, slowing by 60 to 90 percent the rate at which it processes paperwork for children being internationally adopted. It also revoked the license of one adoption agency accused of creating fraudulent documents for adoptees. In July, the government began implementing a plan to close one third of the nation's orphanages, shuttering those it found were functioning more as transitional homes for the adoption industry rather than providing care for children in need; to date, 23 in the SNNPR region have been shut down. People with knowledge of the industry told me that agencies were firing staff in response to the slowdown and a number of agencies were expected to face closure without the revenue stream of steady Ethiopian adoptions. A UNICEF analysis of Ethiopian court data, however, indicates that the slowdown didn't last long and that this fall, the number of adoptions being processed has bounced back to normal levels.

Still, UNICEF's Doug Webb said that the environment in which these abuses took place has changed dramatically in the past year. "There are people in government who are very concerned about this, but we've turned a big corner here. The situation is over where alleged abuses were ignored, swept under the carpet; where nobody was listening and there was too much money involved."

"In many ways," Webb said, "that story is done. The climate has changed so much. Now it's discussed more openly. The government at the highest levels is speaking out against abuses in the system."

"I hope the slowdown is helping things," said adoptive mother Lisa Veleff Day, "but I sort of doubt it. They say they're checking things more carefully, but this is big business for Ethiopia. The terrible shame is there are so many kinds who are genuinely in need of adoption, and those are not the ones being adopted."

The role of searchers won't end any time soon, Samuel is certain. The thousands of Ethiopian children adopted by families in the U.S. and Europe over the last decade will grow up one day. They'll learn about the circumstances around adoption from Ethiopia in earlier years and will want to find out the truth of their background.

Kelly paid $900 in 2009 for her searcher and Samuel charges an average rate of $600. But Kelly has since heard that her searcher increased his rates, asking as much as $3000 to $4000 for a search. When rising demand and supply made adoption an important and rapidly growing source of money in a country that had little of it, even these investigators who are often at odds with agencies have found a place in the adoption economy.

This article supported by a grant from the Pulitzer Center on Crisis Reporting

This article available online at:

http://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2011/12/how-ethiopias-adoption-industry-dupes-families-and-bullies-activists/250296/

Copyright © 2012 by The Atlantic Monthly Group. All Rights Reserved.

December 28, 2011

Bishops Say Rules on Gay Parents Limit Freedom of Religion

By LAURIE GOODSTEIN

Roman Catholic bishops in Illinois have shuttered most of the Catholic Charities affiliates in the state rather than comply with a new requirement that says they must consider same-sex couples as potential foster-care and adoptive parents if they want to receive state money. The charities have served for more than 40 years as a major link in the state’s social service network for poor and neglected children.

The bishops have followed colleagues in Washington, D.C., and Massachusetts who had jettisoned their adoption services rather than comply with nondiscrimination laws.

For the nation’s Catholic bishops, the Illinois requirement is a prime example of what they see as an escalating campaign by the government to trample on their religious freedom while expanding the rights of gay people. The idea that religious Americans are the victims of government-backed persecution is now a frequent theme not just for Catholic bishops, but also for Republican presidential candidates and conservative evangelicals.

“In the name of tolerance, we’re not being tolerated,” said Bishop Thomas J. Paprocki of the Diocese of Springfield, Ill., a civil and canon lawyer who helped drive the church’s losing battle to retain its state contracts for foster care and adoption services.

The Illinois experience indicates that the bishops face formidable opponents who also claim to have justice and the Constitution on their side. They include not only gay rights advocates, but also many religious believers and churches that support gay equality (some Catholic legislators among them). They frame the issue as a matter of civil rights, saying that Catholic Charities was using taxpayer money to discriminate against same-sex couples.

Tim Kee, a teacher in Marion, Ill., who was turned away by Catholic Charities three years ago when he and his longtime partner, Rick Wade, tried to adopt a child, said: “We’re both Catholic, we love our church, but Catholic Charities closed the door to us. To add insult to injury, my tax dollars went to provide discrimination against me.”

The bishops are engaged in the religious liberty battle on several fronts. They have asked the Obama administration to lift a new requirement that Catholic and other religiously affiliated hospitals, universities and charity groups cover contraception in their employees’ health plans. A decision has been expected for weeks now.

At the same time, the bishops are protesting the recent denial of a federal contract to provide care for victims of sex trafficking, saying the decision was anti-Catholic. An official with the Department of Health and Human Services recently told a hearing on Capitol Hill that the bishops’ program was rejected because it did not provide the survivors of sex trafficking, some of whom are rape victims, with referrals for abortions or contraceptives.

Critics of the church argue that no group has a constitutional right to a government contract, especially if it refuses to provide required services.

But Anthony R. Picarello Jr., general counsel and associate general secretary of the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops, disagreed. “It’s true that the church doesn’t have a First Amendment right to have a government contract,” he said, “but it does have a First Amendment right not to be excluded from a contract based on its religious beliefs.”

The controversy in Illinois began when the state legislature voted in November 2010 to legalize civil unions for same-sex couples, which the state’s Catholic bishops lobbied against. The legislation was titled “The Illinois Religious Freedom Protection and Civil Unions Act,” and Bishop Paprocki said he was given the impression that it would not affect state contracts for Catholic Charities and other religious social services.

In New York State, religious groups lobbied for specific exemption language in the same-sex marriage bill. But bishops in Illinois did not negotiate, Bishop Paprocki said.

“It would have been seen as, ‘We’re going to compromise on the principle as long as we get our exception.’ We didn’t want it to be seen as buying our support,” he said.

Catholic Charities is one of the nation’s most extensive social service networks, serving more than 10 million poor adults and children of many faiths across the country. It is made up of local affiliates that answer to local bishops and dioceses, but much of its revenue comes from the government. Catholic Charities affiliates received a total of nearly $2.9 billion a year from the government in 2010, about 62 percent of its annual revenue of $4.67 billion. Only 3 percent came from churches in the diocese (the rest came from in-kind contributions, investments, program fees and community donations).

In Illinois, Catholic Charities in five of the six state dioceses had grown dependent on foster care contracts, receiving 60 percent to 92 percent of their revenues from the state, according to affidavits by the charities’ directors. (Catholic Charities in the Archdiocese of Chicago pulled out of foster care services in 2007 because of problems with its insurance provider.)

When the contracts came up for renewal in June, the state attorney general, along with the legal staff in the governor’s office and the Department of Children and Family Services, decided that the religious providers on state contracts would no longer be able to reject same-sex couples, said Kendall Marlowe, a spokesman for the department.

The Catholic providers offered to refer same-sex couples to other agencies (as they had been doing for unmarried couples), but that was not acceptable to the state, Mr. Marlowe said. “Separate but equal was not a sufficient solution on other civil rights issues in the past either,” he said.

Catholic Charities in the Diocese of Rockford decided at that point to get out of the foster care business. But the bishops in Springfield, Peoria, Joliet and Belleville decided to fight, filing a lawsuit against the state.

Taking a completely different tack was the agency affiliated with the conservative Lutheran Church Missouri Synod, which, like the Catholic Church, does not sanction same-sex relationships. Gene Svebakken, president and chief executive of the agency, Lutheran Child and Family Services of Illinois, visited all seven pastoral conferences in his state and explained that the best option was to compromise and continue caring for the children.

“We’ve been around 140 years, and if we didn’t follow the law we’d go out of business,” Mr. Svebakken said. “We believe it’s God-pleasing to serve these kids, and we know we do a good job.”

In August, Judge John Schmidt, a circuit judge in Sangamon County, ruled against Catholic Charities, saying, “No citizen has a recognized legal right to a contract with the government.” He did not address the religious liberty claims, ruling only that the state did not violate the church’s property rights.

Three of the dioceses filed an appeal, but in November filed a motion to dismiss their lawsuit. The Dioceses of Peoria and Belleville are spinning off their state-financed social services, with the caseworkers, top executives and foster children all moving to new nonprofits that will no longer be affiliated with either diocese.

Gary Huelsmann, executive director of Catholic Social Services of Southern Illinois, in the Belleville Diocese, said the decision was excruciating for everyone.

“We have 600 children abused and neglected in an area where there are hardly any providers,” he said. “Us going out of business would have been detrimental to these children, and that’s a sin, too.”

The work will be carried on, but the Catholic Church’s seminal, historic connection with it has been severed, noted Mr. Marlowe, the spokesman for the state’s child welfare agency.  “The child welfare system that Catholic Charities helped build,” he said, “is now strong enough to survive their departure.”

'Brown babies' long search for family, identity

(CNN) –  Daniel Cardwell’s obsession consumed three decades of his life and $250,000 of his money, he estimates. His energy has been devoted to answering one basic question: “Who am I?”

Cardwell was a “brown baby” – one of thousands of children born to African-American GIs and white German women in the years after World War II. Inter-racial relationships still weren't common or accepted among most in the United States or Germany, and they weren't supported by the military brass, either.

Couples were often split apart by disapproving military officers. Their children were deemed "mischlingskinder" - a derogatory term for mixed race children. With fathers forced to move way, the single mothers of the African-American babies struggled to find support in a mostly white Germany and were encouraged to give their kids up.

Thousands of the children born from the inter-racial relationships were put up for adoption and placed in homes with African-American military families in the United States or Germany. Images of black, German-speaking toddlers with their adoptive American families were splashed across the pages of Jet and Ebony magazines and African-American newspapers.

Their long-forgotten stories have recently been shared in new films, "Brown Babies: The Mischlingskinder Story," which was released last summer and "Brown Babies: Germany's Lost Children," which aired on German television this fall.

Cardwell, who appeared in both documentaries, was brought to the United States at age 4 and adopted by an African-American veteran and nurse in Washington, D.C. He has some memories of Germany, but didn't have any sense of his family's real story until he was an adult. He'd been raised to believe he was a light-skinned black man with African-American parents.

The hunt for his biological parents - and his own sense of identity - has dominated the second half of his life. He has traveled the country in search of aging documents, tried hypnotism therapy, built relationships with distant family members and visited Germany several times.

“Would I do it all again? Yes,” Cardwell said. “If only so others wouldn’t have to go through what I went through."

Between 2 and 3 million African-American civilian personnel, military members and their families lived in Germany from 1945 until the end of the Cold War, according to  the digital archive "The Civil Rights Struggle, African American GI's, and Germany."

Many German women perceived the black soldiers to be kinder than their white counterparts, even admiring - a rarity after the brutal war. After so many years of scarcity, a gift of stockings or canned milk might as well have been a diamond ring.

The soldiers wanted to seize the advantages of being away from Jim Crow America. In Germany, they could go to a biergarten, dance with a German woman at a bar and - if they ignored rules against fraternization - develop a relationship with her.

The total number of children born from those relationships is unclear. Some 5,000 "brown babies" were born between 1945 and 1955, according to the book “Race After Hitler: Black Occupation Children in Postwar Germany and America," and by 1968, Americans had adopted about 7,000 of these German children, the book's author, historian Heide Fehrenbach, wrote. Still more of those kids remained in Germany.

But after the babies were born and the soldiers' superiors discovered the romances, they often transferred the black soldiers to other bases. The U.S. military's policy at the time was to reject any claims of paternity made by German mothers. Black soldiers who wanted to marry their white girlfriends were often forbidden from doing so.

Life wasn't simple for the mothers, either - they were sometimes judged unfit by child welfare officials based solely on the fact that they had a relationship with an African-American man. Some Germans condemned the mothers as "negerhueren" - Negro whores.

German authorities doubted the children would thrive in the country, where national identity was strongly tied to white German heritage. It became common for the babies to be adopted to couples living in the United States, where the children’s roots were hidden, often for years.  Many didn’t know of they had been adopted until they were adults.

Cardwell remembers his adoptive parents as cold and distant. He spent years at boarding schools, then later returned to their home, where he worked on their farmland. He can't remember being hugged, or told that they loved him.

It wasn't until he began trying to find his biological parents that he discovered his mother was actually a half-German refugee from Poland. She thought she was leaving him at an orphanage temporarily, and had searched for him for years. He learned, too, that his father was described as “colored” in official papers, and was a mixture of Portuguese, native Hawaiian, Japanese and Puerto Rican ancestry.

Regina Griffin, a Washington-area journalist, was inspired to make "Brown Babies: The Mischlingskinder Story,"after a "brown baby" and family friend wrote a book about her search for her parents. Griffin realized most people had never heard the adoptees' remarkable stories, so she interviewed "brown babies," German mothers, historians, and the African-American fathers.

“It’s a part of our history,” Griffin said. “It’s not just African-American history, it’s not just American history, it’s world history. There were a lot of people who were caught between two countries, two warring nations. And we allowed those children to be abandoned, and people should know that.”

For the thousands of children who are now adults and seeking their biological families, time is running out. Henriette Cain, a "brown baby," from Rockford, Illinois, knows this all too well.

“People’s mothers are passing away, their fathers are passing away, and people are starting to wonder who they are,” Cain said from her home. “Now even we are passing away, and it’s a story that needs to be told.”

Since beginning her search in the 1970s, the 59-year-old retiree  has been fortunate - she located and met her biological sister, who was living in Darmstadt, Germany, and her biological mother, who had married a white U.S. soldier and moved to Virginia. The family now enjoys a close relationship. She tracked down her biological father, as well, but he died before they could meet.

Cain discovered that her mother had never really wanted to give her up. Her biological father had been reassigned to another military base, and promised to return to bring his family to the United States, but they never heard from him again.

Her mother found herself alone and impoverished in post-war Germany, with two young daughters, an unsupportive family and a choice to make: Keep the children and face poverty and scorn, or put them up for adoption in hopes of giving them a better life.

Cain’s older sister was adopted by the family with whom they had been living while Cain was sent to a local orphanage. When she was 2, she was adopted by an African-American couple living at a U.S. base nearby.

Her adoptive parents doted on her, and she was happy, but she always sensed she was different. Her adoptive parents were much darker in skin tone. They didn't reveal that she was adopted until she was 12. Children she grew up with taunted her and called her “Little Nazi.”

Soon after reuniting with her birth family, Cain began helping other adoptees. She now runs Sunco Public Records Research, a firm that helps black German adoptees, American fathers and German mothers find each other.

Cain said about 25 of her last 40 searches ended with a reunion or positive identification. She has about seven cases that remain open.

“Since I’ve been in their position, I understand how they feel and I know it’s important to get the answers for them,” Cain said.

Cardwell is still looking for answers.

After years without all the information he's looking for, he now sees America and Germany’s obsession with skin color as a destructive force in his life.

“My mother couldn’t marry my father because of color. I couldn’t stay in Germany because of color. Here in America they couldn’t figure out my color,” Cardwell said. “Maybe I should just be an American and just let it be with that. They won’t let me be German.”

Nevertheless, he continues to search for more clues about his father’s identity. Because he’s officially an illegitimate child, he can’t view his biological father’s military records and other papers until they become available to the general public. He's working on a book about his life. He helps other adoptees in their searches.

“My whole objective in this thing is to minimize the pain that I felt for so long,” Cardwell said. “I have come to know that there were a number of mothers that did love their children, and a number of fathers who did want those children, but because of color they weren’t allowed to have them.”

US report: Foster kids get high rate of psych meds

Original here.

Written by

KELLI KENNEDY, Associated Press

Federal health officials are failing to monitor how state agencies are doling out powerful psychotropic drugs to foster children, according to a comprehensive investigation released Thursday showing foster kids are prescribed the drugs 2.7 to 4.5 times more than non-foster children and often at much higher doses.

Hundreds of foster children are being prescribed five or more of the medications at once, which can have severe side effects including diabetes and suicidal behavior. In some regions, foster children as young as 1 year old were twice as likely to be prescribed the medications, according to a two-year investigation by the Government Accountability Office. The investigation looks at 2008 data from more than 100,000 foster children in Florida, Massachusetts, Michigan, Oregon and Texas.

Sen. Tom Carper, D-Del, requested the investigation’s release after media reports of high prescribing rates and anecdotes from former foster children who said they were on multiple medications at the same time. The report was released ahead of a hearing Thursday by his congressional sub-committee that deals with federal services.

“This report we are releasing today confirms some of our worst fears,” Carper said.

Some of the drugs have “black box” label warning for children’s safety and are not approved for use by young children. But doctors often prescribe them off label. The drugs affect the central nervous system and can change behavior or perception. They are prescribed for depression, anxiety, schizophrenia and other psychiatric conditions. Little is known about the long term side effects of the drugs and drug, experts said.

“We’re kind of flying blind as far as knowing the safety and efficacy long term risks (for children),” said Dr. Christopher Bellonci, a child psychiatrist at Tufts Medical Center.

The report offered several explanations for the high prescription rates, noting the children had greater exposure to trauma before entering foster care and that state agencies were lax in overseeing the Advertisement prescriptions.

Critics say the drugs are overused as a chemical restraint for unruly children.

Child welfare advocates say there’s a nationwide shortage of child psychiatrists, often leaving pediatricians to handle complex behavioral problems.

“I do believe that medications are being used almost in default and my concern is that is being used in lieu of psycho- therapeutic interventions,” Bellonci said. 

Six-year-old Brooke was on two psychiatric medications for an ADHD diagnosis when Todd and Lisa Ward adopted her out of Florida foster care in 2010.

Over the next two years, doctors put her on an array of powerful drugs as her parents watched her behavior become more aggressive, erratic and agitated. She twice tried to kill the family dog, pulled skin off her nose and wiped blood on the walls, threw tantrums as doctors plied her with more than a dozen medications over the years, her mother said.

“Her hands would just shake insanely and they would tell us, ‘oh that’s just her’. But it wasn’t her. It stopped once she went off the medication,” he mother said.

The Wards tried desperately to get her into a psychiatrist but wait lists were typically nine months long, so she ended going back to the same mental health center that Ward said constantly overmedicated her. The Wards finally found a psychiatrist last year who helped decrease Brooke’s medications and stabilize her behavior.

But this summer an incident with her sister triggered Brooke and she tried to set the house on fire in an attempt to kill her sister, said Lisa Ward, a 39-year-old accountant who adopted Brooke and her two siblings.

The Wards placed her in a residential facility where she got intensive therapy for the first time, including yoga and play therapy. Three months later, Brooke is home and down to one medication.

“The difference in her was night and day. She actually can express emotion,” Lisa Ward said. “They were able to figure out what this girl had held inside for eight years.”

Lisa Ward, who started a nonprofit to link other foster parents to doctors and therapists, says the medication was just a bandage and notes the girls no longer have Advertisement the ADHD they were diagnosed with when the Wards adopted them from foster care.

The new report found foster children in some areas were twice as likely to be prescribed five or more of those drugs at the same time compared to non-foster children. Texas foster children were prescribed five or more medications most often.

“No evidence supports the use of five or more psychotropic drugs in adults or children, and only limited evidence supports the use of even two drugs,” according to the report.

Eleven-year-old Ke’onte Cook, who entered Texas foster care at age 4, testified he was on 20 drugs during his time in foster care, sometimes taking five drugs at once. He didn’t know why he was taking them and was never told of possible side effects.

“It was the worst things someone could do to foster kids. I was upset about my situation and not because I was bipolar or had ADHD,” said Ke’onte, who has since been adopted and stopped taking all medications. “Meds aren’t going to help a child with their problems. It’s just going to sedate them for a little while until it comes back again.”

Thursday’s hearing comes a week after federal health officials notified state child welfare leaders they will have to provide more details about how they control the medications for foster kids starting next year.

A federal law passed in 2008 lays out oversight provisions required by law, but many states aren’t following them.

In most states, child welfare workers don’t have access to the Medicaid database to identify which medications their child is taking and the Medicaid database can’t identify which patients are foster kids.