Tag: adoption

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How the Christian Right exploits adoption

When you think of adoption, what’s the first thing that comes to your mind? Maybe it’s the vague, rosy notion of a happy ending — of rescue, salvation or (more likely) some do-gooding Hollywood mouthpiece like Angelina Jolie adding kids of various ethnicities to her big, colorful brood.images

Salon.com carries a story that tells a different tale: “What probably doesn’t automatically come to mind is coercion, racism and a conservative Christian agenda that extends beyond mere abortion prevention. Award-winning journalist Kathryn Joyce describes all these issues — and, sadly, many more — as being shockingly rampant in the multi-billion-dollar adoption industry. And she delves into them, in somewhat jarring investigative detail, in her new book, “The Child Catchers: Rescue, Trafficking, and the New Gospel of Adoption.”

“Joyce details how the adoption industry has become overly enmeshed with the Christian right — how evangelical, pro-adoption church leaders have, in recent years, been creepily urging followers to adopt en masse, often internationally and from war-ravaged countries. Christian adoption booms are common in countries like Haiti and Indonesia after natural disasters and other crises — remember Laura Silsby, the Baptist church leader from Idaho who was charged with child trafficking after illegally attempting to smuggle 33 unauthorized Haitian children across the Haiti-Dominican Republic border in 2010? Continue reading “How the Christian Right exploits adoption”

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Puerto Rico says no on adoption

Puerto Rico’s Supreme Court narrowly voted Wednesday to uphold a law banning gay couples from adopting children.Unknown

The 5-4 vote came in the case of an unidentified woman who has sought for the last eight years to adopt a 12-year-old girl who her partner of more than 20 years had through in vitro fertilization, reports Huffington Post.  “It was the first time that the court heard a case on same-sex adoptions.

“A majority of judges upheld the constitutionality of a law that states a person cannot adopt a single-parent child if the would-be adopter is of the same sex as the child’s mother or father without that parent losing their legal rights. Continue reading “Puerto Rico says no on adoption”

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Artists contest Russian adoption ban

They’re fighting over the kids and now artists are joining in.

This time it is a row between the governments of Russia and the U.S. It seems that Russian President Vladimir Putin has recently instituted a ban on American adoptions of Russian children, presumably a calculated response to U.S. legislation aimed at punishing Russian political corruption.

Now a group of prominent Russian cultural figures have issued a call to repeal the ban, including an exception for children to join American parents that have already come to know. As the Times reports,”

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“Chulpan Khamatova, revered here for her charity work as well as her acting, spoke in front of a screen showing blown-up photographs of families whose adoptions have been halted. Beside her sat Beth Hettinger of Westfield, N.J., who flew to Russia to bring back Aleksei, who is 18 months old. Ms. Hettinger was scheduled to leave Russia without Aleksei on Friday.

“’A child, even if he is very small, is already waiting for his mama to come and get him, and she does not come,’ Ms. Khamatova said. ‘When he grows up he is told, ‘When you were small, this thing took place.’ This will happen, anyway. I think he will hate his country, and hate his motherland.’

“She said she had visited children’s homes in Russia ‘where children lie in heaps, in huge wards,’  and added: ‘Dear, respected president, dear, respected society, let’s make an exception. Our country is so big, and we always ignore the specific fates of people. Just once, let’s not ignore them.’ Continue reading “Artists contest Russian adoption ban”