Guatemalan mom says she will seek help from US state court in effort to get back adopted girl

[lovedforaday]

A Guatemalan mother who says her child was stolen and later turned over to a U.S. couple for adoption said Tuesday that she will go to a Missouri court seeking to get her daughter back now that the U.S. State Department has said it doesn’t have jurisdiction to help return the girl.

The State Department confirmed Tuesday that it has informed

Comments

[pepsquad]

Public adoptions in this country often are of not nuerologically typical kids which a lot of people don't want. Private adoptions are a cluster fuck and a half. A friend of mine paid the expenses of three women, who decided to keep their baby at the last minute, which is their right. And my friend now has a 60k loan debt. Turns out one of the women has down this before to two other couple and has now decided to adopt out her newest pregnancy.

It's hard and there are no winners in any of this, so my friends are in the process of adopting a girl from a Russian orphanage and a girl from china.

[bestdaywelived]

That is truly awful. Can they recoup any of the expenses of these women, or are they just out the costs? It seems like a perfect scam on desperate couples looking to expand their families. :-/

[pepsquad]

nope, and women abusing this system are definitely not the norm. it's just really hard. so they were forced to look overseas and about to be spend the summer in Russia to meet the requirements to take home the little girl.

[kyra_neko_rei]

Sometimes I really wish there was a legal option of shared parenthood between the birth parent(s) and adoptive parent(s), in which they agree beforehand to cooperate in the raising of the child the same way divorced/separated parents do, or in the manner of having a nearby aunt/uncle or godparent.

It would be incredibly less devastating for the birth mother, and might well raise the number of children being offered (although not every adoptive parent would be interested in sharing like that; some of them are quite disdainful or paranoid, but I honestly don't give a fuck if they don't get any kids ever).

[pepsquad]

(although not every adoptive parent would be interested in sharing like that; some of them are quite disdainful or paranoid, but I honestly don't give a fuck if they don't get any kids ever).

way to be crappy, until you're in that situation you don't know how you're going to react so keep the judgment of people in incredibly painful, scary, emotionally traumatizing situations at bay.

[thecityofdis]

yeah, that was kind of a gross thing to say.

like, i'm glad you've decided i should never be a parent? gfy.

[kyra_neko_rei]

If you're someone who thinks the birth mother is trash and doesn't deserve any consideration of her potential love for the child, or would go out of your way to choose a form of adoption that denies her contact that she'd rather have, I don't care if all the birth mothers choose other potential parents who treat them better than that, which is different than deciding "such people should never be parents.

Most likely I wasn't talking about you, but about the adoptive parents and potential adoptive parents in the horror stories I've heard from birth mothers. I seem to have worded it badly, for which I apologize.

[thecityofdis]

Yeah, because that's not what was said at all. And I can't fault adoptive parents for wanting closed adoptions or to not leave partial custody (!) with a birth parent, which is unheard of an legally untenable - and the notion of comparing it to divorced parents begs the question of how much exposure you really have to that, because DUDE. THAT SHIT GETS UGLY.

No, I don't want to leave open the possibility that the birth parent could emerge from the woodwork years later and exercise custody options to take a legally adopted child away. This has nothing to do with prejudice toward birth parents and everything to do with not wanting to enable "takebacks" of a family that already faces enormous social and legal challenges in the search for validation and authenticity.

A birth mother certainly has the right to choose the adoptive parents, no question. But that's a faaar cry from "they should retain legal rights and/or custody of the child". Because that? That's not adoption. It's just cruelty, for everyone involved.

[chaya]

+1

[thecityofdis]

At a significant rate? Hardly.

But why would you codify the ability of someone to do such a thing in law? That's just an awful thing to inflict on everybody, and pretty much nullifies the entire practice.

I mean, there's definitely a place for that, where parents may be willing and able to take over custody and care of their biological children again? But it's foster care, not adoption.

[thecityofdis]

Open adoption doesn't, but shared custody absolutely opens you up to the possibility of that custody being disputed. To use their own example: divorced parents. I mean, I don't want to generalize and paint every family with the same brush, but my parents were in court ALL THE TIME for ALL SORTS OF SHIT that didn't even begin to touch on custody issues, and I was lucky. It can and does get far, far uglier.

And quite frankly I don't have a whole lot of faith in the courts, because they do all sorts of shit when it comes to overriding 'unconventional' families, like throwing out wills or power of attorney or custody of same-sex partners, especially in states without second-parent adoption (which most states DON'T have), so. Yeah, I have issues with this.

[chaya]

The reason we do not hear of birth parents (who of course are not evil) taking children away from adoptive parents is because of the documentation which specifically signs away their rights as parents. It isn't uncommon for birth mothers to change their minds later in life, often once they are more financially stable (or otherwise stable), and they do their best to regain as much access and as many rights to the child as they can. It makes the news because it's engaging but legally it can't really ever go anywhere.

[kyra_neko_rei]

Huhwhat?

I've heard plenty of birth mothers talk about being treated like shit by the people who were trying to adopt their babies, sometimes in reaction to a change of heart by a birth mother who decides she can't give her baby up and sometimes in an attempt to pressure the birth mother to go through with the adoption, and sometimes as mere disdainful classism by some Nice Christian Married Couple who just want the slut to hand over her baby and get out of their lives so they can pretend she never had a part in their precious angel's life.

I'm reasonably sure that if I'm ever in that situation I still won't slut-shame a birth mother, call her trash to her face, tell her she doesn't deserve the baby or call her an unfit mother based on her preference to keep it, and if I did, I would be every bit as much of an asshole as I just called them.

Ditto for if I ever attempted a closed adoption, or attempted to lose contact or deny contact with a birth mother whom I'd had an open adoption with, for anything short of abuse of our child by