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

[kaowolfie]

...oh my god. This is the second case I've seen, in the last year and a half, where a Latina has had her child stolen and "adopted" by a family in Missouri. Followed, of course, by the "adoptive parents" refusing to return the child to their rightful parent.

the fuck, Missouri?

[thecityofdis]

I haven't seen others with these specifics, but yeah, human trafficking in the adoption industry is sadly A Thing, way past the minimum point it would need to be at in order to retain faith in humanity.

[kaowolfie]

The first part describes the other case I was thinking of.

The more I learn about the ways adoption is used to subjugate minority groups and strip them of their heritage - hello, stolen American Indian/First Nations/Indigenous Australian children! and white people who adopt kids of color! - with a side of human trafficking, fraud, bribery, and general asshattery... the more difficult it becomes to even support adoption in theory. Its current form is *so* abusive...

[kaowolfie]

I'm just disappointed that people's response is to justify keeping the kid at all costs. I mean - I'm not heartless, I know that they are attached to the kids and love them. But if a child's birth parent wants them, and especially when the child was wrongly taken, the only moral thing to do is to *give them back*.

[kaowolfie]

You're right, the good of the child has to come first, by a very wide margin. I'm just not always certain that people who would make up tons of excuses to keep a child they *know* was trafficked = the best choice. Because what else is wrong with them? :/ And it's hard to find people in the US, at least, who won't just go "but the US is a wealthy nation and the kid's 'adoptive parents' are upper middle class, so 'adoptive parents' win by default" when confronted with birth parents from 'third world' countries.

but I'm getting a migraine and _p loves to dog people whose brains are misfiring, so I should stop talking. >< (not accusing you of dogging, btw.)

[kaowolfie]

I'm glad to hear those cases exist! That really *is* reassuring.

and thanks. I have chronic migraines, so this is normal for about half my week... just means it's time to nap before the cat starts yowling at me. She taught herself to alert when I'm getting one. XD

[mirhanda]

the child's interests should come before that of the parents

This so hard. I really hate hearing about cases like this, it's heartbreaking all around. As a mother, I would do anything to get my child back. But I also think about ripping a child from the only home and parents it's ever known. That doesn't seem good either.

I remember pondering these sorts of questions when my kids were little because a famous "switched at birth" case came out about that time. All I could think of was that if I found out one of them wasn't really "mine" I didn't know what I'd do. I'd want the child I'd been raising because I LOVE that child and I'd want my birth child because I wouldn't know anything about the parents who were raising my child. So I came down to wanting to keep both children.

I just thank the Heavens that it was just a mental exercise for me. I feel for people who are really going through it. I hope and pray that whatever happens, happens for the good of the child.

[ebay313]

And make the transition as easy as possible for the child. Fighting it all the way is not making things easier for the kid if the child is ordered to be returned to her biological parents.

[carmy_w]

It's good that Missouri is doing this. Unfortunately, Missouri has poorly written child-welfare laws that end up catching children like this in a catch-22 situation

[roseofjuly]

I remember reading another case a few months (years?) back about an Indian boy who was kidnapped from his home and ended up trafficked into an "orphanage" in India, where he was purchased and basically sold to a family. They were unwitting at the time, but they changed the boy's name (and he wasn't an infant - he was like 2 or 3 when he was kidnapped). His family was able to track him down and find him, and a reporter and an investigator/police officer went to their house to try to find the boy. His Indian family didn't even want to take him back - they thought he would have a better life in the U.S., and didn't want to rip him away from the only family he'd ever known (the boy was 7 at the time of the story). They just wanted pictures of him as he grew up and updates about his life in the U.S.

When the American family heard what had happened, they refused to speak to anyone anymore and changed their telephone number.

[kaowolfie]

Subash? Of course the Americans stopped talking. Acknowledging that they paid for a kidnapped child, instead of adopting an orphan, would require far too much introspection about why exactly they thought they had the right to 'adopt' internationally in the first place. And why they deliberately chose a country with the least amount of red tape but still aesthetically pleasing - pale - kids available.

Even sending a few pictures is too a high a cost compared to losing one's identity as a Savior of Poor Orphans, I guess.

why yes, I have met a lot of wastes of oxygen who adopted internationally and viewed the kids as property, why do you ask.

[roseofjuly]

Yes, Subash! That's the story I was thinking of.

I dunno, I just think that there are so many problems with transnational adoption that I wish more nations would regulate and monitor it closely. It just follows that if desperate wealthy white couples are willing to pay upwards of $20,000 for brown-but-not-too-brown babies from the other side of the world that this would get a just a little exploitative.