Madonna and Child Adoption Ethics:
Rights Versus Profit
A wider and clearer ideological gap exists between those who profit from adoptions and grassroots reformers and activists, many for whom adoption represents a loss. Adoption practitioners and agencies represent a 2.3 billion dollar industry complete with marketing and lobbyists.
ACT for Adoption, based in Rye, NY, for instance, is a coalition of profiteers of adoption mobilized in late 2008 "to communicate with the White House, Members of Congress, government agencies and the press to educate and advocate for legislation, policies and administrative procedures supportive of adoption." ACT for Adoption is sponsored by the Center for Adoption Policy, and the Child Advocacy Program at Harvard Law School. The name Harvard demands respect, and Harvard Law School, spawns some of the most prominent and wealthy attorneys. ACT represents subgroup of attorneys who specialize in adoption and thus whose livelihoods depend upon the continual flow of children from one family to another. Adoption is their bread and butter and as the saying goes: follow the money. Adoption attorneys are no vested in protecting the best interests children than divorce attorneys. Both have an obligation to protect the rights of their paying clients who hire them, regardless of the outcome for the children involved. Adoption attorneys - entrepreneurs in a multi-billion dollar industry - are as reliant on adoption as plantation owners were to slavery.
An ACT press release1 supporting Madonna's intended second adoption admitted the organization was "not in possession of all the facts relevant to appropriate resolution of Mercy's particular case." They also recognized that International adoption "has come under fire recently from UNICEF" because corruption and baby selling. This, however, did not preclude ACT from opposing both UNICEF and Save the Children, a non-profit child advocacy organization with a pristine record for having no agenda other than children's rights and protection, who defended Malawi's residency requirements to protect against child traffickers. Sarah Jacobs, Save the Children's Africa specialist, working on issues of child protection, hunger, health and education, very strong belief that "children are much better looked after, even if they've lost their parents, within their home communities," does not serve well those reliant on redistributing the world's children. ACT also objected to Dominic Nutt, the spokesman for Save the Children UK's "biggest concern" that "in the most -- in the majority of cases, orphans, so-called orphans, in fact
Published by Mirah Riben
Author of "shedding light on...The Dark Side of Adoption" (1988) and "The Stork Market: America's Multi-Billion Dollar Adoption Industry" (2007) www.AdvocatePublications.com View profile
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6 Comments
Post a CommentMay 19, '09
Madonna has no ethics, and certainly no family values. This woman is a home-wrecker. Waht's worse is that she has absolutely no compassion for biological mothers and fathers of whom I am a natural mother. For Madonna stealing babies away from their natural families I have NO respect for this woman whom, I might add, couldn't keep her own family together. Thank you.
I regret that you take any of this personally or hatefully. I am NOT suggesting what any individual does. i am looking at the whole situation sociologically. My area of advocacy is focused on the needs of children, not adults.
What Madonna or any philanthropist does for children en masse is wonderful. It does not entitle her or anyone to a child in return for her generosity, however.
You are doing it again, pitting people with good intentions against each other. Each family gets to decide whether they want to adopt domestically or internationally. No need to look down on one for choosing the other. Yeah, kids in the US need homes too, but they probably won't die if they aren't adopted. Go where your heart moves you. And every infant I place builds a better orphanage for the ones left behind. Besides, didn't Madonna adopt a 3 or 4 year old, and then spend a couple of million on the other kids? Good deal for everybody. Stop hating, help all of us who are helping the kids.
If international adoption truly emptied orphanages of truly orphaned children or children whose parents cannot provide safe care for them, I would CHEER, just as a support the adoption of the 129,000 children in US foster care who could be adopted.
However, the fact is that those children - both domestically and internationally - are being ignored while baby brokers are filling the demand for INFANTS through coercive and exploitive methods including kidnapping.
I make no apologies, nor am I alone in being opposed to that. I am in the company of the UN, the Hague Convention on International Adoption in prioritizing family preservation and then kinship care. Does that mean i am suggesting you or anyone else has to support family preservation? Not at all. NEVER said that!
I urge you read the resurces listed at:
http://tinyurl.com/adoptionresources
cont.
There are plenty of problems in the world, and each of us helps in the way that make sense to us.
If you try to tell families that the only way they can help kids in orphanages is by supporting the causes YOU think are important, then you will doom a lot of kids to short lives in crappy orphanages. On the other hand if I tell a family, "Hey, you can get a kid out of an orphanage, become its parent, and at the same time give a nice big donation to the orphanage", then I am going to help a lot of kids.
Kids in orphanages need homes. It is better for them to be in a home half a world away than living in an orphanage in a developing country. So you work on emptying out the orphanages in the way you prefer, and I will work on emptying out the orphanages by finding homes for the kids. Perhaps someday we will meet in the middle.
What a giant load of garbage. Marah, you have been an anti-adoption activist for ages, and your staggering bias makes you an unreliable source of information.
Yes the world would all be sweetness and light if everyone could care for their children, but that is not the case. When there are millions of children in orphanages then we should work on ALL the different ways of getting them into real homes.
If you want to go out and fundraise to provide decent foster homes, or to subsidize extended family to take care of kids, go do that. On the other hand if there is a family who is willing to take a child into their hearts and home, then lets do that too.
You complain that Madonna (and by implication all adoptive parents) should be spending her (their) money on family unification efforts. How dare you tell people how they should spend their money. It's like somebody working for cancer research being mad at somebody donating to research on heart disease. Stupid and pointless.