Just in time for National Adoption Month!
Yesterday, the State of Ohio launched Family Forward, a program that creates state-backed low-interest 5-year loan assistance of up to $50,000, to qualified but financially stressed-out PAP/HAPs seeking to “build their families through adoption.” The program was created by HB 405, a bi-partisan measure that passed the legislature unanimously in 2020.
Qualified adoption expenses, according to the Family Forward webpage include, but are not limited to;
- Adoption agency expenses
- Court expenses and legal fees
- Expenses incurred on behalf of the birth mother
- Health and psychological examination fees
- Home studies
- Travel expenses
Once the adoption process and the loan from a participating bank or credit union are approved, the state (at the request of the lender) will purchase an investment at a below-market rate, and the lender will use the interest generated from the investment to offset the interest rate reduction to pass savings on to the borrower
The Cleveland Plain Dealer reports that Family Forward can lower interest by up to 3% compared to the market rate, letting recipients save about $70 a month on a $50,000, five-year loan.
No one in the press or the legislature asks why an adoption should cost $50,000.
Ohio Treasurer Thomas Sprague, who spearheaded the measure, says
Far too often, the rising costs of adoption deter hard-working Ohioans from growing their families., With Family Forward, we can relieve some of that financial stress and allow prospective parents to focus on the excitement of bringing a child into their home. Through this effort, we look forward to assisting Ohio’s families during one of the most important times in their lives.
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Would you be surprised to learn that Ohio Right to Life waxed ecstatic over passage? Thought not!
Ohio Right to Life is proud to see our great state take another step forward in making adoption more accessible to Ohio families. Cost is often a barrier to families looking to grow through adoption, and the Family Forward Initiative is a vital step. As pro-life and pro-family advocates, making adoption both accessible and affordable is one of our main priorities. Every child deserves the love and security of a family to call their own. Thanks to the passing of House Bill 405, more of Ohio’s children will know the love of a forever family and more Ohio families will be blessed by the beautiful gift of adoption.
ORTL would have us believe that newborns –make no mistake that this is the class of adoptables that HB 405 and ORTL addresses–will linger alone and rot in the system if hard-working middle class-and-above desperate and childless Worthies can’t be subsidized or otherwise assisted by the state to move newborns into their “loving forever homes.”
Of course, IRL, virtually, no newborn placed on the market, is going to rot homeless.
Statistically speaking, few newborns end up in the hands of the state for distribution. They go, instead, straight from birth to pre-arranged PAP/HAPs via the adoption agency/adoption lawyer conduit. Those newborns who do end up in the state system are usually placed with vetted foster-to-adopt individuals or couples on a long waitlist as soon as they are cleared medically and legally for placement.
But that’s not what the professional baby fetish crowd wants you to know.
The American adoption industry and its fellow travelers in the fetus-saving industry that conflate abortion and adoption, bemoan their “fact” that not enough newborn product is available to fill the demand. They like to claim that 2 million hopeful adoptive applicants are standing in the adoption line. They never say where they get this absurd number or where we can find these people. Obviously, not all adoptions cost $50,000, but to play my high-end game with their high-en game, that comes out to $100,000,000,000 waiting to circulate and save the US economy.
I can hear the ka-ching of the Ohio adoption spammer clear down here in Texas. Forward Family may in the short-run help adopters, but the real beneficiary is private industry. Pass me that Bloody Mary pitcher.
Imagine what a similar low-interest loan plan could do for financially strapped biological parents in the long-run to preserve their families. $5,000–not $50,000–could be enough to keep parent(s) and child together while they access other resources and not be convinced by the socially constructed better-life-ffor all abstract created by adoption professionals. But, that would mean socialism for Unworthies. There is no ka-ching in that.
A discussion about decent family-centered social and economic systems outside of the state-consumer model is for another day.
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This isn’t the first time ORTL has checked a box off its Aid for Adopters Wish List aka The Make Adoption Fast and Cheap Project.
In 2013-2014 ORTL floated and got passed HB307 later Sub SB 250, a related, and much larger flim-flam that “streamlined the adoption process” to ease adopter burdens–including financial– while hanging biological parents out to dry. The sponsor of the original bill, Rep. Jim Buchy, one of the dumbest legislators ever to stumble through the Statehouse Rotunda, once opined to Al Jezerra (incredibly weird video no longer available online) that he has no idea why anyone would want an abortion nor had ever been curious enough to ask why. He also thinks that ectopic pregnancies can be saved by transferring the fetus elsewhere in the female body.
ORTL called the “reform” measure a way to “encourage adoption,” and even claimed that things like adoption tax credits, which could cost Ohio taxpayers millions in revenue, would encourage pregnant people to forgo abortion for adoption! I wrote about HB307 and SB Sub 250 in The Daily Bastardette several times (original here; follow-ups, here, here, here, and here as well as the Columbus Free Press in its print and online versions. Unfortunately, the online FP piece for some mysterious reason isn’t paragraphed, but you can read highlights of it here
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So here we are, Day 2 of our November of Discontent. What more Just-in-Times can we expect for the rest of our holiday month? Should I even ask? I think we all know the answer.
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Day 2 of 30–
28 to go
