STEPHANIE BENNETT VS THE OHIO ADOPTION INDUSTRY 3: THE HUSTLE

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A couple new developments in the Stephanie Bennett case were reported over the weekend: Rick Armon from the Akron Beacon Journal* reports A Child’s Waiting license will be reviewed by the Ohio Department of Jobs and Family Services. Last year ODJFS found the agency out of compliance for several paperwork and procedural violations in the case (I have a copy in my possession) and ordered it to submit a corrective plan to assure than such errors won’t happen again. Armon says the agency has failed to submit an acceptable plan. More important, A Child’s Waiting, according to records obtained by the Beacon Journal, has been the subject of numerous investigations in the past. In its seven years of operation, it has received an incredible seven citations by the state and has twice had its license reduced to “temporary.” So far, I have been unable to find details on those citations. Despite its problems, according to its homepage, A Child’s Waiting has placed over 1200 children in permanent homes since it’s inception in 2000–a whopping 255 last year. Many of them are listed there by first name, race, and age. How do they generate these kids? HUSTLE: THE NAME OF ACW’S Continue Reading →

MAY 4, 1970

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Tin soldiers and Nixon coming,We’re finally on our own.This summer I hear the drumming,Four dead in Ohio. Gotta get down to itSoldiers are cutting us downShould have been done long ago.What if you knew herAnd found her dead on the groundHow can you run when you know? Gotta get down to itSoldiers are cutting us downShould have been done long ago.What if you knew herAnd found her dead on the groundHow can you run when you know? Tin soldiers and Nixon coming,We’re finally on our own.This summer I hear the drumming,Four dead in Ohio. OHIO–Neil Young ********** COLUMBUS FREE PRESS – Bob Fitrakis Why Four Died in Ohio: Governor Rhodes and His Relationship with the FBI The Lethal Media Silence on Kent State’s Smoking Guns

CUB: CALL FOR PROPOSALS

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Call for Presentation Proposals Concerned United Birth Parents Retreat Hamburger University and Hyatt LodgeOakbrook, Illinois Sept. 28th- 30th 2007 Hamburger University, McDonald’s beautiful 88-acre corporate campus, is the setting for CUB’s annual retreat this fall. Once again, CUB invites all members of the adoption triad and their significant others to meet with others who understand our common challenges. The CUB retreat theme has always been one of sharing and support and we are seeking proposals along these lines. We are eager to hear from old friends and new, and hope to have many wonderful presentations to choose from. We will get back to you promptly and hope to have a brochure out in June. Even if your presentation is not chosen this year, we hope you will attend what promises to be a wonderful and renewing retreat experience. IMPORTANT DATESSubmission Deadline (Midnight ET): May 20, 2007Proposal Notification: on or before May 31, 2007 Target AudienceCUB expects anywhere between 75 and 150 participants. The retreat is open to all members of the adoption triad and their significant others. However, most of the participants of past retreats have been birth parents, followed by adoptees, with some adoptive parents and significant others also Continue Reading →

NORTH CAROLINA: SECRETS AND SHAME PROMOTE ADOPTION

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Shortly after I posted my Tar Heel blog this morning, I received an email alerting me to an editorial in today’s Raleigh News & Observer—The Parent Search–which picks up the tea and sympathy where the Tar Heel scraped off. “It’s perfectly understandable why an adoptee would…”the N&O writes, as it sharpens its ax. Like the Tar Heel, the N&O fears that adult adoptees getting their very own personalized true and original birth certificates unsealed and unimpounded from the State of North Carolina will “harm” adoption. It offers compromise: * Maybe a state-run contact registry for adults (though apparently records access opponents believe these evil databases “could deter potential adoptive parents for fear they would lose the child’s love once a birth parent was found.”) *Maybe a way for “birth parents” to reveal “limited information about themselves–their medical histories, for instance, or their land of origin.” Land of origin? Yes, in North Carolina, state-mandated forged birth documents just don’t change the names of the kid and the parents; they also change the place of the adoptee’s birth! Do we need any more than that to tell us that adoption in the US is a witness protection program? That falsified birth certificates Continue Reading →

NORTH CAROLINA: "DAILY TAR HEEL" STICKS IT TO ADOPTEES

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Bleating behind their Yankee co-religionists at UConn (see previous blog) the “editorial board” of the University of North Carolina Daily Tar Heel, in a misnamed editorial, Adopt a New Law, has decided that the clean records access bill (and here) currently under debate in the NC legislature, is “fundamentally unfair to birth mothers.” No mention is made that the state’s sealed records law in place since the 1940s is “fundamentally unfair” to adopted people. Of course, not. The “editorial board” considers us all perpetual, and petulant children undeserving of being treated the same as the non-adopted–whom Bastardette presumes they are: In North Carolina, the birth certificates of children given up for adoption are sealed and cannot be retrieved by adopted children later in life…. We sympathize with adopted children… Adopted children, by searching out their biological parents… …the state should find other ways to contact birth parents besides releasing their identities to the adopted child. …If birth parents whose children already have been adopted under the previous law wish to allow their children’s birth certificates… I haven’t followed the North Carolina campaign as I should, but I am pretty sure that North Carolina Coalition for Adoption Reform chair Roberta McDonald Continue Reading →

CONNECTICUT: THE UCONN "DAILY CAMPUS" PROJECTS AND PROTECTS FIRST MOMS

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The editorial board of the UConn Daily Campus decided it knows what first moms want. Yesterday it weighed in the April 13 defeat in the Connecticut General Assembly Judiciary of a bill that would have granted birth certificate access to adoptees 21 and older born on or after October 1, 2008. Yeah, that’s right. Prospective. 2029. This bill was a “response” to last year’s bill vetoed by Gov. Jodi “first grandma” Rell which was also prospective. The usual hand wringing applied. The Daily Campus editorial board, sounding as if it were writing with the pickle it was collectively weaned on, called adopted adults “adopted children” 4 times. I guess that’s an improvement. About 11 years ago the Chicago Trib’s Bruce Dold used that abomination something like 16 times in a 500 word op-ed when he went flakey over a records access bill Anyway, the best part of the Daily Campus’s jaunty little editorial, was the board’s paranoiac projection of first moms. Women are weak, ya know! Visions of rape and incest break danced in their heads: “a woman who becomes pregnant as a result, and elects to have a child, should not have to relive the tragedy 21 years later Continue Reading →

THE STEPHANIE BENNETT CASE: FOR ONCE ADOPTIONLAND DOESN’T EAT ITSELF

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I will continue coverage of the Stephanie Bennett case. For previous posts, please scroll directly below this one. I’ll be away for a few days working on a research project, but I wanted to say a couple things about the Blogging Blitz for Evelyn. It’s been an honor to be part of this historic endeavour. No adoption ideology was required. Bloggers could believe adoption is the best thing since Jif or the worse thing since the Battle of the Marne. One’s position in adoption didn’t matter: adoptee, first parent, adoptive parent, activist, bystander…just as long as you cared what happens to a family torn asunder by an uncontrolled “child placing” industry. Some blogs were eloquent, some clumsy, some angry, some thoughtful. Some focused on Stephanie and Evelyn Bennett, some on the rot that defines Adoption USA. Some bloggers only posted the timeline; others surfed the ‘net in search of new information about A Child’ Waiting. The common denominator: outrage and care. About 135 bloggers participated in the blitz. Origins USA and Third Mom list and link many of them. I haven’t read all of the blogs, but I thought I’d share some that resonated with me. In no particular order: Continue Reading →

STEPHANIE BENNETT VS THE OHIO ADOPTION INDUSTRY 2: I GAVE TO A CHILD’S WAITING AND ALL I GOT WAS THIS LOUSY T-SHIRT!

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I will continue coverage of the Stephanie Bennett case. For previous posts, please scroll directly below this one. ********** One thing you can count on in adoption–hypocrisy is never far from mendacity. Last month Working Mother Magazine named Stephanie Bennett’s adoption agency A Child’s Waiting one of the 25 Best Small Companies of 2007. The magazine offers a snapshot of the “family friendly” workplace. You need to check out Akron Beacon Journal business reporter Kerry Clawson’s follow-up for the full studio portrait. The place employs 17 women exploiting women, 4 of whom are “single moms”–adoption status unknown. Free on-site nanny care, a toy-filled playroom, baby swings, and a crib room for napping babies. And get this: a private nursing room! Did I mention flex-time, no set hours, and 1-month paid maternity leave? Employees who adopt (who woulda thought?) receive up to $1000 to cover expenses. It is especially edifying to know that ACW’s professional child recruiter Ronda Berger can stick her youngest in the toy room with the nanny while she’s on the road bringing home the bacon. How can the Desperate and Pregnant resist the sales pitch? Anyway, just when you think you can’t take another ACW happy working Continue Reading →

STEPHANIE BENNETT VS THE OHIO ADOPTION INDUSTRY

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Today is the Blog Blitz for Evelyn and Stephanie Bennett (see previous blog). After reading the background of the case, and listening to yesterday’s radio broadcast, troubling questions on all sides remain and are too complicated to comment on without more information and clarification. Adoption law can be very complex. What is legal is not always ethical. What is ethical is not always legal. What is right gets lost in the shuffle. Family dynamics are even more tangled. That said, since the story broke at the end of 2006 that “Baby Evelyn” had been spirited away to the ethically impaired A Child’s Waiting adoption mill, I’ve been very concerned about Stephanie Bennett. Since the Bennetts live in my hometown, Canton, Ohio, I’ve taken a personal interest in the case, though I never got around to writing about it. Certainly mistakes were made all around, and as the facts of the case emerge, these mistakes loom large in ways I never expected. Nonetheless, nobody deserves to lose their child or grandchild over those mistakes. Horrible things have been done to Stephanie Bennett and her family in the name of adoption. These wrongs need exposed and righted. Evelyn needs to come home. Continue Reading →

PRELUDE: BLOGGER BLITZ FOR EVELYN AND STEPHANIE BENNETT

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Some of you may have read about “Baby Evelyn.” Many of you probably haven’t. MSM, except for the Akron Beacon Journal* has been curiously quiet about the adoption story that has the potential to become the next DeBoers case; the next Baby Richard case. The story of Evelyn Bennett is saddening and maddening. It is bad. But it’s badder for me personally because it’s happening in my home town, Canton, Ohio. You’ll be hearing more about the case in the next day or so, but in the meantime, here’s the nutshell: When Evelyn Bennett was 5 months old, her mother Stephanie Bennett signed adoption surrender documents during the second meeting with a representative of the Akron-based A Child’s Waiting counselor at Glen Oak High School where she was a student. Stephanie, 17 at the time, says she was advised by the adoption agency representative to run away from home and sign documents in another county because it would be easier to sign the paperwork out of sight of her parents. She received no viable counseling. Stephanie had been introduced to an agency representative the day before by David Saltsman, a guidance Ranza and Judy Bennett, who were providing care for Continue Reading →