Society and artificial reproduction

by Margaret Somerville

Should the state assist with conception where it would not approve an adoption?
Two cases -- one in California, the other in Calgary -- involving the use of new reproductive technologies have been the focus of intense media attention recently.

Nadya Suleman, a 33-year-old Californian single mother, just gave birth to octuplets. . .
Ranjit Hayer, a 60-year-old Calgary married woman, just gave birth to twin boys conceived from donated ova and her husband's sperm. She had been trying for decades, including using reproductive technologies, to have a child, but until now had been unsuccessful. Canadian physicians refused her access to IVF because of her age, so she underwent this procedure in India and returned to Canada for care during her pregnancy and giving birth to premature twin boys. Both required special care -- one, neonatal intensive care -- and serious medical complications ensued for Ms Hayer.

What ethical questions do these situations raise? And what insights or lessons might they provide?

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The up side of Down

by Monica Regnal

A mother who has raised two children with an intellectual disability cannot comprehend the view that such lives are “not worth living”.

I am always bemused, as the adoptive mother of two girls with Down syndrome, when people assume that my husband and I did something particularly praiseworthy and saintly. No one seems to regard birth parents who keep children with disabilities, as Governor Sarah Palin did, so highly. Birth parents who choose to give up a child with Down syndrome can be subjected to criticism. However, if the baby is diagnosed with a disability before birth, the most desirable action for the benefit of all (including the child) appears to be abortion. Indeed, the quickest way to find “Down syndrome” in most pregnancy books is to look up “abortion”; what message does that send to pregnant women?

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Pro-family advocates fight to keep adoption amendment

Charlie Butts - OneNewsNow - 1/28/2009

A Christian law society wants to help Arkansas residents keep a recently passed constitutional amendment.

Alliance Defense Fund senior counsel Byron Babione explains the amendment. "The ballot initiative appears [as] Act 1, which is a law passed by the people that says that in order to adopt foster children in Arkansas, you need to be married and that you can't be a cohabiting couple," he explains.

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Catholic Charities would like adoption services

By William T. Clew

The diocesan executive director of Catholic Charities in Worcester has urged Catholics to “speak up” about the state’s revocation of its contract with Catholic Charities “to find faith-filled adoptive families for the state’s most vulnerable children.”

Catherine Loeffler asked that people begin a conversation with the state to grant a religious exemption for Catholic Charities to again help place the most abused and neglected children in homes with faith-filled families.

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ACLU challenges Arkansas adoption law

Charlie Butts and Jody Brown - OneNewsNow - 1/7/2009

The American Civil Liberties Union has filed a lawsuit to challenge a new Arkansas law that prevents unmarried couples who live together from being adoptive or foster parents. Act 1 -- approved by Arkansas voters in November -- limits adoptions to married couples, effectively barring singles, unmarried heterosexual partners, and homosexuals from adopting children. Jerry Cox of the Family Council Action Committee of Arkansas expected the lawsuit but believes the amendment is in the best interest of the children.

"Well, you don't have to be a rocket scientist or social scientist to know that the best place for a child to grow up is in a home with a married mother and father -- a stable home like that," he points out. "Anything that departs from that moves in the wrong direction. We all know that."

According to The Associated Press, nearly 30 adults are plaintiffs in the ACLU suit, including a grandmother who has cohabitated with her same-sex partner for nearly a decade and is the only relative willing and able to adopt her grandchild. The state of Arkansas now has control of the child's future. In another case, a woman who wants to be a foster or adoptive parent cannot because she is not married to the man with whom she has lived for five years. The ACLU argues that in such situations the new law denies many Arkansas children a "chance at the largest possible pool of potential foster and adoptive homes."

But Cox believes the lawsuit promotes the homosexual agenda at the expense of the children. "This measure is not about the rights of adults," he contends. "It's about the welfare of children and the rights of children to be brought up in a good, stable home."

The ACLU argues that the law discriminates against homosexuals who cannot legally marry in Arkansas. However, Cox says it affects heterosexuals and homosexuals equally. He adds that he is confident the lawsuit will fail and Act 1 will "remain on the books." The new law went into effect on January 1.

http://www.onenewsnow.com/Legal/Default.aspx?id=374230

Marriage, Adoption and What's Best for Children

by Marcia Segelstein

A recent piece in the Atlanta Journal-Constitution highlights the ever-growing research that children are substantially better off when raised by their married parents.

Writer Jim Wooten cites the work of Robin Fretwell Wilson, a professor of Family Law at Washington and Lee University School of Law in Lexington, Virginia. Wilson spoke recently at a summit on Children, Marriage and Family Law. She analyzed research studies about what is best for children, and the results were crystal clear. “In virtually every study, weighing every variable – family structure, age, income, race, education – the evidence is overwhelming that children do better in families where married adults are rearing their biological children.”

But what about adopted children? Perhaps because Wilson herself was adopted as a child, she has paid special attention to this issue. In preliminary results, she found that adoptive parents “invest more [of themselves] in adoptive chidlren, on average, than biological parents do in their children.” She believes that adoption “shows that adults can be bound to children and protective of them…But what distinguishes adoptees from kids in boyfriend households that are fraught with peril for some kids is that both adults are committing to the child, permanently, for good, and with identical connections to the child. And they mean to be conneccted to the child, not just to one another.”

http://www.onenewsnow.com/Blog/Default.aspx?id=354276

Arkansas ban on unmarried foster parents

The Arkansas voters banned unmarried couples from becoming foster parents. Although it was aimed at same sex couples, my opinion is that the impact on opposite sex unmarried couples is more significant. We already know that children do better with married couples than with cohabiting couples. The state should absolutely take this fact into account in choosing foster parents. "Opponents argued it would make it harder for the state to find the foster parents it needs to take care of children." I don't consider that a very strong argument. The states should recruit more married couples and make foster care an appealing proposition for them, rather than lowering their standards.
As a personal note, I have seen some unmarried cohabiting opposite sex couples do adoptions and foster care. It doesn't work very well. The problem is attachment. Many, many adopted and foster children have difficulty attaching to loving adults. Their ability to attach has been compromised by the trauma they've already been through. They need the most stable possible people to connect with. The unmarried couple implicitly says, "I do not entrust myself to my partner. My partner does not entrust himself to you. But we want you, the wounded child, to entrust yourself to me and to him." States should not be using cohabiting couples.

Beyond Same Sex Marriage

A lively debate is brewing over at Mercator, where I published my latest article about the CA same sex marriage decision. I expect to have some response to their commentary posted over there soon.
But in the meantime, here is some of what needs to be said in response:
Someone at Mercator pointed out that many of the gay couples who are already raising children had those children from previous heterosexual relationships. In other words, the couple is not raising “their” child. One partner is raising his or her own child, and the other partner is similar to a stepparent. The gay partner doesn’t automatically get parental rights because the child’s other biological parent is not automatically out of the picture. Unless that parent surrenders their parental rights, or is found to be unfit, the child’s biological parent continues to have parental rights toward them. Under this scenario, the child who is living with a same sex couple is not “their” child. Marriage does not and should not attach the child to both members of the gay couple in this situation, any more than a heterosexual divorced woman getting remarried should automatically attach her children to her new husband.
Who are the same sex couples who are raising their own children? They can only be couples who have somehow acquired genetic material from some third party. It is that third party parent who is being ignored. Or more precisely, it is the child’s relationship to that third party that no one wants to look at too closely. One typical scenario is that one member of a lesbian couple gets impregnated by an anonymous sperm donor. All the adults agree to it, and we somehow think that is sufficient. But the child’s right to have a relationship with that parent is fundamentally violated. It is the exact opposite of the trend toward open adoption, which honors the child’s right to relationship.

Psychological Parenting Doctrine

The Volokh Conspiracy has an extended discussion of psychological parenting. This is the legal doctrine that says a person not biologically related to the child can be given parental rights if they have formed a psychological bond with the child and are functioning as a psychological parent. The back and forth gives an idea of the potential for mischief, as well as some of the heart-rending cases that emerge in this area of family law.

Jim Caviezel Shares the Fears and Joys of Adoption

Jim Caviezel, best known for his role as Jesus in The Passion of the Christ shared his story of adopting two children with serious medical conditions. He believed he was called by God to take these children, with all of their challenges.

Caviezel, 39, ...talked about overcoming fear to adopt two children suffering from brain tumors.

Caviezel and his wife, Kerri, adopted the children, a boy and a girl, from China. But the decision wasn't easy, the actor acknowledged.

"I was completely terrified and felt like, why; I felt like, 'Yes, I know you want me to take this child but I feel fear, great fear,'" Caviezel said. "But if I looked in my soul, which I was used to, at that point, I knew that God wanted me to do it. So I felt all the emotions of the negativity, of the burden it was going to … what it was going to do to me."...

"So my wife and I believe strongly in life, that all men are created equal. So it was time to put my money where my mouth was," Caviezel recalled.

A friend challenged him to prove the authenticity of his faith by adopting "not just any child, but a really disabled child."

Caviezel challenged back: "And I said, 'OK, so when I do, will you become pro-life?' So I adopted this child and I called him up.

"He didn't make good on his word, but it didn't matter to me because the joy that we had, have from this child -- he's like our own. I was there with him through the surgery with my wife and we did not know if he was going to live."

Caviezel explained a little of his son's history: "This little boy had nothing. He was left on a train. And he grew up in an orphanage. […] He lived there for five years in an orphanage. They were told that they came from the ground, that they had no mommy. That they didn't come from a stomach, but that they were born from the dirt."

Harder road

Adopting the little girl was another opportunity for Caviezel to act on his faith, he said: "We actually asked God for a girl and we got a newborn girl, […] but the following day, we got another girl -- she was a 5-year-old.

"And she had a brain tumor. We knew that girl would never get adopted and the little baby would. So we took the harder road. And we have chosen that. […] That's what faith is to me. It's action. It's Samaritan. It's not the one who says he is. It's the one who does."

I salute Caviezel and his wife for this decision. But I am concerned: The fact that both these kids were in orphanages for five years is a bright red flag for attachment disorder. I wrote about attachment disorder in Love and Economics. I pray that these children attach to Caviezel and his wife. Attachment disorder can be more difficult, and long lasting than medical conditions.
Let's pray for this family.

Mothers Alone

is the title Policy Review gives to Amy Wax's outstanding review of two rather bad books: Ann Fessler, The Girls Who Went Away: The Hidden History of Women who Surrendered Children for Adoption in the Decades before Roe v. Wade, and
Rosanna Hertz, Single by Chance, Mothers by Choice: How Women are Choosing Parenthood without Marriage and Creating the New American Family.

In Ann Fessler’s book, women born at mid-century reminisce about becoming pregnant out of wedlock and relinquishing their children for adoption in the decades before the sexual revolution and the Supreme Court’s 1973 decision in Roe v. Wade. In Rosanna Hertz’s, the daughters of that generation recount their experiences as women who have decided to become mothers outside of marriage. Fessler’s stories tell of coming of age amidst the seismic shift in sexual mores that yielded the world as we know it. Hertz provides a window into the lives some women live in that world.

The two books in question can't get past their post-modern and feminist categories of thought to observe the data right in front of their noses. The birth mothers who placed their children for adoption do not really see abortion, that is, their child's non-existence, as the solution. The children of the single mothers by choice are "staunchly unreconstructed," in that they want to know their fathers.
The larger problem, which neither author takes seriously, is the question of how to manage sexuality and child-bearing in a world without marriage. Here is Amy Wax.

Implicit (and sometimes explicit) in their complaints is the expectation — indeed the demand — that they should have been “helped” to keep their babies. This book’s central flaw, its core evasion, is its failure to come to grips with that expectation. All eyes are averted from its true implications. How can the demand for “help” mean anything other than its being incumbent on others — family, friends, society, the government — to provide these girls with the funds needed to raise a child alone, without marriage, men or fathers. These women’s complaints lead inexorably to an entitlement depressingly familiar in its contours and consequences: a welfare state in which the public pledges unconditional financial support for mothers barely out of girlhood. It leads, in short, to the wholesale bankrolling of children having children. The sins of this path require no rehearsal. Suffice it to say that we have been there and done that. We know where it leads: men without roots, domestic chaos, deprived children, social pathology — and wholesale political rebellion against the unseemly spectacle of welfare as we know it.

Like Hertz and her single-mothers, Fessler and her birth mothers simply fail to confront their own wishes writ large. The broader question of how to run the railroad does not trouble them. They are not concerned with the norms we all should live by. Rather, to borrow Michael Oakeshott’s phrase, these women are taken up with their own “felt needs.” Every hurt (self-inflicted or not) must be addressed and every hardship (defensible or not) assuaged. In this calculus, the dislocations of individual lives are all that matter. Hertz’s and Fessler’s moms are here to tell their stories, not devise wise rules for social life. The conundrums of social policy get pushed off into the background in favor of an endless recital of grievances against the order. Cut loose from a coherent moral framework, they give little thought to the world their desires would entail.

While this review is harsh toward the Life-style Left, Wax ends with an implied critique of the Right, which is not providing realistic answers. Read it all.

More on Malachi: A Child Advocate Attorney Speaks

From an attorney who has represented both children and parents in the Child Protective System. He was initially not too happy with me for blaming the attorneys and social workers and the whole "due process" process.

I represented one father about 6 years ago, who was on his way to prison, and whose nine children (yes, nine) were in the child-protective system as a result. He was very bitter and wanted to fight the system. I met with him the night before the court hearing, and I asked him to consider whether fighting for his kids was in the best interest of his children, or whether he just wanted to fight for fighting’s sake. When he paused, I told him that I would meet with him the next morning before court, and if he could look me in the eye and give me one reason why fighting was in the best interest of his children, then I would fight all the way. But if he couldn’t, then I asked him to consider voluntarily relinquishing his parental rights. The next day, he did so.

I believe that attorneys should discuss relinquishing rights with their clients, and should not always assume that fighting is the correct approach. Perhaps that is one small area where the system could improve, through training for those involved. Many of the attorneys in the system are inexperienced or barely competent attorneys who either don’t understand the system, or don’t care about the cases very much. And there is a cultural problem among attorneys, where most assume that you must accept your client’s goals without question in order to fulfill your duty of representation. Law schools and bar associations should encourage attorneys to “counsel” with their clients to help them choose the most appropriate goal, rather than simply accept the client’s goal unhesitatingly.

But aside from better training for the participants in the system (including much needed training for social workers regarding the constitution and the integrity of the family unit), I’m not sure what the solution is on a system-wide level. In Michigan, under reform legislation in the 1990s (that I believe many states adopted), the parent has one year from the date a child was removed to get their act together, before the state will file a petition to terminate parental rights. And where there are serious allegations of abuse, the state may petition to terminate parental rights at the first dispositional hearing (after the court takes jurisdiction). Perhaps in the case you wrote about, given the history of that mother, the state should have sought termination sooner. But the laws already allow for that option in some circumstances. Is there some reform to the system or the legal framework that you are advocating? I am interested in considering any possible solutions (or improvements). I sometimes find these court hearings so depressing that I skip the rest of the day and go home to enjoy my wonderfully intact family and young kids!

I think I agree with you more than I first thought. Your article was strongly worded, and I still think blaming the attorney for the mother (and others) for the murder perpetrated by the foster family is incorrect. Balancing the needs for permanency and protection of children with preserving the integrity of parent-child relationships is very difficult. I’m not ready to say that we should abandon the procedural requirements before terminating parental rights. But I think that your comments about the broader cultural issues (i.e., on adoption) are dead on.

More on Malachi

Here is another comment, similar to the one above:
Over the years many young women have crossed my path who have had children out of wedlock. More often than not, these young women would have their own parents care for the child so that the young woman could go out and party, do the hook-up scene, and "still have a life." Only one actually gave her daughter up for adoption, and I commended her for it. As for the others, whenever I would ask these young women why they did not choose adoption for their children, they'd say, "Because I don't want my baby having another mother." If the women were actually taking responsibility for their children instead of going out every night, I would understand. But this kind of selfishness is a sad commentary on our times.

Who Killed Malachi?

Way back when.... I wrote about the sad case of a child killed in foster care, by his foster mother. His birth mother was 15 when he was born, and had been and still was, in foster care herself. My question was: why was that little boy not placed for adoption right away, so he could have had a chance for a normal life?
I got a lot of mail in my in-box, rather than through this blog. So I am just now getting around to posting it all here.

I must say, I feel somewhat uncomfortable with your comments in "Who Killed Malachi". As a crisis pregnancy counselor, I have to tell you how extremely difficult it is to get our clients to be open to the thought of adoption. Just today I tried and tried to get the point of how adoption would benefit their child to a couple that will most certainly lose their child to CYS and the foster care system once the baby is born. Adoption is not something they will even try to consider. Generally, these are lowly educated people who are not responsible and take no accountability for their actions,- all reasons that helped lead them to the crisis they are facing. They generally rebel against authority and truly believe that their children are better off with them. Your article made it sound like if only someone had encouraged adoption, the mother would have suddenly taken responsbility and accountability as a parent. While I am not at all familiar with this case, I can tell you that biological parents will rarely admit their children are better off elsewhere, much less be responsible enough to actually go through with placing their child for adoption. I went through a lengthy training from the National Adoption Council, yet in my 4 years at a crisis pregnancy center, I have yet to see a client 'do the right thing' by placing her child for adoption.

Thanks to everyone who wrote about this. Sorry it took so long to get this posted. The original article is here.

Who Killed Malachi?

My latest on NRO, tells of a child killed in foster care. The little boy was eminently adoptable, but had been in foster care for all of his two years. What would it take for a parent's rights to be terminated? I have had an interesting e-mail dialogue on this point with a couple of correspondents. More later.
The whole sad story about this child's death is here.