Articles

121225 Unwed mothers call for Park's attention

2013-01-04T14:55:25P

Unwed mothers call for Park's attention

The Korea Times 2012-12-25

http://www.koreatimes.co.kr/www/news/nation/2012/12/180_127687.html

Better social safety net needed, they say

By Kim Young-jin

Kim Jung-in (an alias), a public relations officer, knew it would be difficult to raise her one-month-old daughter alone. But determined to try, she ignored family members who pressured her to opt for adoption, just as they had told her to have an abortion.

“I was confident I could get a job and take care of her on my own,” recalled Kim, 36, of the turbulent period four years ago. “But I needed time to find work and persuade my parents I could do that.”

Time and understanding, she would find, were not on her side.

Kim met her boyfriend while working abroad for a Korean firm. They wanted to marry but her family would not give their blessing without meeting the prospective groom first. After they learned she was pregnant, the man convinced her to quit her job, saying he could support her.

But the man’s business fell through, and with scant resources, he convinced Kim to return to Korea unmarried. Despite promises to follow her, he vanished.

She ended up in Busan with her parents, who shunned her for giving birth out of wedlock – a common response in Korean society. “My mother cooked meals for me, but not for my baby,” she recalled. “My father did not accept me as part of the family. I ran out of places to turn to.”

Kim may have been alone, but her story is not uncommon in a country where stigmatization and a lack of social services force many women to choose between abortion and adoption. While single mothers have raised their profile in recent years, groups supporting them say that the government must provide them with a safety net and begin to set straight a painful history.

The issue may be set to go under the spotlight as Korea prepares for its first female president, Park Geun-hye, who has promised to improve conditions for women. Support groups say whether Park pays attention to single mothers will be a bellwether of how thoroughly she plans to follow through on this pledge.

As yet, the President-elect’s team has not made specific policies for single mothers and they are not mentioned in its policy book of over 300 pages.

“Right now, they are included in the policies for single parents,” said an official from the policy committee of Park's Saenuri Party, requesting anonymity. “Once the transition committee is launched, it is possible that the issues of unmarried mothers can be discussed there.”

Entrenched attitudes

The path for Kim to keep her child was precarious. In need of work, she jumped when she heard of a job in Seoul. But with her family refusing to babysit, she made what she felt was a necessary gamble, leaving the child in the care of an adoption agency, with the promise that if potential adoptive parents were interested, she would be called.

She soon received a text message from a social worker informing her that an adoption had been finalized. “I cried a lot that I wanted my baby, but I was told it was impossible. After fighting for three months I got her back.”

According to Statistics Korea, some 2.1 percent of babies were born outside of marriage last year, the lowest rate among member nations of the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) and well below the OECD average of 36.3 percent.

Some 90 percent of Korean babies adopted internationally are from single mothers, seen as representative of the social pressures facing unmarried, pregnant women.

Han Seo Seung-hee, who works with the Korean Unwed Mothers Support Network (KUMSN), believes the attitude stems from deeply ingrained Confucian mores. “Society thinks they are immoral,” she said. The attitude prevails in spite of concerns over the nation’s aging population. Moreover, social stigma against mothers who have children out of wedlock is underpinned by the specific expression in the Korean language referring to them, ‘Mi-hon-mo’, often used as a pejorative term.

Lee Jung-hee, a 31-year-old teacher in Gyeonggi Province, said people treated her differently when she decided to give birth to her son after breaking up with her boyfriend, the father.

“You can’t tell people at work, or you have to lie to them. It’s like you are a criminal,” she said.

Even at the hospital, where she received care under her insurance program, the doctor “suddenly turned really cold” when Lee said the father might not be present at birth. Other hospital officials asked why she did not go to a care center for single mothers.

“That’s when I realized, if you become a single mother in this country, it doesn’t matter if you have a family, if you have a good job or education, or who you are. You just become the bottom of society. People treat you like crap,” she said.

Han said on the national census, if a woman reports being unmarried, it neglects to ask whether she has children. Others point out that existing cash support reinforces the separation of families and institutional help rather than empowering women to raise their children alone.

According to numbers compiled by Truth and Reconciliation for the Adoption Community of Korea (TRACK), the government provides around 1 million won for each child in a family group home facility or an orphanage; and 250,000 won for every child in foster care. Korean families who adopt are supported with a 100,000 stipend. But single parents, including unwed and divorced parent receive 50,000 per month.

Lee, the teacher, didn’t want to be institutionalized in a group home.

“If you stay in such a place for a year, or two, or three, how do you ever start over again? Someone like me ― a professional ― if I get a little support from the government, I can get back on my feet and I am willing to work,” she said.

The monthly support for single parents falls well short of considering unexpected circumstances, Lee learned. Soon after birth, her son was diagnosed with Hirschsprung's disease, a disorder of the abdomen that required surgery.

Through support from KUMSN, she has been able to hire a babysitter, but her son’s frequent illness poses a problem for her work schedule.

Kim Jung-in, the public relations worker, said stigmatization does not stop with the mother. “Most families don’t want to have get-togethers with single mothers and their children,” she said.

Reconciling the past, looking ahead

Jane Jeong Trenka, head of TRACK, said the high percentage of international adoptees that comes from unwed mothers binds the two groups together.

International adoptions from Korea picked up pace during the country’s rapid industrialization under the military dictatorship of Park Chung-hee, the late father of President-elect Park. Many such adoptees return to Korea to learn about the country or search for their birth parents.

Some scholars suggest that like other exports of human resources during that era, babies, especially those born out of wedlock, may have been seen as a tidy source of profit.

“The unwed mothers and their children are woven inextricably into the history of Korea's development,” said Trenka, an adoptee.

She said the stories of the families of adoptees reveal a “complete lack of a social safety net and of course patriarchal practices which include intense discrimination by the society and the government against single mothers and their children.”

In recent years, grassroots awareness campaigns have helped bring the issue to light. Last year, the National Assembly passed an amendment to the Single Parent Law that by 2015 will ban adoption agencies from owning facilities for unwed mothers, which activists say will reduce the influence of the agencies in the women’s decision-making process.

Groups such as KUMSN say now is the time for the government to devise policies to shore up services.

The advocates say efforts must go beyond Park’s promise to increase cash support from 50,000 won to 150,000 won and bolster housing for single parents.

Activist Han said the government can start by collecting accurate statistics on unwed mothers, because it is believed many women do not report their status. KUMSN urges the incoming administration to consider diversifying housing options, tightening regulations over adoption practices, and providing better education for pregnant, unwed women on their options.

The government should mobilize a public awareness campaign to educate society on unwed women, the group says.

Lee, the mother, says the reasons women like her and their children should be treated as normal members of society are simple.

“I pay taxes, first of all. And then every child has the right to be happy,” she said.

“I gave birth to a kid, and he is going to grow up and work for this country. We can raise these kids and make them happy. People need to be open minded, not just for me, but for the children.”

121007 South Korea 'Baby Box' Pastor Says New Law Brings More Babies

2012-10-09T10:03:56P

[The New York Times]

South Korea 'Baby Box' Pastor Says New Law Brings More Babies

By REUTERS

Published: October 7, 2012 at 2:46 AM ET

A South Korean pastor who runs a "baby box" where mothers can leave unwanted infants has seen a sharp increase in the number of newborns being left there because, the pastor says, of a new law aimed at protecting the rights of children.

South Korea is trying to shed a reputation of being a source of babies for adoption by people abroad. It is encouraging domestic adoption and tightening up the process of a child's transfer from birth mother to adoptive parents.

The law that took effect in August is aimed at ensuring adoption is more transparent and makes it mandatory for parents to register newborns if they want to give them up.

But the regulation aimed at seeing more thorough records are kept, though well intentioned, has sparked a surge of undocumented babies being abandoned, said Pastor Lee Jong-rak.

"If you look at the letters that mothers leave with their babies, they say they have nowhere to go, and it's because of the new law," Lee told Reuters.

Lee, who opened his "baby box" for unwanted infants three years ago, said he had seen the number being left there shoot up from an average of five a month to 10 in August and 14 in September.

Despite the new law, Lee said he never forced mothers to provide information about the babies they leave in the box, built into the wall of his church in Nangok, a tough working-class neighborhood in the capital, Seoul.

Many of the babies abandoned in the box have physical or mental disabilities. Lee has adopted 10 of them himself and is in the process of adopting four more.

On a recent sunny afternoon, a bell rang in his church to signal a new baby had been left in the box, a boy about two weeks old wrapped in a blanket.

"In the past, babies used to be abandoned at night but nowadays babies are abandoned in the daytime as well," Lee said with a sigh.

At the moment, Lee is looking after 20 children, aged between 2 and 26, in his cramped two-storey house. Among them, his own son.

But a Ministry of Health and Welfare official questioned Lee's assertion that the new law had led to more babies being dropped in the box.

"It's hard to say there's a specific causal relationship between the law and babies being abandoned in the box," said the official, who declined to be identified.

"The sudden surge of the babies could be due to many reasons," said the official.

Lee has been criticized by some people who say his box encourages desperate mothers to give up their babies. But Lee says he will not close the box until he was sure the government can offer adequate protection for abandoned babies.

(Editing by Jack Kim)

http://www.nytimes.com/reuters/2012/10/07/world/asia/07reuters-korea-babies.html?emc=eta1&_r=0

120918 Korean-Australian woman finds she was falsely adopted

2012-09-25T18:21:48P

[SBS]

18 SEP, 2012

Korean-Australian woman finds she was falsely adopted

An Australian women has found she was the subject of a falsified adoption in South Korea. (AAP)

An Australian woman has found she was the subject of a falsified adoption in South Korea, where her biological mother was told her baby was stillborn.

As Australians find it harder to adopt babies from overseas, one woman has discovered she was falsely adopted from South Korea, where her biological mother was told her baby was stillborn.

Emily Will* was pronounced dead at birth. Born in a small maternity home in the countryside of Geoje, Gyeongsandnam-do, the midwife allegedly told her biological parents the baby was “stillborn”.

“I don’t know how this could have happened to me,” she says. “Why would someone (the midwife) do that? Why would someone make a choice for someone else?”

“Her decision changed my life.”

For 23 years, Ms Will believed she was put up for adoption after her biological parents decided to part ways. Her adoption papers said her parents were in a de facto relationship, a status considered shameful in traditional Korean society, with two daughters.

It was not until she became a mother herself, Ms Will became curious about her biological roots.

“After my daughter was born, something changed. Something changed in me,” she says.

“I didn’t know my medical history. I didn’t know what I could have passed on to my kid. I didn’t know if there were any genetic heart diseases. Nothing.”

EMOTIONAL REUNION

After three years of searching and waiting, Ms Will thought she was prepared to meet her biological parents.

“It’s well known that you may possibly or most probably have a false story given to you so you brace yourself,” says Ms Will, 24, a mother of two in Sydney. “But when you finally get the real story, the story you thought you had prepared yourself for… it definitely throws you.”

Her emotional reunion with her biological family was set up in a small room at her South Korean adoption agency, Eastern Social Welfare Society.

“When I saw them my mind went completely blank. I didn’t know what to think at that stage. It was a bit of a shock. I really didn’t think this day would come. It was very surreal.”

It was at this meeting Ms Will became aware of the truth of her past; she was a stolen baby and her parents had in fact been married at the time.

“When I was born, they told my birth mother I was stillborn… and that was it,” she says.

“Here are some papers. Sign them. We will do the rest.”

While Ms Will’s mother was recovering, Ms Will’s father was told the baby would need to be transferred to a hospital for a doctor to declare the baby dead.

The papers that they had mistakenly signed changed the course of Ms Will’s life.

LOOKING FOR ANSWERS

Since their meeting, Ms Will has contacted Eastern Social Welfare Society asking for answers on how she ended up in the adoption agency.

They revealed she had been transferred to the orphanage at Eastern Social Welfare Society Jinju branch on the same day of her delivery and was then placed in a foster home with another baby for four weeks before being transferred to a foster family, where she stayed till she was adopted at 5 months.

This revelation has now left Ms Will, her biological and adoptive family in a shock as they struggle to come to terms with the cruel turn of events.

“My birth mother can’t really talk about it without crying so I don’t try to push it,” Ms Will says.

“My adoptive parents are just shattered.”

UNCOMMON, NOT UNHEARD OF

The experience of Ms Will is uncommon, but not unheard of. Intentional fabrication, falsification of documents and unintended adoption has been previously reported in South Korea.

Jane Jeong Trenka, the president of Truth and Reconciliation for the Adoption Community of Korea (TRACK) says many adult Korean adoptees that have returned to be reunited with their Korean parents have found themselves to be the subject of a forced adoption, kidnappings or forged identity.

Ms Trenka says money was the driving force behind illegal adoptions.

“It is widely known today that intercountry adoption is driven by huge sums of money,” she said. “It is, in fact, an industry.”

“In the days when South Korea was not economically developed, it was a way to secure precious foreign currency. Today, the intercountry adoption program is a way to save money on social spending.”

South Korea consistently ranks at, or is near the bottom of, family welfare spending among OECD countries.

“What we have 60 years after the end of the Korean War is, therefore, a very developed adoption system and a nearly non-existent domestic social welfare system that specialises in family separation for adoption, instead of family preservation,” said Ms Trenka.

More than 200,000 Koreans have been adopted overseas since the end of the 1950-1953 Korean War. But what began as an incentive to save thousands of Korean War orphans, many fathered and then deserted by American GIs, turned into a lucrative industry whereby thousands of children, mostly born to unwed mothers, were put up for adoption.

In 2011, 88.4 per cent of all intercountry adoptees from South Korea were relinquished from unwed mothers, a status often frowned upon in traditional Korean society. Social pressure still drives thousands of unmarried women to choose between abortion and adoption as they risk the life of economic difficulty and disgrace.

A NEW APPROACH

Stories such as these have been the motivating factor behind South Korea’s new adoption policy. Under revised laws, pregnant women wanting to have their child adopted are given a seven-day deliberation period on whether to keep or relinquish their child after birth. Prospective parents are mandated to get court approval before adopting abandoned children and adoption agencies are required to accurately register information of their birth parents. Domestic adoption will continue to be prioritised over inter-country adoption, where overseas parents will only be allowed to adopt if no adoptive family can be found domestically.

While the government hopes the change will help encourage birth mothers to keep their children, they believe the move will also prevent the self-identity issues and cultural alienation many overseas adoptees face when they are older.

The change is also part of the government’s move to remove the international stigma of being a “baby-exporting country”.

For decades, South Korea has been among the top ranking countries to provide babies for adoption in Australia. However, according to a report by the Australian Institute of Health and Welfare, the number of adoptions from South Korea has dropped 76 per cent since 2006 and South Korea is no longer one of the top four countries of origin.

The South Korean government states revised adoption laws is in the best interests of children, in accordance with the Hague Convention on the Protection of Children and Co-operation in Respect of Intercountry Adoption. Yet, South Korea is not a signatory to the Hague Convention.

But the revised adoption laws have come too late for Emily Will.

She’s filed a complaint to the Australian Government Attorney General's department and her case is being investigated.

A spokesperson from the Australian government Attorney General’s department says it had limited involvement in intercountry adoptions in the 1980s, at the time Ms Will was adopted and is not aware of similar cases in Australia.

While Australia has been party to the Hague Convention since 1998, the Australian government can only request the relevant overseas authority make appropriate enquiries into the circumstances surrounding the child trafficking concerns or allegations, once credible concerns are raised.

Yet, Ms Trenka says it’s the joint responsibility of both countries to ensure adoption processes are ethical and transparent.

“Right now governments are only pointing the finger at each other. Adoptees are being told that to take legal action, they would have had to report the crime within the [10 year] statute of limitations,” she says. “But how can an adoptee file a suit when they are still a child?”

“Adoption should not be treated as a retail industry. It’s not an exporting importing thing. We’re human beings. We’re not products. We’re not for sale. You can’t put a price on a human life,” Ms Will says.

* Names have been changed for privacy reasons

http://www.sbs.com.au/news/article/1693349/Korean-Australian-woman-finds-she-was-falsely-adopted

120814 ACT APOLOGISES FOR FORCED ADOPTIONS

2012-08-17T13:16:56P

[abc] 2012-08-14

ACT APOLOGISES FOR FORCED ADOPTIONS

All three political parties in the ACT Legislative Assembly have apologised to the people affected by forced adoption policies.

Many unwed mothers across Australia were forced to give up their babies during the 1950s, 1960s and 1970s.

The apology was a key recommendation of a senate inquiry earlier this year, and the Federal Government has already committed to its own apology

Chief Minister Katy Gallagher says although the practice pre-dated self-government, the ACT Government will do what it can to support affected families.

"It is our responsibility to acknowledge on behalf of this community that these practices occurred and that mothers did not give up their babies willingly," she said.

"We acknowledge the pain of those affected and express the heartfelt sympathy to those ACT families past and present separated by an adoption that was forced upon them."

Opposition Leader Zed Seselja says the practice of forced adoption has caused decades of trauma for thousands.

"While no apology is ever enough, it is right and just that victims of forced adoptions are recognised and that we as a community say sorry, we do so today freely and fully," he said.

Greens leader Meredith Hunter says she welcomes and supports the motion.

"I'm sure that to those for whom this apology means most, this is a day of very mixed emotions," she said.

"There's a profound sadness and grief that few issues could provoke as intensely, and I hope there's also some feelings of relief and justice that the community is finally recognising what happened and apologising for it."

"For all the terrible things that we've done, for all the hurt and all the anguish over such a long period of time, for the empty space where there should have been a life to share, today is a day when we finally say sorry."

http://au.news.yahoo.com/a/-/australian-news/14543720/act-apologises-for-forced-adoptions/

120812 Hurts of forced adoption must now be healed

2012-08-17T13:11:46P

[Canberra Times]   2012-08-12

Opinion: Hurts of forced adoption must now be healed

IT'S a national scandal, affecting thousands of Australians, that until recently was spoken of only in hushed tones.

While it is sometimes claimed that those involved in the forced adoptions of babies from unwed mothers in the 1950s to 1970s thought they were doing the right thing, the true extent of this cruel chapter in our history is only now beginning to be revealed.

A Senate committee report into the issue earlier this year opened a window into the true extent of the cruelty dished out, including birth certificates marked for adoption against the mother's will, and women drugged with sedatives and pressured to sign adoption papers and later denied information about the fate of their children.

On Tuesday the ACT will join Western Australia, South Australia and soon Tasmania in making a formal apology to both the women and children affected by the so-called coercive adoption practices meted out to an estimated 150,000 mothers around the country.

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The federal government also recently indicated its intention to make a national apology on the issue and has established a reference group to advise on the timing and form that apology should take.

It has taken more than half a century, and even today some victims are only now making contact with their lost children. For many, a national apology cannot come soon enough, as thousands of Australians continue to suffer. Yet an apology on its own is not enough.

Many women, and their adult children, continue to battle the significant cost and bureaucratic red tape involved in tracking the birth families. It is a long, difficult and sometimes expensive battle to unearth the truth.

If the federal government is serious about righting the wrongs of the past, and bringing some form of closure for those affected, its planned apology must go further than just the symbolic.

It should include financial assistance to help those seeking the truth, a determination to collect, centralise and make available important historical records to those who have a birthright to see them and special counselling services to assist those still traumatised by their forced separation.

There is much the federal bureacracy can do to help these people find and recover records, especially with the state and territory based apologies showing a real willingness to help those affected.

Governments can assist the healing process by taking important steps like apologising. The importance of doing so, and the impact it can have on victims, should not be underestimated.

http://www.canberratimes.com.au/opinion/hurts-of-forced-adoption-must-now-be-healed-20120811-2419p.html#ixzz23lkeINIx

101118 The Decline of Marriage and Rise of New Familes

2012-08-17T12:06:45P

[PEW Research Center]                                                         2010-11-18
The Decline of Marriage and Rise of New Families

Executive Summary
The transformative trends of the past 50 years that have led to a sharp decline in marriage and a rise of new family forms have been shaped by attitudes and behaviors that differ by class, age and race, according to a new Pew Research Center nationwide survey, conducted in association with TIME magazine, and complemented by an analysis of demographic and economic data from the U.S. Census Bureau.

A new "marriage gap" in the United States is increasingly aligned with a growing income gap.

Marriage, while declining among all groups, remains the norm for adults with a college education and good income but is now markedly less prevalent among those on the lower rungs of the socio-economic ladder.

The survey finds that those in this less-advantaged group are as likely as others to want to marry, but they place a higher premium on economic security as a condition for marriage.

The survey also finds striking differences by generation. In 1960, two-thirds (68%) of all twenty-somethings were married. In 2008, just 26% were.

How many of today's youth will eventually marry is an open question. For now, the survey finds that the young are much more inclined than their elders to view cohabitation without marriage and other new family forms -- such as same-sex marriage and interracial marriage -- in a positive light.

Even as marriage shrinks, family -- in all its emerging varieties -- remains resilient. The survey finds that Americans have an expansive definition of what constitutes a family. And the vast majority of adults consider their own family to be the most important, most satisfying element of their lives.

Here is a summary of the key findings of the report:

The Class-Based Decline in Marriage

About half (52%) of all adults in this country were married in 2008; back in 1960, seven-in-ten (72%) were.

This decline has occurred along class lines. In 2008, a 16-percentage-point gap separated marriage rates of college graduates (64%) and of those with a high school diploma or less (48%). In 1960, this gap had been just four percentage points (76% vs. 72%).

The survey finds that those with a high school diploma or less are just as likely as those with a college degree to say they want to marry. But they place a higher premium than college graduates (38% vs. 21%) on financial stability as a very important reason to marry.

Is Marriage Becoming Obsolete?
Nearly four-in-ten survey respondents (39%) say that it is; in 1978 when TIME magazine posed this question to registered voters, just 28% agreed. Those most likely to agree include those who are a part of the phenomenon (62% of cohabiting parents) as well as those most likely to be troubled by it (42% of self-described conservatives).

Despite these growing uncertainties, Americans are more upbeat about the future of marriage and family (67% say they are optimistic) than about the future of the country's educational system (50% optimistic), its economic system (46% optimistic) or its morals and ethics (41% optimistic).

An Ambivalent Public
The public's response to changing marital norms and family forms reflects a mix of acceptance and unease. On the troubled side of the ledger: Seven-in-ten (69%) say the trend toward more single women having children is bad for society, and 61% say that a child needs both a mother and father to grow up happily. On the more accepting side, only a minority say the trends toward more cohabitation without marriage (43%), more unmarried couples raising children (43%), more gay couples raising children (43%) and more people of different races marrying (14%) are bad for society. Relatively few say any of these trends are good for society, but many say they make little difference.

Group Differences
Where people stand on the various changes in marriage and family life depends to some degree on who they are and how they live.

The young are more accepting than the old of the emerging arrangements; the secular are more accepting than the religious; liberals are more accepting than conservatives; the unmarried are more accepting than the married; and, in most cases, blacks are more accepting than whites.

The net result of all these group differences is a nearly even three-way split among the full public. A third (34%) say the growing variety of family arrangements is a good thing, 29% say it is a bad thing and 32% say it makes little or no difference.

The Resilience of Families
The decline of marriage has not knocked family life off its pedestal.

Three-quarters of all adults (76%) say their family is the most important element of their life, 75% say they are "very satisfied" with their family life, and more than eight-in-ten say the family they live in now is as close as (45%) or closer than (40%) the family in which they grew up.

However, on all of these questions, married adults give more positive responses than do unmarried adults.

The Definition of Family
By emphatic margins, the public does not see marriage as the only path to family formation.

Fully 86% say a single parent and child constitute a family; nearly as many (80%) say an unmarried couple living together with a child is a family; and 63% say a gay or lesbian couple raising a child is a family.

The presence of children clearly matters in these definitions. If a cohabiting couple has no children, a majority of the public says they are not a family.

Marriage matters, too. If a childless couple is married, 88% consider them to be a family.

The Ties that Bind
In response to a question about whom they would assist with money or caregiving in a time of need, Americans express a greater sense of obligation toward relatives -- including relatives by way of fractured marriages -- than toward best friends. The ranking of relatives aligns in a predictable hierarchy. More survey respondents express an obligation to help out a parent (83% would feel very obligated) or grown child (77%) than say the same about a stepparent (55%) or a step or half sibling (43%). But when asked about one's best friend, just 39% say they would feel a similar sense of obligation.

Changing Spousal Roles
In the past 50 years, women have reached near parity with men as a share of the workforce and have begun to outpace men in educational attainment. About six-in-ten wives work today, nearly double the share in 1960. There's an unresolved tension in the public's response to these changes. More than six-in-ten (62%) survey respondents endorse the modern marriage in which the husband and wife both work and both take care of the household and children; this is up from 48% in 1977. Even so, the public hasn't entirely discarded the traditional male breadwinner template for marriage. Some 67% of survey respondents say that in order to be ready for marriage, it's very important for a man to be able to support his family financially; just 33% say the same about a woman.

The Rise of Cohabitation
As marriage has declined, cohabitation (or living together as unmarried partners) has become more widespread, nearly doubling since 1990, according to the Census Bureau. In the Pew Research survey, 44% of all adults (and more than half of all adults ages 30 to 49) say they have cohabited at some point in their lives. Among those who have done so, about two-thirds (64%) say they thought of this living arrangement as a step toward marriage.

The Impact on Children
The share of births to unmarried women has risen dramatically over the past half century, from 5% in 1960 to 41% in 2008. There are notable differences by race: Among black women giving birth in 2008, 72% were unmarried. This compares with 53% of Hispanic women giving birth and 29% of white women. Overall, the share of children raised by a single parent is not as high as the share born to an unwed mother, but it too has risen sharply -- to 25% in 2008, up from 9% in 1960. The public believes children of single parents face more challenges than other children -- 38% say "a lot more" challenges and another 40% say "a few more" challenges. Survey respondents see even more challenges for children of gay and lesbian couples (51% say they face a lot more challenges) and children of divorce (42% say they face a lot more challenges).

In Marriage, Love Trumps Money
Far more married adults say that love (93%), making a lifelong commitment (87%) and companionship (81%) are very important reasons to get married than say the same about having children (59%) or financial stability (31%). Unmarried adults order these items the same way. However, when asked if they agree that there is "only one true love" for every person, fewer than three-in-ten (28%) survey respondents say, I do.

http://pewresearch.org/pubs/1802/decline-marriage-rise-new-families

120811 OPINION: In Defense of Single Motherhood

2012-08-17T11:21:43P

[The New York Times] 2012-08-11

OPINION: In Defense of Single Motherhood

IN a season of ardent partisan clashing, Americans seem united in at least one shared idea: Single mothers are bad. A Pew Research Center poll on family structures reports that nearly 7 in 10 Americans think single mothers are a “bad thing for society.”

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Conservatives obsess over moral decline, and liberals worry extravagantly — and one could argue condescendingly — about children, but all exhibit a fundamental lack of imagination about what family can be — and perhaps more pressingly — what family is: we now live in a country in which 53 percent of the babies born to women under 30 are born to unmarried mothers.

I happen to have two children with two different fathers, neither of whom I live with, and both of whom we are close to. I am lucky enough to be living in financially stable, relatively privileged circumstances, and to have had the education that allows me to do so. I am not the “typical” single mother, but then there is no typical single mother any more than there is a typical mother. It is, in fact, our fantasies and crude stereotypes of this “typical single mother” that get in the way of a more rational, open-minded understanding of the variety and richness of different kinds of families.

The structure of my household is messy, bohemian, warm. If there is anything that currently oppresses the children, it is the idea of the way families are “supposed to be,” an idea pushed — in picture books and classrooms and in adults’ casual conversation — on American children at a very early age and with surprising aggressiveness.

At 2, my son, Leo, started to call his sister’s father, Harry, “my Harry.” When he glimpsed Harry’s chocolate-brown 1980s car coming down our block he would say, “My Harry’s car!” To me this unorthodox use of “my” gets at the spirit of what we’re doing: inventing a family from scratch. There are no words for what Harry is to him, but he is definitely his Harry.

The other day Leo brushed his mop of blond hair in front of the mirror and announced, “Now I look like Harry.” People are quick to tell me that this is not the real thing. But is it necessarily worse than “the real thing”? Is the physical presence of a man in the home truly as transfiguring, magical and unadulteratedly essential as people seem to think? One could argue that a well-loved child is a well-loved child.

To support the basic notion that single mothers are irresponsible and dangerous to the general order of things, people often refer vaguely to “studies.” I am not a huge believer in studies because they tend to collapse the complexities and nuance of actual lived experience and because people lie to themselves and others. (One of these studies, for instance, in order to measure emotional distress asks teenagers to record how many times in a week “you felt lonely.” Is there a teenager on earth who is a reliable narrator of her inner life? Can anyone of any age quantify how many times in a week they have felt lonely?) But since these studies provide fodder for those who want to blast single mothers, it’s worth addressing what they actually say.

Studies like those done by the Princeton sociologist Sara S. McLanahan, who is one of the foremost authorities on single motherhood and its impact on children, show that conditions like poverty and instability, which frequently accompany single-mother households, increase the chances that the children involved will experience alcoholism, mental illness, academic failure and other troubles. But there is no conclusive evidence that, absent those conditions, the pure, pared-down state of single motherhood is itself dangerous to children.

PROFESSOR McLANAHAN’S studies over the years, and many others like them, show that the primary risks associated with single motherhood arise from financial insecurity. They also offer evidence that, to a lesser extent, particular romantic patterns of the mother — namely introducing lots of boyfriends into children’s lives — contribute to the risk. What the studies don’t show is that longing for a married father at the breakfast table injures children.

And Professor McLanahan’s findings suggest that a two-parent, financially stable home with stress and conflict would be more destructive to children than a one-parent, financially stable home without stress and conflict.

There is no doubt, however, that single motherhood can be more difficult than other kinds of motherhood. In France, the response to the added difficulty is to give single mothers preferential access to excellent day care. Here the response is moralism disguised as concern and, at other times, simply moralism.

The idea of “single mothers” may itself be the convenient fiction of a fundamentally conservative society. In fact women move in and out of singleness, married parents break apart, men and women live together without marrying, spouses or partners die, romantic attachments form and dissolve. Those who brandish research like Professor McLanahan’s ongoing Fragile Families study and Paul R. Amato’s 2005 paper on changing family structures to critique “single mothers” conveniently ignore the fact that such investigations rely on shifting, differing and extremely complex definitions of the households involved.

What gets lost in the moralizing conversation is that there is a huge, immeasurable variety in households, and there are great ones and terrible ones, arduous ones and inventive ones, drab ones and exuberant ones, among families of all structures and economic strata.

It’s useful and humbling to remember that no family structure guarantees happiness or ensures misery: real life is wilier and more fraught with accident and luck than that. If you think that being married ensures a good life for your children you need only enter a bookstore and open any novel, or go to the theater and watch practically any play, or have dinner with nearly anyone you know. Suffering is everywhere, and married parents, even happily married parents, raise screwed-up or alcoholic or lost children, just as single parents raise strong, healthy ones. What matters most, it should go without saying, is the kind of parent you are, not whom you sleep with, and even that matters only up to a point.

With the steep rise of children born to unmarried parents, America’s prevailing fantasies of family life no longer match the facts on the ground. But as the children born to unmarried women under 30 come of age in the majority, these faded archetypes will have to evolve. Our narrow, constricting, airless sense of the isolated nuclear family has not always, if we are honest, served us well, and it may now be replaced by something more vivid and dynamic, and closer to the way we are actually living.

All of the liberal concern about single motherhood might more usefully be channeled into protecting single mothers, rather than the elaborate clucking and exquisite condescension that get us nowhere. Attention should be paid to the serious underlying economic inequities, without the colorful surface distraction of concerned or judgmental prurience. Let’s abandon the fundamentally frothy question of who is wearing a ring. Young men need jobs so they can pay child support and contribute more meaningfully to the households they are living in. The real menace to America’s children is not single mothers, or unmarried or gay parents, but an economy that stokes an unconscionable divide between the rich and the not rich.

By KATIE ROIPHE

Katie Roiphe is the author of the forthcoming book “In Praise of Messy Lives” and a journalism professor at New York University

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/08/12/opinion/sunday/in-defense-of-single-motherhood.html?_r=3&pagewanted=all&ref=opinion

111229 Failed Adoptions Create More Homeless Youths

2012-08-16T13:44:34P

[The New York Times] 2011-12-29

Failed Adoptions Create More Homeless Youths

John Konstantaras/Chicago News Cooperative

Lamar West, 20, in the backyard of the Southwest Side home where his adoptive mother lived.

By MERIBAH KNIGHT

Published: December 29, 2011

Lamar West has lost parents twice in his life. The first time was when he was 4; the second was a month before his 18th birthday. The circumstances differed, but the outcomes did not.

When Mr. West, 20, tries to remember his biological parents, his eyes close and his face goes still. He remembers his mother’s name, Rochelle Griffin. Then he recalls a place — a hallway, an office — and fragments of conversation. “Records. Drug abuse. Termination.”

At age 5, Mr. West was adopted from the Illinois child welfare system. His four siblings went elsewhere. Parental rights were terminated. His child welfare case was closed. His last name and birth certificate were changed, listing his adopter, Frankie Lee West, as his mother. He had a new family.

He lived in Ms. West’s Roseland home with her and her eight other children (six of them were adopted) for years. But in 2008, he went to stay nearby with a family friend for a few months because Ms. West’s new house on the Southwest Side had become too crowded. He remained in regular contact with her. Then, in January 2009, he went to her home and discovered it empty.

She had moved — “upped and went,” as Mr. West said — to Atlanta. It was a month before he turned 18, and a month before the checks she received from the child welfare system on behalf of Mr. West were scheduled to stop.

“I’ve never felt pain like that before,” Mr. West said of finding the empty house. “My heart was beating so fast. It was like someone was punching me from the inside of my chest.”

Mr. West is what caseworkers and providers refer to as a “failed adoption.” He is part of a growing group that is entering the local shelter system for homeless youths after their families vanish as quickly as the government checks attached to them do.

Anne Holcomb, Mr. West’s caseworker and the coordinator for the Night Ministry’s Open Door Youth Shelter, said she was dismayed by the increase in homeless cases resulting from adopted youths who reach 18, the standard cutoff age for adoption subsidies in Illinois.

“I’m definitely seeing more failed adoptions,” she said. “I’m seeing more than I did in the ’90s and even more over the last four years, because these youths were adopted as kids and now they’re 18.”

With one of the largest child-welfare systems in the nation, Illinois had 51,331 children in state care in 1997. Often they bounced from foster home to foster home. Each new placement can add a new layer of trauma, experts said.

That same year, President Bill Clinton called on states to double the number of adoptions and permanent placements in five years because a focus on permanency would help both children and state budgets. Adoptive families received state assistance and provided children with a place to call home, while removing them from state rosters and reducing the number of caseworkers.

Between fiscal years 1985 and 1994, 8,180 children were adopted from the Illinois foster care system; between 1995 and 2004, the number had soared to 36,212, according to the Illinois Department of Child and Family Services.

Today the emphasis on permanency has shrunk the system to 15,413 children in fiscal year 2011, from its 1997 peak.

Research shows that from 1988 to 2006, children were typically adopted at age 7. Now, a little more than a decade after the boom years of 1998 to 2001 — accounting for 22,057 adoptions — more youths are aging out of subsidies than ever before.

“There was a huge scramble to pressure people into permanency,” said Mark Ruckdaeschel, director of Neon Street Dorms, a homeless youths shelter in Uptown. “And there was a big discussion about the financial benefits for doing this. It was a selling point.”

Monthly subsidies range from $360 for an infant to well over $1,000 for a child with special needs.

While foster youths receive benefits until age 21, benefits for adopted youths expire at 18. Youths who are abandoned by their adoptive family at that point are often left homeless and without a safety net — even from the system responsible for their adoption.

“It’s frustrating,” said Mr. Ruckdaeschel, who previously worked for organizations contracted by the Illinois child welfare system. “You feel like you’re doing D.C.F.S.’s job without the backing of D.C.F.S.’s deep pockets.”

The suddenly homeless youths are legal adults and are considered outside the system’s responsibility. In fact, the agency’s responsibility can end even earlier.

“D.C.F.S. has no capacity to and no authority to monitor or track families after an adoption,” said Kendall Marlowe, a spokesman for the agency. Richard Calica took over as director of the agency on Dec. 15, and he was not available to comment for this article.

Mr. West, a reticent and soft-spoken young man, has been homeless since he discovered Ms. West’s house empty two years ago. He had one brief phone call with her, but she never offered to take him back, he said. Ms. West did not respond to e-mails asking for comment.

For a while, Mr. West and his girlfriend, Amanda, stayed with his longtime friend Rodney Carter, 39. They also spent time in homeless shelters. When they married in September, they moved in with Amanda’s parents and her brother; they have a 1-year-old daughter, Kayla, and are expecting another child. With six people in a one-bedroom apartment, tensions are high.

Mr. West recently started seasonal day labor work in the receiving department of Follett Educational Services. It does not pay much — about $300 a week after the placement agency takes its cut — not enough to save for an apartment. He has no high school diploma and hopes to get his G.E.D., but for now he is the primary breadwinner and a paycheck is critical, he said.

Despite his anger toward his adoptive mother, Mr. West said he longed for the family he had known since he was 5.

When the push for permanency began 14 years ago, critics said that placements were being made in haste. They warned that children would eventually come flooding back into the system.

Limited research shows that about 90 percent of adoptions last through the child’s 18th birthday, said Nancy Rolock, a senior research specialist at the University of Illinois at Chicago who studies permanency in the child-welfare system. Yet what happens after age 18, Ms. Rolock said, is nearly impossible to track.

D.C.F.S. is aware that not all placements are perfect matches. To prevent adoption failures, it has adoption-preservation programs, which tries to salvage an adoption before it breaks down.

In the last fiscal year, the programs served 1,318 families, which cost the department $6,231,707. Of the 2,490 children involved, 35 were returned to the custody of the child-welfare system.

In 2009, the Illinois General Assembly passed the Foster Youth Successful Transition to Adulthood Act, which enabled former foster youths under the age of 21 to resume receiving benefits from D.C.F.S. It benefited youths who may have chosen to leave the agency early only to find out that life without its aid can be difficult. Yet the law does not include foster youths who have been adopted.

Representative Sara Feigenholtz, a co-sponsor of the law, said its scope should be widened. “I believe that cherry-picking and hair-splitting doesn’t get us where we want to be,” she said. “I’m beginning to realize that there is a lot more work to be done.”

After a long day at his job, Mr. West collapsed in an armchair in his mother-in-law’s Albany Park apartment. Kayla toddled around, giggling, eating a peeled apple. “I’ve been thinking about something all day,” he said and rose to his feet.

He walked into the 8-foot-by-6-foot bedroom he shares with his wife and their daughter, sat on the bed and typed out a message on his mobile phone to Jennifer, his adopted sister, who left along with Ms. West.

“I’m asking this question to give myself closure. Am I a part of your family or not, honest?” Then he hit send.

mknight@chicagonewscoop.org
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/12/30/us/failed-adoptions-create-more-homeless-youths.html?pagewanted=all

120301 Apologise for forced adoptions: inquiry

2012-08-16T13:36:25P

[World News Australia] 2012-3-1

Apologise for forced adoptions: inquiry

Australian Greens Senator Rachel Siewert tables the report on forced adoptions at Parliament House, Canberra. (AAP)

A Senate committee says Australian governments should formally apologise to mothers and children who were victims of past forced adoption practices.

Pamela O'Brien faced a "friendless, soulless and penniless" existence after her precious baby Angela was stolen from her and forcibly adopted out.

Pam was one of about 150,000 unwed mothers who had their babies taken against their will at the hands of churches, hospitals and adoption agencies between the 1950s and 1970s.

A Senate committee which investigated the Commonwealth government's involvement in past forced adoption practices tabled its report in the upper house on Wednesday and made 20 recommendations.

But its central recommendation is that Australian governments formally apologise to mothers and children who were victims of past forced adoption practices.

Australian Greens senator Rachel Siewert, who chaired the inquiry, broke down as she tabled the report which took 18 months to assemble from hours of testimony.

"It is undoubted that past policies and practices have caused great harm and hurt to mothers, fathers, adoptees and their family members," she told the chamber.

"It is time for governments and institutions involved to accept that such actions were wrong, not merely by today's standards but by the values and laws of the time."

But for Pam, 62, and her daughter Angela Barra, now 44, who both gave evidence to the senate community affairs inquiry, an apology is tokenistic and won't make up for the decades the pair lost.

Pam was kicked out of home and humiliated by the shame she had brought on her family after falling pregnant at 18.

Her mother hit her across the face when she found out.

"She said `You piece of rubbish - you get out'," Pam told AAP at Parliament House in Canberra.

"These days my mother, if she could turn the clock back, she'd cut her throat."

She has foggy memories of Angela's birth at The Mater Hospital in Brisbane and believes she was heavily drugged, so her daughter could be removed.

"How dare these holier than thou people in their ivory towers, think they've got the right to take peoples' children because they didn't fit the social mores of the day," she said.

Committee member and Labor senator Claire Moore said one of the most poignant moments of the inquiry was a woman telling the panel all she wanted was for her son to know she loved him and hadn't given him away.

"To the people caught up in the horror of this history, we can now call it a horror and not pretend it didn't happen," Senator Moore said.

The report's other recommendations include setting up government-funded peer support groups to help victims, money for family tracing services and new birth certificates for adoptees.

Committee member and Labor senator Carol Brown said women had been tricked into signing adoption papers and physically shackled to hospital beds.

She said the pain of women affected was "unimaginable".

"Doctors, nurses and midwives showed no respect to these women.

"They were taunted about their unwed status."

Catholic Health Australia, admitted being involved in past forced adoptions, and apologised to victims in July last year.

Chief executive Martin Laverty encouraged other organisations to apologise and supports the recommendations.

"We think they are concrete steps that can help those affected by past adoption practices move towards healing," he said.

While some adoptees had abusive upbringings in their new homes Angela was happy with her adoptive Italian parents.

"I know the truth now, it's taken all this time for me to know what happened to Pam, it's taken all this time for Pam to acknowledge what happened to her," Angela says.

About 100 victims of past forced adoption practices were in the Senate public gallery when the report was tabled and many cried out and clapped during the ensuring speeches.

Source: AAP

http://www.sbs.com.au/news/article/1630479/Apologise-for-forced-adoptions-inquiry

120229 Australian Senate calls for apology on forced adoptions

2012-08-16T13:25:57P

[BBC]                                        2012-02-29

Australian Senate calls for apology on forced adoptions

A senate committee heard from hundreds of women in the course of its inquiry

A Senate committee in Australia has called for a national apology to thousands of women who were forced to give up their children for adoption from the 1950s to 1970s.

The Community Affairs References Committee released its report on forced adoption practices based on submissions from hundreds of women

Many women said they were coerced into signing away their children.

Many did so because of stigma attached to unmarried motherhood at the time.

The committee urged the government to issue a formal statement of apology that "acknowledges, on behalf of the nation, the harm suffered by many parents whose children were forcibly removed and by the children who were separated from their parents".

Over one and a half years, the Senate committee heard stories from women affected by the practise - most of whom had been in their teens and unmarried when they had their babies.

Many said they signed consent forms allowing adoption only after being coerced. Some said they were drugged, while others said their signatures were forged.

"In many cases, the parents were threatened with the law of the day," said Senator Claire Moore. "To the people caught up in the horror of this history, we can now call it a horror and not pretend it didn't happen."

Some of the organisations involved in the forced adoptions were heavily criticised in the committee's report. The head of the Senate inquiry also said that actions of hospitals may have been illegal.

Some of the organisations have apologised - but many of the women say they also want the government to apologise, just as it did in 2008 to indigenous people who had also undergone systematic suffering

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-asia-17201052

120720 Tears flow after SA adoption apology

2012-07-20T10:40:21P

[Sky News]                                                                                                       July 20, 2012

Tears flow after SA adoption apology



There were tears at South Australia's parliament as Premier Jay Weatherill's government became the second in Australia to apologise to the victims of forced adoption.

Mr Weatherill says he's deeply sorry for the hurt and distress caused to people by past forced adoption practices in the state.

'We accept with profound sorrow that many mothers did not give informed consent to the adoption of their children,' he said on Wednesday.

'We recognise the practices of our past mean that there are some members of our community today who remain disconnected from their families of origin.

'We hear you now, we acknowledge your pain and we offer you our unreserved, sincere regret and sorrow for those injustices.

'To all those hurt we say sorry.'

The special sitting of parliament is being broadcast live on the internet.

In parliament, some women wept as they heard they were blamed for getting pregnant, blamed for wanting to keep their children and then blamed for succumbing to pressure to give them up.

More than 17,000 children in SA are believed to have been adopted before 1980 and some of these were forced adoptions.

'This apology is long overdue, but we hope it will be a significant moment for those affected,' he said.

Between the 1950s and the 1970s about 150,000 unmarried mothers across Australia had their babies taken against their will.

The Western Australian government has already delivered an apology to the people affected by the practice in that state and the federal government is also planning a similar move.

A national apology was one of the recommendations made by the Senate Community Affairs Committee following an inquiry into forced adoptions.

The Commonwealth has established a reference group to advise the government on the timing and nature of an apology.

http://www.skynews.com.au/local/article.aspx?id=773287

120713 MPR, International Adoption, and oh wait… where’s the adult adoptee on the adoption panel?

2012-07-20T10:28:50P

[Blog http://sarahpark.com/] July 13, 2012

MPR, International Adoption, and oh wait…
where’s the adult adoptee on the adoption panel?

[update/note: for new readers, this is full disclosure that I myself am not an adopted Korean. I am a Korean American daughter of immigrant Korean parents. I am an assistant professor at St. Catherine University in the Master of Library and Information Science Program, and I study representations of adoption in children's literature and adoptee information seeking behaviors. I consider myself an ally and advocate for adoptees and ethical adoption.]

Yes, it’s true. I blog mostly when I’m really annoyed. There’s a whole lot more to the background of international adoption than I can post here, but for a brief background at least on the Republic of Korea, check out Dr. Kim Park Nelson‘s “Mapping Multiple Histories of Korean American Transnational Adoption.”

Recently we have seen several articles regarding the “precipitous decline” in international adoptions; one reason for these declines is that there has been so much documented corruption, child trafficking, questionable behaviors, etc., in international adoption, so some countries have shut down their adoption programs – and rightly so. Countries have decreased the numbers of children they make available for adoption because they are trying to care for the children within their own countries, mostly by way of domestic adoption programs, which is a nice thought but fails to address the root problem of why so many children are being orphaned/made into “legal” or “social” orphans in the first place. Another reason may be that birth mothers are being incredibly brave and choosing to raise their children as single mothers. These are all valid and good reasons to decrease the numbers of children adopted internationally. Don’t get me wrong – I’m not anti-adoption. Adoption is and should be a good thing and a great way for a child to find a home. But in recent decades the institution has spiraled out of control and created a market for children that has broken up many existing families. So I’m actually anti-unethical adoption. Anyway, back to the main topic at hand.

Today MPR had another program on the decline of international adoption . Here’s the panel of 4, as stated on the MPR Daily Circuit page:

(adoptive father) Dana Johnson: Professor of pediatrics in the division of neonatology at the University of Minnesota, founded the International Adoption Clinic

(adoptive mother) Maureen Warren: President of Children’s Home Society

Jodi Harpstead: Chief executive officer of Lutheran Social Service of Minnesota

(adoptive father) David McKoskey: Adoptive father, professional computer programmer and adjunct professor of computer science at St. Catherine University (full disclosure: David has guest lectured in my LIS7530 Internet Fundamentals and Design class – and done a fantastic job of it.)

As usual, there are no adult adopted persons on this panel. There is no shortage of adult adoptees in Minnesota who are adoption professionals, activists, etc., that could have balanced out the perspectives and experiences represented by this panel. Earlier this morning when we learned that this program was happening, adoptees encouraged one another to call-in with their comments in order to get their voices heard. Here’s my (almost) live blogging of what went down:

What MPR talked about:

The declining numbers in international adoption

The continuing “need” for international adoption (never mind that the number of global “orphans” are conflated and inaccurate)

How open adoptions can change the landscape of contemporary adoption

The impact of the Hague Convention on international adoptions

How they would prefer the safety of children over volume… but when the volume increased so quickly… that attracted a lot of different agencies and operators… and there “might have been some safety and care sacrificed.”

The goal is to get the number rising again so children can be placed (which I read as “and also so that our finances can stabilize”)

They actually talked about adult adoptees who are now professionals: “Particularly adult Korean adoptees that are influencing the arts, that are influencing adoption, that are very interested in contributing to all walks of life in Minnesota” (except even though they are influencing adoption, we haven’t invited any of them to this panel).

That there’s a “special place in heaven” for the families who open their homes to a child. She needs to read David Smolin’s “Of Orphans and Adoption, Parents and the Poor, Exploitation and Rescue: A Scriptural and Theological Critique of the Evangelical Christian Adoption and Orphan Care Movement.“

That prospective adoptive parents need to be patient because small delays are just that – small delays in the long run.

Kevin Ost-Vollmers called out MPR for not inviting adult adoptees to this panel, and MPR answered that the program focuses on the drop in adoptions and therefore they invited people who work at agencies, and rather, that adoptees could call-in with their comments. I’m not sold on this answer, as I think they need to address the root of the problem – that adoptions may happen at the expense of exploited/misinformed families, and that watching out for them should be a major priority for anyone concerned about building/maintaining healthy families.

(Some of) What call-ins from the audience talked about:

1st caller: adoptee and adoptive father

2nd caller: adoptive mother of Korean daughter: “adoption has really opened our family up”

3rd caller: domestic adoptee who adopted internationally

4th caller: domestic adoptee whose wife is adopted, father is adopted, brother is adopted, and is the adoptive father of 2 children from Ethiopia. Thinks CHS is a great organization. Drives him crazy when people say “Your girls are so lucky. We’re the lucky ones!”

5th caller: asked about the role of infertility in the adoption process

6th caller: KEVIN OST-VOLLMERS! Korean adoptee, blogger and adoptee activist called out MPR for not inviting Korean adoptees to the program!!! And asked another question about culture and whiteness, but I didn’t catch the whole thing because I was so excited that he actually got through the phone lines. I’m so not satisfied with MPR’s answer.

What I wish MPR had talked about:

Some real life examples of intentional fabrication/falsification of documents or child abduction and unintended adoptions, as told by adoptees and/or birth families and/or adoptive parents themselves. Consider, for example:

Jane Jeong Trenka‘s story where false documents led to her unauthorized adoption and legal severance from her biological mother: http://jjtrenka.wordpress.com/about/adoption-file/

Deann Borshey Liem‘s story where a Korean social worker swapped her in for another child in order to get a daughter to a waiting family: http://www.mufilms.org/films/matter-of-cha-jung-hee/

Tammy Chu‘s film about a Korean adoptee and his birth mother: http://www.resiliencefilm.com/Welcome.html

David Smolin‘s story as an adoptive father (and adoption/legal scholar) who found out that his own adopted children had been trafficked: http://works.bepress.com/david_smolin/

And let’s not forget so-called “well-intentioned” Christian organizations that want to expedite and process international adoptions without following established legal procedures. Consider what the Idaho churches tried to do in Haiti after the earthquake: http://www.sltrib.com/news/ci_14338123

That’s all, just some real life adoptees, birth parents, (and adoptive parents, although their stories get PLENTY of airtime already), and their real life stories. It gets better, right, MPR? Can we extend this conversation and add another program that features the voices of adult adoptees/adoptee professionals?

120217 For Women Under 30, Most Births Occur Outside Marriage

2012-02-28T17:18:44P

[New York Times]                                                                                               February 17, 2012

For Women Under 30, Most Births Occur Outside Marriage

LORAIN, Ohio — It used to be called illegitimacy. Now it is the new normal. After steadily rising for five decades, the share of children born to unmarried women has crossed a threshold: more than half of births to American women under 30 occur outside marriage.

Once largely limited to poor women and minorities, motherhood without marriage has settled deeply into middle America. The fastest growth in the last two decades has occurred among white women in their 20s who have some college education but no four-year degree, according to Child Trends, a Washington research group that analyzed government data.

Among mothers of all ages, a majority — 59 percent in 2009 — are married when they have children. But the surge of births outside marriage among younger women — nearly two-thirds of children in the United States are born to mothers under 30 — is both a symbol of the transforming family and a hint of coming generational change.

One group still largely resists the trend: college graduates, who overwhelmingly marry before having children. That is turning family structure into a new class divide, with the economic and social rewards of marriage increasingly reserved for people with the most education.

“Marriage has become a luxury good,” said Frank Furstenberg, a sociologist at the University of Pennsylvania.

The shift is affecting children’s lives. Researchers have consistently found that children born outside marriage face elevated risks of falling into poverty, failing in school or suffering emotional and behavioral problems.

The forces rearranging the family are as diverse as globalization and the pill. Liberal analysts argue that shrinking paychecks have thinned the ranks of marriageable men, while conservatives often say that the sexual revolution reduced the incentive to wed and that safety net programs discourage marriage.

Here in Lorain, a blue-collar town west of Cleveland where the decline of the married two-parent family has been especially steep, dozens of interviews with young parents suggest that both sides have a point.

Over the past generation, Lorain lost most of two steel mills, a shipyard and a Ford factory, diminishing the supply of jobs that let blue-collar workers raise middle-class families. More women went to work, making marriage less of a financial necessity for them. Living together became routine, and single motherhood lost the stigma that once sent couples rushing to the altar. Women here often describe marriage as a sign of having arrived rather than a way to get there.

Meanwhile, children happen.

Amber Strader, 27, was in an on-and-off relationship with a clerk at Sears a few years ago when she found herself pregnant. A former nursing student who now tends bar, Ms. Strader said her boyfriend was so dependent that she had to buy his cigarettes. Marrying him never entered her mind. “It was like living with another kid,” she said.

When a second child, with a new boyfriend, followed three years later — her birth control failed, she said — her boyfriend, a part-time house painter, was reluctant to wed.

Ms. Strader likes the idea of marriage; she keeps her parents’ wedding photo on her kitchen wall and says her boyfriend is a good father. But for now marriage is beyond her reach.

“I’d like to do it, but I just don’t see it happening right now,” she said. “Most of my friends say it’s just a piece of paper, and it doesn’t work out anyway.”

The recent rise in single motherhood has set off few alarms, unlike in past eras. When Daniel Patrick Moynihan, then a top Labor Department official and later a United States senator from New York, reported in 1965 that a quarter of black children were born outside marriage — and warned of a “tangle of pathology” — he set off a bitter debate.

By the mid-1990s, such figures looked quaint: a third of Americans were born outside marriage. Congress, largely blaming welfare, imposed tough restrictions. Now the figure is 41 percent — and 53 percent for children born to women under 30, according to Child Trends, which analyzed 2009 data from the National Center for Health Statistics.

Still, the issue received little attention until the publication last month of “Coming Apart,” a book by Charles Murray, a longtime critic of non-marital births.

Large racial differences remain: 73 percent of black children are born outside marriage, compared with 53 percent of Latinos and 29 percent of whites. And educational differences are growing. About 92 percent of college-educated women are married when they give birth, compared with 62 percent of women with some post-secondary schooling and 43 percent of women with a high school diploma or less, according to Child Trends.

Almost all of the rise in nonmarital births has occurred among couples living together. While in some countries such relationships endure at rates that resemble marriages, in the United States they are more than twice as likely to dissolve than marriages. In a summary of research, Pamela Smock and Fiona Rose Greenland, both of the University of Michigan, reported that two-thirds of couples living together split up by the time their child turned 10.

In Lorain as elsewhere, explanations for marital decline start with home economics: men are worth less than they used to be. Among men with some college but no degrees, earnings have fallen 8 percent in the past 30 years, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, while the earnings of their female counterparts have risen by 8 percent.

“Women used to rely on men, but we don’t need to anymore,” said Teresa Fragoso, 25, a single mother in Lorain. “We support ourselves. We support our kids.”

Fifty years ago, researchers have found, as many as a third of American marriages were precipitated by a pregnancy, with couples marrying to maintain respectability. Ms. Strader’s mother was among them.

Today, neither of Ms. Strader’s pregnancies left her thinking she should marry to avoid stigma. Like other women interviewed here, she described her children as largely unplanned, a byproduct of uncommitted relationships.

Some unwed mothers cite the failures of their parents’ marriages as reasons to wait. Brittany Kidd was 13 when her father ran off with one of her mother’s friends, plunging her mother into depression and leaving the family financially unstable.

“Our family life was pretty perfect: a nice house, two cars, a dog and a cat,” she said. “That stability just got knocked out like a window; it shattered.”

Ms. Kidd, 21, said she could not imagine marrying her son’s father, even though she loves him. “I don’t want to wind up like my mom,” she said.

Others noted that if they married, their official household income would rise, which could cost them government benefits like food stamps and child care. W. Bradford Wilcox, a sociologist at the University of Virginia, said other government policies, like no-fault divorce, signaled that “marriage is not as fundamental to society” as it once was.

Even as many Americans withdraw from marriage, researchers say, they expect more from it: emotional fulfillment as opposed merely to practical support. “Family life is no longer about playing the social role of father or husband or wife, it’s more about individual satisfaction and self-development,” said Andrew Cherlin, a sociologist at Johns Hopkins University.

Money helps explain why well-educated Americans still marry at high rates: they can offer each other more financial support, and hire others to do chores that prompt conflict. But some researchers argue that educated men have also been quicker than their blue-collar peers to give women equal authority. “They are more willing to play the partner role,” said Sara McLanahan, a Princeton sociologist.

Reviewing the academic literature, Susan L. Brown of Bowling Green State University recently found that children born to married couples, on average, “experience better education, social, cognitive and behavioral outcomes.”

Lisa Mercado, an unmarried mother in Lorain, would not be surprised by that. Between nursing classes and an all-night job at a gas station, she rarely sees her 6-year-old daughter, who is left with a rotating cast of relatives. The girl’s father has other children and rarely lends a hand.

“I want to do things with her, but I end up falling asleep,” Ms. Mercado said.

By JASON DePARLE and SABRINA TAVERNISE

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/02/18/us/for-women-under-30-most-births-occur-outside-marriage.html?_r=1&emc=eta1&pagewanted=print

111124 Stigma of baby 'exporter'

2012-01-11T17:01:43P

[The Korea Times]                                                                                           November 24^th, 2011

[Opinion]Stigma of baby 'exporter'

New culture needed to solve the problem

It is a shame that the nation is still stigmatized as one of the world’s biggest “exporters” of babies despite its rapid economic growth. The dishonor is evident in the U.S. State Department’s 2011 Annual Adoption Report to Congress that lists South Korea as the No. 1 source of inter-country adoptions for American families.

According to the report, American foster parents adopted 734 Korean children between October 2010 and September this year. The number of adoptees from other countries stood at 216 from the Philippines, 196 from Uganda and 168 from India.

Korea sent 1,013 children overseas to join their new parents in 2010, accounting for 40 percent of the country’s total adoptees. It is urgent to promote domestic adoptions in order to reduce the number of inter-country adoptions. The nation’s birthrate has nosedived to 1.23, but why has it continued to have its orphans leave the country?

In the past, poverty had driven parents to give up their own children. But these days, young unwed moms are accountable for over 90 percent of total adoptions. The best way to solve the problem is to let such moms raise their children by themselves.

There are serious challenges: deep-rooted prejudice and discrimination against unmarried mothers. Korea is traditionally a Confucian society, and its members have put a stress on blood ties, making it difficult to adopt children here. That’s why domestic adoption has been in the doldrums. Koreans have recently begun to change due to rapid socioeconomic transformations. But it still has a long way to go before having a better awareness about adoption.

What’s important is to create a new culture that can change Koreans’ attitude. The nation needs to create a society that puts more value on family and children. Most of all, all members of society should get rid of discrimination against unmarried mothers.

It is true that unmarried mothers are still treated as “sinners.” People have tried to have the “scarlet letter” engraved into the heart of women bearing a child out of wedlock. They should no longer be hypocrites. Now they must embrace unwed mothers as their neighbors to live together.

It is also required to provide better sex education to schoolchildren in order to help them avoid unwanted pregnancies. Educational authorities and the community should better protect the rights of unmarried teenage mothers so that they can raise their children and study simultaneously.

Needless to say, children are our future. We should let them fully enjoy their basic human rights whoever they are ― adopted or not. We must remember the preamble of the Hague Adoption Convention that reads: “Recognizing that the child … should grow up in a family environment, in an atmosphere of happiness, love and understanding.”

http://www.koreatimes.co.kr/www/news/opinon/2011/11/202_99479.html

111230 Overseas adoption: child welfare or abuse?

2012-01-11T16:45:40P

[The Korea Times]                                                                                          December 30^th, 2011

Overseas adoption: child welfare or abuse?

Some years ago, during a seminar about overseas adoption from Korea, I stated that the practice is “child abuse rather than child welfare.” Some of the social workers who were working for overseas adoption agencies looked very shocked when they heard my presentation.

After the seminar, some of them came to me and made strong complaints and protested. They argued, “Why do you insult and disgrace us, while we try to find sweet homes for abandoned children through overseas adoption?”

Korea’s overseas adoption program started immediately after the end of the 1950-53 Korean War. Now Korea’s per capita national income is more than $20,000 and the economy ranks in the world’s top 15, yet Korea is still one of the world’s major countries sending its own children overseas for adoption.

According to government statistics, Korea has sent nearly 200,000 children overseas for adoption from 1953 to the present. Among those children, there were 5,546 mixed-race children sent from 1955 to 1973 (after which mixed-race children were no longer counted because the vast majority of adoptees were full-blooded Koreans), 98,178 children from unwed mothers, 28,823 children from broken families, 29,950 abandoned children and 37,216 disabled children.

According to these statistics, through overseas adoption, we sent away the mixed-race children, the children of unwed mothers, disabled children, and the children of broken families. That is why I define Korea’s overseas adoption as a kind of “systematic social segregation.” Of course, as a member of Korean society, I am also complicit in this massive “systematic social segregation project.”

From a micro-perspective, overseas adoption can be seen as child welfare. In view of this, certainly I am very grateful to the adoptive parents in Western countries, who have looked after the abandoned Korean children with “philanthropic love.” I also am deeply appreciative of the various social workers in adoption agencies, police stations, maternity clinics and orphanages, to name but a few, who have tried to provide a sweet home for abandoned children. However, from a macro-perspective, the overseas adoption program of Korea has been deeply related to the international social system.

First, overseas adoption is a kind of child abuse by the state. Second, the overseas adoption policy of the government was likely a part of its economic development strategy, which means the overseas adoptees have been used as part of a project to create wealth and prosperity for the rest of the South Koreans.

Overseas adoption is the forced expulsion of children from the society where they are supposed to live. In this sense, overseas adoption is a social violence against children. As humans, we exist as part of a gigantic ecosystem. The existence of the biological parents of adoptees can never be annihilated nor denied. Accordingly, while adoptees are growing up, they should be given information about their biological parents and be able to interact with them. By doing so, adoptees can form their identity with less conflict.

Overseas adoption is a forced separation of children from their natural ecosystems, as well as a way of forcing them into compulsory unity with settings different from and unnatural to their genetic and original social systems. Through this forced separation and compulsory unity, not only the adoptees, but also their biological parents, adoptive parents and their family members suffer trauma.

The overseas adoption of Korean children can be seen as child abuse since it has been interrelated with the economic development strategy of the government. How can we call the overseas adoption program of Korea “child welfare” when we create wealth and prosperity by forcefully expelling them?

According to government statistics, overseas adoptions peaked during the 1970s and ‘80s. Between 1953 and 1968, fewer than 1,000 children were sent away for overseas adoption annually. This figure rose sharply: in 1969, 1,192 children were sent; in 1970, 1,932; in 1971, 2,725; and in 1985, 8,837. Throughout the 1970s and 1980s, 113,568 children were sent for overseas adoption ― more than half of all overseas adoptees in the last six decades.

During the 1970s and ‘80s, “economic development” was the national motto of our society. In view of this, “child export” was used as a tool that promoted economic development and created wealth in our country. In 1988, Matthew Rothschild of The Progressive magazine pointed out that a Korean adoption agency received $5,000 per child as a fee from abroad in return for an overseas adoption. This went up to $10,000 per child by 2000 ― what a land of economic prosperity!

Through the figure given by The Progressive, we can estimate that throughout the 1970s and 1980s, Korea earned between $20 and $40 million annually from the overseas adoption business. At that time, if any Korean company exported even $1 million in goods, they were acknowledged by the government.

Incidentally, it is quite common to find letters of appreciation sent in the 1970s by Korean ambassadors to adoptive parents in Europe. Given this information, it is plausible that in the 1970s, the Korean government itself was the main driving force promoting overseas adoption as a national policy.

By sending nearly 200,000 children for overseas adoption to date, the government may have saved a considerable amount of money. In this respect, the overseas adoption policy killed two birds with one stone. On one hand, it brought in hard currency, while on the other hand, it cut welfare costs.

It is clear that the government systematically promoted overseas adoption and used children as a tool for economic development while neglecting its duty to protect children’s rights.

By Kim Do-hyun

http://www.koreatimes.co.kr/www/news/opinon/2011/12/198_101917.html

Pastor Kim Do-hyun is a director of KoRoot, a nonprofit organization that provides assistance to Korean children who had been adopted overseas. He can be reached at: master@koroot.org.