A child: lost, found, and lost again.

[Dinner]

You've already demonstrated a relative lack of interest in the welfare of the child when you asserted that this should be decided on the basis of some system of desert.

By the way, maybe you should lay off the prejudice against rural people.

What does "system of desert" mean? And why should I cut rural areas slack if the objection is true?

[giblets]

What does "system of desert" mean? And why should I cut rural areas slack if the objection is true?

You basically said "the mother deserves the child so who gives a **** if the child would hate being forced to move to Guatemala and live with people he/she doesn't know in a culture he/she finds to be foreign". You subscribe to the notion, as Elok pointed out, that children are the property of their parents. And you are prejudiced if you assume that someone from a rural area is a backward and ignorant racist.

[Dinner]

Why? The relative number of racists is higher in rural areas. It only makes sense since more cosmopolitan areas have more diversity while rural areas tend not to. Less interaction with people of other races means less opportunity to realize we're not so different. Rural Alabama simply has a higher rate of bigots than NYC. There seems to be a strong correlation to me.

Less interaction with other races means less opportunity to see stereotypes aren't right.

[Elok]

Just to be clear: you're talking about taking the girl away from the people she thinks of as her parents, along with any other children they might have--her siblings--her friends, her school, her church if she goes there, any extracurricular activities...you are proposing removing her from her entire life as she knows it, to go and live with a stranger in a country she likely remembers little of, with a culture she won't understand, living a life that's entirely foreign to her. That's not the sort of thing you should do lightly, and certainly not on the grounds that she's some sort of stolen goods.

[Elok]

My head is starting to spin following this: "a group of people I don't know but have a number of received unpleasant opinions about should be avoided because, of course, they subscribe to a bunch of unpleasant received opinions about people they don't know!"

[Nikolai]

Yes it can. You want the child to suffer as well as its adoptive parents so that the mother doesn't suffer. How is more suffering better than less suffering?

You don't know what I want. I'm not interested in playing with strawmen with you.

[Zevico]

The Adoptive parents are, in all likelihood, considered by the child. All else being equal they clearly ought to raise her in view of that. Access rights for the mother seem reasonable though and may benefit the child

[Dr Strangelove]

Would there even be a question of the proper disposition of the child if her biological parents were Americans. I'm pretty sure the decision would be automatic to return her to her biological parents unless her biological parents were unfit.
I'm wondering why she was adopted in the first place. Her adoptive parents have one biological child of their own. Having has a kid of their own they intending to save a third world orphan? How did that turn out? Someone went out and made her an orphan because they expected a profit from the transaction. Was her adoption really through legitimate formal channels or was it the product of large sums of cash paid to "private" agents? Maybe if people who want to adopt foreign orphans weren't paying small fortunes - amounts far larger than the actual cost, tragedies like this wouldn't happen.

[Elok]

If her biological parents were Americans, I would be less hesitant to return the child, but only because the transition would be somewhat less traumatic and she might have an easier time keeping in touch with the people she thinks of as "family." In fact, if the birth parents were American you could probably work out some sort of joint custody deal.

The problems with international adoptions are a separate, but of course very real, issue.

[The Mad Monk]

Wow. If this is at all accurate, it makes the adoptive parents look very bad:

The daughter of Loyda Elizabeth Rodríguez and Dayner Orlando Hernández, both twenty-four years old, was kidnapped on November 3, 2006 from their home. They reported Anyelí’s kidnapping the same day. The couple had two other children together, and two-year-old Anyelí was their middle child and only daughter. After years of pleading with authorities to help find her missing daughter, Loyda finally found a photo she believed to be Anyelí in Guatemalan immigration records, in the adoption file of a child called “Karen Abigail López García.”

But the child had already been taken out of the country. “Karen Abigail” left Guatemala aboard Continental airlines flight #457 on December 9, 2008 with a new set of parents, Jennifer Vanhorn Monahan and Timothy Monahan of Liberty, Missouri. They were clients of the Florida-based adoption agency Celebrate Children International, a Christian nonprofit with a serious complaint history dating back to the company’s start in 2004. A “contact” for the agency, a young Guatemalan man in his 20′s named Marvin Bran had initially offered “Karen Abigail” to agency director Sue Hedberg for placement. When the Monahans accepted an adoption referral for “Karen Abigail,” the lawyer listed on their Guatemalan Power of Attorney form was none other than César Augosto Trujillo, the same man who handled many other “Marvin Bran babies,” including the little girl at the heart of my book: Fernanda Alvarado.

The Monahans’ adoption was a slow, tangled process that began in 2006. By July 2007, a failed DNA test revealed that a fake birth mother had relinquished “Karen Abigail.” According to emails the Monahans sent to Guatemalan private investigators, they were distressed and confused. They’d already waited seven months for the adoption to move forward, with almost no progress.[i] On August 1st, Jennifer Monahan wrote in her personal timeline of the adoption that agency head Sue Hedberg had planned to ask LabCorp, the primary DNA testing facility in the US used for adoptions, to “bury” the results of the mismatched test. But “LabCorp can’t do that anymore,” Monahan noted, because of newly tightened regulations. She’d grown suspicious about what was unfolding in the adoption, and took careful notes of everything that transpired, including, her notes say, recording conversations with Sue Hedberg. When Monahan asked Hedberg what could be done after the child’s failed DNA test, aparently seeking alternative ways to push the adoption through, Hedberg responded that Marvin might bring the child to an orphanage, where she might eventually become declared abandoned. Or, Hedberg said, Bran might dump the girl “somewhere where nobody could find her.” In subsequent emails, Monahan said she was “terrified.”

A hell of a lot more here.

[giblets]

You don't know what I want. I'm not interested in playing with strawmen with you.

You think shipping the child to Guatemala would be good for it...?

[DaShi]

Wow. If this is at all accurate, it makes the adoptive parents look very bad:



A hell of a lot more here.

That writer certainly tried to twist it to look bad. A shame that some people will be easily influenced by that.

Irresponsible journalism.

[Elok]

It's hard to get to the bottom of this based on the limited information at TMM's site, but it seems the adoptive parents displayed atrociously poor judgment at the least, and then tried to resort to a coverup as a desperation ploy once they'd already invested a lot of time and money. A comment on that site also claims that the girl has spent three years, not five, with the APs. I don't know what the correct response is.

[DaShi]

I don't see any actually evidence of that beyond the writer's speculation. Rather, in the primary sources, I see adoptive parents fearful of losing the child that they have formed an attachment to, and possibly being shook down by the adoption agency.

[Uncle Sparky]

The correct response is to send the child back to live with her real parents and 2 biological brothers. An 8 year old will be able to adapt quickly. If (in the litigious USA) the moneyed adoptive parents, who seem to have known there was a problem with the legitimacy of the adoption, fight for years and lose, it would be much more difficult for a 12 or 15 year old to move back to Guatemala.

Celebrate Children International gets an "F" http://www.bbb.org/central-florida/b...do-fl-62845800