That bill I wrote about earlier this month, which would further privilege the already overprivileged foster parents of Idaho, appears well on its way to passage.
The bill would offer only a tiny window of opportunity for
relatives to step forward to take custody of children removed from their
parents by Idaho child welfare authorities. And once a child has been
trapped in foster care for six months, no matter why she or he got there, or
why she or he was still there, preference for placement actually would shift to
the foster parents if they’ve “bonded” with the child.
In short,
it’s a bill intended to make life easier for middle class foster parents like
Jamie Law, who, the moment she laid eyes on somebody else’s two-day-old infant,
declared: “This is totally my kid.”
And why did the Idaho House of Representatives pass this bill
unanimously? Because they were fed a steady diet of horror stories from
articulate middle class foster parents, people any state lawmaker could
identify with.
According
to the Spokane Spokesman-Review,
House Majority Leader Mike Moyle, R-Star, told of a 14-month-old boy who was removed from a loving foster home, where the foster parents wanted to adopt him, and sent to an out-of-state home where there was no interest in adoption. Instead, Moyle said, the interest was “because with that child comes a paycheck. Think about that. With that child comes a paycheck. I have a problem with that. It’s morally wrong.”
Hard to
know where to start with that one. Does Rep. Moyle believe that foster parents
normally don’t get paid? How does he know why the people in the
out-of-state home (presumably relatives, though he doesn’t say that) didn’t
choose to adopt the children? Because one of those overprivileged Idaho
foster parents told him so? And, of course, no Idaho foster parent ever has seen a
child as a “paycheck.”
But let’s assume for the moment that the story is true. If we’re
going to go the legislation-by-horror-story route, we need to recognize that
the horror stories go both ways.
So let’s start in a state which passed a law that the
overprivileged foster parents of Idaho used as a model: Florida.
In that
state, 10-year-old Nubia Barahona was beaten and murdered, allegedly by her adoptive
father. Her decomposing body was found in the back of the father’s truck.
In the front seat, her twin brother was in convulsions from chemical burns.
Compounding the tragedy: Loving relatives had sought to adopt
the children. But an “expert” said the children were “bonded” to the
Barahonas, who had first taken in the children as foster parents. And
Florida law–the one the Idaho foster parents are using as a model–said
“bonding” could take precedence over any preference for relatives.
Of course the overwhelming majority of adoptive parents don’t
behave as Barahona allegedly did. It’s an aberration. But so are
the tales told by Idaho foster parents seeking a Florida-style law. When
anecdotes collide, it’s time to look at the data.
As I noted
in my previous column about this bill, study after study has found that placing children with relatives is far
better for children’s well-being and, most importantly, safer than what should
properly be called stranger care. Relatives also are far less likely to resort to potent and
sometimes dangerous psychiatric medications to keep children docile when they
“act out.”
The history of the Florida law is also instructive. It has
its roots in a protracted custody dispute involving a little boy named
Christian who was taken from his mother at birth in February, 2002.
Within
days, a second cousin, Tiffany Delk, living in Tennessee, and her husband came
forward seeking custody. The Florida Department of Children and Families (DCF)
ignored her. In fact, they ignored at least 100 phone calls from Tiffany Delk
over the next several months. She was not allowed to see Christian until
May or possibly October (news accounts differ).
Instead, DCF placed Christian with Denise and Ivar Baklid,
strangers who wanted to adopt him.
In October 2002, for reasons that never have been explained, DCF
changed its position and supported placing Christian with the Delks. A series
of court rulings led to Christian being moved to the Delks and then briefly
back to the Baklids until finally the Delks were allowed to adopt Christian.
Even though Christian wound up spending more time living with
the Delks than with the Baklids before finally being adopted, backers of the
stranger-care parents kept playing the bonding card, arguing that the child was
“bonded” to the strangers, and that was far more important than blood ties.
And, once again, because it’s so much easier for legislators to
identify with middle class strangers, they got a law passed to give preference
to strangers when those strangers provided “continuity of care.”
That law was in effect when Florida DCF decided that the
Barahona children were “bonded” to their foster parents–and chose them over
relatives to adopt.
Now, Idaho appears headed in the same direction.
