ADOPTION

SHANE SALTER, Court Appointed Special Advocates for Children of Washington, D.C. Chief Executive Officer, May 18, 2005
CZIKOWSKY: We are having a debate in the Pennsylvania legislature. Some of us wish to provide incentives for foster families to adopt their foster children. Others believe foster parents are intended to be temporary and that no special efforts should be created that may create a bond between foster children and foster parents when that bond is likely to be temporary. Do you have any thoughts on this debate?
SALTER: Yes we should be providing incentives for foster parents to adopt children. Why move a child if we don’t have to. However, foster care is supposed to be temporary. If we fix the system and engage the public as part of the solution, we can recruit the families necessary to move children out of foster care within shorter timeframes. This however all begins with a shift in attitude to commit resources to prevent children from coming into foster care in the first place. Many would not be there if the families they came from were supported and encouraged to strengthen their skills, resolve, and overall capacity to successfully parent.

PEGGY ORENSTEIN, author, March 13, 2007
CZIKOWSKY: Did you consider foreign adoption? I know someone who was engaging in a foreign adoption when the government changed which led to a heartbreaking several months’ addition to being allowed to leave the country with her child. I can easily see how stories such as there can become involved and interesting to pass along to others.
ORENSTEIN: Yeah, we did. We did pursue foreign adoption. We are offered a baby through contacts in Japan (my husband is Japanese American and we’ve done a lot of work with Hiroshima survivors, which is also a part of this book (“Waiting for Daisy”)). We were pushing forward as hard as we could on it, but there was one woman, the head of adoption in what was then called INS in San Francisco, who was blocking Japanese adoption. Only INS in the country where this was the case, but she had total control and power and we were screwed. Other people we knew had babies in Japan that were stuck there indefinitely (though after 6-8 months they eventually got them out, but we didn’t know that would happen at the time). So we went to Japan, spent time with the little boy, and in the end had to make a very painful decision, and it was truly heart-breaking.