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http://yourfreedom.hmg.gov.uk/resto
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The following article has completely creeped me out. I dislike the title anyway as a mother isn’t a “birth” mother until after she surrenders and the adoption is finalized. It is also offensive and disrespectable to refer to an expectant mother as a potential birth mother. If all mothers were referred to as birth mothers I would find it easier to tolerate the term but for many years it has been used specifically for mothers who have surrendered.
http://edition.cnn.com/2009/TECH/03/10/a
CNN
(CNN) — Their paths crossed on YouTube on an August night last year.
Jeremy and Christy Nueman used YouTube to find their adopted baby, Caleb.
// Amanda, a college student seven months pregnant, scrolled past a YouTube video of a young California couple seeking adoption.
The couple, Jeremy and Christy Nueman, wanted to adopt a baby after struggling with infertility for five years. But instead of relying solely on newspaper ads or bulletin board fliers to increase their chances of connecting with a birth mother, they created a short YouTube video to show who they are.
Upon watching the video online, Amanda immediately connected with a snapshot of the Nuemans’ adorable miniature pinscher named Penny. She giggled when she saw video of Jeremy Nueman dancing happily in his kitchen, which reminded her of her own father.
She played the video over and over again.
“The video was comforting, and I could relate to them” said Amanda, who picked the Nuemans to become the adoptive parents of her baby boy out of hundreds of profiles she viewed online and through adoption agencies. Amanda chose to keep her last name anonymous for privacy reasons. “It’s so hard when you are just reading a letter to figure out what are these people like.”
With a high demand for domestic infants, adoption experts say the wait for a baby can be months or years. To gain a competitive edge, a growing number of adoption-minded couples are using Web sites like YouTube and Facebook to sell themselves as parents. Going online is cheaper, faster and reaches a wider audience than using just on print advertisements and word of mouth, they say.
Some wannabe parents are uploading YouTube videos featuring a hodgepodge of photos, home tours and interviews. Others are writing on blogs and personal Web sites to give birth mothers a glimpse of their adoption journey. To help spread the word, prospective parents also are utilizing social networking sites like Twitter, MySpace and Facebook in the hope that their friends may know of a potential birth mom.
“Today’s teens and young adults looking for adoptive parents are more tech savvy than before,” says Jeff Siler, who owns ParentGallery.com, a free site created in 2007 where couples wanting to adopt can post pictures and video online. “Even before teens talk to an adoption agency, they may already be trying to Google for an answer online.”
Social media like YouTube, Twitter and Facebook are also gaining traction among private adoption agencies. Bethany Christian Services, one of the nation’s largest adoption agencies, which completed more than 730 domestic infant adoptions last year, advises its couples — including the Nuemans — to create a YouTube video.
“Having a video makes you feel like you are with them in person,” says Dawn Baker, a social worker at Bethany Christian Services in Madison Heights, Michigan, who says the teen mothers she counsels really connect with the videos. Baker added that she matched a 16-year-old pregnant girl with a family in North Carolina after the teen saw their video last month. The adoption is not yet finalized.
In the past, adoption advertising, which is allowed in at least 34 states, traditionally relied on newspaper and radio advertising as well as brochures, fliers and business cards, adoption experts said. In the digital era, these media no longer have the reach they once did. Newspaper ads can be costly, running hundreds of dollars a month.
Maria Kwarta and her husband, Nathan Kwarta, both 26, of University City, Missouri, saw the Internet as a natural way to reach potential birth moms.
“We were trying to do what was familiar to us. We already had Facebook and MySpace accounts, so why not just use that,” said Maria Kwarta, who has been discussing adoption with her husband for more than five years.
The two are also sending Tweets every few days, seeking potential moms on Craigslist, documenting their efforts in Live Journal, updating their Xanga profiles and posting on CafeMom.
“Get to know us a little better,” says the Kwartas’ three-minute YouTube video with upbeat music in the background. Their video shows a photo montage of the couple with brimming smiles at baseball games and ski trips. The video ends with contact information so the birth mother can reach them directly. Watch the Kwartas’ YouTube video
The Nuemans and Kwartas aren’t alone in their relentless efforts to find a baby. While there is no federal data tracking the number of private domestic adoptions each year, adoption experts estimate that about 15,000 private domestic infant adoptions are completed in a year. Yet experts said the number of couples trying to adopt is even larger than the adoptions that are finalized.
White American infants continue to be in the highest demand, adoption experts say, but the number of domestic infants available for private adoption has dropped as women have more access to contraception and the social stigma against single parenting has lessened.
For example, from 1989 to 1995, the percentage of children born to never-married white women who were placed up for adoption dwindled to 1.7 percent, a steep decline from 19.3 percent of children going up for adoption before 1973, according to the Evan B. Donaldson Adoption Institute in Massachusetts, a nonprofit that tracks national adoption trends.
“The more people who know you are looking, the better your prospects,” explained Adam Pertman, executive director of the Evan B. Donaldson Adoption Institute, who has seen more prospective parents start using the Web to spread the word in the last few years. “It’s a crapshoot, and you are trying to improve your odds.”
Seth Edlavitch, 38, and his wife had waited for a baby for nearly three years. They had made a paper flier to find a birth mother, and on a whim, they uploaded it to Facebook last December. His wife, Melissa Segal, 39, was unable to conceive and had a devastating miscarriage years before.
It took only two weeks before a friend of a friend, who knew someone who wanted to give up her child for adoption, found the flier online.
“It’s just one of those right place and the right time situations,” said Edlavitch, who brought their newborn son, Noah Edlavitch, to their Maryland home on New Year’s Day. “I never would have anticipated that it would work the way that it did.”
There are some downsides to advertising online. Driving traffic to the site can be tough. The blogs, videos and profiles need to stand out to be effective, says Lori Dowd, who owns an adoption consulting Web site, ProfilesThatGetPicked.com.
Karen Greenberg, president of the American Academy of Adoption Attorneys, a national association of adoption lawyers, warns that advertising on Craigslist and Facebook can be a “hotbed for scams.” The academy is trying to create a national “adoption information clearing house” where attorneys, agencies and eventually couples looking to adopt can use the site to check the birth mother’s status. The site is planned to be launched this year.
“There aren’t any regulations to oversee what’s actually going on when you go at it alone,” she said.
Back in their home in San Diego, California, the Nuemans have celebrated their first Thanksgiving and Christmas with their new son, Caleb, a playful, chubby, brown-haired, blue-eyed baby. The adoption was finalized in October 2008.
“I remember walking through the door with Caleb the first time we bought him back,” said Christy Nueman, 29. “Just the thought that our family was going to be full-grown — it was a sweet moment knowing this would be our new family.”
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http://www.telegraph.co.uk/comment/colum
Big money to be made in the adoption trade
If ever there was a scandal which called for the full glare of publicity it is the highly secretive system which allows thousands of children to be sent for forced adoption, writes Christopher Booker.
By Christopher Booker
Published: 6:32PM BST 19 Jun 2010
On June 3, a 17-year-old Staffordshire girl, living with her parents and seven months pregnant, was horrified to receive a letter which began: “Dear Corrinne, I am the new allocated social worker for your unborn child. We have serious concerns about your ability to care for your unborn baby. We are so worried that we intend on going to Court to apply for an Order that will allow us to place your baby with alternative carers.” This so shocked the family that they raised what money they could and, like many others faced with similar threats, escaped abroad, where they now live in circumstances hardly conducive to a happy delivery of their new child.
Staffordshire social workers were also involved in the tragic case of Maureen Smith, the mother so desperate at the prospect of losing her two children that she fled to Spain, where she killed them before attempting suicide. As she wrote in her suicide note: “Social Services In Staffordshire and their policy of forced adoption are responsible for this.”
These are just two instances of the vast, long-running tragedy which Bob Geldof, launching a report last December on the “barbaric” chaos of our family law system, called “state-sanctioned kidnap”, whereby social workers, abetted by family courts and an army of complicit lawyers and “experts”, routinely snatch children from loving parents to feed the maw of the adoption and fostering industry.
Yet contrast this with last week’s report exonerating Kirklees social workers from any failings in the case of Shannon Matthews, the Yorkshire girl made subject, after years of neglect and ill-treatment, to a fake kidnap by her mother (described by local police as “pure evil”). Even though no fewer than 22 agencies had been involved with this dysfunctional family over many years, the report found that Shannon’s treatment did not justify taking her into care.
If ever there was a scandal which called for the full glare of publicity it is the highly secretive system which allows thousands of children to be sent for forced adoption, often on no proper pretext. Meanwhile the list of cases where social workers ignore all evidence in allowing the abuse of children to continue, grows ever longer.
It is not generally appreciated how adoption and fostering, organised by social workers, have become big business – quite apart from the fees charged by those lawyers and experts who are part of this corrupt system. Adoption payments and access to a wide range of benefits can provide carers with hundreds, even thousands of pounds a week. Still to be found on the internet (see the Forced Adoption website) is an advertisement by Slough Family Placement Services headed “Balloons and family fun to promote fostering”. This promised that Slough’s town square would be “bustling with activities including face painting and balloon modelling”, complete with a “David Beckham lookalike” (“bring a camera”), to launch “a new fostering allowance of £400 a week”.
I have recently reported the harassment and repeated arrests of Mauren Spalek, the devoted Cheshire mother whose two younger children were taken from her in 2006, and who faces trial on June 29 on a criminal charge of sending her son a birthday card. Last week it emerged, from an official register, what the occupation is of the woman who adopted her stolen children. She is a social worker.
Forced adoption is a truly dreadful scandal
Social workers are removing children from loving families without proper justification, says Christopher Booker
In recent months, I have been reporting on what is one of the most alarming scandals in Britain today – the secretive system that allows social workers to remove children from loving families without any proper justification, and to send them for adoption or fostering with no apparent concern for their interests.
Four more examples have come to light in the past week. The first came to my attention via Lynn Boleyn, a former councillor from Dudley, who first became concerned about "forced adoption" when she sat on various committees concerned with child care. Last week, she was in court with a mother of five girls, whose family tragedy began when her partner was sentenced to 14 years for abusing the eldest girl, who was sent to live with a relative. Although there was no evidence of their mother harming them in any way, the other four girls were seized by Dudley social services and placed in foster care. Three were kept together, separated from their two-year-old sister whom the council now wants to put out for adoption.
In March, their home was raided by two RSPCA officials and five policemen, complaining she had too many dogs in the house. Her home was untidy because she was clearing an attic, but the seizing of the dogs (breaking the leg of one of them) left it a befouled mess.
Acting on a tip-off from the RSPCA, Leeds social workers then intervened, and expressed surprise that the house was tidier than they expected. Nevertheless, they told the mother to bring her son's clothes to school, from where he was taken into foster care.
After three months, during which he has only been allowed short supervised "contact" with his mother, the boy is miserable, constantly asking when he can return home. His mother has repeatedly had to draw the social workers' attention to various conditions, such as head lice and threadworm, which indicated that he was not being properly cared for. Last week they announced that they were moving him to another foster home.
Although there was no evidence that she was anything other than an admirable mother, apart from the temporary mess made of the house in March, the social workers say her son cannot be allowed home until they have both undergone "psychiatric assessments". These cannot be arranged until October. Nor has the boy yet been given a guardian to represent him, as the law lays down.
My other two cases come from Ian Josephs, the former county councillor and businessman who runs the Forced Adoption website and has helped hundreds of families in a similar plight. When, in January, a couple brought their newborn son to hospital with a fractured arm, Coventry social services were called in on suspicion that the child might have been injured by his parents. After the mother had been arrested, handcuffed and held by the police for nine hours, the couple were terrified that their baby would be taken from them. Although not charged with any offence, they are on police bail, which prevents them from leaving the country.
The child's Irish grandmother took the baby to Ireland, where he is now surrounded by a large, supportive family. Social services are attempting to get an order through the courts for the grandmother to return to England with the baby.
My last case is so shocking that I will return to it in more detail at a later date. It centres on a London couple who, earlier this year, had their six children seized by social workers on what appears to be flimsy hearsay evidence (I have seen the court papers).
The mother was pregnant again. Last month, after the boy was born, three social workers and five policemen entered the hospital ward where she was breastfeeding at 3am, wresting the baby from her by force. They then discovered that they had nowhere to keep him. The boy was put into intensive care, where his mother was taken to breastfeed him for four days, until she was fit to leave the hospital. She saw her baby for the last time two weeks ago.
I will return to this story when I have had some explanation from the council responsible.
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Last Saturday we were in Woodford Green and saw Iain Duncan Smith with campaigners so asked him what policies the Conservatives have on this subject. He pointed us in the direction of this website www.centreforsocialjustice.org.uk which is interesting. Pages of interest are Couldn't Care Less @ http://www.centreforsocialjustice.org.uk/d
I have also contacted the LibDems and Labour Party to see if I can get any feed back on the subject.
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Things with Anthony have gone from bad to worse. He refused to pay for his books to sent to him as he didn't see why he should pay for postage even though it was his fault the books got left. He gave us the option of either sending him the books or giving them to charity as he was also refusing to meet either myself or Rick. I didn't want him holding this against me about getting rid of the books so they are now in our loft. Unfortunately Anthony has shot himself in the foot over contact as he is now accusing me of having creditors on his back which is yet another lie as the only creditors after him are his. Apparently I am a complete mess, he doesn't want contact with me until I sort myself out otherwise he'll take action and he wants a biological mother he can trust. This is coming from someone who wouldn't know the truth if it smacked him between the eyes and we know when Anthony is lying as his lips move. Anthony has no respect for anybody, is a user, completely walked over us, thought it was acceptable to live off us , is arrogant, rude, nasty, vain, a snob and shallow. There is no way I ever want direct contact with him again. I love Anthony but I hate the person he is, I also feel very sorry for him as he is in deep denial of his issues.
We have also been helping out a cousin of Rick's. A complaint was made about the state of her place and against her mother for being physically and verbally abusive to her youngest children. If we hadn't stepped in when we had the youngest two would have been in care. She has been with us for two months although has spent Christmas with her dad with 3 youngest in tow. When they get back we will be putting pressure on the homeless department as she has been evicted from her home. Her mother is living in Basildon and isn't welcome back in the area as the allegations were true and she owes money to various people.
