Tuesday, February 2, 2010

Warning! The Mormons are Back for More "Orphans"

While checking on material for a blog that's going up later today, I found this article from the January 27, 2010 Salt Lake City Tribune, Child Experts Warn Not to Rush Haiti Adoptions. We learn the Utah babylifters are back:

The Utah Hospital Task Force, which leaves for Haiti on Thursday (February 4), plans to provide medical care, rebuild the Healing Hands for Haiti medical center in Port-au-Prince and "assist in the transportation of impoverished and orphaned children."

The group hopes to send its plane back to the U.S. within hours of arriving, after picking up 70 orphans. Those children had already been matched with adoptive parents through For Every Child, an American Fork-based agency.

Here's a response from Adam Pertman, director of the Evan B. Donaldson Adoption Institute

Pertman said aid groups going to Haiti have good motives but attention needs to be paid to the children's psychological well-being.

"You wouldn't choose to move a kid who is traumatized into new circumstances"

and

Nobody would choose to move children into new homes at a time like this. These are traumatized human beings right now. We do not have to decide where they are going to live for the rest of their lives in the middle of a crisis.

and from the Swiss-based Child Relief ( I have been unable to find the original source)

But Child Relief, a Swiss-based international adoption agency, said that 90 percent of children in Haitian shelters were given up by poverty-stricken parents to people "who promise them money."

Child trafficking is common in this country and after the earthquake the risks are now increasing," the agency said in a statement on its Web site.

But, what's ever kept "well-intentioned" baby lifters and kidnappers from following best practice, ethics, and the law?

How how many aid planes will be diverted to fill the entitlement of Utah's privileged?





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