Unfortunately, some foster and adoptive parents say preserving their exalted status is more important.
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| New York State Assemblywoman Latoya Joyner sponsored this excellent legislation in part because of her own experience as a foster child. |
Imagine for a moment that, in those millions of cases in
which parents divorce, we had a very different set of laws than exists today.
Suppose the laws worked like this: If the parents could work
out their own custody and visitation arrangements, fine. But if they couldn’t,
then courts would be required, automatically and in every case, to deem one of
the parents “unfit.” The children would
be denied all contact with the “unfit” parent.
No visits. No phone calls. No video chats. Not even a birthday card.
There are, in fact, circumstances where a no-contact order
is entirely appropriate after a divorce.
But a law that required this
result in every situation where parents couldn’t agree obviously would do
enormous harm to countless children.
Yet there is one situation in which this draconian cutting-off
of contact between child and parent is the norm: Termination of parental
rights.
No contact for legal orphans
In almost every state, when the state itself decides that a
parent is unfit and terminates that parent's rights, all contact between child
and parent is cut off. The cutoff is
immediate. Even if the child is languishing
in a foster home or a group home – with no adoption in sight – the parents
become legally dead to that child.
That’s why, when such children never find a permanent home, they are
known as legal orphans.
A handful of states do it differently. No, they don’t require contact after
termination of parental rights. But they
allow a judge to order such contact
if the judge is persuaded that this would be in the best interests of the
child. The laws apply both in cases
where children are legal orphans and cases where they have been adopted.
A bill now on the desk of Gov. Andrew Cuomo would add New
York to these states.
The bill has the strong support of groups that defend
families in New York courts – and they are family defenders not, as one
news account claimed, “parents’ rights activists.” It also has the strong
support of legal aid groups that represent children in child welfare cases –
precisely because they recognize that such contact sometimes is in the best
interests of children.
Indeed, the prime sponsor of the bill in the New York State
Assembly, Assemblywoman Latoya Joyner, D-Bronx, was moved to sponsor the bill in part because
of her own experience as a foster child.
Who opposes the bill? The usual suspects
So who is against the bill? Among others, of course, the
trade association for New York’s private foster care agencies – for decades one
of the nation’s more regressive forces in child welfare. (I still treasure a
letter of complaint that group sent me when I was a journalist – in 1976.)
But also, the Upstate-based Adoptive and Foster Family
Coalition of New York. Once a relatively
progressive force, they now are taking a position that puts the desires of
foster and adoptive parents ahead of the needs of children.
I would like to think they don’t speak for most such
parents, because their memo
opposing the bill reveals some ugly truths about its authors. It is drenched in
smears and stereotypes about overwhelmingly poor disproportionately nonwhite
birth parents, and it wrongly implies that the bill somehow would make contact
between children and their birth parents mandatory.
They write:
[I]nstead of being governed by the best interest of the child, instead of allowing the adults involved to work in partnership to best support the child they love, decisions would be driven by the wishes of the biological parent, who has shown through their choices and continued actions that they were unable prioritize [sic] or meet their child’s basic needs.
Elsewhere the memo declares that termination only happens to
“biological parents” – itself a pejorative term -- who
…despite being provided extensive support, services and legal representation, were unable to adequately stabilize their lives in order to provide a minimum sufficient level of ongoing care to their children.
This is false on every count.
For starters, the bill explicitly states that judges should
only allow contact if it’s in the best interests of the child – exactly the
criterion the foster and adoptive parents claim to support.
Second, the law would not ban voluntary arrangements between
adoptive and birth parents – they are permitted under existing law. But the bill might serve as an incentive to
make adoptive parents more reasonable about reaching such agreements. Right now, contrary to what is suggested in
the memo, these agreements are not true “partnerships” because the adoptive
parents have vastly more power.
Even worse is the stereotyping of all parents who lose
parental rights. Some are indeed unfit,
and even contact with their children would be harmful to those children. Others might be, as the memo says, unable to
“meet their child’s basic needs” – but why is that grounds to terminate
parental rights at all, let alone cut off all contact?
Even when parents are truly unfit to have custody of their
children, it still may well benefit those children to maintain contact. And everyone in child welfare knows that the
line about “extensive support, services and legal representation” is the Disney
version. In many cases, the termination was unjustified, the result of a
stacked-deck system in which parents often get no help and no
effective legal representation.
150 percent of other
parents’ rights is a bit excessive
But the worst part of the memo is the part where the authors
pervert an argument that advocates such
as myself often have made in other contexts. They write:
This legislation contradicts the legal construct that adoptive parents are the legal parents under the law, imbued with 100% of the rights afforded to all parents, natural or adopted.
No, it doesn’t.
Adoptive parents should indeed have 100 percent of the
rights afforded all parents. That’s why they should not be subject to any
coercive intervention by child protective services agencies just because of
their adoptive status – things like requiring them to present their children to
mandated child abuse reporters, or special accounting requirements for adoption
subsidies.
But they are not entitled to 150 percent of the rights of other parents. And that, in effect, is what they have now in
this most important area of all.
The adoptive and foster parents group also claims that if
the bill becomes law it will discourage some people from becoming foster or
adoptive parents. But anyone who won’t
become a foster or adoptive parent because a new law won’t allow their
privileges to be treated as more important than the needs of children really
shouldn’t be a foster or adoptive parent.
If this bill is signed into law it would give adoptive
parents equal standing with divorced
parents – no more, no less.
Because that’s what’s best for the children.
