In early November Arkansas voters approved a ban on adoption by unmarried couples. I wrote briefly about this on the Chicago Examiner stating that in 1999 Arkansas’s Child Welfare Agency Review Board established a policy that banned gay men and women from serving as foster parents but the Supreme Court ruled against it after a seven-year battle with the ACLU.
Although the title of the measure is “unmarried couples” the agenda clearly is aimed at keeping gay men and women “from becoming foster or adoptive parents”.
 
 
My husband with AJ at the orphanage in Russia.
On November 25 a Florida court pointed out …read more

Vietnam has announced that it is halting all US adoptions after the charges made by the US Embassy several days ago. They will stop taking adoption applications from American families after July but they will continue to process applications and “matches” that have already been made.
“It is tragic for children that the U.S. government has not been able to find ways to work with the Vietnamese government to prevent adoption abuses while at the same time processing legitimate adoptions,” said Tom Atwood, president of the Washington-based National Council for Adoption, a research and advocacy organization.
“Many hundreds, perhaps thousands, of children …read more

Apparently Vietnam has once again failed to police its adoption system (the US suspended adoptions in 2003). The US Embassy is reporting that Vietnam is “allowing” corruption, fraud, and baby-selling”.
The new report is a nine page report detailing brokers who “scour villages for babies, hospitals selling infants whose mothers cannot pay their bills, and a grandmother giving away her grandchild-without telling the child’s mother.”