The Tangled Web of Entitlement, Resentment and Justification

Entitlement is often spoken and written and blogged about in the adoption community. We know it fuels adoptions. But...do we recognize how deeply it motivates through justification.

I was watching a re-run of an old crime show on TV. The detective on a murder case commented on how feelings of entitlement  -  I deserve it (whatever "it" is) - especially when combined with feeling it unfair that others have what you feel entitled to, can lead to justifying most anything. The "it" could be a promotion, a husband or wife, wealth, fame... or a child.

Think about it. Rapists often it feel it unfair that women tease or simply say no after feeling they were led on. They feel entitled and take what they want, even with force. 

Child molesters justify their action because the children want their "affection." They believe they are being "good" and loving to the their victims.

Thieves, too often feel a deep sense of injustice that others have wealth and possession they cannot afford but feel entitled to. Same with white color criminals. they're just - in their justification - leveling an unfair playing field. 

Men who feel their wives are not giving them enough sexually, feel entitled and justified cheating. Women who catch their husbands cheating likewise use it to justify their doing likewise. It's only fair!

Injustice, unfairness, entitlement.... put them together and they justify taking anything by any means.

Infertility builds strong resentments and immense feelings of unfairness. Why can other women get pregnant so easily, even when they don't want to or are not ready, but they can't? UNFAIR!  Monumentally unfair when you "know" you would make as good or better a parent than teens who get pregnant... Infertile women and same sex couples hear about women aborting and they think how UNFAIR!  They read about mothers who abuse, neglect, abandon and they know it is UNJUST!  Entitlement is joined by it's first cousin:  resentment, bitter indignation at having been treated unfairly.

In adoption, this attitude and way of thinking is what allows prospective adopters in Finding Fernanda to ignore blatant signs of corruption and illegalities such as seeing multiple photos of the same child with different names or seeing the same name labeling photos of different children. They know it's not right and they ignore it because it might harm their chances of getting what they want, what they lust for and feel entitled to.

It is illustrated vividly in the documentary Wo Ai Ni (I Love You), Mommy that follows a woman as she goes to China to adopt. And there, in a hotel room, she counts out piles of cash on her hotel bed and says: "I know this looks wrong, but it's just how things are done." The essence, the very definition of justification!

Adoption differs however from crimes that are committed based on entitlement, resentment, envy and justification because adoption is not just socially accepted, it is encouraged and promoted. Those who adopt are treated as heroes.  . 

Bonus - adopters not only get what they long for, they initially receive compassion for the loss of their fertility and after adoption,  society's  admiration for rescuing an 'unwanted' child!  Win-win for them!

Society buys into "the ends justifies the means" hook, line and sinker. It matters not what bribes are paid, how mothers are coerced, how children are trafficked, or who is exploited... We - actors and society - ignore the exploitation of "them" as "other." "They" - destitute and desperate mothers are not "us."  The public can identify with the longing for a child to parent and care for, but cannot identify with being coerced or pressured, or merely lacking the resources to provide... They become "other" -- dehumanized - like enemies in war.   

And their children? The end up going to "better" homes. Our social mores and our laws put their seal of approval on anything goes tactics because the end justifies the means - any means.

The US State Dept even turned a blind eye when Guatemala revoked an adoption after affirming that Anyeli was kidnapped from her mother, Olga Rodriguez. DNA testing to deny or confirm the kidnapping allegation and was never orders  and the adoption of Anyeli Hernandez Rodriguez by Timothy and Jennifer Monahan's of Missouri was declared  "legal."

Kidnapping justified by not just the perpetrators, but by the highest law in the land.  Kidnapping justified by ethnocentric enlistment and the belief that the end - an American life - justified the means. (Similarly, many contested adoptions involve two states fighting for entitlement.) 

Reversing these motivators is no easy task. Simply exposing the exploitation and corruption has proven to have very limited effect. One country closes, another is targeted. Nothing will stop until the social justification ends. 

Reducing infertility would also help reduce demand, but we as a society do virtually no preventive education. Why bother, when you can "always adopt"?  Why prevent a problem that supports two multi-billion dollar industries - infertility and adoption?  certainly those profiting have no reason to help with prevention of infertility or family preservation.

The severest cases of adoption entitlement are seen in contested adoptions. The audacity of adopters to go to the lengths they do to fight loving, capable parents. The become obsessed in their belief of themselves as superior and more entitled to the child than th child's blood mother, father or both. They seem never to think how they will justify it to the child later in life when the child eventually reads the details and/or meets the loving/capable parents who fought to keep their child.

And the cause of many contested adoption are are broken openness promises once the adoption is finalized.

Finding Fernanda

Finding Fernanda: 

Two Mothers, One Child, and a Cross-border Search for the Truth 

by Erin Siegal

Book review by Mirah Riben

Finding Fernanda is a riveting, powerful, excruciatingly detailed view of the underbelly of international adoption, particularly in – but not limited to – Guatemala.  It is investigative reporting at its finest, deserving of a Pulitzer…and at the same time is a heartfelt drama that makes damn good reading as a real life mystery (which tops any fiction). The author’s passion and writing skill puts the reader right in the midst of every scene of this high stake tale of kidnapping, gray/black market adoption, and international child trafficking.

Despite the title, it is really the story of one mother and her two children taken from her by criminals and her unwavering battle against disbelief, accusations against her, bureaucracy, incompetence, and death threats. Mildred Alvarado is a young mother who lived in a middle class Guatemalan neighborhood with her common-law husband and 3 children. Becoming pregnant again and leaving her cheating man, thrusts the uneducated and easily manipulated Mildred into poverty and makes her the perfect victim of the baby broking adoption pimps who exploit ignorance and poverty for a living. She is at once quite and shy and an extraordinarily brave woman of “fierce dignity” and unwavering determination who at 34 refuses to put on makeup to go to court because her father would “kill her” if he ever knew.

The other mother in the title is a brave American named Betsie Emanuel who – in stark contrast to all other adoptive parents in the book – stands up to the corruption and helps solve the case of Mildred’s two missing daughters from her home computer in Gallatin, Tennessee. Betsie is a stand-out whistle blowing exception to all the other mothers she befriended along what was to be the adoption of her sixth child (including three non-adopted). Others saw the same red flashing lights, the bribery, the lies, the changed names and dates of birth, the duplicate photos of children…and made a choice to ignore it out of “fear” not of retribution, but that they would loose out on obtaining the brass ring they sought. “No one wanted to anger [Hedberg] or risk the chance of losing a referral.” They wanted a child, no matter what the cost or what ethics or laws were bent or broken to obtain their goal.

The other characters in the book are the bible-toting, Jesus-quoting, holier than thou, Sue Hedberg, CEO of Celebrate Children International (CCI) a Christian International adoption agency in Florida and a crew of her Guatemalan “contacts,” lawyers, physicians, intermediaries, and baby finders that comprise a chain of “not me” criminals, the majority of whom – including Hedberg – have gone scot free to continue selling children.  Hedberg earned a salary $209,750 doing “God’s work” and “saving” babies in 2004 with CCI netting $2.5 million. The following year, 2005, the net revenue reached of $4.5 million, and in 2006 Hedberg’s salary was over $250 thousand.  CCI currently has adoption programs in Ethiopia and is setting one up in the Republic of the Congo, inasmuch as Guatemala is closed to US adopters. Shame for the baby brokers and child traffickers, as it’s a country of known for criminal impunity and no law against child selling. On the upside for CCI is the Hague Convention on International Adoption's failure to prevent signatory countries from adopting from non-signatory countries making Ethiopia and the Congo prime targets for agencies like CCI which failed its Hague accreditation.

CCI has been investigated by the State of Florida three times, with 19 complaints filed since 2005. DFC, which has a 3,000 plus page report on their investigation of the agency has no authority in Guatemala and nothing but Hedberg’s total denials to go on.

Whatever CCI knew or didn’t know about Mildred Alvarado’s children or any other questionable adoptions such as that of Karen Abigial are among the “murky” unknown facts washed clean by the laundering of children through a massive chain of unscrupulous and occasionally naive characters. In nations as poor as Guatemala there is a pervasive see no evil attitude toward making a buck.

Other players of note for those within the adoption community include, in no particular order: Susana Luarca, the website GuatAdopt.com, Lauryn Galindo, kidnap victim Karen Abigail adopted by the Monahans of Missouri, the Joint Council on International Adoption, Marvin Bran Galino, the Congressional Coalition on Adoption, Guatemalan Judges and government agencies both Guatemalan and American. An entire chapter (6) sidesteps the story-line to detail the depth of the corruption in Guatemalan adoption. 

Between 2008 and 2010, CICGI [the International Commission Against Impunity in Guatemala] found 90 percent of all children who left Guatemala in adoption had been relinquished, and in many cases, illegitimately so. Some relinquishments were not made voluntarily, one CICIG investigator said, or had been made by women who were not the true biological mothers. More that 60 percent of the transition adoptions contained abnormalities, including “theft and illegal purchase or sale of children, threats and deception to biological mothers, forgery of documents to carry out ‘adoption processes…’” Guatemala’s participation in international adoption in 2008-2010 was a “lucrative form of human trafficking,” CICIG noted…

If ninety percent were relinquished, that leaves 10% abandoned, taken by the state, or truly orphaned. And with a 60% rate of abnormalities, one is very hard pressed to find substantiation to the “anomaly” or “rare” claims of the pro-adoptionist profiteers.

Spoiler alter beyond this point:

Mildred is among a very small handful of Guatemalan mothers whose kidnapped children were miraculously found and returned because they were located before being sent to the US for adoption. However, the majority of the criminals involved have not been charged nor have Mildred and her children been given any compensation for their year-and-a-half ordeal during which the children report being hit and were left with long-term damages. No one in jail, no adoption agency closing, despite the very clear fact that an alleged relinquishment was dated a full month after Mildred had filed missing persons reports for her girls.

This book should be required reading for anyone considering international adoption. And three facts need to be recognized: 1) there is no line between gray and black market adoptions and perfectly legal ones; 2) ethical, reputable adoption agencies can - and do - all too easily unknowingly place children who have been obtained illegally; 3) these atrocities are not limited to Guatemala, which has currently closed adoptions to the US. Any internationally adopted child could be a kidnap victim!  With child trafficking for adoption documented in India, Nepal, Vietnam, China, Ethiopia and elesewhere, prospective adopters need to think long and hard if they want to risk being the recipient of a stolen child.

For more see: FindingFernanda.com