Child experts warn not to rush Haiti adoptions
Child experts warn not to rush Haiti adoptions
Evacuation ยป Says Haiti specialist, 'Families need to understand they can't just line up for a kid. You're not ordering a pizza here.'
By Brooke Adams And Kirsten Stewart
The Salt Lake Tribune
Updated: 01/26/2010 09:49:06 PM MST
As a second volunteer team prepares to leave on a "life-saving, rescue and rebuilding mission" that includes bringing Haitian orphans to Utah, adoption experts called for a cautious approach to helping traumatized children.
The priority should be ensuring orphans are safe and having needs met, said Adam Peterman, executive director of the Evan B. Donaldson Adoption Institute on Tuesday.
For children whose adoptions were nearly completed before the earthquake, it may make sense to bring them out of the country.
But there should be no rush to airlift other children from their country and culture.
"Nobody would choose to move children into new homes at a time like this," he said. "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."
There were 20,000 children in orphanages before the Jan. 12 earthquake and about 380,000 Haitian children with just one parent, according to international children's groups.
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.
In past international disasters, "orphans" sometimes turned out
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to have merely been separated from parents or other relatives, Pertman said.
Nearly 500 children whose adoptions were in process have been evacuated from Haiti, and on Tuesday several U.S. senators called for federal help to speed evacuations of hundreds more.
The U.S. State Department is expediting only those adoptions near the end of the lengthy process, which can take up to two years.
The Utah Hospital Task Force, which leaves for Haiti on Thursday, 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.
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," he said.
Prospective adoptive parents also need to be wary of too-good-to-be-true promises, said Katherine Holliday, Haiti specialist for the Lehi-based adoption agency Children's House International.
With the help of a wealthy St. George pilot doing relief work in Haiti, Holliday was able to rescue a handful of Haitian orphans last week, all of them previously matched to U.S. families.
Holliday has fielded countless inquiries from parents looking to adopt one of the Haitian orphans reportedly bound for Utah.
"One parent said an announcement was recently made in church soliciting good homes. Another said, 'I saw Anderson Cooper holding a baby in an orphanage. I want that baby,'" said Holliday. "Families need to understand they can't just line up for a kid. You're not ordering a pizza here."
Said Holliday, "What I'm worried about is people will pay money and be sorely disappointed. I don't want to scare families away. There are orphaned children in need of homes all over the world."
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