STATEMENT OF SUSAN A. FREIVALDS COORDINATOR, HAGUE CONVENTION POLICY JOINT COUNCIL ON INTERNATIONAL CHILDREN’S SERVICES
HOUSE COMMITTEE ON INTERNATIONAL AFFAIRS
Mr. Chairman and members of the Committee:
Thank you for the opportunity to address you today regarding implementation of the Hague Convention on Protection of Children and Co-operation in Respect of Intercountry Adoption, currently under consideration for ratification by the U.S. Senate. I thank you for holding these hearings to explore how the United States might best implement the Convention and provide its protections to children who would benefit from intercountry adoption and to the parents who are adopting them.
I am the Hague Convention Policy Coordinator for the Joint Council on International Children’s Services, the nation’s oldest and largest affiliation of state-licensed, not-for-profit child welfare agencies serving children through intercountry adoption. The Joint Council’s 130 member agencies provide services in an estimated three-quarters of all intercountry adoptions to the United States. I also was a member of the U.S. delegation to the meetings at the Hague that prepared the Convention in 1992 and 1993, where I represented the interests of adoptive and prospective adoptive parents when I was Executive Director of Adoptive Families of America. I myself am the lucky mother of a daughter adopted from Korea 24 years ago when she was an infant.
Joint Council calls for U.S. ratification of the Hague Convention.
The Joint Council and its 130 member agencies call for U.S. ratification of the Hague Convention in the strongest possible terms believing that the Convention’s goals of providing a framework for cooperation and safeguards for children, birth parents, and adoptive parents in intercountry adoptions are not only laudable, but also necessary to the continuation of intercountry adoption as a means to provide children overseas with new, permanent, loving families.
We are joined in this call for ratification by the Hague Alliance, an informal affiliation of adoption professionals, legal experts, child welfare organizations, and national association and organizations that support the ratification of the Hague Convention on Intercountry Adoption. This Alliance includes leading U.S. organizations working for child welfare, including Child Welfare League, American Bar Association, National Association of Social Workers, American Public Human Services Association, Catholic Charities, Association of Jewish Family and Children’s Agencies, Council on Accreditation of Services for Families and Children, National Council for Adoption, American Academy of Adoption Attorneys, and North American Council on Adoptable Children, in addition to the Joint Council on International Children’s Services. The Hague Alliance strongly recommends U.S. ratification of the Hague Convention, an important credential from this extremely knowledgeable and impressive group.
Conversations with foreign adoption officials have convinced members of the Joint Council that U.S. ratification of the Hague adoption convention is necessary. Not only will the Convention provide many protections for children and parents, it will also safeguard the viability and continuation of the very process itself. Joint Council believes that U.S. ratification may be necessary to keep intercountry adoption open as an alternative for U.S. families and for the children most in the need of families.
Joint Council endorses H.R. 2909, the Intercountry Adoption Act of 1999.
The Joint Council supports enactment of legislation that will enable the United States to implement the Convention in a manner that will allow intercountry adoptions to proceed ethically and expeditiously. We feel that H.R. 2909, the "Intercountry Adoption Act of 1999" co-authored by Mr. Gilman, Mr. Gejdenson, Mr. Camp, and Mr. Delahunt, is such legislation and we endorse its passage. We salute the authors for their hard work and spirit of compromise that have produced this bipartisan bill that the adoption community can embrace.
H.R. 2909 has been written with a minimalist approach to implementation of the Hague Convention. For the most part, only provisions that are essential to implement the Convention have been included. Furthermore, where decisions concerning implementation can be left to state law, they have been. H.R. 2909 rightfully addresses only the implementation of the Hague Convention and does not attempt to impose any conditions or corrections of adoption law or practice that are not required by the Convention. We anticipate that H.R. 2909 would allow adoptions under the Hague Convention to proceed in a manner that is both ethical and expeditious.
While Joint Council endorses H.R. 2909 and encourages its speedy passage by the House, I would like to comment on several of its provisions and perhaps provide some guidance to your further deliberations. In particular, I will address parent-initiated adoptions, accreditation of agencies and approval of persons to provide adoption services, and access to identifying information.
Parent-initiated adoptions should be restricted.
The Hague Convention provides for adoptions to take place not only with the assistance of accredited bodies (in the U.S., these will be state-licensed, not-for-profit adoption agencies) and/or approved persons (primarily attorneys and for-profit adoption agencies), but also by prospective adoptive parents acting on their own behalf. While the Convention provides these three options, it also empowers signatory countries to disallow certain of these methods. Joint Council strongly encourages the Congress to ban intercountry adoption by U.S. prospective adoptive parents acting on their own behalf.
H.R. 2909 appropriately exempts from accreditation or approval agencies or persons providing home study services only. This exemption will allow continued convenient access by prospective adoptive parents to home study service providers throughout the country. Quality control will be assured, in most cases, by the fact that an accredited body or an approved person will provide the balance of the adoption services (for example, the referral of the child). The home study, although not directly provided by the accredited or approved body, will have to be acceptable to such a body and will need to meet high standards. Accredited bodies and approved persons who accept substandard home studies will risk losing the status that allows them to provide adoption services under the Hague Convention.
In the instance where prospective adoptive parents have their home study provided by a non-accredited, non-approved provider and then act on their own behalf to complete the adoption, the quality control function I just described will be absent. This scenario, which is an option as H.R. 2909 is currently written, would allow adoptions by U.S. parents with no participation by either an accredited body or an approved person. The safeguards intrinsic in the Convention would be missing.
The home study is not only a tool to screen families for their eligibility and appropriateness to adopt, it is equally important as a means to provide pre-adoption education to prepare families for intercountry adoption. Countries of origin are counting on those of us in the receiving countries to appropriately prepare intercountry adoptive families. If we require no input into the home study from accredited bodies or approved persons, then the Convention will have failed in its goal to protect children. Appropriate screening and preparation of the prospective parents is perhaps the most important protection we can give children who need new families through intercountry adoption. Therefore we ask you to eliminate adoptions to the U.S. by parents acting on their own behalf.
This mandate becomes clear when we remember that intercountry adoption should be about finding families for children, not children for families.
Accreditation is a valuable process to assure delivery of high-quality adoption services.
Joint Council, in its 25 years of existence, has been dedicated to promoting standards of excellence and accountability for adoption professionals and has taken a leadership role in drafting, disseminating, and gaining acceptance for high standards of accreditation for agencies to provide adoption services under the Hague Convention. We have done so not only because accreditation is a vital part of Hague Convention safeguards, but also because it provides rigorous and appropriate opportunities for improved services and professional accountability.
As you are aware, the Hague Convention mandates that agencies and individuals that provide certain services in an intercountry adoption be accredited or approved to provide such services. Although the Convention is silent on the details of this requirement, the Hague Alliance has promulgated standards of practice for accreditation to provide adoption services under the Hague Convention that have been widely accepted throughout the adoption community. These standards, which the Hague Alliance has made available to the U.S. Departments of State and of Health and Human Services, provide a template for adoption services that are ethical and in the best interests of children.
Some may argue that state licensure of agencies or persons is sufficient to compel compliance with the terms of the Hague Convention. We feel, however, that licensure requirements vary so much from state to state that this is not a viable option to meet the standards of uniformity that federal accreditation or approval would require. Even though the 130 agencies of the Joint Council would be submitting themselves to further scrutiny, expense, and inconvenience, they have chosen to support federal accreditation, in addition to state licensing, to take full advantage of the Hague Convention protections.
H.R. 2909 rightfully determined that state licensure is not sufficient to assure compliance with the Convention and to secure its protections. Joint Council also endorses the provisions in H.R. 2909 that assign to the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services oversight of accreditation and approval of adoption service providers. Proposals that have assigned this function to the Department of State overlook the fact that State has no expertise or experience in supervising accreditation for child welfare services, and we would argue that this lack of expertise would result in greater expense and longer timelines for the accreditation and approval processes. Joint Council urges that HHS retain its traditional role regarding oversight of child welfare services, as proposed in H.R. 2909.
Accreditation as envisioned by the Hague Convention is being called for by adoption authorities in countries all around the world. The United States is one of a few countries, if not the only country, whose federal government does not currently license or accredit adoption agencies. Foreign adoption officials are looking to the U.S. to set a national standard for adoption service providers, to assure the well-being of all the parties to an intercountry adoption, and particularly of the children.
Provisions for access to identifying information must be retained.
As part of its minimalist construct, H.R. 2909 has rightfully deferred to state law determinations concerning access to identifying information in Hague Convention adoption records. In light of evolving child welfare practice and advances in medical knowledge, Joint Council supports access to identifying information under certain circumstances and by means that take into account the needs of all parties. Laws in every state provide such access, whether through court order or by less restrictive methods.
Joint Council’s only caution regarding the provisions in H.R. 2909 that address access to identifying information is that they not have the unintended consequence of restricting the provision to prospective adoptive parents of information for which no guarantee of privacy has been either sought or intended. In a number of countries, identifying information is routinely provided to adopting parents, either because it is required for completion of the adoption or because what we know in this country as "open adoptions" are preferred by the birth parents and the authorities in the child’s country of origin. We must make sure that H.R. 2909 does not interfere with the ability of families, both birth and adoptive, to choose an adoption in which identifying information is exchanged, if they so choose.
While intercountry adoptions have traditionally been "confidential," there is now movement toward more openness in adoptions in countries around the world. For example, the Korean government has recently established an office to assist its international adoptees in reuniting with their birth families in Korea.
There are many advantages to U.S. ratification of the Hague Convention.
Many advantages have been identified concerning U.S. ratification of the Convention. Prospective adoptive parents will have assurance that the adoption service provider they are using is experienced, knowledgeable, ethical, and financially sound, because the provider will have undergone a process of accreditation or approval before being allowed to operate under the Convention. Service providers overseas will also be subject to the same sort of scrutiny by their own Central Authorities.
Countries that ratify the Convention are endorsing the declaration, found in the very first clause in the Preamble to the Convention, that "the child, for the full and harmonious development of his or her personality, should grow up in a family environment, in an atmosphere of happiness, love and understanding." This is the first time that an international document has recognized the superiority of a permanent family, thereby preferring intercountry adoption to foster care or institutional care in the child’s country of origin, a very welcome and important endorsement of intercountry adoption. Child advocates hope that this sort of commitment will result in fewer delays and barriers being placed to intercountry adoption.
The relaxing of orphan visa requirements for "Hague adoptions" would allow U.S. citizens to adopt children who do not meet the current "eligible orphan" requirements, including children with two living birthparents who consent to their adoption and emigration. This change, along with the Convention’s requirement that eligibility for immigration be assured before the adoption is finalized, will eliminate most of the uncertainties surrounding the current visa process.
Because the Convention requires its party countries to recognize Convention adoptions finalized in any one of them, re-adoption in the United States will no longer be necessary. The U.S. Central Authority will issue an English-language document certifying that the adoption took place under the Hague Convention. Provisions requiring the preservation of records, including those on the child’s origins, will ensure that they will be available, according to the laws of the country in which the records are retained.
Finally, the Central Authorities could become a positive force in facilitating adoptions once a child is identified and approved for intercountry adoption. If there’s one thing we know, it is that every day spent in institutional care damages a child. Central Authorities are directed by the Convention to act expeditiously and there are many ways they could work under the Convention to facilitate the adoption process. For example, if countries of origin should accept the accreditation determinations made by the receiving country, there would be no need for adoption agencies to undergo additional scrutiny before they are allowed to work in certain countries.
Thank you again for allowing me this opportunity to address these critical issues on behalf of the Joint Council on International Children’s Services and its 130 member agencies. We must proceed in a thoughtful yet expeditious manner to ratify the Hague Convention on Intercountry Adoption and to enact appropriate implementing legislation. Children around the world are counting on us to secure the future of intercountry adoption to the U.S. in the 21st Century through ratification of the Hague Convention.
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