Bring Us Your Healthy White Babies

by Eden Anesidora

Domestic adoption is a multi-billion dollar industry where money talks and the laws benefit those with deep pockets. Adoption facilitators, including agencies and private attorneys, profit from arranging a successful adoption for paying clients. This has significant implications for women who find themselves faced with an unplanned pregnancy. The demand for white, healthy infants is high, and the adoption industry strives to supply white, adoptable babies for prospective couples. In this widely unregulated system, efforts are made to encourage women to relinquish their child to adoption. Furthermore, adoption laws don’t provide safeguards that allow a birth mother to make a fully-informed decision. If they did, there would simply be fewer infants available for adoption.

State laws that govern a mother’s consent to adoption provide for a hastily made decision and serve the best interest of the adoptive couple. These laws vary from state to state. Kansas allows consent 12 hours after birth, while the mother is still reeling from anesthesia. In California a mother’s consent is irrevocable. Alabama allows the birth mother five days after birth or after signing consent, whichever comes last, to make up her mind. After those five days, she has nine days to revoke her consent, but must prove she is in best interest of her child. Her “right to revoke” doesn’t include a “right to parent.” In 14 days, she’s stripped of her natural ability to parent and must fight in court, battling a system where the scales weigh in favor of the more affluent adoptive couple. She will also need to come up with over $100,000 to fund this expedition.

Possibly one of the most corrupt tactics in the Alabama Adoption Code is the pre-birth agreement. Yes, mothers may commit to an adoption before seeing her child; unaware of the legal red tape and resources it takes to withdraw her consent. This agreement assures the prospective adoptive couple of a successful adoption. It also makes it more difficult for the birth mother to change her mind and “disappoint” the couple who depended on her for nine months.

Stigma surrounding unwed mothers helps perpetuate a system that breeds infants for respectable white folks. The media usually presents adoption the way most perceive the process. A poor, unwed and unfit mother surrenders her child to an affluent and fit couple—everyone goes on their merry way. Sadly, the adoption process is not this simple. Unwed and pregnant does not make a woman unfit to parent. Furthermore, all adoptive couples are not fit to be parents just because they are in leadership positions at a big Presbyterian church or offer the right sum of money.

The truth is the birth mother is often desperate. She may seek help from an adoption agency or close friend. A permanent solution to a temporary problem is presented to her—adoption. This solution may be presented as the only or best one. She may hear, “Do you really want to farm your child out while you try to finish college?” or “God meant for a child to have two parents.” Gifts of little monetary value, “Dear Birth Mother” letters, religious guilt, and promises of future communication with her child are all tactics used to keep her on the right “path.” The couple may even offer to pay her medical and living expenses (this is legal in Alabama if approved by a judge). A lack of knowledge concerning legal matters in adoption, as well as a lack of resources, put the birth mother at a disadvantage. Because of their resources, the adoptive couple has an attorney to guide the process.

One successful attorney, Drew Whitmire, helped draft the Alabama Adoption Code under which he conducts adoptions for prospective adoptive couples. He is also president of Villa Hope Adoption Agency that offers domestic and international adoptions. Would a prominent adoption attorney draft a law that would make his job harder? Absolutely not. I’m sure Whitmire feels confident his adoptions will go smoothly, as the law includes safeguards for the prospective adoptive couple. According to Villa Hope’s website, 75% of Whitmire’s practice is in adoptions.

The Congressional Coalition on Adoption Institute wrote that Whitmire had been “considered by many in Alabama as its premier adoption attorney.” Furthermore, his “dedication to adoptive parents and their children makes him an outstanding choice” for Alabama’s Angel of Adoption Awards, a signature public awareness program for the CCAI.

Unknown to the birth mother, the visits with her child that were promised in a letter will not occur, as these letters are not legally binding. The letters with updates on her child will not arrive. Those gifts (flowers at the hospital, candles and baked goods, etc.) do not have “monetary value;” therefore they are not considered coercive. How subtle. The language used by the adoption facilitators was not undue influence, just encouragement. In addition, the poignant interviews with the social worker, in which the birth mother discloses every detail of her life because “it’s important to be truthful,” will come back to haunt her if she contests the adoption in court. Medical records, dating back to the birth mother’s adolescence and teenage years, may be used to prove her “unfit.” Her decision, because it is based on emotional appeals and granfalloons, is one she regrets.

These stories fail to garner media attention, widening the gap between truth and fiction. The stigma surrounding birthparents will continue, as facts are not able to surface. Adoption practitioners and private attorneys will continue to depend on vulnerable, young women to supply healthy infants for those who can pay big bucks.

Until legislation enacts laws that ensure best practice and provide safeguards, birth mothers will continue to be exploited.

Rednecks & Aliens

by Francis Brodeur

Once again Alabama has put herself into the limelight of the world's stage, and once again, it's not for anything good. All over the national and international news, you will find discussions about the Beason-Hammon Alabama Taxpayer and Citizen Protection Act aka HB 56 aka "That Immigration Law." If there's one thing people on both sides agree on, it's that this is the strictest such law of any state in the nation. Among people with a grasp of the subject, there is also little debate that the law is unconstitutional and will eventually be found to be so in federal court.

So why did the freshly elected, first time in a century Republican majority legislature, act so quickly to jump on the trendy states' rights racial-scapegoating bandwagon of shame? Because it's what the people want! Not so long ago, people of the same ilk wanted racial segregation to be the law of the land; not too much further back, they wanted the right to own certain shades of people as property. Thank God we have a national constitution to make sure that the people don't always get what they want.

Strangely, these same folks who fight tooth and nail against the Constitutional separation of (their) Church and State claim that immigration isn't a moral issue at all; it's purely a matter of economics. How convenient to have that to fall back on when your fear-driven desires are in direct opposition to your religious dogma. That whole bit about loving your neighbors and forgiving trespassers is so old fashioned anyway. So if they want to talk numbers, let's talk numbers.

They took our jerbs!

Although Alabama has experienced a dramatic increase in undocumented immigrants over the past decade, it still has one of the lowest populations of them in the South—about 120,000 according to the Pew Hispanic Center. Of those people, about 95,000 are working, making up approximately 4.2% of the state's workforce. So if we can kick them out, that's 95,000 jobs for Alabama's legal residents, right? Not exactly. The presence of these 120,000 people is directly responsible for the creation of 18,000 jobs in Alabama according to a study by the Perryman Group. Those jobs simply disappear when the immigrants go.

And there's no questioning that these immigrants are willing to do the jobs that we are unwilling to do. Our neighbor Georgia's government determined that 11,000 agricultural jobs went unfilled this year due to similar laws going into effect there. They couldn't even get more than a handful of the thousands of unemployed convicts who were required to work as a condition of parole to take the jobs. Crops rotted, and are still rotting in the fields. Similar labor shortages are already being reported in Alabama in agriculture and construction. In response, proponents of HB 56 assure us that things will eventually balance out and return to normal. Tell that to the small farmers to whom one or two lost harvests means the end of their business. They already can't compete with industrial agriculture from out of state and overseas, this blow could mean the end for many small farms. And all this is coming at a time when Alabama's farmers were enjoying a rebirth of interest and support by the local market with new farmer's markets springing up all over the state.

They're leeching our prosperity!

Not according to a 2009 trade policy analysis by Peter B. Dixon and Maureen T. Rimmer of the very libertarian CATO Institute. It's en vogue for conservatives today to style themselves free-market libertarians, bur that's only when it doesn't offend their xenophobic sensibilities. The study found that tightening up the borders to restrict the immigration of undocumented low-skilled laborers and increasing enforcement within the borders would lead to a loss of $80 billion in US household wealth. In contrast, allowing even more low-skilled workers and legalizing all of them would increase American household wealth by $180 billion. Both of these figures were arrived at after subtracting all of the public expenditures they incur.

If you want to talk about leeching off of the prosperity of others, let's talk about the citizens of Alabama, who receive far more Federal funds than they pay into the system. Alabama is undeniably a welfare state, taking wealth out of prosperous states and giving very little in return (we suppose American Idol finalists have to count for something). According to a study by the non-partisan Tax Foundation, Alabama received $1.66 for every dollar of Federal tax paid in 2005. In contrast, New York received 79 cents back.

Speaking of taxes—these illegals aren't paying any! Or are they? The Immigration Policy Center estimates that at least 50% of undocumented workers work on the books under false identities, paying into Social Security and other programs that they will never be able to collect on. In 2007 alone, undocumented workers contributed an estimated $12 billion to Social Security. At current levels, at least $407 billion will be contributed over the next 50 years according to the National Foundation for American Policy. Here in Alabama, undocumented workers contribute $130 million a year in income, property, and sales taxes. Remember, even those working under the table pay rent and buy almost all of their goods and services right here in this state. If they pack up and leave, the economy shrinks.

Jim Crow rears his ugly head?

If it's not about ethics, and it's not about the numbers, then what is really going on here? Mickey Hammon came right out and said that he intended for the bill to make unlawfully present aliens' lives so difficult that they will "deport themselves." What about the 65,000 Alabama Latinos that are citizens or otherwise legal residents, and the 5,000 a year who become eligible to apply for citizenship? Should they just put up with the authorized racial profiling, discrimination, and government sanctioned racism for the greater good? This is purely and simply pinning the blame for society's ills on a small (3%) and disempowered minority. It sure is easier than working on real solutions to problems caused by one of the most regressive tax structures in the nation, a rotten and racist state constitution, and a largely failed educational system.

Why not put some of those free market principles that conservatives are so enamored with to the test and open up Alabama's labor market to whomever is willing to work here? Welcoming new residents and filling up low-skill labor positions with low-skilled workers will only expand the economy, create more and better jobs, and allow skilled and educated Alabamians to fill positions at their level of qualification for a change.