Ohio’s Mad Crapload of Proposed Adoption Laws; Ohio RTL Waves Flags in Support of the Industry

This  “opinion piece” article was published on Sunday November 9th by Cleveland.com . There are more than several inaccuracies regarding Mike Gonidakis‘s viewpoint as an adoptive parent and president of Ohio’s Right to Life. I dare say his position puts him in a place where he is unable to see the true realities of what he is saying and the real benefits of such a proposed piece of legislation.

The full text of the proposed  HB 307 bill can be found here.  It is worth noting that they took a crapload of miscellaneous  changes to current (and already inadequate) Ohio adoption laws and mashed them together in some version of false improvement. It’s basically some slopping marketing geared towards making everyone feel warm and fuzzy while masking the true intent of these laws and how they will be used, not the way we want people to think they will used.

House bill helps both birth parents, adoptive parents: Mike Gonidakis, Ohio Right to Life

Guest columnist Mike Gonidakis, is president of Ohio Right to Life. He writes in support of House Bill 307, which addresses adoption.

I write in the block quotes to address the reality and point out the blunt inaccuracy of  Mike Gonidakis point of view.

Early this year, Ohio Right to Life witnessed its groundbreaking adoption reform legislation voted out of the Ohio House with a historic bipartisan vote (77 to 14). This legislation is on its way to assuaging the concerns that plague the minds of potential adoptive parents: Adoption is expensive. It’s long. It’s stressful. What if a birth parent changes their mind?  The legislation also puts birth mothers first while balancing the rights of birth fathers.

Let’s not fool ourselves here. This proposed legislation does NOT puts birth mothers first nor does  anything but further erode the almost already nonexistent rights to fathers to parent their children.  This bill was proposed by and lobbied by the true folks that it will serve, the adoption agencies in Ohio who want to be able to assure their paying customers, potential adoptive parents, that they can be guaranteed that their good money will result in what they basically have purchased; the right to parent a baby. It makes the job of the adoption professionals, the  agencies and attorneys,  just that much easier.

The approach is common sense and compassionate.  The most often cited reason Ohioans cite for not adopting children from Ohio is due to the uncertainty of our laws and the fear that comes with it.  Imagine getting that dreaded knock on your door six months after your adopted child is at home from a social worker telling you that the child has to be returned.  We can do better as a state to ensure birth mother and father as well as adoptive couples rights are protected and more children can be placed for adoption.

I don’t know  where you are getting this “six month fear” from, but it’s just not based  in reality. The current law in Ohio gives a mother a ZERO time frame for revocation; aka the legal time frame she can “change her mind” after consenting to adoption.  Just look at the case of Carri Sterns, Adoption by Gentle Care  resulting in the Bring Camden Home cry for help. Carri “changed her mind” within days of her signature, but the agency is NOT compelled by law at all to return her baby to her and to this date, they have refused even after the child was diagnosed with a medical condition  and was returned to the agency by the adoptive couple voluntarily and kept in foster care until he was over 6 months old by the adoption agency.

Common sense and compassion? The goal of adoption overall and further supported by child welfare advocates is that adoption is the last resort for any child after all other options have been exhausted including supporting the biological family in parents, kinship placement and lastly, stranger non genetic caretakers. Adoption is supposed to be finding homes for children that NEED homes, not making I easier for people who desire child to acquire children.  In a case like Camden Stearns and AGC, if there is a willing, able and loving mother, then adoption is NOT needed. The laws that already exist in Ohio  already do not strongly support  parental rights of the biological family when it comes to the adopting out of their offspring.

For many would-be parents, the temporal and financial costs are enough to prevent them from considering adoption. In fact, adopting my son from Cleveland was much more difficult than adopting my daughter from Guatemala. Think about that.

Of course, domestic infant adoption was more difficult than an international Guatemalan adoption at the height of that adoption wave. It’s all about supply and demand and historically, US DIA has always had difficulty with the supply side, where in  Guatemala nearly one in every 100 child born  was adopted by an American family. Think about the fact that Guatemalan adoptions were basically suspended due to the massive amounts of corruption  that was known about on a federally level here in the USA and still allowed to continue for too long because, well, it was “good business” . Glad you personally benefited form that, Mr. Gonidakis.

Currently, Ohioans experience a year during which their adoption decree can be challenged after their adopted child is already living with them.  They endure a year of stress and worries, knowing full well that a child is theirs—but that this reality could be challenged at any moment.

Ohio Right to Life is working to change that, shortening the period that an adoption decree can be challenged to 60 days, a period that is still long enough to address concerns if they arise.

Again, the chances of an actual finalized adoption being disrupted is also most unheard of unless, of course, it is done on behalf of  the adoptive parents, but then we just call that “re-homing” and we look the other way. The current time frame of an adoption placement is required to ensure, even weekly, that the placement is good and that, the child’s true best interests and needs are being met. With the tremendous  concern over hurried and rushed placements of children,  especially in regard to foster adoptions and international adoptions that result in rehoming and the continued damage to children, and with an already known lack of post adoptive services available  all parties  in adoption, this bill actually proposes  that in two MONTHS is a long enough time frame to make sure a placement is deemed beneficial?  Or is the reality, two months is enough tome for the adoption professionals to collect their fees and find more customers.

In addition, to make the cost of adoption less crippling, this legislation dramatically enhances the tax credit for adoption from $1,500 to $10,000, with the flexibility to roll over unused portions of the credit for four years.

The adoption tax credit is the act of the adoption industry  to use tax payers moneys to subsidize their own businesses.  We might as well take tax dollars and put it in the agencies bank accounts. The current use of  adoption tax credits is wrong exploitative and unfair.  While the original adoption tax credit was created to benefit the adoptions of special needs children, successful lobbying from adoptive parents and the adoption lobbyists have increased the credit by both the amount refunded and the range of adoptions covered. Just like we are seeing her in action right now.

Furthermore, our initiative will streamline the adoption process eliminating more of the cost. Adoption should not just be an option for the wealthy or those who have an equity line.

I will agree here.  There should be no money in adoption. We call it adoption but it the commoditization of children.  But with typical DIA going for about 35K and the annual profit of the adoption industry at about 13 billion in 2013, the name of the game is legalized baby selling. This bill will help make Ohio tops as a baby  buying and selling capital of the USA. Tell me now about how adoption agencies are non-profit and therefor not corrupt?

Another of the legislation’s provisions will concentrate the birth father’s opportunity to claim or renounce his parental rights in the pre-birth period, giving him potentially months in advance and an additional seven days after birth to do so.  Currently, he has 30 days post-birth to address these rights. By repositioning the starting place of his rights at a point before birth, birth fathers can decide to claim or renounce their rights much earlier.  This will offer certainty and respect to birth mothers and adoptive couples.

Additionally, it encourages birth father’s involvement during pregnancy. Because we know that about 80 percent of abortions are on single women, we believe that father involvement is a key component towards choosing life.

Anyone who actually thinks that the putative father’s registries are created to somehow benefit or protect a father’s right to his child during an adoption is willfully ignorant.  A putative father’s registry is an easy tool used by adoption industry agencies and lawyers to ignore father’s. Not on a registry? Oh well, then we can just pretend you do not care about your child. It won’t really matter if you “didn’t know she was pregnant” because clearly ALL responsible fathers will be proactive and use the registries that they didn’t know existed.  If you “really” cared about your child, you would be registered, right? Hence it becomes the fault of the father for losing his parental rights; consequences of your “choices” or more gaslighting in adoption!

Essentially, these adoption reforms are child-focused, as they provide more choices and opportunities to secure the best life possible for the adopted child. When this reform passes, Ohio families will find a cornucopia of new opportunities to make life-giving choices, without having to worry as much about so many emotional, financial, and temporal costs.

And adoption, once again, has nothing to do with abortion. While many pro-life anti abortion, anti choice, anti women types might want to see adoption as the perfect win-win alternative for a woman facing an unplanned or ill-timed pregnancy, increasing adoption awareness does not decrease abortions.

• The alternative to abortion is giving birth.
• The alternative to adoption is actually parenting your own child.
• Separate events at separate times even if in the same pregnancy.

You want to decrease abortions in Ohio, Mike Gonidakis? Good, then stop wasting your time being a mouth piece for the adoption industry and get behind bills that support a mother parenting her own  child. Let’s help her have access to things like birth control so she can make choices proactively, or day care so she can support her children, or educational recourse so she can better herself.  But stay out of the adoption debate, please. You have no idea what you are talking about when it comes to the reality of how these laws are used in an adoption in Ohio.

This is not a “child focused” approach. This is  a business approach so that those who profit form adoption can have an easier time making their way to the bank.

Kudos to the publisher for posting an opposition piece as well; though sad that they only asked adoptive parents for their opinions.

http://www.cleveland.com/metro/index.ssf/2014/11/house_bill_on_adoption_will_cr.html#incart_related_stories