Job Description Reveals Babies Are Commodities for Sale
Richmond, VA January 8, 2006 – Natural family advocacy groups OriginsUSA and Adoption Crossroads, Ltd. take a stand against infant adoption marketing, saying it separates families and turns our children into commodities.
If you think that infant adoption is a benevolent social service, then reading the highlights of a job description appearing in the Wall Street Journal’s Executive Career Site online for an “Adoption Recruiter” might change your mind. Originally posted by the Boys and Girls Aid Society of Oregon, this detailed job description reveals the aggressive marketing strategies used by adoption agencies and proves that babies are marketable products used to generate agency revenue.
The job description, the full text of which can be accessed at
http://www.boysandgirlsaid.org/about_us
/employment_opportunities/pdfs/Recruiter,
Adoption,Marketing.pdf,
certainly contrasts the website’s claims that, “The goal of the Adoption Program is to find families for children, not to find children for families.”
Reading the applicant’s tasks, however, reveals that the agency is indeed “out to find children for families:
“Gather market research and develop a marketing and recruitment plan to ensure an increase in the number of pregnant women, birth mothers requesting services.”
“Collaborate with the Adoption program in developing and implementing strategies for the recruitment of pregnant women, birth mothers and adoptive families.”
The job description finally makes it clear that the agency recruits pregnant women who will lose their children to adoption (“birthmothers”) for the purpose of increasing agency revenue:
“This position influences Agency revenue through recruitment of birth mothers and prospective adoptive families for the program.”
“This ad is proof that they actively troll for vulnerable, at-risk mothers and that they know infant adoption is an industry….a market” said Karen Wilson Buterbaugh, author, mother who lost a child to adoption, and president and founder of OriginsUSA. Started in 1996, OriginsUSA (www.OriginsUSA.org) promotes natural family preservation and provides emotional support to those who have suffered adoption loss.
The agency’s website states, “The Boys & Girls Aid Society is a non-profit agency that has been facilitating adoptions for over 120 years. We are a founding member of the Child Welfare League of America and are accredited by the Council on Accreditation, meaning we are held to a higher standard than Oregon’s licensure requirements.”
The agency is also licensed by the state of Oregon. Oregon requires the supervisory staff of adoption agencies in the state to be made up of social workers. The National Association of Social Workers (NASW), the largest membership organization of professional social workers in the world, has developed a Code of Ethics to serve as a guide to the professional conduct of social workers.
The Code of Ethics states, “Social workers should not engage in uninvited solicitation of potential clients who, because of their circumstances, are vulnerable to undue influence, manipulation, or coercion.”
The “birthmothers” recruited by The Boys and Girls Society– emotionally troubled young pregnant women, without resources, who are being affected emotionally by the hormonal changes of pregnancy–would certainly fit the NASW’s description of vulnerable clients who social workers should not solicit uninvited. By employing a marketing professional to increase the number of such women as clients, adoption agency social workers are skirting the ethics established by the NASW.
“This blatant exploitation of vulnerable women is contrary to and in violation of the social worker’s code of ethics,” said Joe Soll, LCSW, an adopted person, psychotherapist, author, and founder and director of Adoption Crossroads.
Adoption Crossroads® (www.adoptioncrossroads.org) is the largest search and support network in the world for adoptees and parents who lost children to adoption; it is a non-profit charitable organization with over 475 Adoption Search and support groups world-wide. Adoption Crossroads is dedicated to helping people who have been separated by adoption find each other and to preserve families, open adoption records to all people separated by adoption, and educate the public about adoption-related issues.
The final question remains: If this is an above-board agency dedicated for over a century to helping children and it openly and actively works to lure in more mothers in order to use their babies to meet an adoption demand, what are the less ethical agencies up to?
Ok..that is the end of the offical press release.
Some things I would love to point out:
Listed as a non-profit corporation, with assets at over 11 million and 2004 half year profits at almost 5 million, why do they really need to push recruitment so hard unless the income made by adoption is a main stay of the agency.
Though gently termed by Michael H. Balter the executive director as ‘homes-away-from-home for pregnant teens” the checkered past of a Maternity Home is hard to remove. The original backbone of a business financials frequently remains stable.
Boasting over “10,000 completed adoptions” of which 335 were in 2004-2005 alone, the Boys and Girls Aid Society spent $907,000.00 on their adoption program. The annual report of 2004/2005 shows a mere 173,000.00 income from ‘fees’ presumable from adoptive parents and a mysterious income of 2,382,000.00 ( more than 50% of their income..the rest is “gifts”) listed as coming in from contracts? As the fee income does not come close to covering adoption cost, one might look closer at the undisclosed contracts as source of revenue. Consider that with a sliding scale in adoptions costs and that older children adoption are not as costly as infants, the math says that the 335 adoptions brought in an adverage of $7,110.00 per adoption so that could be a credible source for the “contacts” income and enough to know why an “Adoption Recruiter” is very needed. Following the money is always a good indicator of what is really happening.
Someone gets paid abut 30K a year to find babies. I was doing some number crunching. In the Portland area alone..IF ALL 41.7% of Portland’s women within childbearing age all had babies IN THE SAME YEAR..and IF the normal 9% of those pregnancies were “unplanned” then only 201 children would available for adoption. And they are not the only agency either. So they got those 335 children to adopt form elsewhere than the immediate Portland area.
Professional Trollers..that’s what we have come to. Very icky.
That ad is HORRIBLE. Even though I am an adoption proponent, I find that pretty darn reprehensible. I believe that a good reputable agency should be trying to find a way for a woman to parent her child, and should be viewing adoption as a last resort. For the most part, I think it is a last resort for most women, just going by the fact that less than 1% of unplanned pregnancies result in an adoption. There’s usually pretty compelling reasons when a woman chooses adoption for a newborn in modern times. For an agency to actively recruit prospective birthmothers is beyond bizarre. The agency we used to adopt works hard to help women parent. Out of all the prospective birthmothers who show up at their doors, only 3% go through with their adoption plan. The rest are given resources to help them.
For anyone who does not think that pregnant women are aggressively recruited, I invite you to Claud’s link in this blog. One agency I have seen with a huge presence on the Internet brags about spending over a million a year on “birthmother marketing”. http://adoptionnetwork.com/adoptiveparents/advertising.shtml –
Actually they changed this page recently and no longer mention the $ amount that they spent for “marketing”. You can still see how aggressive they are however.
Disgusting. Revolting.
I think even the “dear birthmother”letters are agressive, I don’t agree with advertising for other people’s children.
FauxClaud, thank you for posting your weblog on another site. You inspire me.
Best wishes — shoeshopping
I hope this anti-adoption movement doesn’t extend to all domestic American newborn adoptions, because it would just leave babies in the hands of abusers. One of my children came to us as a newborn after her birthmother murdered her first child. It could never be completely proven because the child was left alone with the mother, father and grandfather and they could never pin it on one of them. But obviously, the mother was a failure at protecting her child. Thank GOD my child was taken away from her birthmother and if she ever tries to find her, she will be met with trouble in return. I just don’t think you should forget that most domestically adopted infants come to adoption because their birthparents are a danger to them. Being anti-adoption means anti-child to me.
“I just don’t think you should forget that most domestically adopted infants come to adoption because their birthparents are a danger to them.”
I think that you need to do some more research on this since it really sounds like you are only speaking for your expierence.
I can assure you that out of ALL the many many natural mothers that I have had the honor of knowing..none, I repeat, NONE, we a danger to their children. I am not speaking of foster adoption, I am speaking of willing, voluntary domestic infant adoption..and in that, MOST of them are COMPLETELY unnecessary.
I hope you are just confusing the two..foster and voluntary..coz if not, then this is by far one of the most inane and horrificly stupid comments I have ever heard.
When talking about infant adoption, you will find that statistically most of them occur because of abuse/neglect/drugs, etc. Those are the facts. Voluntarily relinquished infants of stable bmoms make up a very tiny percentage of newborns placed for adoption. Facts, not fantasy. The state where I live has a program where pregnant mothers can choose adoptive families for an open adoption in cases where their babies would be taken into foster care. By choosing adoption while still pregnant, they avoid the foster care scenario where they will completely lose touch with their babies. By you speaking out against infant adoption, you are advocating for child abuse. And THAT is what is inane. You live under the illusion that ALL infant adoption situations are like yours. There is a woman who posts on all the bmom groups…she is my child’s bmom and I know for a FACT that she is a dangerous woman who would have lost her child to foster care. Yet on her blog, she is all sunshine and light and you just wouldn’t have a clue about who she really is. Yep, you read her, you’ve mentioned her, you are being fed a story by her. Oh, but that’s right…you should believe anything you read on the internet.
I will tyoe this out very, very slowly so maybe you will understand.
Thee is a HUGE difference between VOLUNTARY infant adoption..IE: Oh dern, Look I am preganant..what should I do? I never had a baby before!!I am too young/not ready/have school/my parents will kill me/my boyfriend is out of here/I work for minumn wage part time..oh, lookie..adoption! Wow..that makes it all better….
AND
A mother in “the system” with previous children taken alway already for poor live choices and abuse.
I do NOT compare the two..NOR doo I lump them in the same catagory..NOR do I expect the same rules to both.
In the first case..the women are of NO DANGER to their children..and that is what i fight against. That is not Pro-child abuse.
Now stop making stupid blanket statments and go see if you can find the difference. It’s not that hard.
And if ONE example of ONE person not being as truthful as you think they should makes everyone a bad apple and a lier? Well then, we have a lot of bad blanket statements to apply to ALL adoptive parents too, don’t we?
It works both ways.
Now read this again a few times, very slowly, until you get it.
http://adoption.bloggingbaby.com/2005/07/26/confessions-of-an-almost-birth-mother/
Good link that tells first hand of the correlation between money and adopting babies.
Do you think mothers who have lost their babies involuntarily ache any less for them than you do? No. Do you think that the adoptee experience is different whether your were voluntarily relinquished or not? A resounding NO! A child is a child; it does not matter “how” he/she was relinquished. Do you distinquish between adoptive parents who adopt a voluntarily relinquished child versus a involuntarily relinquished one? I haven’t seen you address this. Adoption is adoption. The reasons why a child is relinquished are not all that important when talking about reunion or the experience of being adopted. The reality is that many women who voluntarily relinquish their babies do so because they KNOW that they will make bad parents. They know they can’t give their child what they need/want. They KNOW they can’t do it. They choose a family that can give their child what they themselves can’t. You pretending that all voluntarily relinquished infants come from mothers who could make good parents is just delusional garbage. Most bmoms have compelling reasons why they are choosing adoption. Perhaps you could have made a decent mother to your son; who really knows, but you made a choice to give him other parents, just as all moms make the choice to parent or relinquish.
One more thing: do you honestly think that all babies are better off being parented by their biological mothers? Do you never, in the course of parenting your own children, run across sad situations where you wonder how much better a child might be thriving if their mother had made the choice to place them for adoption? Parents who drink too much, parents with mental illnesses, parents who forget to pick their kids up from school…there are a TON of crappy situations out there. And reality is that you hear about these crappy family situations more in bio families than in adoptive families.