2y ago

When Foster Parents Don’t Want to Give Back the Baby

www.propublica.org

Politics @beehaw.org

tintory @lemm.ee

2y ago

When Foster Parents Don’t Want to Give Back the Baby

www.propublica.org /article/foster-care-intervention-adoption-colorado

54 comments

Although hired as a consultant by Washington County in this case, Baird had a long-standing independent agenda: helping foster parents across Colorado succeed in intervening and permanently claiming the children they care for. Often working hand in hand with Tim Eirich, she has been called as an expert in, by her count, hundreds of child welfare cases, and she sometimes evaluates visits between birth families and children without having met them. Baird would not say how many foster parent intervenor cases she has participated in, but she can recall only a single instance in which she concluded that the intervenors should not keep the child. Thinking that particular couple would be weak adoptive parents, she told me, she simply filed no report.
what the fuck
- I fully believe that woman is a monster. She doesn't care about any of those kids. She's being paid to get the foster parents a baby, so that's what she's determined to do. Eirich is just as bad. They're getting uncomfortably close to being traffickers.
  Of course there are parents who should never get custody back, but I've seen plenty of cases where they work extremely hard, make big changes, and are very successfully reunited, and everyone deserves the chance to try before we just decide they can never have their kids back.
- There are specialized lawyers for everything. There are also judges who specialize in child welfare cases. Eventually, in the future, I fully believe there will be a license requirement to have children that includes showing you have the available income to support the child, adequate space in the home, and a background check and drug tests to ensure both parents are safe to raise a child.
  
  and she sometimes evaluates visits between birth families and children without having met them.
  she can recall only a single instance in which she concluded that the intervenors should not keep the child.
  Thinking that particular couple would be weak adoptive parents, she told me, she simply filed no report.
  I also don't find the concept of "You have to be rich and stable enough to be allowed to reproduce without your child being taken from you" quite as comforting as you seem to phrase it.
  
  available income to support the child
  So poor people don't get to have kids, huh? Which is easily and quickly turn into only rich people get to have kids. How would you enforce that? Involuntary sterilization? Involuntary abortions?
  
  Being able to have children is a fundamental human right. It’s the whole reason we exist according to biology. Restrictions on that right, no matter how well intentioned, is effectively genocide. Especially when considering how authorities have tried to wield that power in the past
Lemme guess
It's all states with large indigenous populations still around.
I can sympathize with foster parents that have a hard time letting go, dear friend of mine who's been desperately trying to have kids of her own had to give a little baby that became her world back to the bio mom and it absolutely crushed her, but formulating an entire legal strategy around it just reeks of trying to get around court preference to return indigenous kids to their nation of origin if possible.
This is very common in regards to parents who use illegal drugs. If you give birth to a child and it has drugs in its system you will be deemed unfit. This includes alcohol or tobacco which can severely damage a child's development.
This article doesn't do much more than state the obvious, drug use in parents is a sure way to lose your kids.
- The article says a lot more than the obvious, and really has very little to do with the topic of placing children in foster care. It’s not claiming infants shouldn’t be removed from unsafe homes or trusted to foster parents as long as those homes remain unsafe. It’s saying the foster system is being manipulated to the detriment of children, birth parents, and foster parents. The main family in this article is a shining example of when placing a child in foster care works perfectly, where the parents expediently turned things around and managed to bond with their child despite the tragic circumstances. The goal of foster care is to reunite families, and even in these ideal cases it’s easy to turn the system against its own goal.
  
  The argument will always be which household is better for the child. Bio parents are regularly found not to be the safest fit.
- You clearly have no damn clue what you're talking about. Having worked as a CPS investigator, there is far more involved than "hurr drugs r bad". Please take your misinformation somewhere else.
  
  This IS WHAT THE LAWYERS ARE DOING. That's what the article is about.

54 comments