I’ll go farther than that. I don’t believe that parents who have had children removed from their care for neglect and being unfit parents should ever be allowed to regain custody, if the original removal was justified.
To consider and discuss the ethical issue, read this article, ProPublica’s “When Foster Parents Don’t Want to Give Back the Baby: In many states, adoption lawyers are pushing a new legal strategy that forces biological parents to compete for custody of their children.” It’s too long and detailed for me to summarize fairly, and make no mistake, it’s an excellent overview of the ethical dilemmas and conflicts involved even if the author’s bias is clear.
The author focuses on a particular conflict between birth parents and foster parents in Colorado while also revealing the different approaches taken by various states. I learned a lot: for example, having adopted our son Grant as an infant in Russia in 1995, I exhaled a long “whew!” after reading this:
“…It has become harder and harder to adopt a child, especially an infant, in the United States. Adoptions from abroad plummeted from 23,000 in 2004 to 1,500 last year, largely owing to stricter policies in Asia and elsewhere, and to a 2008 Hague Convention treaty designed to encourage adoptions within the country of origin and to reduce child trafficking. Domestically, as the stigma of single motherhood continues to wane, fewer young moms are voluntarily giving up their babies, and private adoption has, as a result, turned into an expensive waiting game. Fostering to adopt is now Plan C, but it, too, can be a long process, because the law requires that nearly all birth parents be given a chance before their rights are terminated. Intervening has emerged as a way for aspiring adopters to move things along and have more of a say in whether the birth family should be reunified.”
The article attempts to focus on what the author apparently believes is an especially sympathetic couple (above) trying to regain custody of a child placed in a foster home:
Alicia’s period [Alicia was a meth user, as was Fred, the father-to-be]was irregular because of the meth, which also dimmed her self-awareness. She was six months along before she realized that she was pregnant; a month after that, she woke up in pain. She had preeclampsia, which caused dangerously high blood pressure, and needed an immediate C-section….Her and Fred’s son, Carter James Thornton, was born on Aug. 6, 2019 — two and a half months premature, 2.5 pounds in weight, and, according to his lab work, exposed to meth and to THC….The third week, she and Fred visited their son and held him skin-to-skin. The fourth week, back in Akron, they faltered: They had no gas money for a return to the big city; they were bickering; they were high. On the fifth week, when Carter was stable enough to leave the neonatal intensive care unit, Alicia returned, but foster parents from Akron were the ones who took him home.
Good.
We learn that after a judge laid out what had to occur before Fred and Alicia could get their child back—pass random urinalysis drug tests with missed ones considered failures; secure stable housing and employment, make it to regular supervised visits with their child—the couple missed visits and failed drug tests. Finally, “they decided that if they wanted to raise their child together — and they did — they would have to get sober for good.”
Right….except that addicts almost never get “sober for good.” Except that Fred and Alicia weren’t (and aren’t) married. Except that they conceived a child that they weren’t fit to parent, and that little in their mutual histories indicates that they are psychologically and emotionally able to provide a safe and healthy environment for a developing child.
Except that irresponsible and untrustworthy people rarely become responsible and trustworthy as they get older. Unquestionably, some do. I wouldn’t bet a child’s life on the odds, though.
There is no question that the foster parents their child was placed with can provide a safe and healthy environment. That closes the case for me. Our heroes, Alicia and Fred, blew it with Carter (their son’s name), and should have forfeited any claim to continue being trusted to care for him. I wish them better luck with their next offspring, which should begin as the product of a lawful marriage, or not at all.
ProPublica channels a culture that holds that neither breaking the law nor abusing drugs, nor unstable home conditions, nor reckless, irresponsible conduct when children are involved are sufficient reasons to cancel their parental rights. Ethically and logically, they are wrong, and I wonder how many kids die or are abused as the result of this delusion.
Ethics Alarms 
Our youth pastor and his wife have a stable income, a good home, a son of their own and are cool parents. They fostered two children – a little girl and her little brother – for two years. The girl had spent most of her life in foster care and the boy all of his life.
The mother was addicted to drugs. There were inconsistent visits. There was minimal attempt to get herself together. Her daughter needed a consistent medical treatment that mom would only provide if the children were returned to her for good. The father was out of the picture. On more than one occasion, the judge observed that the mother only began working on herself when she was close to losing the children.
Case workers came and went. Each time there was a new case worker, the cycle started all over again.
The mother finally – after multiple chances – lost her parental rights and it looked like this wonderful couple and their son were going to be able to add these two precious little ones to their family.
But…the children are Latina and their father is Latina. The new case worker was also Latina and contacted the father to persuade him to fight for his children. The children he’d had virtually nothing to do with for over two years.
The case worker felt that a white couple shouldn’t be able to adopt two Latina children, you see.
When this came to light, the case worker was removed from the case, but the damage was done.
The father has a minimum wage job, no ability to transport his children anywhere, no demonstrated skills in raising the children who barely know him, but the court required visitation with this father and, in the end, put the children with him.
Our youth pastor talked about how they just wanted what was best for the children and were thinking about offering the father some resources to help: taking the kids to doctor’s appointments, for example.
But they are now pursuing children who are ready to adopt: children whose parents have already had parental rights terminated. The pain of losing the foster children is still there. It comes out when they see photos of the kids they took while on fun days.
And, of course, we have no idea what life the two kids will have now.
This is why people go out of the country to adopt. This is why its hard to find foster/adoptive parents. The system takes too long to remove children completely from unfit and/or disinterested parents. And is too eager to return them.
It’s sad, but one of the things they teach in foster parenting classes (those things are incredibly extensive) is your goal is reunification. This kind of sucked when we did it because the mother was always bad mouthing us on social media (and we never met her).
Reunification is the goal in our county, too. The couple in question were aware of that. After the termination of the mother’s parental rights; however, they were unprepared for a partisan case worker to enlist the intervention of a previously-uninvolved father.
Our DHS’s policy is that their goal is to reunite children with their birth mothers…period. Because of this, adopting children is almost impossible. Mothers who lose their parental rights are allowed to get them back, even multiple times. A couple I know decided to take care of a foster child who was 16 so that he could go to college. His birth mother was on drugs and was a prostitute. She lost custody when he was a baby and she went to prison. He was in foster care until 5, when she got out of prison and petitioned for her rights back (and got them). She lost them 6 months later when she went back to prison. He went to foster care again until he was 11 when she got out of prison again and petitioned for her rights back (and got them). She was back in jail 6 months later. This poor kid was put in a holding pattern hoping for the off-chance that his mother would pull herself together.
This is all the result of policy by emotion. Perhaps that is the theme for the day. As a society, we have traded logic and reason for emotion as the driving factor. It needs to stop. The human toll is too high.
Cutting off incompetent parents and denying them endless second chances would definitely contribute to breaking cycles of drug abuse, child abuse, and to a certain extent poverty in general. It shouldn’t be difficult to draw clear and reasonable lines for when someone loses the right to raise their biological children. I can understand the goal of wanting to get someone into a stable and healthy position where they can raise their own child, but after some time has passed it’s more important that the child has the certainty of a continuing relationship with the person who’s currently raising them. Parental figures and relationships aren’t fungible. You can’t just switch them out because someone got competent all of a sudden.
EC
Yours is a sensible approach. People are fallible and need a chance to demonstrate they have redeemed themselves. I agree that such redemption opportunities must be balanced with need for creating a stable home environment. As such clear statutes of limitations should be established for reclamation of parental rights. I would say any recidivism would terminate opportunities to regain parental rights.
Why do lefties want abortion on demand and also miscreant parents being given endless Mulligans on the poor kids they, at best, neglect? Maybe these kids should just be put down, like fetuses? They’re obviously hampering the parents’ lives. Why is so much of society so intent on supporting losers?
Because losers vote.
The general policy of the left is to support irresponsible people and punish responsible people.
(1) Punish law-abiding citizens who defend themselves from criminals, but don’t punish criminals, even violent ones.
(2) Give free housing, food, health care, and daycare to people who can’t take care of their children. Heavily tax people with jobs, making it difficult for them to afford children. Support debasing the currency, raising fuel and energy prices through idiotic policies, raising food prices through restrictive policies, etc to make it worse for working people.
(3) Give social security benefits to survivors of people who die young in case they didn’t have life insurance. You then pay even the people with life insurance, because you can’t just pay the ones without. This depletes the social security fund for the elderly and 90% of the money is wasted on people who don’t need it.
(4) Mandate that localities have to provide free education and food to children for the whole world. This puts a massive strain on the education system and the responsible taxpayers.
(5) Restrict firearms ownership by nonviolent, law abiding citizens. Spend vast amounts of time and effort to stop citizens from owning a pistol the government doesn’t know about. At the same time, refuse to even investigate the tens of thousands of illegal machine guns being used by criminals in the inner cities right now. When Antifa takes over a police station and steals a hundred machine guns, devote 0 resources to investigating or recovering them. When a felon on parole is found with a firearm, refuse to revoke the parole and give him the firearm back so he can kill a high-ranking police official the next day.
(6) Give welfare benefits for the children of couples who aren’t married, but not for parents who are married. These include WIC, food stamps, and free college.
When my son was an infant and I bought formula at Wal-Mart, every cashier had the same comment. “Wow!, that is expensive. I have never seen the price before.” Apparently, I was the only one paying for formula, because everyone else got it through WIC. If my wife and I hadn’t been married, they only would have used her income for eligibility and we would have received benefits.
Keep the money flowing, keep the votes flowing. I believe it really is that simple. The same worthless people who wouldn’t find their welfare checks if you hid them under their work boots will make great effort to get out there and vote for the Democrat who will make sure those checks keep coming, that there are always more punches on their prescription cards, and that their apartments are paid for.
I think you’re going to have to help us out with the claims that antifa stole police automatic weapons and the cops just let them go and that a felon was let off the hook with a gun and killed a high-ranking cop the next day. It wouldn’t surprise me, but let’s get the factual bases.
I think the left is actively trying to undermine society, the family, the law, and every other building block of society. They want an easily manipulated voting base, dependent on the government for basic survival.
I’m all for cutting off the parental rights of parents who cannot stop shooting fentanyl, beating their children, or otherwise commit severe crimes of abuse. No change to the law is going to bring that scenario to fruition, however, because the left will twist any law that is made into a pretzel to continue inflicting their malevolent goals on society. Stricter laws will probably be used to remove parental rights from the religious, the people who vote the wrong way, the people who don’t want to submit to government mandates, and anyone who oppose the left in any way, but they won’t be used to protect kids who are actually stuck in limbo with bad parents.
Emotional appeals are how the left gets away with the things they do, but emotion isn’t why they do the things the do. Callous indifference to actual harms caused by their policy and a desire to overthrow the existing social order is why they do what they do. We need to stop pretending people mean well when they enact horrendous policies that have staggering negative impact on real people’s lives. They don’t mean well. They do notice the harms caused and they quite simply do not care.
In Seattle, the CHOP occupied at least one police station. Police departments store full-auto weapons in their armories. The police department was evacuated rapidly and was occupied by the CHOP activists. The SoundCloud rapper warlord of CHOP was seen distributing 1970’s style M-16’s to his ‘troops’ out of the trunk of the car. There was at least 1 video showing them firing them full-auto. Three of them shot a teenager in a Jeep Cherokee, killing him. The news reported those as AR-15’s, but those are older, triangular handguard guns. Only a few manufacturers make those replicas in small numbers. They are fairly rare and sought-after. It is much more likely that they are older guns from the police department armory. They would not be AR-15’s, but actual M-16’s used by police departments in the 1970’s and 1980’s.
I haven’t seen any attempt to retrieve theses firearms.
The police and military lose a lot of machine guns. Commonly, as in the last link, they don’t even know they are gone. Remember, the military patted itself on the back for failing its fifth audit in a row less dramatically than the others (it never has had a successful audit) in 2022. In that audit, it was able to account for 39% of its assets (61% unaccounted for). Now, since some of them (aircraft carriers) are rather hard to lose, that doesn’t seem that impressive to me.
https://extras.mercurynews.com/policeguns/
https://www.thetrace.org/2018/11/lost-and-stolen-police-guns/
https://taskandpurpose.com/news/lost-stolen-military-weapons/
https://bearingarms.com/camedwards/2022/09/27/texas-couple-who-ordered-surplus-gun-cases-get-fully-automatic-surprise-n62723
Some of this is fact (the occupation, the video), but a lot of it is circumstantial (we don’t know where those guns in the video came from for a fact, nor do we have evidence specifically linking them to the SPD). Funny that the DOJ and state law enforcement, who’d be all over you and me for owning a single relatively small-caliber pistol, don’t seem too interested in looking at groups like the “Pacific Northwest John Brown Gun Club,” which is really no different than a lot of these southern and Midwest right-wing militias except being oriented left instead of right.
I think that’s just more proof that the Democratic Party likes having a militia that it can unleash on law-abiding citizens when the circumstances allow it, sort of like the brownshirts.
I just count myself lucky they didn’t decide to send a “freedom caravan” to my hometown in 2020, and that the one time they were ready to rip down a Columbus statue outside a big liberal city (the town of Nutley), the Italians (the town is 80% white and 50% Italian) took poorly to the idea and showed up in force, some armed, and told them “you lay a fucking finger on the damn pedestal and you’ll wish you’d stayed in Newark.” Thankfully the police showed up in force and stopped it from turning into a full-on riot, or more properly a rumble. BLM later said, “oh no, we support the legal removal of that statue, but we were never going to remove it by force.” Yeah, right. Somehow the dopamine hit of ripping something down that’s not yours to rip down loses its appeal if there are a bunch of brawny construction workers and longshoremen in guinea tees and hard hats armed with bats and pipes standing in the way objecting in no uncertain terms.
That’s some pretty fierce clarity, Michael. Nice job. Mrs. OB’s and my working and active parenting days are over, so I guess I’m a little more detached than you are. A nice wake-up.
Parents have rights to their children for a reason, namely that the family is the basic building block of society. Unfortunately, too often a lot of parents have no business parenting children, especially those that are not much more than children themselves. I can see there being a presumption in favor of reuniting children with their parents, but, that should be a rebuttable presumption If the parents are clearly unfit. The goal of raising children should ultimately be to produce productive citizens who will contribute to society, not citizens who will just be a drain on societies limited resources because they can’t get their act together. Drug use should be an automatic disqualifier until the parent can prove that they’ve kicked the habit for good. Criminal activity should be an automatic disqualifier, kids deserve better than parents who are terrible citizens.
And what’s up with supporting this couple? They appear to be cisgendered. They also seem to want to be or are being required by the court to be a nuclear family. Aren’t these people oppressors? And they’re not of color. They’re white supremacists. This kid should be raised by a government program, otherwise, he’ll turn out to be a capitalist.
This was the most sympathetic couple they could find. When trying to get people to support bad ideas, it is best to find the most sympathetic example you can find and push that, presenting it as a ‘typical’ case. They look pretty normal in a picture (don’t have obvious meth mouth) and they neither of them is in prison. They used a white, heterosexual couple to appeal to as many people as possible. Remember, the best case they could find were parents who were parents incapable of financially supporting the child and incapable of responsibly caring for a child because they are on meth.
Just think what couples were rejected for the article.