9UNP0148SD_Catherine_Swessel_Wordpress

- Let me tell you a little bit about Children's Service Society. We're a private, not-for-profit, statewide child welfare agency. We've been in existence since 1889. And for the bulk of that time our work was adoption work. and we have a wonderful story about Reverend Dysart, our founder, who lived in the Hudson area, who placed children on horseback. So when parents, usually birth mothers, were unable to care for their children, he found homes for the children. So we've been around for a long time. 

We're licensed by the State of Wisconsin as a child placing agency. And what that means is we're licensed to do foster care and adoption. 

We're also licensed as a mental health clinic. And we're accredited by the Council on Accreditation for Services to Children and Families. So that just means that we have one of those big reviews every couple of years. 

I thought I'd give you a brief overview of our services, just so you understand adoption is, as this point, a very small part of what we do. We do out-of-home care services, which includes treatment foster care. And that is foster care for children who have some very special needs. Usually those needs are behavioral needs. But they also can be medical needs. They also could be emotional needs. We have a respite care program that provides respite for families who have children, again, who have special needs, who can't just hire the babysitter down the street to care for their child. 

We have independent living skills programs. That's for children generally aging out of foster care. But it can be any child over the age of 14 or 15 who needs help launching onto their own. 

Our prevention area includes our family resource centers. And we have a large number of family resource centers around the state. Those are informal places, voluntary clients, where families come to us because they are looking for other parents, or they are looking for classes or resources. We have a lot of libraries. We have drop in play times. Those kinds of resources for families. We also do family home visiting. 

In many cases, that means that when a mother gives birth in the hospital, there is a hospital visit and there is follow-up, particularly if it's her first child. 

Our counseling and case management services, I think, are pretty clear. Counseling for families where there are child-related issues. We don't see children in isolation. We work with the families where they are placed. And case management is more of a situation where we're working with families, making sure they get the services that they need. In many cases, those are families who have been identified by the court system as needing some assistance. 

And the last area is our government contracts for foster care licensing adoption. And I'm responsible for those. 

I wanted to talk about adoption today. 

And I was glad that Alexa called me and asked me to do this, because I find that adoption is often considered this mysterious thing. You know someone who's adopted, but there's all these rules and things that you don't understand. Now the process, of course, is rocket science, because it involves the court. So there are some very specialized, technical pieces of knowledge that we need as practitioners. But the field of adoption has really changed over the years, so if you have information-- I find, often, people have their adoption information from old movies. Most of that stuff wasn't correct when it was made, and it certainly isn't correct now. 

So what I'd like to do today is give you a very brief overview of adoption, but I'm allowing a fair amount of time for questions, because I find that when we talk about adoption, generally people do have a lot of questions. 

Here's a list of the different kinds of adoption. I think what you want to know about, really, is domestic infant adoption. But I wanted you to see the breadth of adoption as it is today. 

I'm not going to talk really much about relative or step-parent adoption. Those are pretty cut and dried. Children are placed with relatives, the relative wants to adopt, the parent is either willing to give up their parental rights, or they're not in the area, and parental rights are terminated. Step-parent adoption, obviously, when someone remarries and they want to adopt the child of their spouse. Those are worthy of a great deal of discussion, but that's not what I'm here to talk about today. 

Domestic infant adoption is generally newborn infants, although not always. Sometimes mom takes the baby home and realizes over a period of time that she just can't care for the child, and we can still place the child for adoption. But generally it's newborns. The birth mother is also making a voluntary plan. When we're doing a domestic infant adoption, this is not about someone trying to take the child from her. 

This is where a mom says, I don't think I can take care of this child, for whatever reason, and she makes an adoption plan for her child. And I'm using that language very carefully. We don't place children up for adoption. That's the old "orphan trains" put the children up, people select them. We don't consider that good language anymore. 

So you make an adoption plan for your child. And I think that's an important distinction when you're talking to birth mothers about adoption. What is her plan? We need to empower her. These days, in most cases, she chooses the family that her child is going to. 

And I'll take a little bit about the process later. 

The other thing that generally people are not aware of in adoption is that birth fathers have rights. So as part of the court process, we must address father's rights. There's a lot of ways you can do that. It depends on whether or not he's still in the picture or not, but we do need to take care of that. 

In most cases, particularly in Wisconsin, adoptive parents do pay fees. Part of the reason for this is that we need to find a funding source for this service. Many years ago, United Way Foundations, others used to be willing to pay our agency to do these services, but they are no longer willing to do that. So really the only source we have for funding is fees. That is part of reason that fees are what they are, but I think that these days, people expect to pay fees. 

And they are paying for a service. Usually what happens is when we dialogue with families about fees, they don't understand what they're paying for. Well, they're paying for a home study, which is a great deal of work on our part. Under our child placing license, there are certain things we have to do. So families are sometimes concerned about that. But there really are costs to doing this business. 

I also wanted to talk for a minute about foster care adoption, to give you a contrast to domestic infant adoption. This is a public child welfare function, as opposed to domestic infant adoption, which is not a public child welfare function. That's the private agencies provide those services. 

Children are placed in foster care because something has happened. 

The public child welfare system received a referral. They went out and they saw some concerns. They had to be serious concerns about the child's safety in order for them to remove the child from the home. To make that decision, they need court involvement and court approval. So those children come into care in a very different way. Most of those children do return to their birth parents. I would say, I think in the Bureau, we're running about 75-80% of the children do return home to their birth parents or a relative. If the child is unable to return to their birth parent, they are adopted. In most cases, they are adopted by their foster parents. 

So what happens in the public child welfare system is that we don't have open-ended placements. 

There is a federal law called the Adoption and Safe Families Act that says that if a child is in out-of-home care for 15 out of 22 months, we need to file a termination of parental rights petition with the court. There are a few situations where we're allowed not to do that, but basically, we have to move those kids along. And that's good for children, so I have no objection to that. 

International adoption is what many people think of when they hear the word adoption these days. And that's adoption from another country. What I'm seeing of the initial 2006 statistics is that is the first year that the number of international adoptions decreased in the United States. Now some of that is due to the many issues you hear about in terms of international adoption. Countries open and close. They decide they're not going to allow kids to leave, or they bring in new requirements, and that adds to some of the delays. You will see many families that spend a lot of time waiting for the child to be placed with them because of those delays. 

I've listed the four countries that send the most children to the United States at this point: China, South Korea, Guatemala and Russia. Those things are in flux already. 

China, in the last year, has changed their qualifications to adopt. They are not prioritizing single parents, or parents with other certain age or health issues. It used to be China was considered easy to adopt from, easy as international adoption is. That's no longer the case. 

South Korea, this year for the first, I should say, last year for the first year, did more domestic adoptions than international adoptions. So they're obviously looking to keep children within their own country. 

Guatemala has a large number of legal issues. Right now, the state department is not recommending that people start adoptions from Guatemala. 

And Russia also had stopped allowing adoptions for a period of time. So we have a lot of issues with those countries. 

The big thing that's coming that you may hear about is the Hague Convention. It's something that all the countries, hopefully in the world, but pretty much the bigger countries doing adoption, are signing on to. What it does is it establishes a number of protocols, for how children will be-- how the process of termination of parental rights will happen in their country, and what will happen in the receiving country. And this is basically good. It's a good protection for kids. It's a good protection for families who've not always been protected in the international adoption process. So that is implementing now. Guatemala is supposed to be starting this month, I hear. 

And the United States is also starting in the next few months. So that will really change the international adoption picture. 

I wanted to give you a few numbers so you understand what adoption is in Wisconsin. You may be surprised, these numbers aren't real big. But, if you look at the contrast between the numbers, I think you would see this in most states in the country. Domestic infant adoption is very, very small. The last number I saw in terms of a nationwide number was from the Evan Donaldson Institute, and they were estimating between 15,000 and 16,000 domestic adoptions in the United States. I believe that was a 2006 number. So you can see that's not a real big number that we're talking about. 

Special needs adoption, which is adoption from foster care, is much more significant, as is international adoption. 

Given what's going on in international adoption, I think those numbers could shift, and we could see international go down again. And I think that's going to create some dilemmas for adoptive families in terms of how they make a plan to adopt, what kind of adoption they would like to do. 

Let me start talking about adoption and to talk a little bit about the adoption triad, because the question here, I think, is really the crucial question, how do we balance the needs and interests of the various parties. 

Our agency is a child welfare agency. The child is our client. Our internal saying is that we find homes for children, we don't find children for families. Adoptive families are a resource. I don't mean to say that to diminish them in any way, but the child is our primary interest. So what we're looking for is what is the best match for this particular child. Now with an infant, obviously, you don't have the same kind of issues you have with an older child who has a personality, who has a history. 

But you are looking for someone who can provide the type of parenting that this particular child needs. 

In some cases, that could be things like, we know from family history that there are these certain issues that may come up. They could be health related issues, they could be issues such as, there's a strong family history of substance abuse. So we're going to look for a family that we think can handle those things, and who understands the history. One of the things I'll talk about a little bit later is medical history. Not that medical history, as you well know, is predictive of everything, but it is an important piece of the child. So again, we're looking for the best home for that particular child. 

Secondarily, when we're doing adoption-- Oe thing I forgot to mention is that we have closed our infant adoption program, so we no longer do infant adoptions. So anything I say here is my opinion. It's not reflective of the agency,in the sense that we don't have this program anymore. 

But my first job working in the agency was working with birth parents. So that's another reason I was glad to come and talk to you today. And I feel very strongly about birth parents and what they should get through the adoption process. 

Birth parents, as they think about their options, often get a great deal of pressure, and everybody has an idea about what they should decide. And often, that has to do with the other person's agenda. So one of the things that I have always felt is important is that the birth mother have a support system and have people around her who are not pushing a decision, who are just there to listen to her, support her, give her information. This is one of the most difficult decisions that she will ever make. 

And the third party in the triad is the adoptive family. The adoptive family, we have to remember, in many cases has gone through infertility treatment, which is very difficult, very draining. And in essence, they start over in another system in adoption, and in another system where they don't have control of anything. 

So we have a variety of rights here, a variety of interests here that we need to balance as we go through the process. I thought I'd give you the very short Cliff's Note version of how we work with cases in adoption. 

Birth mothers approach us, these days unfortunately, it's often very close to their delivery date, and talk about wanting to make an adoption plan. Some are very firm in that decision. Others really just want to explore it, get some information. And they may be doing that simply because somebody told them they should. We try to work with them and have to tried to work with them that I consider genuine counseling. Again, no judgments, no values, just what do you want to do, what information do you need, how can we help you? So we're really talking about any of the options that are available. Looking at the well-being of the mother and at that point, usually the child. 

Usually, by the time someone comes to an adoption agency abortion is not an option anymore. 

So in many cases we're working with moms who are in, if we're lucky, in their third trimester, if not, "I'm delivering next week." And in many situations, those moms have had little or no prenatal care. So one of the things that we traditionally done as an agency is make sure that mom gets on Medical Assistance, get her into a doctor, and also look at her support network. In many cases, the moms that come to us are moms already. They have a child or two. They just can't see how they can care for another child. We're really looking at what's their whole life situation. How can we help them have a healthy labor and delivery, have a plan for this child and for their life, given their circumstances. 

Most of the young women that our agency traditionally had worked with were low-income, so they didn't have a lot of resources. 

In some cases, they didn't have a lot of family support. And again, they're being encouraged by others to make certain plans or do certain things. So you'll often see a birth mother who just feels very confused, and sometimes depressed on top of that. When the mother goes into the hospital, she usually calls her birth parent counselor so we know that the baby is born and while she's in the hospital, it's important to remember that she is still the legal guardian of that child. So what can happen in some circumstances is people feel that if she has made an adoption plan, she has already lost all her rights to this child, which is not the case. She still is the mother of the child. She places the child through the agency in a foster home, which some people have concerns about, but -- I think it's a good idea so that mother can be firm in her choice. After she leaves the hospital, generally within a week or two of leaving the hospital, she will sign a petition for termination of parental rights, in essence saying, I want to terminate my parental rights to this child. During this counseling process, we've been talking to her about the birth father's rights. Does she know who he is, and amazingly enough, in some cases, she really sort of doesn't know who he is. 

And we have to find ways to notify him. That's the law. Pardon me. There's case law from 20 or 30 years ago that says birth fathers have rights, and we have seen birth fathers come forward and want to parent their children. Sometimes birth mothers are not happy about that. The birth father is not someone that she feels is safe for the child, but he does have rights. So we have to track him down. That can be in person. We can give him personal service, or we can notify him by mail, or we can notify him in the newspaper, and from time to time, if you look in the personal section of your newspapers, you will see a notice to an alleged father, talking about his parental rights and the hearing will be held on this date. We have been known to serve Joe at the corner bar, I mean, we've had some very interesting service situations, but the court needs to feel sure that we have done everything we can to find this father. 

That is important to do because we want to be able to assure the adoptive family that we have done a sound termination of parental rights and legally, there will be no issues in terms of their adoption later on, so that's an important thing to do. There is a hearing held on the petition. The mother testifies as to how the pregnancy occurred, what her wishes are. The judge asks her several questions to assure that she is making this decision voluntarily, that no one is forcing her to place this child for adoption, and again, I think that's another important thing to do. At that point, if the judge feels that the burden of evidence has been met, he will order guardianship to the agency and we will place the child with the adoptive family. A child must reside with the adoptive family for six months before we can finalize the adoption. So during that time period, the agency continues to have guardianship of the child, continues to make home visits to assure the child's well-being. I just said all that. There we go. I wanted to give you a little bit of information about things that I think are important in working with birth mothers. 

The initial work that we do with birth mothers is really around sharing information and assuring that she has the support that she needs. In terms of a professional, we maybe a big part of her support network. We may be very little of her support network. We just need to make sure that she has that. We need to talk to her a lot about grief and loss issues, really throughout the pregnancy and normalize that. I think in many situations birth mothers are told how to feel or they're told to forget about it. You can't pretend this didn't happen to you. So we really encourage birth mothers to talk about their situation, talk about their feeling of loss. I think it's particularly significant for a woman who has a child already. she understands what it means to be a parent, she understands attachment to that child, and so I think it has another level of meaning for her. 

Again, assure that she has a support network. And that can be a lot of different things and people. That can be a neighbor. It could be -- her physician could be part of that support network. It could be friends, relatives, coworkers. Everybody sort of designs their own support network, but I think it's just very important that birth mothers have that. Again, birth mother retains guardianship of the child until her rights are terminated. So she makes decisions. What that means is if she's in the hospital and she wants to visit with that baby, she visits with that baby. If she wants certain things done -- she wants her son circumcised or not circumcised, she is in charge at that point. 

The other thing that -- and this is an ethical issue for me, not everyone agrees with this -- We do have some attorneys in this state who ask mothers to sign papers before the child is born. I just think that's unethical personally. This mother has the right to change her mind until the time of the court hearing. And so, I think she needs to have her baby. She needs to work through the process and see where she is at the time that we're ready to ask her to sign the -- either the papers for the child to go to the foster home or the termination of parental rights petition. Mothers have changed their minds both ways. Again, we've had mothers who have taken their children home, come back to us and said, no I really do want to place this child. I really believe that it is our responsibility to assure that that birth mother is comfortable with her decision, and not just comfortable today, but comfortable in the long-term. It's a decision she can live with. I would say that the birth mothers I have been most concerned about are the birth mothers who shut down. 

They don't really want to talk about it, just give me the papers, and let me go away. I've been very concerned about those birth mothers. This is just sort of a checklist or a couple of issues that came to mind as I talked about -- thought about adoption in preparation for today. We really need to make an individualized plan for each child and family, based on their needs. This is not a checky box thing. This is not picking up your groceries at the store. This is serious business. So we really need to look at what does this child need, what does this mother need, how can we get that for her. Again, I really see us building a support network around the mother. We want to assure a healthy pregnancy and delivery. 

We often find that mothers are embarrassed by some of the things that they do in terms of using cigarettes, using alcohol, and so it's really important to have a strong relationship with that birth mother so she can be honest with you. We have no desire to punish her. We want the best for her baby. So what has happened during your pregnancy? How can we look at that and assure that has not had an impact on your child? Birth mothers, for example, might say that, during their first trimester, when they didn't know they were pregnant or didn't want to know they were pregnant, that maybe they -- in most cases, it's alcohol, they drank and sort of wished they hadn't, but we just need to know that in terms of assuring the child's well-being. We also want to give birth moms objective decision-making based on information and their reflection. I think it's important that people have accurate information about which to make judgments about -- it's their life, it's their decision, so what does it mean for me to place a child for adoption? What does it mean for me five years from now? How will I be thinking about this? 

Will I wish I had done something differently? Again, I think everyone needs to reflect on their own heart what they think is the right decision for them. A big part of that is what is in the best interest of my child? What can I give this child? Can someone else give this child more? I think that is part of the exploration of adoption. When we had an adoption program, what we did, and most agencies do this now, they have a book of families that they give to the birth mother to select the family for her child. I think that's an important thing to do. That this mother is giving this child to another family. She's not giving it to the agency to raise. 

She's giving it to another family, and I think it's important for her to know about that family so when people ask her about that she can talk about that and talk about it in a way that it was a positive decision for her child. Again, back to the pressures on birth mothers. Friends, family will come forward and tell the birth mom what they think she should be doing. I have a friend who will take your baby, and I know someone. Those are not helpful things to birth moms. Birth moms need to think about the decision in relationship to themselves, their child, their family, their partner, if the father of the child is still involved. So where the child goes is secondary to that decision about do I want to parent this child or am I going to place this child elsewhere. The last thing I want to talk about is safe haven laws, because this is a bit of an issue for me. Everybody feels real good about safe haven laws. That's nice. 

The problem with safe haven laws is that -- and I don't know if everybody knows what safe haven laws are -- I see some heads nodding. Safe haven laws are -- they came out of the time when we had some very publicized cases about women putting children in garbage cans or endangering their child or killing their child and people felt that, oh, we need to give these mothers a way to give their children up without harming the child, and as a very good friend of mine said, we have safe havens -- they're called adoption agencies. In most cases, I don't believe those mothers -- the mothers who killed their children would not have used a safe haven. Unfortunately what's happening with the safe haven laws is that when birth mothers find out that they have to notify the father, they decide to abandon their child because they don't want to deal with the father. And from a child welfare perspective, that really denies the child their heritage and it denies them their medical and genetic information, which we collect. It really denies them a lot of connections. They can never go back and search for their extended family. So as you can tell, I don't feel real good about safe haven laws, and I'd be glad to debate that anybody later on. We have seen some situations where it's been very frustrating, that we knew who the mother was, but technically because it was a safe haven, we had to pretend that we didn't, which is crazy and again not good for the child. Birth father's rights. 

This is often a very vexing and complicated subject for people. By statute and case law, fathers have rights. The birth mother will be asked in court, under oath, who is the father of this child, and she will be asked the circumstances of conception and asked about their relationship on an ongoing basis. That can be very uncomfortable. We try to prepare birth mothers for court, and it is closed court. Children's court is not an open court, but it is nonetheless embarrassing and difficult. He can request custody if paternity tests prove he's the father. And he can ask to have the child -- and he can give the child to his mother to raise or extended family. Once he's been decided to be the father, he has equal rights to that child. For many of our birth mothers, that means she may change her decision. 

And she may decide to raise the child herself, which I have a few concerns about depending on her situation. She may feel, I cannot allow the child to live with the birth father and therefore, I will raise the child myself. Physician's role. These are just a few of my suggestions. Listening and support. Listening, as you well know, goes a long, long, long way, and I think birth mothers need to feel that they have some people on their side and you could be one of them, so I think that's critical. I think another thing that's critical is providing information on how what's going on physically will impact feelings and decisions. So you have all those hormones raging at the time of labor and delivery and I think that that's a really critical thing to help birth moms work about -- or think about -- that bursting into tears right now is not amazing and shocking and difficult. It is what your body's doing. And that is part of the reason that I encourage moms not to feel that they have to make their final decision in the hospital. 

To wait until they are out of the hospital, have stabilized a little bit before they feel that they have to make a final decision about adoption placement. Allow the mother to do what she needs to do to make her decision. That includes things like naming the child. Again, she's the legal guardian, she can name the child. The adoptive family will get a new birth certificate. They can name the child whatever they want. So allow mother to name the child, to have the child in her room, to visit with the child, to visit with her other children and the baby, any of those kinds of things. I just think she needs to do what she needs to do to make her decision. And make sure that child and mother have access to their medical records. One of the biggest questions we get from adoptees and adoptive families is, do I have all the medical information. 

Certainly understand why they want that. So any medical records that we can gather as the adoption agency and provide to the family are very, very, very valuable. You know how much medicine has changed in the past few years and it's going to keep changing. So information now that may not seem critically valuable, could be in the future, so we really try to gather the best record that we can. We do, from time to time, have adoptees or adoptive families come back to us and ask for more information because the child has developed a condition and the doctor has asked for information. So the medical records are just absolutely critical, just very important. We also have a set of forms that we do, state forms, they're called the medical and genetic history of the child, and then there's a second one that is about labor and delivery. And the medical and genetic information is information we try to capture from the birth mother or her extended family, if we need to do that. It talks about conditions in the family, so there's a whole list of diseases, glasses, asthma, whatever, and we really try to collect all that, but again, it's a form we're filling out. It does not include, necessarily, everything that a family would want to know. 

The labor and delivery information is just a summary of the labor and delivery. But again, we like to of the actual records and we keep that as well. I wanted to talk for a minute about openness in adoption and the dilemma with adoption laws is they really vary from state to state. In Wisconsin, only the adoptee can search. The birth parent cannot search. Siblings cannot search. Extended family cannot search. Only the adoptee can search and they can only search at the age of 18. We also have a system in Wisconsin where if the adoptee makes their search application and the agency doing the search finds the birth mother -- it's usually not the birth father because he was usually not adjudicated, therefore, we cannot search for him, the birth mother can say no. And she has the right to do that, and then we cannot disclose the information. 

Right now, there is a bill pending to give siblings the right to search for each other, and I certainly would support that. I think we also need to look at opening up birth certificates, but that's going to be very controversial. Not everybody believes that should be the case. The adoptee must apply to the State of Wisconsin search program and a fee is charged. It's nominal. The wonder of the Internet is we can find birth mothers much more quickly than we used to be able to. Our biggest barrier is if she marries, we have to find her maiden name and that can be a little tricky. But, generally, we can find someone within an hour or two of searching, that's not a difficult thing. So, I wanted to leave time for questions. Maybe we don't have as much time as we'd like, but are there any questions or anything that I could explain furthe