Yes, this is one of my downer posts. I was outraged by this issue yesterday, but rare frank rain has me in a morose funk as I write.

There is a shortage of adoptable children in the US. Foreign countries now try to place children needing parents at home, which has overall reduced the availability of foreign children by more than 80%, while more US women are choosing to raise unplanned babies as the stigma of single parenthood continues to decline. That is to say, there is a dearth of supply in a resource coveted by well-heeled childless people in the US, and capitalism has combined with politics to provide a solution: Foster parent intervention.

Some people who have the misfortune of being unable to care for their children, even temporarily, lose their children to the foster system. Depending on their state of residence, these parents often have a supervised plan under which they can regain custody after demonstrating they have removed obstacles to child-rearing, which can range from inability to support and/or house the child to drug addiction or abuse. The foster child system in recent years has been designed to return the children to their birth parents as soon as possible. This is no longer true.

A lawyer in Colorado created the concept of foster parent intervention. This phrase encompasses a complicated process of petitioning the state on the child’s behalf, documenting the child’s behaviors, and paying experts to observe the child during birth parent visits, experts who subsequently write reports opining that the child is negatively affected by those visits. This lawyer works closely with one of these behavioral experts, and as a team the two of them were able to convince the state to award the child to the foster parents 90% of the time. Many of the children were infants, the age most coveted in this “market,” and hence the most lucrative cases to pursue.

I wrote “were able” because a pair of clever birth parents who lost their child, after years of both meticulous compliance with their plan and legal battling, publicized the huge expenditure of both money and time on the part of their county to remove their child from them. Now only were they able to reverse the case, but the Colorado legislature also passed some laws prohibiting many of the practices of the interveners.

There is an article about this in the current issue of The New Yorker.

However, this practice had already spread widely and is still extant in many states, some with laws more egregious than those expunged in Colorado. Indiana allows non-relatives to petition for a foster child even if they aren’t fostering it, with a very short legal window open for the child’s relatives to respond. In this way, a grandmother lost her grandchild because she did not know a claim had been filed and did not respond in time.

Mounting a foster intervention is expensive for those seeking a child and lucrative for the professionals helping them. The original lawyer came up with the concept because he found a client base willing to pay quite a lot to realize their dream of having a baby. My assessment of this practice is that multiple US states have legalized the purchase of children by wealthy persons from loving families using arcane procedures and doctored evidence.

The cynicism of our age is depthless.