Six children are dead
There were six Hart children, all adopted from foster care. And now, though not all bodies have yet been found, authorities think all of them perished in the car that was intentionally driven off a cliff in Northern California. The children were adopted from foster care in Texas in two separate transactions, two sibling sets of three each. The adoptive parents were white, the children persons of color. Now everyone is dead.
Foster care
Children end up in foster care after a clusterfuck of missteps. A lot of things go wrong. And then things go wrong over and over again. Really wrong. And so children are removed from the home. The Hart children were permanently removed. Their parents lost custody. The children were adopted out. They were removed from the state they were born in, removed from family, both immediate and extended. Maybe things were epic proportion horrible for these kids. But here’s the thing. It didn’t get better. They were “saved” by two white women who killed them.
The birthmothers are always the tragedy in the background in stories like this. There’s a whole cast of characters in this silent background that doesn’t make the newspapers until weeks later, if ever. In this story there’s an aunt who had custody but broke a rule, and so she lost custody too. Now according to THIS, the birthmother of one of the sets of children is” taking it hard.” Taking it hard. Can you imagine?
Adoption practices ignore research
There’s a long history of adoption in our country, and we’ve learned things that we have yet to put into practice. In Adoption in America: A Historical Perspective, E. Wayne Carp cites an early 19thcentury historian, reporting on four orphan asylums between 1800 and 1820: “But adoption did not emerge as the preferred system of child care in the early nineteenth century because elite families with whom the children were placed often treated them as servants rather than family members. This experience led the female managers to favor blood relatives when considering child placement.”
Similar conclusions were made decades later as a result of the orphan trains wherein foundlings and street children from eastern cities were sent to more rural areas throughout the country to live with families that sometimes treated them as indentured servants. Early adoption law in Minnesota was forged to combat the corruptions of the orphan trains.
The toughest truths
While there are certainly many kudos deserved to those who adopt children from foster care–those people who have the capacity to love and to work toward healing, there are still uncomfortable truths to be reckoned with. I’ll leave you with these thoughts from Liz Latty and her piece “Adoption is a Feminist Issue, But Not For the Reasons You Think,” :
“Here’s the toughest truth yet: Those children are almost always the children of poor and working class people, people of color, native and indigenous people, and young people. The people who adopt them, who directly benefit from the economic and racial oppression of these groups, are most often middle and upper-middle-class people and are primarily white”.
And if you’re the sort of person who prays, pray for everyone. The social workers in the system, the children, the foster parents, the adoptive parents, and the birth families. I’m really not much for praying myself, but I’ll be thinking of the birthmothers of the Hart children forever.
I read Latty’s piece and am very impressed with her argument. As a foster parent, it is beyond frustrating to see the inconsistency in a system where minority mothers are punished to a much greater degree than white mothers. Reading her article, it hit me hard how one sibling group I fostered who have been under the purview of social services since the oldest was born ten years previously keep being returned to their biological parents regardless of their histories of abuse, neglect, and drug use, which they claim never happened, while many of the minority parents rights are terminated in a couple of years of their children coming into care for the first time. I would doubt they are keeping any data on this, but it is striking from my experience.
In the case of the Hart family, I will always think of the lives those children could have had had the state done it’s due diligence and had the aunt of the one sibling group been allowed to keep those children. Sadly, social services always comes out with the “we have changed or training and policies since this incident occurred.” and my experience shows that the major issues that put children in danger while under the gaze of the social welfare system continue to persist. I so pray that something is learned from this horrific tragedy.