Advocating “open adoption” and stressing the importance of maintaining connections between children in foster care and their birth parents was the focus of “Honoring Family Connections,” a forum presented yesterday by Massachusetts Families for Kids, an advocacy group that works to place foster children in permanent homes.
State Rep. Kathleen Teahan spoke to an audience of state legislators, child welfare workers and families, stressing the rights of biological parents.
“You don’t have to exclude one part of your family and one part of your life to move on to another family,” Teahan said.
The group advocated “open adoption,” which allows birth parents to remain in contact with their children after giving them up for adoption.
Tyler, a 15-year-old who was adopted but maintained ties to his birth mother, said having his birth mother in his life was positive.
“I’m not confused about my identity because I know exactly who I look like, act like and take after,” he said.
Open adoption has benefited his birth mother, Tyler added, because she knows her son is healthy and has someone to take care of him.
“Take it from me,” he said, “open adoption works.”
The forum also opposed the Infant Safe Haven Act, a proposed law which would make it legal for parents to drop off unwanted babies at hospitals, police stations and fire houses. The bill, which has been passed by the Massachusetts House, is intended to provide a “safe haven” for children who might otherwise be abandoned on the streets. It also protects their parents from prosecution for child abandonment.
Dr. Charlotte Moore, a pediatrician at Children’s Hospital, said the bill was well-intentioned, but would ultimately do more harm than good, to both children and their mothers.
“Our ‘safe haven’ offers no safe haven for those mothers most at risk,” said Moore, noting many of the mothers supposedly protected by the bill are young, abused, traumatized or otherwise in need of help.
“This so-called ‘safe haven’ would offer these teens no post-partum medical care,” she said.
Women who had been abused would also be given “no protection from further physical, sexual or emotional abuse, no treatment, no therapy,” she said.
Director of Massachusetts Families for Kids Lauren Frey said she opposed the legislation because it “legalized abandonment.”
“What we’re really behind is a safe and supportive way of taking care of your child, or if not, giving it up for adoption, as opposed to abandoning it,” Frey said.
Professor Mary Collins of Boston University’s School of Social Work agreed.
“Young people can often regret their decisions, especially when they make a decision under stress,” she said, referring to the potential emotional stress that might come after abandonment.
With the “safe haven” system, she added, “they have no recourse, nobody to turn to after a very traumatic experience.”
Sarita Rogers, the director of Healthy Families, a program that provides young families with information and support through voluntary home visits, said intensive support is crucial to child welfare and could often prevent the initial need for foster care or adoption.
“Prevention, more than anything, is extremely cost-effective,” she said, noting 90 percent of the parents her group deal with accept support services when they are offered.
The Children’s Trust Fund, a division of Healthy Families, has worked with 6,000 families in Massachusetts, Rogers said, and 80 percent of the young parents they serve are back in school or have graduated – twice the national average.
Furthermore, Rogers said, 40 percent of parents served by her program were abused or neglected as children, but only 10 percent reportedly abuse or neglect their own children.
“We consider that a very big step toward ending the cycle of abuse and neglect,” she said.