adoption agency...lies

What is the name of your state? TX

I would like to know if there is any legal accountability for an adoption agency who lied to an adopted parent or to a birthmother. For example, a birthmother was told the adoptive parents had masters degrees and in fact they did not. Or a social worker who told the adoptive parents that birthmother was a nursing student and father was military...when in fact the b mom was a waitress and b father was a welder.

thanks
Pamela

B@STARD NATION

There are organizations that are trying to pass legislation to enforce accountability of adoption agencies. Try the B@STARD NATION website at [email protected] for starters. B@STARD NATION advocates for the rights of adoptees to access their original birth records when they reach adulthood. When you enter the name of the group on your computer, regularize the spelling. The freeadvice.com computer censors the word "*******," so I have used the @ in place of "a" here.

The cases I've seen on TV involve more serious lies by adoption agencies. They tell adoptive parents that the child is healthy when that is not the case. TV shows are finally letting the public in on this travesty. I have seen quite a few cases in which a teenager commits a serious crime, and then the adoptive parents of the teenager find out that the biological parent(s) were mentally defective. The adoptive parents of the teenaged criminals should have been informed of the mental problems of the parents, but the adoption agencies lied to them.

I wonder about ramifications not so much of lying but blotching records. Like everything from employment of parents (adoptive or bio) to birth dates etc. There are MANY people who have this complaint about some agencies, so I wonder if a case can be made.

Re: Adoption agency lies

(Illinois) I am not an attorney. I AM the adoptive mother of many. Unfortunately I have learned the hard way that many adoption agencies do lie and/or fail to share negative info. about the child in order to ensure the finalization of the adoption. It is especially common when the child is a sex offender or if the child was sexually assaulted while in foster care. In Illinois, once a child is adopted, the adoptive family has almost no access to support services. Parents considering adoption are not told this. Then when the child becomes violent, etc. after the adoption, there is absolutely nowhere for them to turn. Families are emotionally and financially devastated.


I have been researching wrongful adoption cases but have been unable to find an attorney willing to take on the system and handle my case. Be very, very careful if you plan to adopt.

It is no better, and often worse when adopting internationally. We did an orphanage adoption to ensure the finality of the adoption at placement. WE have no regrets about our adoption and our daughter, but certainly she had many issues that were either unknown or undisclosed. LIke arriving at age 2 half deaf and having no language development at all. WE had met her and started the process at 15 months, and were aware she was delayed at that time and also had a severe cross-eye condition. But she was far worse 10 months later when the adoption was approved and she could leave the orphanage.

The US agencies use in-country facilitators, and those facilitators may or may not provide full-disclosure, to whatever extent it is available. We were in the heartbreaking position of refusing to go forward with our first referral - a little Roma girl who was SOOOO severely affected by either fetal alchohol or fetal drug exposure, or some other form of brain damage that she was absolutely non-responsive to any stimuli. Because I had spent time with brain damaged adults after my father's brain surgery, I recognized many things that the average person may not. The facilitator tried to use guilt ("You just want a perfect child" "You don't like the way looks (not true, we already had pictures and knew what she looked like)" and so on to try to coerce us into proceeding with an adoption of a child that I knew would need lifetime care. We, as older parents, knew we would not live long enough to be there for her the way she'd need.

Our wonderful daughter has overcome many delays and difficulties, these have not fazed us. But certainly none were addressed in the minimal med report that the agency provided.

I do wish to comment that one cannot presume that a person working as a waitress is NOT a nursing student. MY sis, who now has two masters, including one from Yale, has waited plenty of tables working her way through school. And my father, who had a juris doctorate, prefered to work selling real estate and trading. So a person working in a field they like can STILL have the degree the agency stated they did. They MAY not have lied.

Also, as an adoptive parent, what is really important is that the adoptive parents have a stable, happy, loving, supportive and safe environment for their child. And time to spend with them. My husband does not have a masters, nor do I, but we have a nice home in a very good neighborhood, a good school for her, and a great marriage. She is a very happy, kind, loving and accomplished child. I'd hate to think we would have been considered not good enough to adopt because he lacked a masters degree.

Re: Last message

I agree with everything you have said. However, I am talking about a different situation. These are the kids who have sexually assaulted others in the past, then are moved on to new foster/adoptive homes without full disclosure to the new parents. Or kids who are sexually molested in foster care, then moved to cover up the problem. Those kids do not receive the treatment they desperately need. Failure by the state to provide such treatment puts these kids at a much greater risk of a lifetime of "victimhood" or of becoming sex offenders themselves.

You better believe that when this happens the workers do not accidentally forget to provide treatment or inform the new family. The sex offenders should not even be in a family setting. They are placed there rather than in residential treatment because it is much less costly to do so.

I am sorry, I was not clear. I understand that you are speaking of one type of failure to inform. I was adding another. MY post was intended as a suppliment. I am aware of the agencies and government organizations, both here and abroad, basically using misinformed adoptive families as a way to alieve the society of the costs and responsibility for care of dangerous and emotionally damaged children. Society fails to intervene, leaving children in the care of people who have no business being parents, on the misguided presumption that bio is always better.

The children continue to suffer physical, sexual, or emotional abuse. off and on for years (as the bioparents regain custody for a time after "parenting classes"), until the parental rights are finally terminated. The government sponsored agencies, who are driven to place these children permanently and remove them from the foster system (or orphanage system in places like Russia and Ukraine) withold important information. There are children who NEVER should be placed in a home with orther children, AND the parents have every right to full disclosure, as they had no control over these child's early years. I know of many horror stories, people I speak with on adoption support lists, living in fear, with bedroom doors locked to protect other children. Children brought into their families with the best of intentions. Children with really serious attachment disorders. It happens in both domestic and international adoption programs.

I was very intrigued by this post. I adopted a newborn in 1968 from one of the oldest, most reputable agencies in Dallas. I was very young (21) and believed every word the caseworker told me. And for the next 20+ years, I told my son the same story - just as it had been related to me. When my grandson was born with a chronic illness, we requested all non-identifying information the agency had. They tried to get my son to come in personally to pick up the information, and to avail himself of post-adoption counseling. He declined. They REALLY tried to get him to reconsider, and I began to question why they felt so strongly that he needed counseling to deal with his adoption. When we received the paperwork, I knew...the agency had lied to me, left out lots of important details (like the fact that he had been placed with another couple first, who "returned" him after a month), and claimed that a lot of the record had been "lost". I was FURIOUS. This agency had undermined my son's lifelong trust in his mother. When I called to tell them what I thought of this practice, I was informed that they owed me NOTHING because my child was now an adult. About a year ago my daughter-in-law "found" my son's birth mother. Her story is quite different from the story I had passed on to my son. Who is he supposed to believe? What is he supposed to think? He has to wonder, though he says he doesn't, if I deliberately lied to him...if I made his birth mother out to be a "bad person" when, in fact, she claims to have been a victim herself. Adoption agencies should be held accountable. They are playing God with people's lives.

CMfromTX said:

I was very intrigued by this post. I adopted a newborn in 1968 from one of the oldest, most reputable agencies in Dallas. I was very young (21) and believed every word the caseworker told me. And for the next 20+ years, I told my son the same story - just as it had been related to me. When my grandson was born with a chronic illness, we requested all non-identifying information the agency had. They tried to get my son to come in personally to pick up the information, and to avail himself of post-adoption counseling. He declined. They REALLY tried to get him to reconsider, and I began to question why they felt so strongly that he needed counseling to deal with his adoption. When we received the paperwork, I knew...the agency had lied to me, left out lots of important details (like the fact that he had been placed with another couple first, who "returned" him after a month), and claimed that a lot of the record had been "lost". I was FURIOUS. This agency had undermined my son's lifelong trust in his mother. When I called to tell them what I thought of this practice, I was informed that they owed me NOTHING because my child was now an adult. About a year ago my daughter-in-law "found" my son's birth mother. Her story is quite different from the story I had passed on to my son. Who is he supposed to believe? What is he supposed to think? He has to wonder, though he says he doesn't, if I deliberately lied to him...if I made his birth mother out to be a "bad person" when, in fact, she claims to have been a victim herself. Adoption agencies should be held accountable. They are playing God with people's lives.

Click to expand...

Just curious, was it the Gladney Home?

No...it was Hope Cottage.

Agencies withholding of info post-adoption

CMfromTX said:

No...it was Hope Cottage.

Click to expand...

Sorry, I can't figure out how to reply without including a quote.


My son's worker told me his mother was a prostitute who either did not know the father, or did not know the father well enough to know the father's middle name.(my son was supposedly a jr., but had no middle name.) According to the worker, the agency was unable to locate such a man, therefore his rights were terminated by the courts assuming the man id'd by the bio mother might not even exist.

I believed this for 5 yrs. When my 14 yr old was determined to be a serial sex offender, I stumbled across the info that there was a father with the same name. He was killed when my son was two months old. I located the info in the hometown newspaper where the agency was located. (In the obituary archive.) I am sure the agency knew about this, because the man's death was front page news. Since you would think an agency would be upfront about the death of a bio parent (after all, aren't most of us fairly sympathetic when it comes to considering "orphans"?) I have real concerns about what else was kept from us and why.

To post without quoting hit the "reply" button instead of the "quote" button.

cashing in

My guess is that the adoption agency did not acknowledge the man who died as the father so that they would not have to notify his next of kin about his biological son. The biological father's family may have wanted to adopt the child, had they been notified of the child's existence. The adoption agency would lose out on a fee if that happened. The biological mother may have wanted to avoid dealing with the biological father's family, and so declined to notify them herself. This is just speculation based on other cases.