[ArrereGarhync]

the kid thinks the adoptive parents are the real parents, giving it back to the biological parents would be cruel, I agree with what Elok said, the child will have 4 parents from now on, and decide on what do with his life as a teenager

Does she think the adoptive parents are her real parents? I think the trend these days iis to tell a kid that she's aodpted at some point. Also I beleive that she was around 3 or 4 at the time of her adoption. She may not remember her adoption, but she may remember living in the orphanage.

[WournGona]

She has siblings in Guatemala. She should be with them and her parents. Also, the adoption agencies responsible should be closed down and charged. Someone should have been responsible for due diligence.

[varrozans]

While she may know that she is not the biological child of her parents (it may be obvious, depending on their respective ethnicities), she's been with them and their family for five years, while she is unlikely to remember more than tiny traces of her birth mother. Returning her means uprooting her from her entire life as she knows it; it's quite likely she'll come to regard her birth mother as "that woman who took me away from my family," IMO. No matter how kind she is, that's how it's going to seem, especially if she's going away to a whole other country. This seems like it would create not one but two broken families.

I agree.
The child has been with his adptive parents for years, it regards the children of his new family as his own siblings, has made friends in the new country and speaks its language fluently, while probably not being able to communicate with the inhabitants of the country in which his biological parents reside.
It would be rather cruel to the child at this age if it is suddenly taken out of his normal surroundings and put into a foreign country with a family it doesn´t know.

[ElegeExcest]

She has siblings in Guatemala. She should be with them and her parents. Also, the adoption agencies responsible should be closed down and charged. Someone should have been responsible for due diligence.

IIRC nine people are charged, including a judge. I'll see if I can find more.

[kertionderf]

Yes it can. You want the child to suffer as well as its adoptive parents so that the mother doesn't suffer. How is more suffering better than less suffering?

[Jeffery]

How about you ask the kid?

Children are not consider to be competent to make adult decisions especially on legal matters. Yes, an advocate/representative for the child must and should be appointed to make sure the child's interests are upheld but that doesn't mean a child is the same as an adult. Also children tend to want what they know even though they are unable to understand complex concepts such as legality. Someone has said that the child no longer speaks Spanish and that this would cause an undo hardship but a young child can adapt and she would have had Spanish language skills had this horrible crime not been committed.

Lastly, some judges, especially (IMHO) American judges from rural areas are filled with nationalist or even racist beliefs feeling that central America must be horrible there for the child is better off in America. Such paternalistic beliefs must be avoided. The child, even if they live a poor life, is better off with their real family as long as their real family is not abusive which no one has claimed is the case. The adoption is clearly not legal so if the adoptive parents did not adopt her then certainly she belongs with her real parents.

[retyopj]

Thank you, Dinner, for reminding us that believing in ugly, asinine stereotypes about whole classes of humanity is A Bad Thing. Is this one of those "only Nixon could go to China" things?

[Dwnijzhd]

By the way, maybe you should lay off the prejudice against rural people.

But...but...but those ignorant dirty peasants in backwoods America have ugly and wrong beliefs about the proud working people of rural Guatemala!

[erepsysoulperj]

What does "system of desert" mean? And why should I cut rural areas slack if the objection is true?

You basically said "the mother deserves the child so who gives a **** if the child would hate being forced to move to Guatemala and live with people he/she doesn't know in a culture he/she finds to be foreign". You subscribe to the notion, as Elok pointed out, that children are the property of their parents. And you are prejudiced if you assume that someone from a rural area is a backward and ignorant racist.

[googlopharm]

Just to be clear: you're talking about taking the girl away from the people she thinks of as her parents, along with any other children they might have--her siblings--her friends, her school, her church if she goes there, any extracurricular activities...you are proposing removing her from her entire life as she knows it, to go and live with a stranger in a country she likely remembers little of, with a culture she won't understand, living a life that's entirely foreign to her. That's not the sort of thing you should do lightly, and certainly not on the grounds that she's some sort of stolen goods.

[gundos]

Yes it can. You want the child to suffer as well as its adoptive parents so that the mother doesn't suffer. How is more suffering better than less suffering?

You don't know what I want. I'm not interested in playing with strawmen with you.

[Agitoligflise]

Would there even be a question of the proper disposition of the child if her biological parents were Americans. I'm pretty sure the decision would be automatic to return her to her biological parents unless her biological parents were unfit.
I'm wondering why she was adopted in the first place. Her adoptive parents have one biological child of their own. Having has a kid of their own they intending to save a third world orphan? How did that turn out? Someone went out and made her an orphan because they expected a profit from the transaction. Was her adoption really through legitimate formal channels or was it the product of large sums of cash paid to "private" agents? Maybe if people who want to adopt foreign orphans weren't paying small fortunes - amounts far larger than the actual cost, tragedies like this wouldn't happen.

[CULTDIAMONDS]

Wow. If this is at all accurate, it makes the adoptive parents look very bad:

The daughter of Loyda Elizabeth Rodríguez and Dayner Orlando Hernández, both twenty-four years old, was kidnapped on November 3, 2006 from their home. They reported Anyelí’s kidnapping the same day. The couple had two other children together, and two-year-old Anyelí was their middle child and only daughter. After years of pleading with authorities to help find her missing daughter, Loyda finally found a photo she believed to be Anyelí in Guatemalan immigration records, in the adoption file of a child called “Karen Abigail López García.”

But the child had already been taken out of the country. “Karen Abigail” left Guatemala aboard Continental airlines flight #457 on December 9, 2008 with a new set of parents, Jennifer Vanhorn Monahan and Timothy Monahan of Liberty, Missouri. They were clients of the Florida-based adoption agency Celebrate Children International, a Christian nonprofit with a serious complaint history dating back to the company’s start in 2004. A “contact” for the agency, a young Guatemalan man in his 20′s named Marvin Bran had initially offered “Karen Abigail” to agency director Sue Hedberg for placement. When the Monahans accepted an adoption referral for “Karen Abigail,” the lawyer listed on their Guatemalan Power of Attorney form was none other than César Augosto Trujillo, the same man who handled many other “Marvin Bran babies,” including the little girl at the heart of my book: Fernanda Alvarado.

The Monahans’ adoption was a slow, tangled process that began in 2006. By July 2007, a failed DNA test revealed that a fake birth mother had relinquished “Karen Abigail.” According to emails the Monahans sent to Guatemalan private investigators, they were distressed and confused. They’d already waited seven months for the adoption to move forward, with almost no progress.[i] On August 1st, Jennifer Monahan wrote in her personal timeline of the adoption that agency head Sue Hedberg had planned to ask LabCorp, the primary DNA testing facility in the US used for adoptions, to “bury” the results of the mismatched test. But “LabCorp can’t do that anymore,” Monahan noted, because of newly tightened regulations. She’d grown suspicious about what was unfolding in the adoption, and took careful notes of everything that transpired, including, her notes say, recording conversations with Sue Hedberg. When Monahan asked Hedberg what could be done after the child’s failed DNA test, aparently seeking alternative ways to push the adoption through, Hedberg responded that Marvin might bring the child to an orphanage, where she might eventually become declared abandoned. Or, Hedberg said, Bran might dump the girl “somewhere where nobody could find her.” In subsequent emails, Monahan said she was “terrified.” A hell of a lot more here.

[joanasevilyboaz]

Wow. If this is at all accurate, it makes the adoptive parents look very bad:



A hell of a lot more here.

That writer certainly tried to twist it to look bad. A shame that some people will be easily influenced by that.

Irresponsible journalism.

[haudraufwienix]

I don't see any actually evidence of that beyond the writer's speculation. Rather, in the primary sources, I see adoptive parents fearful of losing the child that they have formed an attachment to, and possibly being shook down by the adoption agency.