A few mornings ago a chilling story hit the airwaves about 300 Ontario adoptions being halted by the Ontario Government. I won’t even begin to suggest that I am objective on this matter. Barely a month has passed since we received the court order confirming the adoption of our daughter. The court order marked the end of our long 4 year adoption process. Needless to say the sense of relief was palpable. But now some 300 adoptions in Ontario, in various stages, have been halted due to a problem with drug tests from Mother Risk. WHAT!?!
Now to be clear, we are not one of the families that got a call from Children’s Aid telling us that we had a problem. It would appear that we are not personally affected by this huge bureaucratic bungle. But I cannot describe the chill that went through me when I read this news story. And now the inevitable question arises about how much power the government has to remove a child? Could a different scenario arise and reverse a court order? Every parent’s worst nightmare is the thought of losing a child. With adoptive parents it’s no different. Some of the families affected were days or maybe weeks away from finalizing. This means that the child was in all likelihood living with them for a year or more.
In our case my daughter lived with us for over a year before everything was finalized, but all along the presumption was she would be staying permanently. She took her first steps in our home, said Daddy for the first time in our home. She snuggles on the couch every Saturday morning with her 7 year old brother. To him she is his sister; to her he is big brother…no room for interpretation or conditions. Because we already had a child when we opted to go down the adoption path we made decisions and choices to protect our son. We were offered the “Fostering with a view to Adopt” program. In this scenario you start as foster parents while Children’s Aid is still in the process of getting custody of the child. We opted NOT to accept this program as the risk of the fostering NOT ending in an adoption was real. We felt it would be very difficult for us as parents to “give back” a child, but not at all acceptable to put our young son through such a loss. Instead we opted for conventional adoption to avoid this kind of risk. But given the News Headlines of a few days ago, we were kidding ourselves about mitigating this risk.
So how do you accept a phone call or a visit from Children’s Aid to be informed that despite doing everything correctly, the child may be taken away…or maybe not, because of potentially inaccurate testing by an agency? I don’t have an answer; I don’t know what I would do. I cannot imagine sitting down with my 7 year old son to inform him that his sister might be taken away. So you can believe that I have incredible sympathy for the hundreds of families that have had their lives turned upside down by this decision.
Part of the adoption process is this great education that parents receive about how the system is all about the interests of the child. We are told about the great lengths that occur to try to re-unify the family and the precautions that are taken, and the great lengths to get it all right. And then there is the intense over the top scrutiny of the adoptive parents. If you want to adopt, you better be prepared to have every part of your life, past and present be scrutinized. Medical, criminal, social and family history is fair game for the state. So how did this go so wrong? And how did such a highly respected institution like Sick Kids Hospital drop the ball with the Mother Risk program? We are constantly told to trust science, trust doctors, trust medical procedures… so how do test results in hundreds of cases become questionable? Where is the oversight?
We are lead to believe the process to remove a child from a parent is thorough and every case scrutinized with great care and is full of legal procedures, including a year where the birth parent can work to redeem themselves. We are told that each case is unique and that each child has their own story. I would like to think that the process of removing a child from a birth parent is the result of clear evidence, on many levels, that the parent is unfit. A drug test is certainly an important part of this scrutiny but should not be the single deciding factor. Yet this decree to halt 300 adoptions seems to be based only on the test result from Mother Risk. The halt of 300 adoptions also has the appearance of a bureaucratic ‘one size fits all’ solution for cases with very diverse situations and needs.
I’m not usually the conspiracy theorist, and I do believe our gov’t usually has good intentions, even when they get it wrong. But in this case it feels like some bureaucrats are making blanket decisions affecting hundreds of lives, because they are too afraid to do the next right thing. This has all the feel of a solution for political expediency at the cost of individual families. And sadly it is going largely unnoticed. It’s time our officials were held more accountable. Adoptive families matter, we love and we hurt the same as the rest. We must do better.
