Adoptive Couple v. Baby Girl Update

By Liberty on Lost Daughters Blog, May 29, 2013

This post revisits
the adoption dispute between a South Carolina couple and the Cherokee father of
the girl they thought they'd legally adopted, which I wrote about here. After a not-so-by-the-book adoption, the well-meaning
family brought their new daughter back to South Carolina. The father, who had
been fighting for custody of his daughter for months after mistakenly signing
away his rights, took the case to the South Carolina court, which ruled in his
favor due to the Indian Child Welfare Act. In the year since, the adoptive
couple launched an online campaign called "saveveronica", and brought the case
to the Supreme Court, which heard the case last month. The court is set to rule
sometime in June.

It's the lack of nuance that really gets me. People
toss all manner of bitterness into the Internet, and comments on the story tend
to demonize the father and heroize the adoptive parents. That's not fair and
it's not the whole picture. And imagine the compartmentalization that has to
happen in their minds--(birth father = bad; adoptive parents = good; therefore,
child, who is biologically related to birth father = ?)   I'm not talking
exclusively about the adoptive parents--I'm referring to the band-wagon-jumpers
who have to throw their two cents in and call the birth father a "loser" and
worse.

Even the words "save veronica" are painful. "Save" implies that
the girl is in danger. Save her from her father? From the Indians? Really they
mean "bring her back to us". Not that their desire is inappropriate--of course
we can understand their feelings of loss. But let's call it what it
is.

This comic highlights the irony:

Used
with permission by the artist; Marty Two Bulls http://www.m2bulls.com

I'd like to know more about how the
little girl has fared since living with her father. In a disappointingly
unbalanced article on NPR, the writer admits in one line that, "No one
disputes that she was sublimely happy with her adoptive parents, and videos of
her with her father, now married, seem to show a little girl equally
happy."

"No one disputes" the "sublime happiness" of the girl with the
adoptive parents. Yet evidence of her life with her father merely "seems to
show" happiness.

There are all sorts of privilege issues this case bring
to the surface: Adoptive parents v. birth parents. Married parents v. single
parent. White people v. Native American. Birth mother v. birth father.

Bottom of the hierarchy of "rights" is
often birth fathers, it seems. In a comment on my last post about this case, a
birth father wrote: 

"As a birthfather who has been separated from his
child, and having been through a 2 year legal battle to for full custody and
ending up with practically no rights, I am sympathetic to [Dusten] in this
scenario. The birthfather is almost always treated as the bad guy, and the legal
system is generally stacked against him - not to mention the adoption agencies,
social workers, and birthmothers. The phrase "best interest of the child" is
thrown around in courtrooms and blogs in way that is unilaterally synonymous
with "best interest of the adoptive parents and birthmother". Way to go Dusten
for getting your kid back!! I tried to do so and it left me emotionally,
mentally, and financially devastated, with serious stress-related health
complications to boot. I can only imagine the effort that this man has put into
being present for his daughter. There are, of course, legitimate concerns about
the effect of the transition on the child. Surely there is some immediate
negative psychological effect from being placed into a new home at the age of 2.
Hopefully the long term benefits of being with her biological family in a
culturally appropriate environment outweigh and counterbalance these short term
challenges. To clarify, I am not without sympathy for the adoptive parents - it
must be a tremendous loss for them as well. It's a shame that birthfathers are
kept dumb and in the dark in adoption scenarios, otherwise such heartbreak could
be avoided."

I'm nervous for the Supreme Court ruling. It's hard even for
me to write about it--it literally makes my heart rate increase. I'm sad for the
adoptive parents who feel they got slighted. But honestly I'm even more sad for
the birth father and all the backlash against him. And the little girl too--what
trauma she's been through (and what more trauma might await her if the court
says she should be removed again and taken to live with the adoptive
parents whom she hasn't seen for a year!) I hope that all those nasty comments
about Native Americans and about her father will be gone from the Internet by
the time she is able to read them. I hope society as a whole will embrace a more
balanced viewpoint about adoption by the time she can read, too.