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Garrett LeClere and his new guardian Jeff McCormick.
The Tornadoes that swept across Alabama and other Midwestern and Southern states last month were some of the worst storms on record. According to TIME, “In Alabama alone, at least eight kids lost their parents.” One such young boy, 5-year-old Garrett LeClere, “survived with broken arms and a fractured skull after his parents stuffed the boy and his 13-year-old sister in the bathtub of their Phil Campbell, Ala., home to help shield them from the storm.” LeClere survived, but his parents did not. He, like some other tornado orphans, may have ended up in foster care, but instead he was rescued from the system by his mother’s ex-husband. Continue reading »
It took more than 40 years for Cornell University to realize having multiple "mothers" wasn't healthy for babies
I’ll never forget a day or so after giving birth to my daughter when the nurse came into our hospital room and said she had to take her to the nursery for some vaccinations. She advised it could be too hard for me to watch, but that another nurse would be present and they’d administer the shots simultaneously.
The thought of my daughter being frightened as two strangers hovered over her and inflicted pain was too overwhelming for me, so I gathered myself together and hobbled down the hall to find out where she was so I could be there to comfort her. After all, only hours into her life, my husband and I were all that she knew consistently.
With that in mind, my heart broke as I read about the Cornell University home economics program that lasted from around 1919 to the late 1960s, in which orphaned children were placed in the care of “practice mothers,” who were 22-year-old students, in order to get experience rearing a real newborn.
Children available in the United States
November is National Adoption Month. What most people do not know is how many children are currently in serious need of a loving home in The United States. At any given moment there are 423,000 children in foster care, and roughly 115,000 of those same children are up for adoption.
The problem we currently see surrounding foster care and adoption is that many people interested in adopting are in search of a newborn of Caucasian decent, who are few and far between when it comes to adopting through the current system.
A Canadian court ruled this week that Canada can assume permanent guardianship of two children whose parents were raising them to become Neo-Nazis.
The kids have been in foster care since 2008. They were removed from their parents’ home after the oldest, an 8-year-old girl, came to school with “racist writings and symbols” drawn on her skin. Continue reading »
I imagine that, as a child in the foster-care system, it would be difficult to trust anyone, be it case workers, foster parents, or pretty much any adult. But when an entire foster-care program throws up its hands and walks away, that’s got to hurt. Especially when the reason is as irrelevant and malicious as a personal opposition to same-sex marriage. That, however, is exactly what the Catholic Church has done in Washington D.C.
Steve Bevelheimer was 64 years old when his foster parents finally adopted him. While his age makes his story unusual, it’s sadly not rare for foster children to age out of the foster care system at age 18 without being adopted. Some, like Bevelheimer, will remain a part of their foster parent’s lives forever. But for many, reaching the age of majority means being out on their own, often ill-prepared for adulthood.
He was fourteen when he escaped a drunken father and an abusive stepmother. At sixty-four, former foster kid Steve Bevelheimer has finally been adopted.
Yes, it’s time to pull out the tissues.
Until the other day, Steve was Steve Harland, a foster kid of Lee and Ellen Bevelheimer since Christmas Day 1959. Continue reading »
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