Parents for Ethical Adoption Reform (PEAR) announces it's new initiative to develop a model education program for adoptive parents. We believe that all parents should receive a comprehensive and realistic education prior to adopting. PEAR also feels many parents come to adoption inadequately prepared for the challenges of adoption. We hope to create a parent friendly HONEST education program that will give parents what they need and want in order to assist them in this amazing but often taxing journey.

As part of this initiative, PEAR will be collecting the thoughts, opinions and experiences of current adoptive and prospective adoptive parents. We have created a Yahoo group to help facilitate the easy collection of this information: http://groups.yahoo.com/group/PEAR-ED.

If you wish to contribute, but do not wish to join a yahoo group, you may submit your input directly to PEAR at reform @ pear-now.org. After collecting information, resources, and adoption community opinions, the PEAR-ED project intends to create a model education program for use by adoption agencies and prospective adoptive parents.

• Please tell us what you think was helpful or useful about your adoption preparation, what was bad, what could have been better, what you would like to have read, experienced or participated in. 
• Tell us what articles, books, educational materials or programs were best for you and why. 
• Tell us what is needed to prepare parents for the journey of adoption. 
• Review any existing programs you have participated in. 

We invite you to contribute your
own writings and opinions and lists of information. (for large articles, please contact the list management via PEAR-ED-owner @ yahoogroups.com) We invite you to REFER us to the work of others you feel are useful - please do not copy and paste the work of others due to coppyright issues.

PLEASE DO NOT CONTRIBUTE UNLESS YOU ARE WILLING TO HAVE YOUR WORDS AND WRITINGS PUBLISHED at a later date as part of this project. You may contribute anonymously.

Please list your name at the top of your article/list/information *if* you would like to be credited. All materials contributed are deemed to be freely distributable by PEAR-ED.

There's a great, great article in this month's Mother Jones by Elizabeth Larsen titled, "Did I Steal My Daughter? The Tribulations of Global Adoption". I encourage you all to read it; it's a terrific piece. An excerpt from the article:

Is it ethical for an adoptive parent to push for information about her child's birth family? Or should that be a decision left to the adoptee? And what about the birth family's right to privacy? "You can't compare an open adoption in the U.S. with an open adoption process internationally," says Susan Soon keum Cox, vice president of public policy at Holt International, an Oregon adoption agency whose founders launched transnational adoptions in the United States. The child of a Korean woman and a British soldier, Cox, who was adopted in 1956, found her Korean half brothers when she was an adult. Yet she cautions against too-hasty birth family searches. "The stigma of adoption in many countries is still very powerful and very real. Women place their children for adoption and slip back into society. It's a very different thing than the acceptance of single parents and adoption in the U.S." In China, currently the greatest source of transnational adoptees—6,493 U.S. "orphan" visas were issued to Chinese adoptees in 2006—relinquishing a child is illegal, and families sometimes abandon their children to avoid running afoul of the one-child policy; birth mothers found to have done this can face prosecution.
...
Openness, Smolin notes, would also make it harder for parents to think of adoptions as "rescuing" children. "There are cultural reasons why people give up children for adoption," he says. "But when you have a situation where money alone, in relatively small quantities, would allow the birth family to keep the child—under current law you are allowed to take the child and spend $30,000 when $200 would be enough to avoid the relinquishment."

Today, Allison Quets pled guilty to international kidnapping. In case you can't place her, she was the 49-year-old mother who had placed twins (conceived intentionally, through in-vitro) then took them to Canada over Christmas-- without their adopting parents' consent.