Babies for Cash – How the State Abuses Infants by Destroying the Mother-Child Bond in CPS Abductions

A baby's first year is crucial to a baby's emotional and cognitive development. It is in the earliest months of life that the foundations for basic trust, security, and relationships are laid. The parent-child relationship is the environment in which that is designed to happen. Yet the majority of children who enter foster care are taken within their first year of life, depriving them of critical bonding time and causing permanent trauma and damage to the babies' ability to trust. More children in this age group are not returned home and are later adopted out than any other age group. According to the 2017 AFCARS report (Adoption and Foster Care Analysis and Reporting System) from the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, almost 1 in 5 children who entered foster care during 2016 (the latest date for which data is available) were less than 1 year old when they were taken from their parents. Fully 25% of the children deemed to be "waiting for adoption" were babies who came into the system at under a year old. These are defined as "children who have a goal of adoption and/or whose parents' parental rights have been terminated." The numbers are clear that babies are the most likely age group to be seized from their parents, not returned, and adopted out. 92% of the adopters receive an "adoption subsidy," which is a taxpayer-funded financial incentive to adopt. Human babies are born with an innate emotional and psychological need for their biological parents. When the child cannot or does not receive the love and acceptance of their own mother and father, he or she is left with a gaping hole deep inside that they may struggle the rest of their lives to fill even if they are loved, wanted, and cherished by a substitute parent. The harm of that separation is seldom considered by anyone within the Child Protective Services or foster care industry, evidenced by the fact that it is never mentioned in any of the thousands of pages of documents that we have examined for hundreds of families whose stories have been featured by Health Impact News.