By Staff Reporter |
Republican Rep. David Schweikert criticized adoption agencies for predatory practices during a hearing this week featuring celebrity Paris Hilton, founder and CEO of 11:11 Media.
Schweikert came to the conclusion through his experience adopting his two-year-old son, the brother of the little girl they’d adopted before him. According to Schweikert’s remarks during Wednesday’s Ways and Means Committee hearing, adoption agencies impose prohibitively expensive adoption fees — even if the mother had just given birth and they had no role in the pregnancy or birth up to that moment, as was in his case.
“Two years ago this week, all of a sudden I’m getting text messages from my office, saying there’s a social worker who needs me to call her. Okay. I immediately assume I have a family member who needs bail money. I call the social worker and the first words out of her mouth were, ‘Are you going to come pick it up?’ Pick up what? Apparently the birth mother of the little girl we had adopted six years earlier had walked into the hospital, no prenatal care, substance abuse, and had a little boy. The little boy was very small, and going through withdrawals. […] One of the greatest things that’s ever happened in our lives. But before we were able to walk out of that hospital with him, turns out an adoption agency worker had gotten the birth mother to sign a piece of paper. Now remember, the birth mother had said, ‘Hey, the Schweikerts had adopted my little girl. This is the brother, wouldn’t that be nice if they could be together?’ We were told we had to sign a piece of paper for $40,000 before we were allowed to walk out the door with the baby because the baby belonged to adoption services. How does a middle class family adopt with these types of costs?”
Schweikert reflected on his experience to compare with Hilton’s testimony, which detailed her allegations of inhumane treatment at a congregate-care facility. The congressman concluded that the child welfare system suffers from financial greed.
“Mrs. Hilton actually said something that was brilliant. It’s about the money,” said Schweikert.
Hilton recounted how she was taken to a youth residential treatment facility at 16 years old. She testified that, under “troubled teen” programs promising “healing, growth, and support,” she had actually faced two years of physical, emotional, and sexual abuse.
Hilton testified she was force-fed medications, sexually abused by staff, violently restrained, dragged down hallways, stripped naked, forced in solitary confinement frequently, and deprived of views of the outside world.
“My parents were completely deceived, lied to, and manipulated by this for-profit industry about the inhumane treatment I was experiencing,” said Hilton. “Can you only imagine the experience for youth who are placed by the state and don’t have people regularly checking in on them?”
As reason for her testimony, Hilton advocated for the reauthorization of Title IV-B, a Social Security Act provision that created two child welfare programs with federal funding under two parts. Part 1 enacted Child Welfare Services while Part 2 enacted Promoting Safe and Stable Families.
Hilton also advocated for the Stop Institutional Child Abuse Act and again declared support for the Senate Finance Committee’s “Warehouses of Neglect” report.
This latest hearing of the Ways and Means Committee was the latest in a long string of hearings on the subject, more than any in the last eight congressional systems combined per the committee. The committee has been conducting a thorough review of Title IV-B over the past year.
Committee Chairman Jason Smith, a Missouri Republican, outlined a number of pervasive issues with the child welfare system: inadequate kinship care support, high social worker turnover, excessive bureaucratic red tape, slow hearings and lack of lawyer access for families, remaining barriers for Native American tribal families, high rates of mental health issues in older foster youth, and discrimination rather than support for impoverished families.
Watch Wednesday’s full hearing below:
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