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An Associated Press story announced that Robert and Renee Albert, of Brookline, MA, were awarded $409,000 in damages because their adoption agency did not disclose accurate medical records of the twins they adopted in 1991.
One of their boys has cerebral palsy; the other has obsessive-compulsive disorder, a tic disorder and Tourette’s syndrome. The parents claimed that the founder of Adoptions With Love, a Massachusetts-based agency, told them the birth mother had an uneventful pregnancy and delivery, when in reality, she suffered from hepatitis and various other ailments and spent two weeks in the hospital after giving birth.
The Albert family sought more than $1 million in damages from Adoptions With Love; its founder, Elizabeth Quackenbush; employee Amy Cohen; and Chosen Children (a Florida adoption agency). They will collect about $104,000 plus 12 years of interest. The remainder will be deducted from the $409,000 to cover a settlement received from the medical center in which the boys were born and from medical bills covered by insurance.
Amy Cohen, who is now the executive director of Adoptions With Love, claimed that nobody from her agency withheld information or did anything wrong.
The jury apparently thought otherwise. Renee Albert said:
“This case is about when people don’t tell the truth, there are consequences. Prior to placing them in our arms, we were a young, childless couple with a choice.”
That’s the bottom line in this case. The Alberts had a choice. They could have intentionally chosen to adopt children with physical challenges – they indicated that they didn’t feel equipped to do so. And yet, because they were lied to, they ended up adopting the boys.
It’s not that they don’t love their children – in the article, Renee Albert indicates that they do love them and are committed to them. But in a case in which the lives of three people would be drastically different had the Alberts not been misled, someone has to take responsibility.
I believe that most adoption agencies do their utmost to give accurate reports about the health of the child(ren) being adopted. Most agencies also spend a great deal of time with the prospective parents, helping them consider health issues they do and don’t feel capable of handling.
Not only must adoption professionals be honest about the potential pitfalls of adoption, but prospective parents have the responsibility to be clear about what they will and won’t accept in a child. If parents say they want to adopt a child with cerebral palsy or Tourette’s syndrome, that’s great. But we all know it takes special parenting skills to deal with these issues.
If children with these challenges had been born to them, the parents would figure out how to cope with them. But they weren’t. The parents were adopting and they had a choice. It was the one element of their adoption that they had control over, and it was taken from them. That’s wrong.
Source: Boston.com
