terriwriting:

Was Baird’s method for evaluating these foster and birth families empirically tested? No, Baird answered: Her method is unpublished and unstandardized, and has remained “pretty much unchanged” since the 1980s. It doesn’t have those “standard validity and reliability things,” she admitted. “It’s not a scientific instrument.”

Who hired and was paying her in the case that she was being deposed about? The foster parents, she answered. They wanted to adopt, she said, and had heard about her from other foster parents.

Had she considered or was she even aware of the cultural background of the birth family and child whom she was recommending permanently separating? (The case involved a baby girl of multiracial heritage.) Baird answered that babies have “never possessed” a cultural identity, and therefore are “not losing anything,” at their age, by being adopted. Although when such children grow up, she acknowledged, they might say to their now-adoptive parents, “Oh, I didn’t know we were related to the, you know, Pima tribe in northern California, or whatever the circumstances are.”

The Pima tribe is located in the Phoenix metropolitan area.

It went on and on like this. Baird acknowledged that her entire basis for recommending that the foster parents keep the baby girl was a single less-than-two-hour observation and interview that she’d conducted with them — her clients. She’d never met the baby girl’s biological grandmother, whom the county child services department had been actively planning for the girl to be placed with, according to internal department emails. Nor had she even read any case documents.

“Who hired and was paying her in the case that she was being deposed about? The foster parents, she answered. They wanted to adopt, she said, and had heard about her from other foster parents.”

If only there were a name for the sort of person who accepts payments to take children away from their non-consenting parents. Something to do with children or kids, and perhaps nabbing.

(via jaybirrrd)