Before you read Heather’s post today please congratulate her on this month’s publication in Adoptive Families Magazine! Congrats Heather and Well DONE!

An official at Duke University was arrested last week on charges of not only molesting his son but offering him up to be raped by others.

He was a father by adoption.

Before anyone protests that there are horrible parents out there who abuse their biological children, too, just wait–because it gets worse. In Internet chats, Frank Lombard allegedly said he was “into incest” and implied that he adopted for the purpose of having children to molest.  When asked how he got access to a child so young, he answered, “’Adopted’… and said that the process was ‘not so hard … esp (sic) for a black boy.’” (Lombard is white and his two adopted sons are African-American.)

I often hear organizations and individuals saying we need to make it easier for people to adopt. Honestly, I’ve never understood exactly what they want to see happen. The articles don’t say whether Lombard’s adoptions were public or private. But I can tell you that the home study process for our first (domestic, private, agency) adoption was almost a joke. Yes, there was a lot of paperwork, and, sure, we grumbled at times that most parents didn’t have to jump through any hoops before birthing a kid. But shouldn’t it be hard? We were being entrusted with a child. The home study should have been the hardest, most stringent, most thorough process we’d ever faced. Frankly, I’d had tougher interviews for entry-level jobs.

And we should be ashamed that we let continue a de facto scale in which children deemed “harder to place”–like these two African-American baby boys–are adopted through a less restrictive process than other kids. It’s in the best interest of the children to have the same requirements applied to prospective adoptive parents across the board, not loosened based on what value a market-based system has assigned to them.

I know we can never predict what will happen years down the road, what sorts of tragedies will befall adoptive families, nor every choice adoptive parents will make in the future. But at the very least we should be able to stop people like Lombard, who go into adoption with nothing but sick, selfish intent.

My heart goes out to those two children and to their first families, who likely don’t realize that the unnamed boys in the news are their kin. As might be expected, the two boys are now in the protective custody of the North Carolina Department of Social Services. Let’s hope we do better by them this time.