US: When Foster Parents Don’t Want to Give Back the Baby (May require subscription)
New Yorker & ProPublica – October 16, 2023
Carter’s drug exposure and his parents’ weeks-long absence had triggered a call to child-protective services, and then a neglect case against Alicia and Fred in the juvenile court of Washington County, where they lived. To get their son back, the judge informed them, they’d need to take a series of steps laid out by the county’s human-services department: pass random urinalysis drug tests, with missed ones considered positives; secure stable housing and employment; and make it to regular supervised visits with Carter. By the summer of 2020, Alicia and Fred had met every one of the judge’s requirements, and then some. They’d tested negative on more than thirty consecutive drug screens between them, including hair-follicle tests that indicated how long they’d been clean. They had continued to visit Carter weekly through the first months of the pandemic, when a “visit” meant trying to entertain an infant over Zoom. As the couple hit six months sober, the county’s Department of Human Services added, and the judge approved, one more element to their treatment plan: an expert evaluation of how well they interacted with Carter. If they cleared this last hurdle, Alicia and Fred understood, the system would let them reclaim their son. Alicia worried in advance about whether she could be silly with her baby while under scrutiny, and with everything to lose. She would have been more anxious had she known the truth: that she and Fred weren’t just demonstrating their fitness to care for Carter-they were competing for him. His foster parents, hoping to adopt him, had just weeks earlier embraced an increasingly popular legal strategy, known as foster-parent intervening, that significantly improved their odds of winning the child.
https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2023/10/23/foster-family-biological-parents-adoption-intervenors