Adoptions delay is over
An eight-month adoptions delay that led to frustration and heartache for would-be new parents should now be at an end, according to Child and Family Services director Alfred Maybury.
However, more stringent adoption regulations now in force come with extra expenses for parents — such as a bill of $2,125 for their home assessment.
This newspaper investigated the matter after being contacted by a married couple left baffled by a year of red tape stonewalling.
In a candid interview with The Royal Gazette, the Department head acknowledged that “a lot of people have looked at the passing of the Act and said ‘You should have been ready for this’ — but unfortunately it doesn’t work like that”.
CFS employees, along with staff at Magistrates’ Court and the Attorney General’s Chambers, have been tied up in training since complex new regulations were unrolled in November 2013. The Department has also been delayed by a shortage of up-to-date forms.
Asked why the Department hadn’t been fully prepared, Mr Maybury replied: “I hate to say it, but when you’re told to do more with less — it takes time.”
Mr Maybury pointed to the required creation of an Adoption Coordinator under the 2006 Act, which was itself amended in 2011.
“That post of Adoption Coordinator means that someone already with the staff is going to have an additional role added,” he said.
“That doesn’t mean that everything moves as fast as it can. First and foremost comes the protection of children. As director, I’ve made it very, very clear to my staff — there will be no dead babies; I’m serious. I want my people to ensure that they are there for the care and protection of children.”
Mr Maybury added that since December of last year the Department had seen a surge in referrals from troubled families.
“Unfortunately, we have to look at where the pressures are and alleviate those pressures,” he said. “Things like the Adoption Act will take a back seat while we deal with that. That’s just what happens.”
In 2010, this newspaper reported that the 2006 Act still hadn’t come into force.
In the following year, amendments were approved to bring the Island’s laws for adopting children from overseas in line with international standards.
“The changes from the old Act to the 2006 Act were not even like night and day — they’re like millennia,” Mr Maybury said.
“The new Act is much more comprehensive in looking at every aspect of overseas adoption. For example, you must make every effort and convince the court that every effort has been made to identify both parents and get their approval before a child can be placed for adoption. We must be assured that the parents are the real parents. There are technical aspects with DNA to ensure that the person giving the approval is the correct person.”
Meanwhile, last year’s new set of Adoption Rules repealed the 1964 regulations — but have only just become effective.
The updated package of forms is now available at the Department’s quarters on Victoria Street, as well as Magistrates’ Court. Parents had formerly had to go between the two offices.
Obtaining new forms for the often laborious process of adopting a child was only part of the impediment, the director said “significant training” had to be undertaken across Ministries, and orientation was hampered by staff schedules.
“In between all that, we recognised some gaps that we had to address,” Mr Maybury said. “We are now well versed in the process. The new forms are out, and we’re working with all those people that have made applications to get on the adoption register.”
About a dozen “unlucky” applicants have been in adoption limbo after registering past the November 2013 cut-off. Those who applied prior to the gazetting of the new rules were permitted to go ahead under the old regime.
For reasons of safety — and liability — the new legislation is “much more complex”, Mr Maybury said.
“Previously, the home study evaluation was done at the back end; now it’s done at the front end. We need to ensure that those individuals who want to adopt clearly understand it and are able physically and financially.”
The new Act also requires the consent or at least notification of a former parent, Mr Maybury added.
“We have to do due diligence — meaning if one parent doesn’t know where the other is, but the last they heard he was in Timbuktu, then we have to place ads in newspapers there to indicate that we are looking for that person. We have to make every effort.”
Part of this includes a financial burden that can’t be borne by CFS: psychological assessments have to be paid for by the adoptive parents, and a person who wishes to place their child up for adoption must receive counselling and assessments. Mr Maybury said due to the complexity of individual cases, it was impossible to say upfront how much the average adoption might cost under the new regime.
“Now we’re in a better position to explain to adoptive parents what the process is,” he said. “It would have been unfair, prior to last month, to give people adoption packages without also saying how each of the steps works. They would have been frustrated by that as well.”s
For one married couple, Bermuda’s slow switch in adoption regimes has proved so “contradictory and confusing” that they had no recourse but to hire a lawyer.
But recent communications with the Department of Child and Family Services only compounded their frustration, as CFS staff told them the Department was “in the midst of a holding pattern”.
The prospective father, a foreign national, has been striving to adopt his Bermudian wife’s daughter for eight months, with legal costs expected to run to $5,000 — and still no end in sight.
“When I first met my wife four years ago, her four-year-old daughter had never even met her birth father, who lives in Bermuda but chose not to play any part in her life,” the father, requesting anonymity, told The Royal Gazette.
“So when we got married, I was very happy and proud to unofficially take on the permanent role of the little girl’s father. I was lucky enough for her to accept me in that role too.
“Now we have another child of our own, and as far as the two of them are concerned they are just like any other brother and sister. In fact we’re just like any other family: a mum, a dad, a little girl and a little boy ... except that the little girl doesn’t get to say she has a father.
“She knows I’m her little brother’s father and sometimes she calls me daddy herself, but she’s also old enough and smart enough to realise the sad truth that, in the eyes of the law, her own father is still that other man who doesn’t want to be in her life.
“We’ve long believed that adopting her would be the natural way to make our family complete. We appreciated this process wouldn’t be easy, and neither should it be, but whereas before we were faced with red tape, we now seem to have come up against an iron gate.
“On a wider scale, we’re constantly hearing Bermuda’s leaders blaming social problems on the lack of active fathers on the Island. Yet here’s one guy being denied the privilege of being a loving father to a daughter who wants and needs him.
“For us, though, the only thing that really matters is that, legally, our little girl is left without a father, through no fault of her own, until something is done to end this legislative standstill.”
