Essential Estrogen

Committees in Des Moines have squeezed two more bills out ahead of a funnel week deadline.

The so-called bottle bill remains alive after being approved 20-0 by the House Environmental Protection Committee. While the bill creates a beverage container task force, the primary focus of the bill is the doubling of redemption center revenues (increase reimbursement per container from one penny to two). This would mark the first change in revenue in three decades.

While it wasn't really a full bill, members of the Iowa Senate Human Resource committee have passed enough of a bill summary to keep adoption regulation alive in this session. Committee Chair Amanda Ragan (D-Mason City) says the "shell bill" includes only a basic intent of the future full bill (which will be completed in the next week or two).

The bill takes aim at adoption facilitators by allowing the Iowa Department of Human Services to oversee their operations. Such facilitators are individuals or companies that charge a fee to match prospective adoptive parents with women looking to place their children.

The bill was prompted by problems which surfaced with a company known as Adoption Insight out of California. The company (like many other similar agencies) places classified ads in newspapers throughout the U.S. and advertises on the internet for pregnant women who are considering adoption. Through a court case spawned by a mother who refused to give up her child to an adoptive family, the public learned that Adoption Insight was bringing such pregnant women into a certain apartment complex in Sioux City where they were introduced to prospective parents for their unborn children.

Such facilitators often get paid an up front fee of $5,000 or more to match an adoptive family with a mother. They charge so much more than the traditional nonprofit agencies because they are typically much more aggressive with recruiting mothers which leads to quicker placements.

When the Florida woman who was relocated in Sioux City and then refused to sign the final papers to release her newborn daughter to the chosen adoptive family, she says the adoption agency retaliated by evicting her with one day notice and phoning the hospital with concerns about the woman's ability to care for her newborn and older daughter. The state, upon discovering the woman had no home, took both children and placed them into foster care.

Unfortunately, this legislation comes too late for the mother mentioned above. I attempted some phone calls today to see if the mother had ever re-won custody of her children, but have not been able to find an answer. The last update I have is from Feb. 2006 when the woman and her mother were living in a Sioux City home and continuing to fight to get the children back. It was expected for the children to remain in a foster home throughout the summer.