[Congressional Record (Bound Edition), Volume 160 (2014), Part 11]
[Senate]
[Pages 16065-16068]
[From the U.S. Government Publishing Office, www.gpo.gov]




                        NATIONAL ADOPTION MONTH

  Ms. KLOBUCHAR. Mr. President, I rise in recognition of National 
Adoption Month, and I know our great colleague Senator Landrieu will be 
here to also address this important month. She has been such a great 
leader in fighting for this cause. She has literally gone to Guatemala 
to make sure that children who are awaiting loving homes in our country 
get to come to those homes. She literally knows the names of those kids 
and is hands-on every step of the way and has been the leader in 
Congress.
  She established the Congressional Coalition on Adoption, which has 
brought together Senators and Members of Congress on behalf of children 
who need loving homes and families who want to welcome them home. We 
are very pleased with her leadership.
  Senator Landrieu is joining us right now, and I will be able to flip 
it over to my friend at any time it is appropriate. But I do wish to 
speak about National Adoption Month. It is especially important in my 
home State of Minnesota.
  Many people don't know this, but Minnesota actually has the highest 
rate of international adoptions in the country. Minnesota families have 
opened their homes and their hearts to children from all over the 
world--from Vietnam to Guatemala to Nepal to Haiti.
  I have had the opportunity to witness the power of adoption 
firsthand. Before being elected to the Senate, I spent 8 years as 
Hennepin County attorney,

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the largest county in Minnesota. We had jurisdiction over foster care 
and adoption. I actually worked to speed up those adoptions. I remember 
saying we need to eliminate this delay and reduce the time it takes for 
a child who has been going from foster care home to foster care home in 
half, and we were able to do that because people understood the need 
for children to have a permanent home.
  I know Senator Landrieu is here right now and has a busy schedule, 
and I will turn it over to her as soon as I finish.
  In the United States, nearly 400,000 children are living without 
permanent families in the foster care system. Over 100,000 of these 
children are eligible for adoption, but too many of them will wait for 
years and years to be adopted. Some will not be adopted at all.
  Last night I attended an event called Kidsave. It is about children 
who are older and in other countries. This group has actually set up an 
incredible system where the kids come to our country for a few weeks 
and many of them end up being adopted. As the kids get older, it 
becomes harder and harder for them to become adopted.
  Senator Landrieu and I are aware that as some of these countries, 
such as Russia, completely close their doors to adoption, there will 
actually be more and more children who are older that will need to be 
adopted. We hope the system changes and they do eventually open up 
their doors.
  Around the world it is estimated that nearly 18 million orphans who 
have lost parents are living in orphanages or are on the streets and 
lack the care and attention required for healthy development. As a 
nation, we must open our arms to these children. Just last night at 
this event, I had the opportunity to hear the story of Jennifer 
Baumann, a 17-year-old girl from Colombia. She spent years in a broken 
home and then in a broken foster care system in that country. She was 
exposed to violence. She would go to bed hungry.
  At age 14, she was still in foster care and had lost hope for her 
future. She was considered too old to be adopted. As she said in her 
own words, she ``cried for a year.''
  But then, miraculously, she had the chance to visit a family here in 
America as part of the program that Kidsave organized. The family fell 
in love with her, she fell in love with them, and in 2011 she was 
adopted into a loving home. We have seen this time and time again in my 
State, and that is why I got involved in legislation with my mentor, 
Mary Landrieu.
  One of the things we found out is--we had a family called the 
Makorises, and they were adopting nine children from the Philippines 
who had first lost their father, and their mother kept them together, 
and then their mother died, and it was the two oldest children who held 
those kids together. When they turned 16 and 17, they couldn't be 
adopted. The Makorises of Cambridge, MN, had to make a decision: Were 
they going to strand those two kids who held the family together, leave 
them in the Philippines, and take the other children? It was like 
Sophie's choice. That was their choice.
  They decided there was a better way. They came to Congress. I led the 
bill in the Senate with the help of Senator Landrieu, Senator Sessions, 
Senator Inhofe, as well as House Members, and we were able to pass a 
bill that allowed kids who had reached an age where they were not 
legally allowed to be adopted, to be adopted if a younger sibling had 
been adopted. That means that retroactively, thanks to the work of 
Senator Landrieu, 10 million children all across the world were allowed 
to be adopted into loving families. And how fun was it to be in the 
Makorises' living room and see all nine children, like some Minnesota 
version of ``The Sound of Music,'' with a place for all of their winter 
boots and their coats. They came from the Philippines in the middle of 
the winter to Minnesota; yet they were still as happy and as warm as 
can be because now they have parents who love them.
  The Senator from Maine understands how important adoption is because 
it has touched his own family. This has touched every Member of the 
Senate.
  As we focus on National Adoption Month, we have to continue to look 
at policies and changes we can make to our laws to make them better. We 
passed that law to allow those older siblings to be adopted. We passed 
a law to allow vaccinations to be allowed in our country to make sure 
they are safe and that they are actually done. But there is more work 
to do with these intercountry adoptions, and I can think of no one 
better to lead that charge than the Senator from Louisiana, Ms. 
Landrieu.
  So I am here to acknowledge the work we have done with the adoption 
tax credit, which we have gotten into law, and the work we have done to 
make sure it is easier for these international adoptions. Every single 
family out there knows there are problems right now with international 
adoptions. A lot of them stem from people such as Vladimir Putin. By 
the way, the reason Senator Landrieu was banned from going to Russia is 
because of the work she is doing for kids, being willing to take Putin 
on because of the fact that he was closing the doors to kids and using 
them as pawns for political gain. That is an amazing story, and that 
shows a fighter.
  (Mr. KING assumed the Chair.)
  I thank the Presiding Officer for his work with adoption and his 
personal story, as well as all the Members on both sides of the aisle 
who have devoted themselves to looking out for these kids who have no 
one else to look out for them.
  I yield the floor.
  The PRESIDING OFFICER. The Senator from Louisiana.
  Ms. LANDRIEU. Mr. President, yesterday we had a very different 
topic--the Keystone XL Pipeline--on the floor of the Senate. That fight 
is over for now, but the fight for adoption, foster care children, and 
all children in the world who are in desperate need of parents to love 
them and to nurture them goes on.
  I could not be surrounded with a better team than Senator Grassley, 
who has been fighting for this in the Senate since before I arrived--
and 18 years ago when I got here, I quickly joined with him to continue 
the fight--and then Amy Klobuchar joined us a few years ago and has 
become an extraordinary, effective, and willing soldier to go to the 
frontlines of this battle. I can't thank the Senator from Minnesota 
enough. She brings tremendous experience as a former prosecutor, which 
I didn't have and I don't think Senator Grassley had, and she really 
understands the inner workings of the court systems in a way that has 
brought a lot of value to our coalition.
  In addition, as she said, we are so proud of Minnesota as the State 
in our Union that has the highest per capita rate of international 
adoptions. So the leaders in Minnesota of all political parties and 
stripes as well as the faith-based community really understand this 
issue and have stood up time and time again. I wish to recognize 
Minnesota's leadership and particularly Senator Klobuchar.
  This month is November. It is a great month. It is Thanksgiving 
month. We give thanks for so many things in our country. It is a 
wonderful celebration--I think in some ways even better than Christmas 
because we are not so much focused on gifts; we are focused on really 
understanding the blessings we have received. One of those great 
blessings is a family.
  I am so fortunate to have been born into one of the most remarkable 
families--not rich when I was born into my family and still not rich, 
and when I was born into my family we were not at all famous either, 
but we have two extraordinary parents, and to this day they continue to 
teach all 9 of us, 37 grandchildren, and now 5 great-grandchildren the 
value of family.
  I have said many times, and Senator Klobuchar has shared this with 
me, governments do a lot of things well, but raising children isn't one 
of them. I will repeat that. Governments do a lot of things well, but 
raising children isn't one of them. Actually, we were created and wired 
for one human to raise another. It just doesn't happen any other way. 
Our faith tells us that.
  But now, interestingly, some really extraordinary science is being 
done by

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some of the most brilliant scientists in the world and sociologists, 
and one of them is from my State, Dr. Charlie Zeanah. I want to give 
him a shout-out. When the terrible tragedy happened in Romania and 
Ceausescu fell--that crazy man who starved his country and put millions 
of children in orphanages--Charlie was one of the Americans who got on 
the plane with me and went to Romania, and he has never left. He 
stayed--not physically the whole time, but his colleagues stayed and 
did the most extraordinary science on the planet of what happens to a 
child who is detached from their birth parent or from a loving 
caregiver--just detached.
  They also did the leading study in the world on institutionalization. 
The findings are remarkable in such a way that if they can't make us 
change the way we think--group homes are not sufficient. No matter how 
well run, they are not sufficient. No institution, no matter how 
beautifully it is run, no orphanage in the world, no matter how 
magnificently it is run, how clean and brightly painted--nothing can 
substitute for what an infant and a toddler and a young child and a 
teenager and an adult, amazingly, but particularly an infant need when 
they are born. They actually need it before they are born, and that is 
a whole other story. But when they are born, it says that the brain 
literally reacts physically to the fact that there is no caregiver who 
is consistent, and that is what happens when a child is abandoned. They 
go through what they are calling now this toxic stress.
  The way I like to describe it--and I know maybe I only have 10 
minutes, but it is worth talking about. Every adult in this world 
within the listening of my voice knows what stress is to an adult. We 
can literally feel it. Some people go out for a run. Some people have a 
couple of glasses of wine. Some people have long talks with their 
friends. We can feel that we have to do something. An infant feels that 
but in multiples, and an infant can't go out for a run, and a toddler 
doesn't know what to do. So that toxic stress goes right inside of them 
and they cannot release it. They don't know how. So it begins to affect 
the development of their brain.
  These scientists are saying that when a child doesn't have, from the 
moment it is born, a constant, caring, confident touch and talk the way 
that loving parents demonstrate--as we know, as we hold our infant 
children in our arms, we give them strength. I used to think they just 
needed food and warmth, but that is not what the science says. The 
science says it is so much beyond that. We should have known this by 
our faith, but sometimes we doubt. So now the science is stepping up 
and saying exactly what we know by faith, which is that it is 
imperative that children have a loving, safe place.
  I have been to orphanages all over this world, and I will never 
forget some of the visions I have seen. This is the most common vision 
we will see in an orphanage anywhere, particularly an orphanage where 
they have infants who are in cribs who are let's say around 1 year old. 
We walk into a room as big as this--sometimes smaller, but I have been 
in ones as large as this--with cribs everywhere, and the infants just 
sit there, those who can sit up, and they stare into space and they 
just rock themselves. The scientists say that is their last desperate 
attempt to console an inconsolable emptiness. So they just rock and 
they stare. They don't cry. The reason they don't cry is because they 
cried incessantly for the first 30 or 60 days of their lives, and then 
when no one came they just stopped because little babies are really 
smart. Contrary to popular belief, they are literally born with an 
exceedingly brilliant brain, but the more toxic, the more distorted it 
gets. So by the time a child is 3--not 13, not 30, but 3--their brain 
is like a muscle that kind of--it just doesn't function. It doesn't 
form correctly. And we can see this on this new imaging.
  I know there are those who think this is a soft issue. People look at 
Amy and they look at me and they look at Chuck Grassley and think, why 
do these people keep talking about this? It is like nothing. Well, it 
is a lot. It is not nothing. It is very serious science, and it is very 
serious community development, and it is very important for this world 
to get this and get it quickly.
  We wonder why prisons are filled. We wonder why psychiatric wards are 
filled. It is not because people are born bad because even though--I 
won't even go into mortal sin and my Catholic background. Let's just 
say forget that. Children are actually born beautifully made because 
God made them, and it is what we do to them in the time of their birth 
and the few years after that really shapes what they are going to be.
  So, in my view, as a leader, that is why I have spent a great deal of 
my time on this subject. It is not a soft issue. It is as hard and as 
important as any Army or any trade policy, and I am never going to stop 
talking about it because it is so clearly the truth that I just can't 
stop talking about it.
  So, again, this is National Adoption Month. We have put a resolution 
on the floor. We always get a remarkable amount of support from our 
Members.
  I want to also give a special shout-out to Senator Blunt, who has a 
child and who is very engaged in this issue, and he has really stepped 
up. He has a child who was adopted, as do I and as do other Members who 
have adopted children or grandchildren. Rosa DeLauro has been a 
remarkable leader in the House. Her grandchild was adopted from 
Guatemala. She has become an extraordinary voice. Susan Bonamici, the 
Congresswoman from Oregon, has also been a great leader. And I just 
can't say again how happy I am that Amy Klobuchar has been here to 
help.
  I have some amazing photographs to share, and I thank the Huffington 
Post because that is where they came from. This is National Adoption 
Month. The Huffington Post has a great picture--and my colleagues can 
go online and see this--of many of the most remarkable adoption stories 
on Adoption Day.
  These are all children I am going to show you, and I am going to tell 
you a little bit about them. This is a domestic adoption out of foster 
care. This is the Michael family. The parents are Tiffanie and Adebayo 
Michael from New York. The couple fostered two siblings, a boy and a 
girl who are pictured here. After 2 years and 4 months, the couple 
adopted these two children out of foster care on National Adoption Day. 
You can see the smiles.
  It is so amazing to see these stories that happen all over the 
country. On National Adoption Day, this Saturday, many of the judges--
this was started by a judge in California. I want to give him credit. 
His name is Judge Nash.
  Judge Nash started this 20 years ago because he was in his courtroom. 
He was so frustrated--as Amy has been as a prosecutor--that no one was 
processing these adoption cases that he decided. This was how simple 
this was. He said: You know what. I am tired of the backlog. I am going 
to come in on Saturday. That is what he did. He said: I am just tired 
of it. So staff, we are coming in on Saturday. We are going to process 
25 adoptions, 30 adoptions when we are not distracted and where we can 
get people in.
  This is how National Adoption Day started. Judge Nash is my hero. 
National Adoption Day was started 20 years ago by one judge in one 
courtroom, and then lots of other organizations joined in. Now it is 
really a big movement.
  This is a happy picture. This is a picture of parents from Baltimore 
who adopted an infant with a cleft palate from China in 2012. When this 
little infant was born--I know something about what happens in China 
and many countries. If an infant is born in almost any country in the 
nondeveloped world and they have anything wrong with them like a finger 
is missing or they have a cleft palate or, particularly, if they have 
something like spina bifida or a leg missing, in some countries they 
are literally put in rooms called dying rooms. They just leave them 
because they don't have the same understanding that we do in the United 
States about A, the dignity of every life, which our faith in this 
country teaches us; and B, in some countries

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they actually think it is a curse by God if a child is born with a 
defect, so they just sort of take it as if God never meant for this 
child to have a life.
  I don't know what would have happened to this little boy. Trust me; 
it would not have been happy. The only little problem with him is he 
had a cleft palate.
  This couple traveled a long distance. Under the law now, they would 
probably have to go back two or three times because we have made it 
harder, not easier, for these parents. I don't know how many times they 
traveled, but they probably took their own money, borrowed money--
unless they are super rich--from their relatives and went twice to get 
this little boy and finally brought him home.
  The next picture is the Haden family. This is my favorite picture. 
They have two adopted children. Crew is a 1-year-old. He was adopted 
from Niger in 2013. Shepherd was 2 years old and was adopted from the 
DRC in 2012.
  The most amazing thing is the biological children, which you can see, 
were the ones who received the children when they came. I have hardly 
seen a more beautiful picture than this that represents what the future 
could be if we would do our jobs.
  The fourth picture is the Williams family. Jeff and Kelley Williams 
are from Nashville, Tennessee. Their faith called them to adopt in 
2012. They brought daughter Haley home to Nashville from an orphanage 
in Ethiopia. This is how many relatives gathered to meet her. The most 
amazing thing about this picture is how tightly her father is holding 
her.
  The fifth is a picture of the Hardbarger family. They are angels this 
year. They are from Shreveport. They are an amazing family from 
Louisiana. Chad is a pastor of a church. He is the senior pastor at 
Emmanuel Baptist Church in Shreveport. They formed an adoption ministry 
because they became so moved by their own experience in adopting.
  They adopted all of these children. Monique is 19, Chris is 14, Bryce 
is 11, Jordan is 9, Bailey is 8, and Gavin is 7. He is a pastor of a 
really wonderful church. They have now taken this as a ministry and are 
developing--I see the leader on the floor.
  I will wrap up in 2 minutes.
  They are developing a wonderful ministry in Shreveport, and many of 
our churches in Louisiana are really stepping up to do this.
  You may not believe this because this is a very famous family. They 
are admired--or otherwise--depending on what circles, so I have a lot 
of respect for the ``Duck Dynasty'' family in this area of what they 
have done. Willie and Korie Robinson have five children, three 
biological, one adopted, and one fostered. The couple adopted Willie, 
often called little Will, through a private adoption agency when he was 
born. They have a foster daughter from Taiwan named Rebecca. Since 
becoming rich and famous, which they weren't always--just a little 
simple family making duck calls, but now they are one of the most 
famous families in the world. They were our national angel 2 years ago, 
and they have continued to promote adoption, both domestic and 
international.
  I wanted to just show a few of the most extraordinary families, both 
famous and not so famous, who are doing this great work.
  I want to thank my colleagues for supporting this resolution, calling 
on us all in every elective office--Governors, Presidents, Members of 
Congress, and then at home in our districts, our courts, our judges, 
our prosecutors--to do everything we can to help.
  I want to show you the last picture because this is our challenge. 
Domestic adoption--I am very proud to have moved this line. I want to 
give Secretary Hillary Clinton a shout-out--Senator Clinton--who helped 
to move this line. She really did remarkable work since 1999--basically 
2000 to 2014. We now have more children being adopted domestically than 
ever before at all ages--infants, teenagers, et cetera.
  Our challenge is international adoptions have dropped precipitously. 
I am going to come back to the floor and give a speech about why this 
is happening and what we have tried to do--a few of us--to turn it 
around, but our voices are hitting the wall and bouncing off because 
the State Department is not listening. We will continue the fight. This 
number is going down dramatically.
  There are children such as that little boy in China with a cleft 
palate who will rot for the rest of their lives. If you want to wonder 
where terrorists come from, I will tell you where they come from. They 
come from families that are dysfunctional, and they come from places 
where there is no hope, no love, and no faith. That is where terrorists 
come from. If you want to stop it, I would suggest we start turning 
this line the other way.
  I yield the floor.
  The PRESIDING OFFICER (Ms. Heitkamp). The Senator from Minnesota.
  Ms. KLOBUCHAR. Madam President, a lot of these adoptions wouldn't 
have happened without Senator Landrieu. When we go anywhere in this 
country on the adoption issue and mention her name, we see nodding of 
heads of so many parents because they actually know what she has done 
to fight for domestic adoptions and foster kids and also on the 
international level. There is so much more work to be done.
  Thank you so much. I will be there when you give your speech.
  The PRESIDING OFFICER. The assistant majority leader.
  Mr. DURBIN. Madam President, let me add my voice in this chorus 
because it is true. Senator Landrieu, more than any Member of the 
Congress, has made adoption her cause. We are reminded by Senator 
Landrieu what a difference it makes in the lives of children and their 
families and the world. I want to commend her. Senator Landrieu is the 
best.
  As the grandfather of an adopted child, I know the difference, the 
joy, the importance of that moment in our family life. I thank her for 
continuing this battle to make certain that we understand the 
importance of adoption.

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