This article is a collaboration between The New Yorker and ProPublica.

Alicia Johansen spent her childhood moving with her drug-addicted mom from one place to the next, trying to brace herself for the moment when the water and the electricity would get cut off. So at twenty-two, when she had a chance to run Dolittle’s pool hall, in the ranching town of Akron, Colorado, she was intent on making some money. She kept the bar open deep into the night, after the older guys who bet on horse races departed, and the truckers and the younger crowd, with the meth, drifted in. Meth, she soon discovered, helped her work longer hours.

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An occasional customer was Fred Thornton, a former high-school baseball star in his early thirties. Fred was sometimes a roofer and at other times unemployed and homeless. They began dating casually and using together, and he told her of his own complicated childhood: placed in foster care as a toddler, after allegations of neglect, and later adopted.

Alicia’s period was irregular because of the meth, which also dimmed her self-awareness. She was six months along before she realized that she was pregnant; a month after that, she woke up in pain. She had preeclampsia, which caused dangerously high blood pressure, and needed an immediate C-section. She was airlifted to a hospital in Denver, a hundred miles away. Her and Fred’s son, Carter James Thornton, was born on August 6, 2019—two and a half months premature, two and a half pounds in weight, and, according to his lab work, exposed to meth and to THC.

That first week at the hospital, Alicia hovered over Carter, who was curled beneath a web of tubes and wires, before going home to get baby things. The third week, she and Fred visited their son and held him skin-to-skin. The fourth week, back in Akron, they faltered: they had no gas money for a return to the big city; they were bickering; they were high. On the fifth week, when Carter was stable enough to leave the neonatal intensive-care unit, Alicia returned, but foster parents from Akron were the ones who took him home.

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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. During the next three months, as the department steadily recorded Alicia and Fred’s positive drug tests and missed visits, none of their excuses were entertained, a hard line for which they would later be grateful. In December, they decided that if they wanted to raise their child together—and they did—they would have to get sober for good.

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. Fred took a job as a maintenance man for the county, installing plumbing in low-income housing and mowing the fairgrounds. Alicia left bar work, and began delivering mail for the U.S. Postal Service and manning the deli counter at a grocery store on her days off. They spent much of what they earned replacing carpets, repainting walls, and fogging air ducts to remove any lingering trace of meth from their one-story house, which, before Carter’s arrival, at times lacked water and electricity. They had completed parenting lessons and were in therapy, getting support for their sobriety and learning how to be better partners to each other. In other words, the foster-care system, whose goal under federal law is to be temporary, in service of a family reuniting, seemed to be working.

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.

It has become harder and harder to adopt a child, especially an infant, in the United States. Adoptions from abroad plummeted from twenty-three thousand in 2004 to fifteen hundred last year, largely owing to stricter policies in Asia and elsewhere, and to a 2008 Hague Convention treaty designed to encourage adoptions within the country of origin and to reduce child trafficking. Domestically, as the stigma of single motherhood continues to wane, fewer young moms are voluntarily giving up their babies, and private adoption has, as a result, turned into an expensive waiting game. Fostering to adopt is now Plan C, but it, too, can be a long process, because the law requires that nearly all birth parents be given a chance before their rights are terminated. Intervening has emerged as a way for aspiring adopters to move things along and have more of a say in whether the birth family should be reunified.

Intervenors can file motions, enter evidence, and call and cross-examine witnesses to argue that a child would be better off staying with them permanently, even if the birth parents—or other family members, such as grandparents—have fulfilled all their legal obligations to provide the child with a safe home. When Carter’s foster parents intervened in the hope of keeping him, they turned to the firm of Tim Eirich, a Denver adoption attorney who charges as much as four hundred dollars an hour and has almost single-handedly systematized intervention in Colorado.

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A video of the two-hour parenting evaluation that would help determine who would raise Carter shows Alicia and Fred sitting on the floor of a utilitarian playroom in a government building, smiling, and their son, now almost one, grabbing Fred’s baseball cap and chewing on it. Alicia feeds him a bit of red bell pepper, explaining to the evaluator, who sits in a chair just off camera, that an occupational therapist suggested that they introduce Carter to new food textures. Both parents cheer as Carter scootches around, and, intermittently, they answer questions that the evaluator poses in a warm Texas accent. What do they think a successful transition from foster care would look like? How would they characterize Carter’s personality? (“Curious,” “Easy to soothe.”) At one point, Fred confides that the playroom has sparked a memory of his birth mother in a similar space, her black hair down to her waist, shortly before she was erased from his life.

After the visit, the evaluator, a social worker named Diane Baird, made a report to the county. Alicia and Fred were kind to Carter, she noted, and she praised them for remaining sober and being “earnest in their regret” about the mistakes they had made. But she criticized them for repeatedly encouraging Carter to crawl, which he wasn’t quite ready to do, and for giving him the bell pepper—actions, Baird said, that betrayed a lack of understanding that he had developmental delays. “Neither parent has the kind of relationship with Carter that will help him feel safe in a new situation,” she wrote.

When Alicia read the report, she was bewildered. Did Baird not understand how hard it is to bond with a baby you’ve been allowed to see for only a few hours a week, while masked, or in fifteen-minute stints on Zoom? And why was Carter’s eye contact with her, which Baird had specifically praised during the visit, now described as lacking “affective involvement”? But she and Fred decided to focus on the practical advice that Baird had given them, including not to fall silent around Carter and to face his developmental delays instead of avoiding them.

After a follow-up evaluation a month later, Baird reported that Alicia’s knowledge of child development was deepening, and that she and Fred had engaged in imaginative play, as when Fred aced a feeding game by using a toy dinosaur. Nonetheless, Baird opposed Carter’s being returned to Alicia and Fred, on the ground that the foster-parent intervenors had reported that he pitched fits and struggled to eat and sleep after seeing them.

Although hired as a consultant by Washington County in this case, Baird had a long-standing independent agenda: helping foster parents across Colorado succeed in intervening and permanently claiming the children they care for. Often working hand in hand with Tim Eirich, she has been called as an expert in, by her count, hundreds of child-welfare cases, and she sometimes evaluates visits between birth families and children without having met them. Baird would not say how many foster-parent intervenor cases she has participated in, but she can recall only a single instance in which she concluded that the intervenors should not keep the child. Thinking that particular couple would be weak adoptive parents, she told me, she simply filed no report.

In front of the judge in Carter’s case, Baird elaborated on the danger of returning Carter to Alicia and Fred, saying that their visits with him were threatening his primary attachment and causing “a biologic hyperarousal that not only burns calories but self-perpetuates”—a state that becomes worrisome when a child spends “twenty-five to fifty-seven per cent of their time, or whatever,” in it. Rupturing a primary attachment could ultimately cause “sociopathy” in a child, she said.

Source: https://t-tees.com
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