A False Start - our problems with The Cradle and Holt International.

In brief, our story is that we weren't very careful in choosing a homestudy agency. We'd chosen Holt as our International Agency because of their great reputation and the personal experiences of some good friends. We naively assumed that any of the agencies on Holt's list would be perfectly OK. We were wrong, big time. The journal entry below was written when we were still pretty raw and very upset. Our purpose for posting this to our web site is to remind folks to do their research and not to make any assumptions.

For the record, we're not half as upset at Holt as we are at The Cradle. What The Cradle did to us is inexcusable. Holt is just being a bunch of mindless bureaucrats who don't want trouble.

We have been advised that we probably had a good case for a lawsuit on ADA grounds, but we put it aside - that would have taken away our time and money from going to China and getting our daughter. That didn't, however, stop us from writing to Holt and suggesting that they re-evaluate their social work agencies, or from making a complaint to the Illinois Professional Licensing Board.

The full story and the supporting documentation is below:

From Jim's Journal:

(06/23/99) Time to bring you up to date on what's been going on behind the scenes that we couldn't talk about. It's very ugly, and it has sucked up a lot of our free time. I can talk about it now because a negative set of events have basically set the adoption process back to square one with our original agencies, and we have to get a new agency. In short, we've got nothing to lose in telling our friends (and the agencies if they happened to look at this site) the truth about what's been going on. We got screwed, blewed and tatooed, folks, and anyone asking for our opinion of The Cradle, an adoption agency in Evanston, IL, is likely to get an earful.

To do an overseas adoption, you need two groups working with you...a local agency that helps you with the local paperwork and checks you out in a home study, and a group that deals with the foreign bureaucrats, orphanages, and the paperwork and arrangements that have to do with them. The whole process is a huge paper chase, and will cost around $17-20,000 by the end - fees for everything imaginable.

What the various bureaucratic agencies (state, Federal and the other country) need to have to process you, however, is (while very involved) pretty cut and dried. However, the agencies you are working with may add their own internal limitations, and may play fast and loose with you. This we did not know, and we wish we had. And a lot of the evaluation of you can be very subjective, if the local agency has a particular set of prejudices you fall afoul of that have nothing to do with what the governmental agencies need or want.

What happened is that we ran across one of those tripwires by applying to The Cradle. They had a branch office not far from our home, and seemed legit. What we encountered was that the social worker we had (who was the head of the international adoption program) a serious thing about anyone who was overweight (i.e.over insurance acturiarial standard fitness levels) - a presumption that they were going to die in the near future and leave the kid an orphan again. When we first ran into it (much to my surprise and Susan's horror), we asked what we could do to show that we were OK and were in good health.

The social worker (whose name is Judy Stigger) started us on a useless set of paper chases - we sent her statements from our doctors, and so on. I spent a day going through a hideously uncomfortable stress test to prove my heart and lungs were in good shape. Our doctor's report was tossed aside with a 'yeah, but so what - fat people die early, it says so on the internet'. (I'm not kidding.) Even a 'possible' hormone imbalance called PCOS with Susan (possibly indicative of her prolems with fertility and contributing to weight gain) that the doctors brought up was seen as indicative of her early demise (because of a article Judy Stigger found on the internet about it!), regardless of Susan's doctors' statements to the contrary.

Finally, one of the doctors (Susan's endocrinologist) got back to us - he'd called Stigger directly, and talked to her, and said that we should give it up and find another agency or get a lawyer - that Stigger declined his offer to provide a statement about Susan's possible PCOS (which has never been confirmed because if she does have it, it's minor and would be a concern if we were being treated for infertility). In his words, Stigger was looking for 'the perfect candidate'. And we weren't it, and never would be it. All without ever meeting us once. We were wasting our time with the paper chase, and decided to send in a last appeal to Holt...

We made two requests to the international agency, who had come highly recommended to us (Holt International) to get a different local agency to handle us. The final word came back today, even after a detailed description of what the situation was - no dice. Holt's absolute policy is to never ever second guess the locals; what they say goes in rejecting you, regardless of your case against the locals. Which means that we have been set back to the beginning after months of expensive tests that were dismissed in favor of personal, unfounded prejudice and medical information found on the internet.

In investigating further, we found that China doesn't care about your weight, Holt didn't care about our weight (we'd provided them with what our weights on their applicaton which was accepted last November), and other local agencies and social workers were horrified when we described our dilemma. 'We don't play God', one of them said. Well, some people do.

If you'd care to read the original documents,. they're here as PDF Adobe Acrobat files. There's an email from Beth at Holt and our formal request to Holt to change social workers, our GP's statement to Stigger, Stigger's first and second letters to us, and we'll put up the final letter from Holt here.

Are we mad and upset? You better believe it. There's more to come on all this. But first, we need to find a new agency to take care of us locally. We ain't done yet, folks. Not by a long shot. We're going to China (our daughter, Meredith is there), and we'll show Judy Stigger (and the folks at Holt) what a great kid was waiting for us (and shame on them for throwing up road blocks).