Um, did you read the article ? The child is 9. She's not a toddler.
"Ok, so you want whats best for the child? Lets see how this little scenario plays: Say you have a child, but youre a redneck living in a cabin in some remote area. You are really struggling. Youre not well educated. Your prospects are not good. In fact, theyre downright bleak. Youve been accused of a crime you didnt commit, too. So you put your child in foster care and she was sent to me for a year."
"I am an Ivy-educated Boston Brahmin. I am rich and powerful. I have a loving wife and children, beautiful home, too. I want your to keep your child when you want to claim her after the year is up. And I have the resources to tie you up in the court for years, trying to get her back."
"Well, certainly I can provide better for your child than you can! So the courts should turn your child over to me. After all, the opportunities I can provide are whats best for your child. You wouldnt mind making that sacrifice, right?"
Tactics aside, the child WOULD be better off with the family that could provide them the most advantaged life. And, yes, if I were the aforementioned family, if I cared about that child's well-being, I WOULD make that sacrifice. Wanting that child returned to me under such dire circumstances when I could have them grow up under better conditions wouldn't speak well to me as a parent. Again, we can argue the foster family's tactics were questionable, but giving the child the best upbringing possible was not.
Maybe YOU should read the story. I did. For the record, Anna is 9 NOW .. the suit dragged on in court for seven years, she returned to China a year ago .. do the math.
I am going to assume you haven’t yet had a child of your own or your views might be tempered by that life altering experience. I know several childless families with resources far superior to my own who would have loved to have had any of my children as their own. They would have had an easier time getting that rifle out of Charlton Heston’s live and fighting hands.
The Hes may not be the ideal family, but after all those years in court, no ‘lack of fitness’ was established. At what point do our courts become the arbiter of what financial and other advantages are best for a child, and award the child to the most financially advantaged?
Do we really want to become a nation whose laws pronounce that money talks and BS walks when it comes to children? The beauty of the American judicial system is that we are a nation of laws and not of men. In the eyes of the laws, a Chinese immigrant family is equal to Bill and Melinda Gates. Our laws state that absent abuse, physical or psychological, or other disqualifying behavior by the biological parents, the courts will send the child to the same family God chose to send her to.