Free Republic

Families are the foundation of our communities and our country.  All children deserve a stable, supportive, and loving home in which to grow, thrive, and realize their full potential.  During National Foster Care Month, we honor the selfless men and women who open their homes to nurture at-risk children and promote healing, unification, and family-based empowerment.Foster care plays a critical role in providing young people who have had to be removed from their homes a critical place of refuge.  It is an invaluable resource for keeping children safe in temporary circumstances and providing stability, direction, and comfort to our...

WASHINGTON—The Supreme Court said it would consider the city of Philadelphia’s decision to exclude a Catholic organization from its foster-care program because the group indicated it wouldn’t work with same-sex couples as foster parents, a case with major constitutional implications for church and state. The justices, in a brief written order, said they would consider an appeal by Catholic Social Services and others who say the city’s position violates constitutional guarantees of religious liberty. Philadelphia says private groups that contract with the city to care for abused and neglected children must abide by the city’s antidiscrimination laws, which prohibit bias...

The Department of Family and Protective Services (DFPS) recently announced that more children exited foster care into safe homes than entered the system during 2019. The department also announced that the number of adoptions during the year surpassed 6,000 for the first time. This good news has been a long time coming for the foster care system. It indicates that major reforms enacted by the Legislature in 2017—notably the localization of foster care and adoption services—are working. Continued improvement requires a continued commitment to seeing these changes through. It is important, however, to resist the temptation to interpret the positive...

If you're a young child trapped in our infamous foster care system, your future is bleak. It's likely that you'll bounce around to more than a dozen foster homes until you "age out" at 18 and are allowed to live on your own. Then, within two years, there's a six in 10 chance you'll be living on the street, in jail or involved in sex trafficking. Being adopted by a loving family is the miracle any foster child hopes and prays for. But chances of that happening are tragically low. Only about 110,000 of the 400,000 children in government foster...

This month, Simone Biles became the most decorated gymnast of all time when she earned five gold world medals at the World Championship on October 13. Biles’ birth mother struggled with addiction and when Biles was just three years old, she and her siblings were taken from their mother and placed in foster homes. For three years, they bounced from home to home, never feeling as though anyone saw them. Then her grandfather and his wife stepped up to adopt Biles and her sister. “Although I was young when my foster care ordeal began, I remember how it felt to...

A growing number of young males — some just ten years old — are being forced into the sex trade in the United States, with traffickers dressing some little boys as girls before selling them. Geoff Rogers, co-founder of the U.S. Institute Against Human Trafficking (USIAHT), recently told Fox News that most Americans don’t realize that boys — and not just girls — are commonly victimized by the sex trafficking industry. “When you think about the magnitude of the problem, the number of kids being sold for sex here in America, most people think of girls,” he said, “and certainly...

Pro-choicers, especially the rich and famous ones, have been attacking pro-life bills all over social media, including Alabama’s Human Life Protection Act, which seeks to make abortion and attempted abortion felony offenses. It’s a bill that aims to protect human lives, but abortion advocates are fighting against it using the same old failed argument of “what about the kids in foster care?” Well, Alabama families have a very clear answer to that question. Governor Kay Ivey announced at the end of 2018 that a record number of children were adopted from foster care in Alabama and placed in forever homes....

Among children reported as likely victims of child sex trafficking upon running away from home, most have one thing in common—they were supposed to be looked after by the government. In 2014, some 10,000 endangered runaway children were reported to the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children (NCMEC), a nonprofit that serves as a clearinghouse for reports on missing children. Nearly 1,700 of them were likely victims of sex trafficking and of those, 68 percent were in the care of social services when they went missing, be it a group home, a government facility, or foster care. While these...

I understand why the national media is so obsessed over the story of children of illegal immigrants being separated from their parents at the Mexican border. It's a heartbreaking sight to see photos of innocent little kids traumatized and crying - even when they were taken in the Obama era. It's also great TV. I also get why the Democrats can't stop using the crying border kids as a political weapon. It's the only issue they have left. The Pelosi Party can't very well complain about the booming Trump economy, the low-low unemployment rates for blacks and Latinos or the...

A foster parent in Indianapolis admitted to injuring a 2-month-old baby in his care, and child welfare advocates are calling the case alarming. Doctors discovered that the baby had bruises on her body and 35 broken bones from her ribs to her hands, and now her foster parent is charged with neglect and battery. Court record shows the foster parent, 26-year-old Kyle Rice, has since bonded out of the Marion County Jail. The abuse came to light when when Rice’s mother noticed a suspicious mark on the baby’s leg and told his wife. The wife took the baby to the...

It’s ironic or tragic or outrageous that in a nation where parents are allowed to keep their children on the family health insurance policy until they’re 26-years-old, many foster children are told to hit the streets when they turn 18. Why is that you ask? Foster parents receive a monthly stipend for foster children in their care. The check is based on the age of the child, extenuating circumstances, and if the child has any disabilities. Amounts can vary depending of the state administering the program. One thing all the checks have in common is that when the child turns...

A white, Christian, five-year-old girl has been forced to live with Muslim foster carers who removed her cross, encouraged her to learn Arabic, and told her European women were alcoholics. The five-year-old girl was put into the foster care system by scandal-ridden Tower Hamlets borough council, and has spent six months in two Muslim households against the parents’ wishes, reportsIn local authority reports seen by the newspaper, a social services worker describes the sobbing child begging to not be returned to the foster home, saying “they don’t speak English”.Another report, which describes the girl as “very distressed”, reads that the girl was not...

When Tristan Torres was 16 and placed in foster care after his mother kicked him out for being transgender, his new home was supposed to feel safe. It didn’t. “The first inkling I had that this wasn’t going to be good was when (my foster mother) refused to call me by my preferred pronoun,” Torres said. “It progressed from there.” He is now advocating for creating legislation that would better protect LGBT youth in the foster care system. “What I went through could have been prevented,” he said. Torres, 19, is expected to testify about his experiences when Assembly Bill...

A Utah judge removed a foster child from a lesbian couple, saying the 1-year-old girl would be better off with a heterosexual couple.

For the first time in a decade, there was a notable increase last year in the number of U.S. children in foster care, according to new federal figures released Wednesday. The annual report from the Department of Health and Human Services tallied 415,129 children in the foster care system as of September 30, 2014, up from about 401,000 a year earlier. The peak was 524,000 children in foster care in 2002, and the number had dropped steadily since 2005 before rising slightly in 2013. The long-term drop resulted primarily from shifts in the policies and practices of state and county...

Neglect and abandonment landed the girl in foster care. But it’s what happened next, she said, that nearly destroyed her. In a hushed courtroom in Miami’s gleaming new downtown Children’s Courthouse, a teenage foster child inventoried the traumas she had endured at the hands of those who were assigned to protect her: She had been starved and beaten, molested and forced to fight during her two years in foster homes and group care. As a runaway, she was trafficked into prostitution. And, just as her life appeared to be mending, the girl was raped by a driver in whose care...

FULL TITLE: 'I am not a monster': Gay foster dad, who left baby daughter to die in hot car as he smoked weed, sobs and begs for freedom in court A Kansas man who left his 10-month-old foster daughter to die in a hot car while he and his partner smoked weed and watched 'Game of Thrones,' has been sentenced to 32 months in prison 'I'm not a monster,' said Seth Jackson, 29, in court on Friday as he begged the judge not to give him jail time for the death of kadillak Poe-Jones. 'Your honor, I'm a broken man,...

He's a city cop by day - but by night, Detective Jack Mook is working on his toughest case yet. Mook, a Gulf War veteran who also teaches boxing to Pittsburgh-area kids, fostered two of his young students after learning they were living in abusive conditions with a foster family. And now after two years, Mook and the boys, 11-year-old Jessee and his 15-year-old brother Josh, have finally become a legal family - after Mook adopted them in September. It means the bachelor, 45, is now adapting to a new routine of homework and healthy meals.

Hundreds of adoptive parents in New York City who've sent their children to live elsewhere continue to get monthly government subsidies of up to $1,700 per child. They can continue receiving the checks until the child turns 21 years old.They gave up on their “hard-to-place" adopted kids — but not on the government check intended for the discarded kids’ care. Hundreds of adoptive parents across the five boroughs who've sent their children to live elsewhere are continuing to pull in monthly checks of up to $1,700 per child while the city, state and feds look the other way, the Daily...

My nine month sojourn in Georgia is coming to an end next week. I came here in July in order to endeavor, with the help of the Aleph Institute, to rescue my two granddaughters from the foster care system of a rural Georgia county. They were placed in foster care after my daughter's worthless boyfriend assaulted one of them and broke her leg. She was four at the time. He got 30 years. My daughter got ten for not calling 911 immediately, but instead escaping with the hurt child and hiding out in a fleabag hotel. As may be inferred,...