Expert Witness Justifies Baby-stealing

ProPublica reports:

Was Baird’s method for evaluating these foster and birth families empirically tested? No, Baird answered: Her method is unpublished and unstandardized, and has remained “pretty much unchanged” since the 1980s. It doesn’t have those “standard validity and reliability things,” she admitted. “It’s not a scientific instrument.” ...

Who hired and was paying her in the case that she was being deposed about? The foster parents, she answered. They wanted to adopt, she said, and had heard about her from other foster parents.

Had she considered or was she even aware of the cultural background of the birth family and child whom she was recommending permanently separating? (The case involved a baby girl of multiracial heritage.) Baird answered that babies have “never possessed” a cultural identity, and therefore are “not losing anything,” at their age, by being adopted. ...

But a ProPublica investigation co-published with The New Yorker in October revealed that there is a growing national trend of foster parents undermining the foster system’s premise by “intervening” in family court cases as a way to adopt children.

Of course there are no scientific instruments to justify this child-stealing. The judges claim to act in the best interests of the child, but they rely on hired kooks and do not look at any scientific evidence.