In the Recent News Story about the Kilshaws adopting twin babies, who is most to blame?

In the week of the 16th of January 2001, Judith and Alan Kilshaw from Flintshire, North Wales decided to tell the tale of their controversial adoption of the “Internet Twins”, to the Sun. This turned out to be a big mistake for them and their recently adopted twins, Belinda and Kimberley. The stories that ensued described the Internet baby industry “lurid” by some magazines, and follow-up stories labelled the Kilshaws as a “dirty, eccentric couple who aren’t at all fit to be parents”. Shortly after the story got out, social workers in Flintshire took the twins into custody and a judge later ruled that they should “remain in the care of the local authority” while courts in both the USA and the UK decided the fate of the “Internet Twins”.

One question we could ask is where the “Internet Twins” really belong but the first question we should ask is who is most to blame for the fact that these two American born, eight month old “Internet twins” are now in the care of British Social Services?

The first person we would think of would be the natural mother of the twins, Tranda Wecker. She was the one who put her two youngest children up for adoption in the first place. She was the woman who sold her babies to one family (the Allens), via the Internet, for $6,000 because she was going through a divorce and did not have the money to bring them up, then deceived the Allens so that she could take the babies and sell them again (for $12,500) to the Kilshaws. Now she has decided that she wants her babies back again. The idea of parents making money from putting their babies up for adoption is an awful idea. You can’t pay money for a person because people are not things that can be bought and sold, each person has a life and you can’t buy and sell life. If you look at Tranda Wecker as that kind of parent, it seems obvious to me that she would be most to blame, but Mrs. Wecker said that she did not accept any extra money at all for her babies, so she is not so much to blame. Even so, if Mrs. Wecker did not have the money to bring up the babies before, she can’t be so sure that she will be capable to bring them up this time, even with the help of family and friends. So, even though she may not be the most to blame, it seems that she should not be the person to get custody of the twins.

The California law allowed Mrs. Wecker to take the babies back from the Allens within 90 days and perhaps her motives for doing so were not purely about the money. If she did want the best for her babies, it would be a cause for concern if the Allens’ check for $4,000 bounced. If they could not afford that amount of money would they be able to finance the two children properly as they grew up? And if the recent allegations against Mr. Allen for molesting two teenage babysitters are true, that would have been a very good cause for concern to take the babies away from the Allens. Mrs. Wecker did not have to trick the Allens to get the babies back but perhaps she felt that they would not hand them over nicely if she just asked for them, even though they should have known that Mrs. Wecker could takes the twins back within 90 days.

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Parents who buy children such as the Kilshaws or the Allens may also be looked down upon. They encourage people like Tina Johnson (the baby broker who ran the Angel Heart adoption agency and who helped Tranda Wecker sell her babies over the internet) to profit from selling young lives. Even so, it is understandable why a parent may want to pay a lot of money in a ‘private’ adoption rather than adopt a baby from a public agency. It is because in Britain, if you want to adopt a baby, you must undergo close scrutiny from the child welfare department for quite a few weeks. There is always a very good chance of you getting turned down if the adoption agency finds that you may not be the perfect parent. But this is a necessary process that should be put into place in Arkansas and other states in the USA. It is the kind of system that makes sure that the children go to parents who will always have the child’s best interests at heart, and makes it less likely that people like the Kilshaws can adopt. This would be for the better as the Kilshaws seem to be more than just a little bit eccentric. Mrs. Kilshaw once offered her eldest daughter, Louisa age 22, £3,000 to be artificially inseminated with her stepfathers’ sperm when Louisa was already pregnant by her boyfriend. One would think that if the Kilshaws really wanted children that badly, they might have put up with the more lengthy but legal public adoption. But Mrs. Kilshaw was 47, and she was worried that she might be turned down by the public adoption agencies because she was too old.

The Kilshaws seem to be less than fit parents to bring up the two babies. As well as their eccentricities and the fact that Mrs. Kilshaw is an alcoholic, they were the ones who first told the story of Tina Johnson’s “double dealing” to the Sun. They did not stop to think about what effect that might have on their two young sons or the twins. What kind of parents would expose their children to the glare of the media? Ultimately it is the Kilshaws who are probably the most to blame for the confusion in the lives of the ‘Internet Twins’, because if they had not let their story out, the social workers would probably have never been alerted and the whole confusing story may not have been looked into. Though perhaps this would only have been better for the Kilshaws as the babies will probably benefit from a life without the Kilshaws. In my opinion, of the four sets of parents (the natural father also has a claim on the twins), the Kilshaws are probably the worst couple to bring up the children.

When considering the whole complex custody battle, many people willingly come to the conclusion that the Internet is somehow to blame but, as certain newspapers put it, ‘you can’t blame the Net for everything’. Adoption scams had been happening for years before the Internet really took off. The Internet and Technology just seem to be easy targets for blame when complicated issues such as adoption scams arise. Perhaps the Internet does make it easier for people to deal in babies and for fraud to happen but the Web also makes matching up parents with children worldwide a lot more efficient. With respectable adoption agencies online, you would still have to go through the same hassle of home visits and thorough interviews as you would if you had not found the adoption agency online. For some reason certain newspapers seem to suggest that the awful idea of selling a helpless baby to the highest bidder is somehow made worse by the fact that the adoption agents doing the job have a web page. If you were going to blame someone for these horrible adoption scams you should really blame the scandalous adoption agents (such as Tina Johnson) who make a lot of money from trading babies. Tina Johnson is now being investigated for fraud.

If we were going to lay blame on the Internet for making it easier for these adoption agencies to deal in babies, then we should also lay some blame on states like Arkansas who allow these ‘private’ adoptions to take place in the first place. This was the whole reason why the Kilshaws had to go to Arkansas to adopt instead of Britain. This encourages con artists to pose as respectable adoption agents and to make vast sums of money from selling babies. Sometimes these babies may even have been kidnapped from some unfortunate, unsuspecting parent. Though these ‘private’ adoptions may make the adoption process easier for some parents who crave a child and are willing to pay the large amounts of money, it means that the adoption agencies may not check up on the parents when really they should, if the child’s best interest was at heart. Some people may argue that it is not fair on adoptive parents that they must be thoroughly checked up on when natural birth parents can have children no matter if they aren’t the ‘perfect parent’, but if you really wanted to care for a child you would put up with the inconveniences. If you were not prepared to do this, perhaps you would not make a very good parent because in parenting there are lots of inconveniences.

The fact that the two babies have had four homes in six months and will probably have three more homes when they are sent back to the USA may partly be because of the media. One article from the British newspaper the Telegraph is entitled “Couple expose sons to media glare”. In this article they criticize the way the Kilshaws exposed their young sons to the glare of the media. This may be right but how can they criticize the Kilshaws when they actually have the choice to print the article or not? Of course they would print the article because it would sell newspapers, but consequently they would be subjecting the twins and the Kilshaws’ sons to the ‘media glare’. Oprah Winfrey would not dream of cancelling a show featuring the Kilshaws and the Allens just because it might draw unnecessary attention to the twins. Her ratings would go up if she hosted that show, so she did. When Mr. Allen said, “What is important is what is in the best interests of the girls. The legalities of the adoption is not an issue here,” he received much applause from the audience. But how can he be thinking of the best interests of the children if he has appeared on the Oprah Winfrey Show? By doing this he would be subjecting the twins to even more publicity. Many people may argue, though, that the damage had already been done when the Kilshaws leaked their story out and you couldn’t do any more damage now that the story was out in the open, but it was the Sun (the media) who printed the story in the first place and other newspapers carried on printing follow up stories.

When we start to lay blame on the media, we must remember what drives the media and what makes them want to print those stories. It is because they want to sell a lot of papers and make money, but how can they sell a lot of papers? By writing about things that people want to hear, that are interesting, like the complex custody battle over the ‘Internet Twins’. So, indirectly, it seems that we (the public) could also be partly to blame for the unnecessary amount of publicity the twins are getting and the anxiety it has caused in certain families. We are the ones who want to hear about all the interesting complications as to who should really gain custody of the twins. Perhaps if we refused to buy papers that contained these kinds of stories to protect the children, maybe the Kilshaws would not have sold their story to the press because the press wouldn’t have been able to sell it.

It seems clear to me that the Kilshaws are most to blame for the fact that two little babies have had four homes in eight months, as they were the ones who sold their story to the press and exposed the whole business in the first place, but it is not entirely their fault. The Kilshaws knew they would make money out of selling their story to the media so that is why they did. And the media wanted the story because the public would want to hear the story. So not all the blame can be shifted onto the Kilshaws, but some blame should fall on us: the public and the media. You could say that the Kilshaws might never have been able to adopt babies if Tranda Wecker had not given her babies up, but this is not the case. They probably would have found a different adoption agency, just as unscrupulous as Tina Johnson’s and would have gone to the state of Arkansas or some other state that legalises the baby trade and would have adopted someone else’s baby. So it seems to me that the state of Arkansas and Tina Johnson are also to blame as they made the trade in babies possible. But overall, I find that the Kilshaws are most to blame as they themselves participated in the immoral baby trade, then brought the twins into Britain illegally, then went on to tell the tale of Tina Johnson’s scandalous “double dealing”.