when the news first was reported. I just wanted you to know why nobody has been reading your post. I did read the article. There are several more articles on this same guy that you can find if you search for them here.

This was new to me, so thanks. Why am I not surprised? Dirty deeds, done dirt cheap, unless you're the TBM struggling with infertility. Heaven forbid you're single, poor, non-European in descent and pregnant. Then your loving church gives you a nice mattress on the floor far from home and sells your baby like a lamp on eBay.

I'm feeling pessimistic about Powers that Be and how the predators always seem to come out on top. This is some next level authoritarian, dehumanizing misogynistic stuff done for the sake of the dollar. So OF COURSE the cult is neck deep. At least this guy got caught and you know whatever stamp of approval the cult gave him will be quickly buried. I can hear the documents in SLC shredding through the quantum foam from four states away. They're fascists hiding in religious garb. I hope the whole organization evaporates as people wake up and walk away.

How thin must a coin be before it is impossible to give it a second side?

I agree that the perp is not someone with whom I would want to play golf. I'd be very annoyed at whatever chatter emerged from him about the good he is doing.

And the thing is, he IS doing some "good", as defined by this or that human being, namely the ones who get a new baby to adopt at less than prevailing market price.

And there may be, over the course of the perp's career, a couple of young Marshallese women who feel that things turned out okay for them. After all, at some level, personal opinions do have validity.

I've been trying to gain what I term "an overview perspective" of all of this. Have I succeeded? Heck if I know...

I do agree that there are some serious charges that should be leveled against the mormon attorney perp, having to do with fraud. Federal charges might apply, but I haven't seen that done yet, and I'm not certain an avenue exists to exact a pound of flesh from the perp with regard to bringing the young women to the United States from the Republic of Marshall Islands.

From my perspective, this Marshall Islands baby-selling exists ONLY because of the actions of the United States from 1946 until 1958, when they used one of the atolls, Bikini Atoll, for atomic and thermonuclear testing. This included a hydrogen bomb test that yielded twice the destructive power as expected, resulting in at least one inhabited atoll getting a liberal dusting of nuclear fallout, resulting in radiation burns and sickness. A total of 67 airburst nuclear explosions occurred

The United States was assessed a 2 billion dollar fine by an organization called The Nuclear Claims Tribunal. The US has simply ignored the fine.

All this is a background for explaining why citizens of the US-sponsored Republic of Marshall Islands have free, completely unrestricted access to the United States. They show up at customs & immigration control and get the same treatment any American citizen does when returning to the country.

Which didn't take baby-snatchers (good a name as any, right?) from figuring out what an easy source of uninformed, unmarried teen & young adult pregnant females! Just like the young ladies in all the wards in which we grew to maturity! Dumb and often desperate.

I don't recall right now the exact year, but recently 'do-gooders' in both countries recognized that young Marshallese women were getting taken advantage of with regard to 'selling' their not-particularly-welcome babies. I honestly think that it was the 'baby-selling' that was the problem, but the inequities involved. which was what made it possible for this business to flourish: they were selling the same product as all the other mainland sellers, but at a big discount. So of course 'buyers' have been so supportive of the perp. He did a wonderful thing for them, 'on the cheap'!

Anyway, the two governments agreed that Marshallese women ought not to be allowed to fly to the US in the last month of their pregnancy, and be allowed entry if their purpose was to sell the baby they were carrying. I don't know if a penalty was mentioned and if the appropriate penal code statutes were created or amended. And I don't know if 'aiding & abetting' was made a crime.

Not that it mattered. The young ladies were taught, when asked the question, to look aghast! "What, sell my baby! How dare you!!" And what could the customs & immigration guy or gal do? They had to let them pass!

The perp, in this case, got too greedy.

The practice is certainly still proceeding. Numerous attorneys are involved; it's too lucrative a practice!

Again, I find this all fascinating.

Here is an update.

https://www.azcentral.com/story/news/local/phoenix/2019/12/23/paul-petersens-wife-raquel-petersen-files-divorce-ahead-adoption-scheme-trials/2735866001/

Having up to eight women in her home at a time was not suspicious to her?

Oh, at first I thought this was about the Lamanite Placement Program.


my.bad.

I guess learning human trafficking skills is one of the benefits of serving a mission.

A friend of mine has adopted at least two, maybe three children from women from the Marshall Islands. We last spoke about this roughly three years ago. After the bad press, I didn't want to call him and ask him more questions. He volunteered what he told me three years ago in our ordinary conversation between friends. I don't see that my friend did anything wrong. But I am pretty sure that he used this same guy to facilitate all three of these adoptions. Too many very unique details that he told me about three years ago match what I read in the recent articles with almost no chance those matching details could be coincidental.

The reason people adopt children this way and from this one adoption attorney isn't to save money. It costs several tens of thousands of dollars to adopt each child this way. I am sure this attorney gets a premium when it comes to what he charges for each baby. He gets the high price because for older couples, there are no babies available for them to adopt. The supply is much lower than the demand and the younger couples are always given the highest priority when adopting children from any other source that my friend could find. Even in to a good home, there are no babies available to older couples who technically do qualify but who are considered less than an optimal match by ordinary standards that are used to decide how to select adoptive parents, given the limited supply of babies. Like me, my friend and his wife are in their mid to late fifties. My friend's kids will grow up in a good home and will have a good start in life. One advantage for these adopted babies is that one qualification is that their adoptive parents are all wealthy. Technically, the relative high household income probably isn't a consideration. But people will filter themselves out if they can't spend tens of thousands of dollars on just the adoption fee alone. Then there are a lot of additional expenses and fees. Out the door, it'll cost between thirty to fifty thousand dollars per baby. The woman does make money on the deal but they call it reimbursement of expenses. The adoption takes a significant amount of time to transact (several months). She starts being paid before she leaves home in the Marshall Islands and at least up until the time she surrenders the baby. But she can legally accept all of that money and then change her mind at the last minute without having to pay it back. That is a risk that the adoptive parents agree to up-front. Considering the high price and the risk of ending up empty handed in the end, it's not the poor who adopt babies from this guy. But this adoption attorney seems to squeeze money out of his system at every turn. He is a state official and yet he encourages the women to commit welfare fraud against the state. Yet my friend and his wife paid huge expenses to support these women who he adopted his children from. Somehow, this attorney must have charged these 'expenses' from the wealthy adoptive parents to support the mothers, while the money didn't go to the mothers.

It's my guess that this practice is why this adoption attorney is in so much trouble right now. I didn't read that the adoption attorney did charge those fees for the mothers and kept that money for himself. But my friend spent some big money, just to support each woman. When the articles say that the women were encouraged to commit welfare fraud and that several of them lived with this adoption attorney and his wife, that is what seems to make the most sense. But however this adoption attorney structured these support expenses for the mothers, I suspect that whatever he did was technically legal or if not legal, difficult to prove legally that a crime was committed. That would leave the government trying to go after him for whatever they can find to pin on him or to prove a difficult-to-prove crime that he may have been committing. The morals of the case against this attorney are probably quite repugnant, while the legal case may be weaker or more difficult to prove. If nothing else, he could charge a few thousand dollars per month per mother and then have those women live with he and his wife in their home, or rent-out a low-end house to put several women in and keep the difference each month for himself. These women from a poor country could easily be brainwashed not to question that deal if their support checks are being issued directly from the adoptive parents directly to the adoption attorney and if those mothers never see the money anyway, especially if there is shame involved and the deal feels crooked to them anyway and that they feel at fault also. The legal mistake made by the adoption attorney in that case would have been the adoption attorney getting too greedy and having these women also get additional aid from the state to help pay his potentially outrageous rental fees without disclosing the fees paid by the adoptive parents on behalf of the adoptive mothers, to the state (thus, welfare fraud). The attorney's wife would see the deal for what it really is and she is now divorcing him. If the state is trying to prove that he is taking part in a welfare fraud scheme, it might not be in their best legal interests to tell the media about perfectly legal rental transactions which it could be argued, are perfectly legal and unrelated to the charges against him, no matter how bad it looks. Many people will discount the shame motivation and forgive an exploitive rental/support expense fee. If welfare fraud is the accusation, the elements of that crime would be the only things that are legally relevant. If the state tries to prosecute him for making too much money, that won't work. So those issues (however repugnant) wouldn't make it in to the media.



Edited 12 time(s). Last edit at 01/19/2020 11:53AM by azsteve.