TORN APART BY METH

In the Past Five Years, More Than 7,500 Iowans Have Lost Their Parental
Rights. for Many, Meth Was the Cause.

Mitchellville, Ia. - Tessa Garcia wasn't the first in her family to lose
her children to meth.

The Des Moines native was 13 when her mother, a methamphetamine addict,
agreed to send Tessa to live with a grandmother. Garcia then lost her own
babies to the state when, a decade later, she was arrested twice for
selling the drug in 2001.

Now Garcia watches Alejandra, 3, and Francisco, 4, grow from the cramped
confines of a prison visiting room. Her name has been stricken from the
children's birth certificates. Her mother, clean for more than five years,
is their new legal parent.

Garcia counts herself lucky among the more than 530 inmates at the
Mitchellville women's prison. "I don't know what I would do if they didn't
let my mom adopt my children," said Garcia, 25. "My kids were the only
thing I had left."

Among the drug-addled in Iowa, Garcia is indeed fortunate. In the past five
years, more than 7,500 parents have had legal rights to their children
severed by the state - almost 2,500 more than during the previous five years.

Much of that unprecedented growth is attributed to two things: the
methamphetamine scourge and tougher federal laws. Behind bars or not, many
of the parents never see their children again.

Child-welfare experts say Iowa could do much more to work more effectively
with drug-affected families and ease the suffering that children endure as
a result of parental addiction.

The state should, they say, because more children nationwide are being
taken permanently from parents because of stricter federal laws aimed at
better protecting neglected children. Since 1996, when Congress passed the
Adoptions and Safe Families Act, adoptions of foster children in Iowa have
almost tripled, from an average of 350 annually to 1,037 during the last
state fiscal year.

Many people involved with child welfare applaud that milestone, but the
federal requirement that states more quickly find permanent homes for
foster children has triggered controversy.

Wisdom of Cutting Ties Is Challenged

Experts agree that children taken from addicted parents should not have to
wait years for new, long-term homes if they cannot be returned home. Yet
they disagree over whether youths should be legally cut from their birth
parents and families, especially when new adoptive parents or relatives,
like Garcia's mother, have not been identified to take in the children.

Many child-welfare experts also question the wisdom of creating many
incentives for adoption, when the healthiest option for children has always
been to reunite families when possible.

Across the country, the pressure to find new adoptive parents for thousands
of needy foster children is so great that the federal government is
initiating a nationwide media campaign to champion adoption.

"Almost all states are having trouble keeping adoptions up with the number
of kids being freed for adoption," said James Ray, president of the
National Council of Juvenile and Family Court Judges.

In Iowa, human-services workers have struggled to find enough families
equipped to care for children scarred by neglect or abuse. Though the state
is now faster to sever parents' rights, the time it takes to adopt children
has almost doubled since the federal law went into effect in 1997.

During the state's last fiscal year, the number of so-called "legal
orphans" waiting for adoption statewide dropped to 413 from a record 762 in
2002. Yet many of the children who remain state wards are the hardest to
adopt: older kids, those with severe behavior problems or others with
special needs.

Unlike other states, Iowa has thus far failed to take other steps that
experts believe can ease damage to families while keeping children safe:

* The state Department of Human Services has a poor track record compared
with other states' agencies in including parents and children in resolving
issues that led to child removals. DHS also does a poor job of helping
relatives care for children, a recent federal review said.

* The state has no policy that gives priority access to drug treatment to
parents who risk losing their children. The judicial system also lacks
family drug courts, which some experts believe are more effective in
helping parents face the consequences of their addiction.

* Iowa now spends almost $1 million more annually on adoptions than it does
on services to help families broken by addiction and other problems. That's
because the federal government rewards states for placing children in
foster care and adoptive homes, but it provides few incentives for agencies
to help biological families stay together.

Money for family reunification has grown slightly in the past five years,
as thousands more children have flooded the human-services system and the
amount of money for adoption subsidies has skyrocketed.

* Iowa law also discourages open adoptions allowing children access to
their birth families, even though most experts concur such arrangements are
best for older children.

Carol Shauffer, director of the San Francisco-based Children's Legal
Protection Center, said some states, including Iowa, still use a model that
is based on the adoption of the perfect baby.

"The new model we have to embrace is based on openness, co-parenting in
some cases, and maintaining relationships with grandparents when the real
parents are out of the picture," she said. "Kids, especially older kids,
don't lose their psychological parents, so you have to do it another way."

Adoption Viewed As Just Part of Solution

While child advocates such as Shauffer praise the record number of
adoptions, others doubt the country will be able to adopt its way out of
its huge drug problem.

More than a half-million children today are in foster care nationwide, a
near-record number fed by addiction. While thousands of children have found
more stable homes, government subsidies paid to adoptive parents have grown
substantially since the push to cut the foster rolls began.

Some states such as California now face lawsuits because they can't keep up
with the number of foster children who need homes. "We are certainly seeing
a rise in legal orphans," said Shauffer. "We have a lawsuit against the
state because it is taking so long for them to get adopted."

State human-services officials said they hope that Iowa's new child-welfare
design, which will be finished by year's end, will encourage more work with
drug-affected families. They are also pursuing federal waivers that would
give them more freedom to spend tax money on families' needs, not foster care.

Yet, they say, those changes will do little to quell the devastation of
meth on children.

Last year, 520 Iowa children were classified as victims of abuse because
their parents were making meth or possessed meth-related chemicals. The
count, the first of its kind by DHS, is expected to grow as more social
workers begin accompanying drug agents to meth lab busts.

A recent DHS study in southwest Iowa showed about one-third of all cases in
a 10-county area involved meth.

Human-services officials say child-protection workers don't remove every
child found in the home of a meth user, especially when the child's safety
can be assured using another parent or relative. However, the highly toxic
drug causes erratic, dangerous behavior in adults that often warrants
placing children in temporary homes.

"Especially with meth, we see chronic, horrible neglect because all the
parent cares about is the drug," said Mary Nelson, a human-services
administrator.

The 1996 federal adoption law was written to discourage states from
allowing children to drift for years in foster care, as happened when crack
cocaine use became an epidemic in many parts of the country. Judges now
have no more than a year in most cases to decide whether children in foster
care should be returned home or freed for adoption.

Echoing other parents, Garcia and her mother, Lisa Davis, said that while
they understand the government's insistence on long-term safety and
stability for children, severing all of a parent's legal rights to a child
is not always realistic or appropriate.

Although the state required that Garcia's rights be terminated, both of the
women believe the children will be best off if the prison inmate can one
day become their mother again.

"It is possible to recover from methamphetamine and become a responsible
parent," Davis said. "I'm living proof of that."

'I Know I Helped Put Tessa in Prison'

Davis concedes her drug addiction and the years her daughter spent without
her probably had a profound impact on Garcia's choices. She missed out on
much of Garcia's teenage years and was behind bars when Garcia gave birth
to her first child.

By the time Davis was released, Garcia, who had already married twice, was
an addict and a dealer.

"I know I helped put Tessa in prison. . . . I showed her that way of life,"
Davis said.

As hurtful as the experience was, however, Davis' daughter said she
wouldn't have wanted to lose her mother altogether. Garcia's grandmother is
deceased, and her husband is behind bars in Fort Dodge, so Davis is her
biggest source of strength.

"My mother is doing wonderful now. I'm really proud of her," Garcia said.

As Iowa's child-welfare system undergoes reform, many human-services
officials hope the state will do more to aid those who want to overcome
addictions and make their families whole.

However, Ray said he believes entire generations will continue to be torn
apart by meth and other crutches until the country faces its pervasive drug
problem.

"We in the United States have a rescue mentality," he said. "We believe we
can rescue people and fix them up. I can tell you that we can rescue every
kid and we have done nothing to fix the problem. Culturally, we're not
changing."