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Friday, December 4th, 2020

The stolen climate crisis babies: US politician jailed for selling children of mothers desperate to escape environmental catastrophe

Author:     Louise Boyle
Source:     Independent (U.K.)
Publication Date:     2 December 2020
 Link: The stolen climate crisis babies: US politician jailed for selling children of mothers desperate to escape environmental catastrophe
Stephan:   When I read this story about a Republican politician in the Marshall Islands -- The Republic of the Marshall Islands is now a sovereign state in free association with the United States -- in a British paper I was left with the feeling that there is no level to which members of the Republican Party will not sink, no limit to what they will do. My personal feeling is the Republican Party should be dissolved, and members barred from holding office. It is basically a racist christofascist criminal organization.
Two children look at the flooding in a house on the Marshall Islands in 2014. The low-lying Pacific nation is among one of the most vulnerable to sea-level rise from climate change 
Credit: AFP/Getty

A former politician has been sentenced to six years for running an illegal adoption racket which took advantage of impoverished women from the Marshall Islands, a low-lying nation in the Pacific Ocean, where more and more citizens are being forced to flee because of the climate crisis.

Paul Petersen, a onetime Republican county assessor who was also an adoption attorney, illegally paid women to come to the US to give up their babies to Americans. Petersen had at least 70 adoptions cases in Arizona, Utah and Arkansas over three years.

Petersen “manipulated birth mothers into consenting to adoptions they did not fully understand,” said First Assistant United States Attorney Fowlkes of the Western District of Arkansas.

Judge Timothy Brooks, who imposed the sentence from Fayetteville, Arkansas on Tuesday, said that Petersen abused his position as an attorney by misleading or instructing others to lie to courts in adoptions that wouldn’t have been […]

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