Facebook stops adoption agency promoting birthday post

A Monroe family wanted to celebrate the birthday of their adopted daughter on social media — but now says that Facebook made it more difficult for their adoption agency to do so.

Scott Beyer and his wife Jenna have six children, five of whom are adopted. The couple said their faith calls them to give needy children a home.

“God has done an awful lot for us, and based off our beliefs of the Bible, we believe that every child matters,” Beyer told KIRO Radio’s Dori Monson.

One year ago, their adopted daughter Eve was born at 23 weeks — about four months early — weighing just over a pound.

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“Though that is a very difficult medical circumstance, many kids can survive being born that small,” Beyer said.

Eve spent her first 100 days in the hospital in Arizona, where she was born. The Beyers flew back and forth to Arizona to see her, helped out by donors through Sacred Selections, their adoption agency.

Bit by bit, their new daughter began getting bigger — they measured her by the gram — and healthier.

“Since then, she’s been doing better and better all the time,” Beyer said. “Really, you wouldn’t know at this point, just meeting her, that she’s had any medical challenges.”

Turning a year old is a prominent marker for Eve, considering how far she has come. As a tribute to his daughter, Beyer posted a “then and now” photo on Facebook, showing the difference in size.

“I purposely didn’t go with anything that would have been particularly difficult for anyone to look at, but there is a picture of her when she was small … when she was first born, my wedding ring could fit all the way up her arm, all the way up to her armpit,” he described.

Sacred Selections posted the photo to their page to celebrate the effort made by everyone who had contributed to bringing Eve to her new home. Because the post received a lot of attention, Facebook recommended that Sacred Selections boost the post, a feature where an organization can pay to get a post more exposure.

However, when Sacred Selections attempted to boost the post, Facebook denied it five times in a row — even after a manual review. Facebook stated that the post “creates an unexpected experience for users and goes against our core value of fostering a positive global community.”

Beyer frequently sees similar posts on Facebook, such as ads for hospitals showing children who are undergoing chemotherapy. He applauds posts from hospitals that help save children’s lives, but cannot see why, if those are allowed, the adoption agency’s post was not.

“The only thing that I can tell that seems to be different is that this goes against the pro-choice agenda,” Beyer said.

If the post’s pro-life nature is the reason Facebook censored it, then that would confirm that the social media giant has a Leftist bias, Beyer said.

“I’m not a particularly political person, by nature,” he said. “This was in no way political. It was just simply pro-adoption, if anything, and happy birthday to my daughter, and we wanted to inform so many people who had been helping through praying and finances and just general support, to let them know how well she was doing.”

Beyer questions why he is not allowed to simply celebrate the day of his daughter’s birth and her journey of beating the odds.

“I get if you don’t want people coming out against something all the time, but if I can’t even show a picture of my kid who was born, and we can’t celebrate that, and we can’t be happy about that, what are we coming to?” he asked.