Did I Steal My Daughter? The Tribulations of Global Adoption
The answers are never easy when you enter the labyrinth of global adoption.
She dutifully repeated my questions, but after Maria answered, she paused.
"She wasn't told that this was your pickup trip," the translator told us. "She thought you were only visiting."
Tears streaked down Maria's cheeks as she adjusted the stroller's back to show us that Flora liked to take her bottle lying on her back. Then, her voice catching, she recited the prayer Flora fell asleep to every night, crossing herself as she whispered. She explained that she and her husband tried to prepare themselves to say goodbye, but it was always hard. We asked her to join us for lunch in our room and she stayed until eight that evening; I'm still not sure how we found the words and gestures to communicate.
When I asked Maria if she knew Beatriz, she smiled. "Muy linda," she said. "Muy cariñosa." Very lovely. Very affectionate. That last word opened up a hopeful possibility: Had Beatriz been able to spend time with Flora? The agency hadn't been able to tell us, and the lawyer's office claimed Beatriz didn't have a phone.
Maria looked puzzled when I told her this. Then she held up her cell phone and gestured that Beatriz's number was stored in her speed dial.
"Would she want to meet us?" I asked.
Maria shook her head. I think she said that it would be too painful for Beatriz.
I looked at Flora gumming a french fry. Maria had styled her hair so that two tiny ponytails stuck out atop her head like miniature oil geysers. Somewhere, a woman was coming to terms with the fact that she would never see her baby again.
maria called on Flora's first birthday to say that Beatriz wanted us to know she felt she had made the right decision. A few weeks later, our social worker told us that Beatriz had visited the lawyer and wanted to see photos of her daughter.
Several months later, Maria called again. The lawyer had threatened to fire her if she continued to contact us.
That night I was changing Flora's diaper. "Who's my girl?" I sang as I pulled the tab taut across her stomach. She pointed at her chest and laughed, her dimples creasing into pinholes. Then she reached up to tickle my chin. "Flora Beatriz," I cooed. "You are one beautiful kid." Hearing myself say her middle name took me aback. Beatriz, I suddenly realized, had chosen it, the only connection to their brief life together.
And that's when it finally sank in: Beatriz hadn't made a "choice" in the liberating way that our post-Roe culture thinks about reproductive options. Like any woman in the developing world placing a child for adoption, she'd buckled under crushing financial or social pressure—perhaps even coercion. I'd considered this before, but had always batted the thought away by telling myself that Flora was going to be adopted, whether it was we who stepped forward or someone else.
Walter walked in, flushed and sweating from wrestling with the boys, who were now happily digging into bowls of applesauce.
"She's getting so big," he said. "She'll be talking soon."
His smile fell as he saw me crying. "Did something happen today?"
I nodded.
"I think Beatriz wants us to find her," was all I could say.
is it ethical for an adoptive parent to push for information about her child's birth family? Or should that be a decision left to the adoptee? And what about the birth family's right to privacy? "You can't compare an open adoption in the U.S. with an open adoption process internationally," says Susan Soon keum Cox, vice president of public policy at Holt International, an Oregon adoption agency whose founders launched transnational adoptions in the United States. The child of a Korean woman and a British soldier, Cox, who was adopted in 1956, found her Korean half brothers when she was an adult. Yet she cautions against too-hasty birth family searches. "The stigma of adoption in many countries is still very powerful and very real. Women place their children for adoption and slip back into society. It's a very different thing than the acceptance of single parents and adoption in the U.S." In China, currently the greatest source of transnational adoptees—6,493 U.S. "orphan" visas were issued to Chinese adoptees in 2006—relinquishing a child is illegal, and families sometimes abandon their children to avoid running afoul of the one-child policy; birth mothers found to have done this can face prosecution.
While there is no simple way to track down Chinese birth families right now, voluntary dna data banks might one day help people find relatives. (A database developed by the University of California-Berkeley's Human Rights Center is already connecting children stolen during El Salvador's civil war with their families.) "China will be a different China in 10 years," says McGinnis. "Just as Korea is not the same Korea it was in the 1970s." A Dutch family recently traveled to the Chinese town where their daughter was born; they talked to the media, a couple came forward, and dna tests confirmed that they were the girl's parents.
Some of these reunions could turn out to be unsettling. "One of the ways that wrongdoers hide their child-laundering schemes is by the closed-adoption system," says David Smolin, a law professor who's written extensively on corruption in transnational adoption. He and his wife adopted two sisters from India only to find out that they had been stolen from their birth family. Last March, a Utah adoption agency was indicted in an alleged fraud scheme involving 81 Samoan children whose parents were told that they were sending their children away to take advantage of opportunities in the United States—that there would be letters, photos, and visits, and that the children would return when they turned 18.
Openness, Smolin notes, would also make it harder for parents to think of adoptions as "rescuing" children. "There are cultural reasons why people give up children for adoption," he says. "But when you have a situation where money alone, in relatively small quantities, would allow the birth family to keep the child—under current law you are allowed to take the child and spend $30,000 when $200 would be enough to avoid the relinquishment."
As it stands, families who have forged relationships with birth parents often find it impossible to turn their backs on their economic needs. Some send a monthly stipend; others pay for the education of their child's siblings, help finance businesses, or buy computers or cell phones to make it easier to stay in touch. And while all this is legal once the adoption is finalized, it's a lot messier than writing a check for Save the Children. "We need to be careful what kind of impression that makes with other people in the village or area," says Linh Song, the president of Ethica, a nonprofit organization that advocates for transparent adoptions worldwide. "Will they receive aid if their child is sent abroad?"
i was working on deadline the afternoon Susi's email flashed on my screen, a month after we had hired her to find Beatriz. Operating by word of mouth, Susi has done hundreds of searches for birth families in Guatemala and elsewhere in Central America. In 1999, when she first considered this line of work, "I asked my friends and they all said, 'No, don't get involved in that.' People here see adoptions only as a business. A big business. And when there is a lot of money involved, there is corruption."
Still, the idea of connecting families appealed to her. Her first search was easy. "I knocked on the door of the address I was given by the adoptive family and the birth mother opened the door." Soon, though, she got threats: Stop, or you'll get into trouble. Her husband accompanies her on every search; she will not contact anyone who works directly with adoptions, or discuss the details of a search.
Her email relieved us of two worries: Beatriz had been hoping we would find her, and she had not been coerced into placing Flora for adoption. She thanked us for making it possible to watch her child grow up. She missed her, prayed for her, and wanted Flora to know that not a day passed when she didn't think about her. She said that before the adoption she was a bubbly person. Now she kept mostly to herself.
I'd nurtured a vague notion of a faraway woman grieving for her lost child. But as soon as an image of Beatriz sobbing into her pillow materialized, my brain concocted a counter-narrative, a story in which she was healing from her loss. A story in which not having to raise the child I tucked into bed every night freed Beatriz in some way.
Then one evening not long after the email arrived, Walter and I spent our date night at a reading of Outsiders Within: Writing on Transracial Adoption, an anthology that is a stirring and stern rebuke to the standard heartwarming adoption narrative. Back in our car, Walter bowed his head.
"We should give her back," he said.
I'd harbored the same thought, but the anguish on his face threatened me enough to push back.
"We can't," I answered.
"Why not?" he countered. "It wouldn't take much money to support them."
"Because we are her family."
"She'd adjust."
"How do you know that?" It was an unconvincing dodge. We were friends with several families who had adopted toddlers; their kids were thriving. "How could we do that to the boys?" I insisted.
"We couldn't," Walter said.
"And how could we do that to us? I couldn't live with that pain."
"But why should Beatriz have to?" he asked.
To most Americans, Flora's adoption is measured entirely by what she gains—Montessori schools, soccer camps, piano lessons, college. But it no longer quite computes that way for me. To gain a family, my daughter had to lose a family. To become an American child, she had to stop being a Guatemalan child.
McGinnis told me that because adoptive parents are put through such a rigmarole of assessments and trainings, it's easy for them to jump on the "super-parent track" in the quest to raise a happy child. "If 'adoptees want to know their past' becomes another item on the super-parent track, it's important to understand whether you are doing a search because you don't want your child to be mad at you later," she says. "My research has shown what makes a healthy identity is when the adopted person feels like they have a chance to make decisions."
Walter and I are nothing if not grade-grubbing students in the super-parent classroom. We have a babysitter who is from Guatemala and speaks only Spanish with our children. She cooks us pepian and invites us for tamales with her family, which likes my trés leches cake. A jade statue of a Mayan corn goddess stands on our living room shelf, and a woven huipil hangs in the hall. We send the boys to a summer camp for children adopted from Latin America and their siblings, and get together once a month with other families with Guatemalan children. From the moment we met Flora, we planned on visiting Guatemala every few years.
Which is all very well—but the results can sometimes feel like a trip to Epcot. Perhaps one day Flora will appreciate our efforts; maybe she will resent them. I hope that if she rolls her eyes at our jaguar masks and woven placemats, I'll be able to smile. But what if the decision she most resents is the one we can't rescind? You can't exactly put a birth family back into a drawer.
by the time we returned to Guatemala City, Flora was two and a half. Walter and I had decided it would be easier for her to meet Beatriz this young; as she grew up, she and Beatriz would figure out what they wanted from their relationship. But it was an uneasy compromise. Unlike our domestic counterparts, we didn't have the benefit of longitudinal studies and books detailing best practices. We didn't even really have an open adoption. There was no legal document to set out the terms of contact, only a tendril of trust spun from the fact that Beatriz, Walter, and I all loved the same child.
Where Do Babies Come From?
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CHINA Greater wealth and a looser one-child policy have shrunk supply of adoptable babies; this year, China banned parents who are unmarried, obese, over 50, taking psychotropic drugs, or are worth less than $80,000. RUSSIA Popular, though expensive (up to $30,000), destination for parents. But Moscow tightened rules after an American adoptive mother was convicted of killing her Russian-born son in 2005. |
GUATEMALA Very young infants can be adopted; single women as well as couples with one partner over 50 may adopt. But State Department warnings about fraud and baby smuggling may slow the flow. ETHIOPIA Has been rising in popularity thanks to model orphanages and an efficient adoption system—but may not be able to handle the surge in applications that followed Angelina Jolie's adoption of Zahara in 2005. |
ROMANIA Foreign adoptions shot up after Romania's packed, miserable orphanages made world headlines following dictator Nicolae Ceausescu's fall; protests ensued, and Romania froze adoptions the next year. Some U.S. parents, unable to cope with children who had massive mental health problems, placed kids in foster care. CAMBODIA In 2001, State Department issued first-ever ban on adoptions from an entire country, citing corruption and outright baby selling. |
Dear LBE: You said, "I just read a great article about orphans in Romania. It is a study comparing institutional care vs. living with a family. Check it out at: http://tinyurl.com/yokxdf" in response to my post about children being better off living with their single mother (assuming she is not abusive) versus being adopted. On the one hand, I do appreciate you making my point for me... you respond with comments about the difference between institutional care versus adoption (Nothing at all to do with my points, remotely). On the other hand, it illustrates how horribly twisted the anti-mother and anti-child adoption agenda really is.
Dear Yada blahblahblah: You had a chance to stop the cycle of abandonment, and you failed. How unfortunate for you child. I'm sorry that you feel some need to perpetuate the fantasy that people are replaceable (the very basis of adoption). I hope for your sake that you never wake up to what you've done to your child. PS, from my experience, most people are angry at the INSTITUTION of adoption, and at people like you and LBE who openly support the lies and myths that perpetuate the abuses that happen in adoption, not at a specific "group" within the adoption experience. I don't hate adoptive parents as a group, I hate the industry that preys upon mothers and children in order to meet the demands of adoptive parents- who are often themselves victims of lies and euphamisms. The buying and selling of children shouldn't be an industry. Right now, though, it is one. Especially in the US in domestic infant adoption. If you don't believe me, try to explain why the "fees" for children of non-white ethnicity are "cheaper" in fees than children of caucasian descent. Because you are thrilled that you weren't able to grow up with your biological family, happy to be rid of your pesky unplanned pregnancy, and thrilled to be able to take someone else's children... not all of us are so happy with our experience. I, for one, ache with missing my son, 15 years later. I hate the industry that lied to me and did the same things that LBE is doing in order to force their agenda. And I hate the fact that when that failed, they extorted him from me. I hate being an adoptee, even though my experience was that I was adopted at 8. MY son was unplanned but for even an instant unwanted. I miss him, and I hate his adopters (a word specially for them), and the lies they told that the industry encouraged them to tell just to get my son from me so I would choose them instead of someone else. Not all firstmothers see adoption as the way they were able to get rid of something they didn't want in their lives. Indeed, if statistics are correct, you are in the minority- most of us would rather have never done it and most of us feel we were coerced, lied to, and sometimes even emotionally blackmailed (or worse). Blackmail easily seen in this very grouping of responses- look at LBE and his deliberately twisted and dishonest/incomplete statistics. My son was wanted. My son is missed. Do I hate adoption? I hate the industry. Adoption has EXTREMELY limited positive applications. Most of the applications to which it is put today, are not those.
You have made me think about issues that in many ways I would prefer not to have to deal with. Your story moved me and helped me to see some issues related to one of my granddaughters in a new way. Thank you for sharing
Did you steal your daughter? I don't know if you did or not, and apparently your not sure either. It seems to me that you really don't want to know...I know this article is really for fellow adopter's of foreign children, for all of you to relieve the ache and guilt of something you feel but dare not confirm..If you feel there is something shadowy or wrong with the circumstances of one of these adoptions, there is...! That's what intuition is all about...but it's easier to console, educate, and do penance through admission of doubts and sin...You just need to go to confession and say a few rosaries, or what ever Catholics do to absolve themselves from sin...The hip cool latest super world citizen fad is to at least have one foreign adopted child in your home...It use to be a poodle or other type of expensive dog, then you would never consider rescuing a mutt from death at the local dog pound. Some but mostly conservative types, must still buy the most trendy, expensive show off hound, to keep up with the neighbors...I actually sat at a party one night of liberal activists types, one upping each other about who was the purist vegetarian, what kind of chocolate they buy...One guy out did the other by mentioning that his chocolate was not only free trade, and organic, but also shade grown, therefore not harmful to the local wild life...Well I relate to those guys as much as I relate to the author of this article...Guilt, yes, did you actually try to really know the truth? No...And what about the fact that right here in the US there are so many kids who are in the foster system there are not enough foster homes to place them in...In the US we punish people for being poor, and sick, (mentally or physically) and we ignore their offspring like they are cancerous growths....Go way out of the way to travel to another country to pay off child dealers, etc...to rescue the orphan, yet we let the foster fodder rot, and die, or turn into criminal or drug addicts when they grow up... We buy imported very expensive chocolates and organic food, when a working mom, can't afford to feed her children fresh fruit or vegetables that are not organic..The person who may be cleaning your home, or wiping the rear end of your grandparents in the nursing home, don't even make enough money to eat decently, or live in a safe neighborhood... For some their social conscience doesn't work within the borders of their own country...If they don't get some kind of social reward from their fellow Yuppies, liberal types, well it's just not worth the effort, is it? Now some may say, well what about the child health programs that the congress has been trying to make law...Hey what about dental coverage, so adults and children don't loose their teeth and don't die from tooth infections that went into their brain...And how do you expect that a parent will be able to support their healthy child who has bare minumim state paid medical coverage, when the parents are sick...How can you keep working if you can't afford to go to the doctor to get antibiotics or whatever it takes to get better...Employers fire people because they are sick, or because their children are sick too much...Punish the lower classes, and to add to this, the bleeding heart liberals, only bleed for people outside of the US border....This type of superficial thinking really turns my stomach, and I have been a card totting, recycling, activist, organic grown breastfeeding liberal for near 40 years...I am so disgusted with our government, and the liberals are just as bad as the right wing neo nazi republicans, just in a different way...Angelina is making a superficial point, by adopting children from all countries, she is ignoring the big picture at home, the US...Madonna did steal that little boy but justifies it because she's rich, and she is an ugly American kidnapper, who lives in London, and wants to look internationally trendy...She should have stayed with an animal, like Paris Hilton...The only person to me who is a celebrity but who has been virtually ignored, is Mia Farrow, who is a real mom, she is sincere and is not doing it for the fame publicity or anything else...Her kids are also from the US, many and physically and mentally challenged...She has been doing this without the photo ops and publicity that Brad and Jolie or Madonna, etc...get...This is a very sick and twisted trend, and I would sincerely ask myself why I am doing it this way especially in this point in time...
Jay, I can conduct a study that proves that all people men and women named Jay have a lower social knowledge IQ than people who are named another name...Jay, get some education, I don't care how many studies you site, in sociological research, or anything like that, these are all evil justifications to manipulate people to do what you want them to do... It doesn't matter if a child is raised by a single parent or a couple, what matters in love, happiness, and basic needs met...There are enough right wing nazi enews sites to comment on where you will have many many supporters of your two parent good one parent bad cause...I know one thing Jay, if you have an education it's not in the Humanities, or anything higher level...Sorry But have a day, ok...Jay....
If it is true that you are an adoptee/birthmother/adoptive parent, than why didn't you introduce yourself as such, Yada? Why did you clearly refer to "this world of birth parents etc etc" as something that you have no relationship to? Why did you later tell about your involvement in the issue in a strikingly detached manner, while attacking a simple display of emotion from other people with extreme vehemence? It really looks like you are emotionally dissociating from your experiences, Yada. People who deny feelings in themselves are prone to overreacting to those same feelings in others, and perceiving them as weakness. It really is OK to feel angry, as it is a first step towards learning and healing. You are right about one thing though: it is only a beginning; endless bitching and no action solve nothing. Still, acknowledging your feelings is necessary before proceeding. You may chose to manage yours by sweeping them under a rug, although you can't really hide them. But to attack others for a simple display of emotion underscores your lack of understanding of a larger picture and your lack of empathy towards others.
Homefirstmom, I am sorry but you come across as a yet another person venting out her unrelated frustrations without having read the article carefully. Are you suggesting that American foster care children are more worthy of being adopted than their foreign peers? If that's so, you are putting a value on a child's head basing on her origins in a same way as the author and the bleeding-heart liberals supposedly do, as per your accusations. Are you blaming liberals for the current 'adoption as a social status' trend? Conservatives are just as guilty of that -- check out the many Christian adoption ministries that are looking to add on to God's Army through adopting as many kids as possible. Are you blaming adoptive parents for other people and parents' poverty? That's so off the mark it's not even wrong. The gist of it all is that it's the purity of one's individual INTENT what matters, not one's affiliations or circumstances. And the author has done a mighty find job in examining and purifying that intent in her particular situation. You obviously had missed that most important part of the article, if you say that "she doesn't really want to know". She did. This is the whole point. I wish that you have given her credit where it's due.
Dear Homefirstmom,
You criticize people for not adopting from the foster care system, yet you mention being a breastfeeder. Therefore I am assuming you have had at least one biological child. Am I right? If so, than you are a hypocrite. You criticize foreign adoptive parents for not putting US foster children first. What about you? How come you didn't adopt those kids instead of giving birth? Have you ever been a foster parent? Exactly what have you done to help the social problems in the United States?
My first child, a son, was both conceived AND born within marriage. Explain, then, why I lost him. His father got in a lot of trouble with the Army, I had to turn his father in, and then it was not safe for me to go home. I had no college education, I was the one who had to sacrifice anything resembling a career if my husband got relocated (he was in the Army), and so when the family fell apart I was left with no way to make a living wage and very little family help. I trusted my son's paternal grandparents to help out with him because up to that point they had been good to me. They rewarded my trust with betrayal and I could not afford a GOOD lawyer to fight them. On top of that, my son turned out to have a speech center defect that left him unable to speak as well as his age-peers, so they thought I had abused him. He was not diagnosed until three years after he left me. In all that time I was demonized as a bad mother. I have a child again, and it was touch and go because this one WAS conceived out of wedlock, but with a man with whom I'd had an ongoing relationship and was living with him. Things fell apart after I got pregnant--something we had both wanted and planned for--and I thought I might give up my child. Then, as I was finally on good terms with my son's grandparents (who had adopted him), I thought I might keep the siblings together. The other person I'd been speaking with about my options, an infertile woman I knew online, got angry at me because she wasn't in the running anymore. The amount of entitlement these women so often feel just staggers me. She went on to protest my opinion that people should adopt needy kids, period, and not just look for a perfect white newborn because SHE is disabled and should be able to have a kid she can handle. I said, "What if your child turns out disabled later? Do you really think even a healthy infant is easy to deal with?" They don't think this through. They think it's some kind of fairy tale. For those of us they're making these demands from, it's nothing but a nightmare. I grieved for my son for a long time. I'm so glad I kept my daughter. And I'm just LIVID at the amount of hatred of and discrimination against American women that gets passed off as "culture" and--amazingly--"equality." If a child turns out well, it's because he had two parents and the father is praised. If a child does not turn out well it's the mother's fault and it's because the child didn't have a father. You know what? The two factors that make ANY family not turn out well are (1) lack of money and (2) lack of community. If you control for those factors, single-parent families turn out JUST AS WELL as two-parent, and sometimes BETTER. But the United States does not have the moral courage to face these facts, so it keeps bashing mothers. And it's not enough to say, "Oh, you need money? Get a job," because most of the wage gap between men and women in the U.S. is because of the wage gap between women who are mothers and women who aren't. If I had felt comfortable applying for welfare when I was facing losing my son, I would still have him now. If we had a medical system worth a damn in this country I could have gotten his speech problems diagnosed sooner. If, if, if. Quit blaming women for the fact you want to steal their children, and start taking a good hard look at yourselves. Because I would bet any amount of money that I don't have that if Third World women gain the political savvy and the resources to start fighting the stealing of THEIR children, you're going to start talking the same trash about them that you do about us. Check your privilege and grow up.
It is not hypocrisy for a birthmom to criticize an adoptive mom for not looking to U.S. children first. Obviously she did not want to adopt a child at the time she had her biological child. If she had wanted to adopt, and then did not look to U.S. children first, then yes, she would be a hypocrite. Meanwhile, whether or not she is one is irrelevant. The relevant point is whether you are neglecting your own country's children, since one of the reasons given for adopting is wanting to give a needy child a home. Hello? There are needy children here. Some of them even age out of the foster care system. I think the adoption system is messed up and that it is essentially stealing children from their families when we refuse to help the families instead, but IF we're going to have this system anyway, you can't claim the moral high ground in "improving a child's life" by adopting them if you don't give a damn about the children here. And please don't tell me it's the "bureaucracy" getting in your way; I had a friend in high school (early nineties) who gave her baby up, and she was adopted rather quickly. There are lots of older kids waiting for homes too, if a fit family would just come looking for them. The path is clear; you just won't walk it.
The article about adoption , espically in the case of an American or Western family adopting a child from a thrird or industrilizing nation was interresting. I find it interesting the fact that someone would adopt because it is an idea that i've thought about myself. The only question that i haven"t been able to answear is wehter or not i would be able to adopt a child if i knew that the mother or fatjer had been drug users or have had mental health issues. But the idea of raising another's child is very much a sign of some of humanities better traits.
i think that the states should provid a little backround to the childen that have been adoted. they thould now were there form and basic info on there familys to have some sence of there family.
Larsen's article is well-written and appears to be an honest account of her experiences. Many of the public comments to the article are neither. We live in an imperfect world where almost every adoption begins with tragedy in one or both families. A few people spew vitriolic, hateful opinions about adoption in general, and international adoption in particular. Few of these people have personal experience with adoptive children or families. To those of us involved in adoptions as parents, birth parents, or children, I recommend reading these hateful comments with a careful look at the writer's experience and agenda. For example on Oct. 23 Ms. Jackowski wrote, "There are only 2 justifiable reasons for the 'taking' of any child from a birth mother. 1. If the birth mother has abused the child. 2. Or if there is absolute provable evidence that the birth mother does not want the child." This is a naive comment. What about this: a woman watches her husband kill their sons in a drunken rage; when he's released from prison he terrorizes the woman and threatens their remaining child; she is afraid for the child's life and hides him with distant relatives who take poor care of him; she finally places the boy for adoption, hoping he will thrive elsewhere. Or a simpler story: in a rural family a girl contracts polio and is left severely disabled; her chances with extended family are being an invalid and probably early death; her mother places her in an orphanage with the hope that she will receive state-sponsored care and eventually be adopted by a family that can give her a full life. Then there are children born of incest, born to institutionalized teens, born to mothers who die in childbirth. I know children who came from these specific circumstances. None fit Ms. Jackowski's criteria. None were stolen from their birth families. All come from imperfect real-world situations. I chose Ms. Jackowski's comment because it is refutable in a shorter post, but I can give personal rebuttals to most of the hateful comments here. Generalizations are rarely useful in any serious conversation. Adoption systems need constant oversight and refinement, and there are certainly adoptions that have gone wrong, but we don't need to throw out the baby with the bathwater. Or is that what some commentators are suggesting? --Cindy Brown Bair, adoptive mother to 2 children born in former Soviet countries
We adopted our son internationally 5 years ago. Adopting, and now parenting, has been a highly fulfilling experience. I am now also an adoption social worker and love connecting families. I think adoption is one of the most miraculous concepts humanity has devised. How wonderful to connect children who need permanent families with people who want to parent. I appreciated the article. However, I do want to make it clear that most countries have solid systems to ensure that adoptions are done legally and ethically. The stories of child-trafficking makes for interesting headlines, but aren't the norm. I wouldn't want people to think otherwise and therefore be critical of adoption. Some of the comments to this article (listed here) seem to be based on misperceptions. I'd like to address some of those misperceptions: Any adoptive family is highly scrutinized by clinical social workers and are deemed stable and able to effectively parent. Open adoption is often ideal for the health of the child, but unfortunately isn't always possible for various reasons. I've found most adoptive families do desire some sort of openness with birth families. Most adoptive parents who adopt internationally don't do so to steer clear of birth families. There are many reasons why people make the adoption choices they do. Yes, children in the US need to be adopted as well. However, adoptive families should be honored for making the best choice for their families. I see too many adoptive families criticized unnecessarily. Those who have their children by birth do not receive the same level of criticism and are not questioned about their motives. Why should adoptive parents fall under unmerited scrutiny? Further, the existence of adoption doesn't lead to over-population, but actually reduces it. I see no need to advocate against adoption as one reader here suggests. Overall, adoption is a beautiful thing in our global society. I'm glad it is now more common and accepted.
I'm an adoptee and grateful for it. I'm glad to have been raised by my parents, a mom and a dad, not a single mother.
My daughter is adopted from China. Her birthparents didn't profit from her adoption. Nor did her orphanage. If we were able to locate them, we would be happy for her to have a relationship with her birthparents. Would it be better if she had never been conceived or born, since they couldn't afford her? WHY? She is loved and happy and secure and cared for. For us, adoption was a wonderful experience of love and family, and I think it is the same for most adoptive families. We had good reasons for not choosing America--reasons that are no more the business of anyone else, than what sexual position bio parents used to procreate! Those who attribute selfish and negative motives to adoption, have selfish and negative hearts. My daughter has a wonderful, loving home, and we have a wonderful, loving daughter, and no one no how is ever going to make me feel bad or guilty about that--because as Oprah said, YOU are the small person for thinking that way. I know many adult adoptees, and work with pre-teen adoptees. Without exception, they are all happy, well-adjusted, contented individuals who are very close to their adoptive families. But as in most issues, a few angry people with personal issues feel that they can project their problems onto an entire community. Sad.
What about the idea that a child can be abandoned by his/her parents for whatever reason.. and then another family who wishes to raise a child wants THAT child? I am fairly certain that my son (if not my daughter) was abandoned because of a birth defect - he most certainly would have died if there were no mechanism for his care! Why should we be deprived of each other and the opportunity to love because of national boundaries? I truly believe that adoption, when ehtical and legal, is a way for children who need parents and parents who want children to come together. I respect the article's subject for looking deeply and honestly into the matter and being able to allow us a glimpse inside. Does every child born deserve the best pssible future - absolutely. Is it possible - no not under the currect circumstances. Is adoption a good solution - sure for some. Not perfect but good.
btw - to those who are railing against single parenting.. you make no allowances for the death of a parent? My Mother raised three children singlehandedly when my father passed away. I am a college professor and the Mother of two children adopted from China. I do not believe that having been raised by one parent I am any the worse off... how shortsighted to beleive that single parenting - whether by choice or necessity is less than any other parenting.
ProudMama. Are you sure that the birthparents did not benefit from the abandonment? Are you not aware of the fact that many children are sold in China and that so much of what is happening there is closed to the eyes of anyone other than CCAA?
Also the 3000 dollar manditory donation along with the multiple "donations... tips... whatever we want to call them" makes the orphanages(directors)rich.
200 children per year at 3000 dollars per child = 600,000 U.S. dollars per year which is approx 4,200,000 yuan (math may be off)
Then the orphanages receive donations from many overseas charities such as the nutrition program, toys, clothes and washing machines, air conditioners, cameras... the list continues depending on requests from the orphanage.
As adoptive parents, we are truly kidding ourselves if motives are not about money in the IA scene.
Yes we are so happy we have her in our lives, however with this happiness comes a reality that what we chose to do may not be in the best interest of the children of the world.
We created a demand, we gave money to many people and helped keep the adoption business up and running.
Solution? Let's see how long IA would survive if no money was given? Just children being adopted.
However the last I heard fee's keep increasing. More demand, more money requested.
Thank you, Elizabeth, for your honest and informative account of your experiences. You have certainly touched a nerve in the intercountry adoption universe. For the past year I have been working with Salvadoran adoptees--adopted in the 1980s--in the Boston area who either have had reunions with their birth families or who are awaiting the results of the investigations by the Salvadoran-based human rights organization, Pro-Busqueda (the group that blogger Laura Briggs wrote about on Oct. 22). Through my work with Salvadorans, I have become aware of the courageous work that human rights defenders in Guatemala are doing as they address the problem of the thousands of disappeared persons from the years of armed conflict, estimated to be around 40,000. Scores of these defenders have been murdered in recent years, including a Catholic Bishop. And the offices of human rights organizations are routinely broken into and sensitive materials are stolen. Perpetrators are immune from prosecution since corruption exists throughout the criminal justice system. These oppressive conditions must be recognized in this discussion of intercountry adoptions from Guatemala. Just under 16,000 Guatemalan infants and children have been adopted by Americans in the past five years,and the State Department reports that there are 3,000 pending orphan visa applications today. Were any of these children abducted? Were parents coerced into relinquishing their parental rights? Ultimately, the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Service (CIS) and the U.S. Embassy in Guatemala City must decide. Do they have the personnel to undertake a careful examination of the pending visa applications-as required by law? I doubt it very much. And will CIS and the U.S Embassy cooperate with--and protect-- Guatemalan human rights organizations in an effort to investigate allegations of past child abductions and coercion? To do so will require a fundamental change in U.S.-Guatemalan relations. If our government officials and agencies in Guatemala continue to support the status quo, then not only will allegations of child abductions continue, but the dream of a free and prosperous and democratic Guatemala will never be realized. (Robert McAndrews, Salem State College).
All I can say is "Oh, yes!" Thank you for sharing your heart with us.
Anotherchinaadopter: first off, most of the baby-selling by parents are to IN-COUNTRY adoptions, not to orphanages. Domestic adoptions and baby selling is very common and has been going on for decades; long before the west entered the scene. Additionally, the "donations" to the orphanages ORIGINALLY went towards dramatically improving the lives of the orphans left behind. And while, it is true the not all the money goes to the children themselves, if you talk to a parent who adopted 15 years ago versus today you can see the extremely dramatic difference in the health of the children. This can also be seen now in comparing an orphanage with alot of IAs versus one with very few. Money is going towards the children at least to some degree. As you stated though too much money does little but further the demand for more healthy babies. However, China is taking care of that problem as we speak. They signed Hague which means they must increase domestic adoptions which brings in much less money. Also the increased wait times on our end result in less babies each month leaving the orphanages for the "west" and less money coming in each month. This will more than likely curtail any underhanded baby-dealing by orphanages. Remember though, China's IA program started not because of the "demand we created" but the reverse. The children were there and China was more than happy to have the west take the burden off her shoulders. Thankfully, that is no longer true and I believe, in dragging the wait times to 3 years, China is making sure that orphanages don't resort or continue to resort fufilling the demand "at all costs" for the sake of money. http://research-china.blogspot.com/ is a great resource.
Colleen, I agree with what you have said. I also feel the slowdown will help with the long term demand for a Chinese child, however what it has also accomplished is for people to move to another IA route.
I am very familiar with Brian's research and to be honest what upsets me most is that China has the resources to care for its children. The families are there and want to adopt. I think we are truly fooling ourselves if we believe that people who are infertile in China or just want to adopt, are priorities. Possibly in time they will be, however right now it is the foreigners who come first.
Economic growth and a lenient 1-child policy is allowing for less abandonment. The Hunan trafficking may have slowed down the shifty directors who filled orphanages and our demand. These are the reasons for the slow down.
China claims that these kids were adopted domestically however there are many parents who know differently.
And to be honest, I still feel that orphanages are still trafficking. To think otherwise would be too naive.
We all tell ourselves what we need to hear. It feels better correct? However if even one couple on China is childless and one child could have stayed in their homeland and we robbed them of this, then it is wrong.
Chinese born children belong in China first and that is not what is happening.
Yes the orphanages have also improved the physical care for the children in some orphanages, however they still come to us with severe trauma and many other issues. Many orphanages are understaffed and children are still suffering, however the money we "donated" went into building beautiful rooms in the orphanage that people never use.
I think if you read over Brian's blog you will also see his main motive is to keep children in China where they belong.
Imagine if our children here were being exported and our chances to have a child were given to foreigners. Absurd really that anyone would speak in favor of this and we wonder why it is adoptees seem angry!
I've kept in touch for eight years with my son's birth mother in Asia. I've sent money to her so that she won't have to give up her other children. She tells me (through our intermediary) that her boyfriend takes the money. She keeps the boyfriend because living alone is too hard. She sent away her older children because she couldn't feed them. I have sent money to pay for those children to live in a foster home, and I paid for their schooling. Now the mother wants to take the children back and put them to work during the day, because the boyfriend is sick with HIV. She's waiting on her status. The kids are four and six. The foster parents want to fight the mother since she signed over legal custody. They say that if the mother gets them back they'll never go to school, and will have very bleak futures.
I can't agree to taking those kids out of school and sending them out to the streets. I can't agree to fighting a birth mother for custody of her kids. I can't afford to send enough money to keep the boyfriend happy and still have enough left over to feed the children. That's the kind of stuff you get into when you do an international adoption. Sure, I could've just not tried to find our son's mother. Everyone says to let the kids grow up and decide for themselves. Well, if the mom is HIV positive, she might not be here when he's eighteen unless we can find a way to sponsor her for meds. I'm giving specifics because it seems like a lot of people are very firm about the ethics when they're talking about generalities. It's a little harder when you look at each case on its own. Some kids are better with their mothers if it can be managed, some kids need more care than their mothers can give.
I may have been young and poor when I found out I was knocked up, but I wasn't ignorant to my options. I chose to do an open adoption and I am very happy with the outcome. I love my child very much and I love the adoptive parents as well. When I see them together there is no doubt that they love each other. I don't think that it is fair for anyone to judge or name call. I think my baby and the A-parents are pretty awesome.
Given the corruption of the international adoption processes these days, especially in countries like Guatemala, the question is this: How do we connect our deepest and best desires with the deepest needs of our crazy, fragile world? We can remain aloof, allowing children to die at an early age from malnutrition, or grow up scavenging the garbage dump in Guatemala City. Or we can enter the flawed processes society makes available, navigating them as best we can, trying to correct them as we go along. And, perhaps, living with some moral ambiguity as a result. But at the end of the day, we must do what we can. Nothing more, or less.
I'm a gay dad who adopted our son from Guatemala. My mixed reactions to this piece are here: http://richardlsmith.blogspot.com/2007/10/internationally-adopting-paren...
My husband's sister-in-law is a VP at a major US corporation. She desparely wanted a child. She and her husband went through a broker and adopted a child in the USA. The birth mother signed over irreversable rights to the baby 48 hours after giving birth. I honestly don't feel that a young girl should be able to sign over irrevocable decisions with her hormones out of whack. Anyway, this young lady will never get to see her child again. I have daughters and I shudder to think what would happen if they got in trouble while they are off in a different state going to college and hid the pregancy from me and was manipulated by one of this so called "baby brokers".
Anyway, long story short...the Mom adoptive mom works long hours in the city, and the husband owns his own firm. They must pull in over $500,000 a year. The baby is dropped off at my mother-in-laws house every morning. My husband's sister (late 50s) moved in so that she could watch this child. Her own husband and teenage child still live at home (a few blocks away). The adoptive mother travels alot on business so the baby is left at the in-laws house for sleep-overs on many occassions.
In other words, there is no fine line between what is the nuclear family and what is the extended family. I'm sure the birth mother thought the child was going to grow up in a McMansion with a swingset in the backyard. Instead, the child is living with very wealthy parents, in a condo...because they don't have time to take care of a house...and spends most of her time being raised by two "old" women. The 50 something year old and the 80 something year old.
In other words, I think alot of the young birth mothers in the United States are being duped.....after all, they really don't get much money...in fact, I don't think they get anything except expenses paid. The "broker" is the one who pockets the 20 or 30 thousand dollars.
In ending, please, please warn your kids that if they ever get in "trouble" to let a family member know. This poor young birth mother has absolutely no recourse in getting her child back. And the poor child....he doesn't know who to call Momma....the aunt, the grandmother, the adopted mother, etc., etc., Very, very pitiful story.
Thank you for one of the most thoughtful and honest pieces on adoption I have read.
As an adoptee, and a recent visitor to Guatemala, this is an issue I have thought a lot about.
Is the choice really a choice? – When I was in Guatemala, my Spanish teacher shared with me some notes he took at a university discussion related to unwanted pregnancies in Guatemala. Among the list of problems leading to unwanted pregnancies was women’s promiscuity. Absent from the list was any mention of birth control (or men’s promiscuity). It took about a 15 minute discussion with my teacher for him to even understand why I thought that might be an oversight. Would the $30,000 paid to an adoption attorney be better invested in programs that provide birth control to young women?
Should only rich people have kids? Should only the young and cute poor people be helped? –Many people throughout the world give up their children because of poverty, but that does not mean that the only choice is adopting children one by one or allowing them to starve. Would the $30,000 paid to an adoption attorney be better used on development programs to bring an entire village out of poverty rather than lining the pockets of an attorney and helping one child? Would the time spent finding birth parents or raising that one adopted child be better spent lobbying our government and international financial institutions to change political policies that contribute to poverty in places like Guatemala? Or perhaps that time could be spent monitoring U.S. companies like Chiquita banana whose policies are so destructive to poor working people in Guatemala?
Is having a nuclear family the only way? Do people still feel an obligation to have a television family? – While I love my adopted parents, I know that my a-mother was not prepared to have a child. In addition to a litany of issues she inherited from her parents, she was still recovering from the trauma of losing two children (who died shortly after birth). She adopted in part because she grew up in an era where all people assumed they should have children and the inability to have children meant she was not fully a woman. The structure of a nuclear family is not the only way to address people’s needs in this world. I wonder how many people could do more good by focusing on the problems we suffer as a world family and not just their nuclear family (biological or adopted).
I’m not against adoption. I think there are many instances where it is the best course of action, but I also think there are many instances where it is not. It is nice to see someone thinking about it within a larger context.
As I sit here crying I think about my own adoption. I came to America when I was 18 months on St. Patricks Day. I have struggled for years reguarding the circumstances of my adoption. I have seen the pictures of my orphanage and have clung for years to the official paperwork that my biological mother had to sign with her statement. My adoptive family was not allowed to travel to Guatemala due to continued warfare in the early 80's. It was simply unsafe for them. For years I was told that my father left my mother and older brother. I became very sick and she was not able to care for me. The option to give up her rights in exchange for hospital care and the promise of being adopted to the U.S now haunts me. Enlight of new stories and articles I have read, I wonder if there were other options or was she a young poor 19 year old victim to money hungry agencies. I am now 26 years old. I have gone through my life filled with saddness, guilt, anger, hurt, questions and now I feel upset at the temporary cease in adoptions in Guatemala. For several years I have called down to the agency, AGAND to speak with Mirna who had taken care of me so many years ago. I have begged for information but have come to a brick wall everytime. I want to search so badly but am afraid of corrupt organizations. I feel that you were very lucky to have meet Beatriz. To be able to look in her eyes. I know that my mother would like to meet my birth mom to say thank you. And for me, all I want is to look in here eyes. For her to hold me, to smell her. Does she have glasses like me, is she slender or slightly pudgy like me?Do my children look like me brother? Why was I given up? What happened to my brother. Was it all true? In the end, I want to know for sure that I was loved. Thank you again for sharing your painful yet true feelings. I read this through the eyes of my own mother. God Bless you and your family.
Adopting children, whether internationally or within a country, is certainly better than having a surplus of children in orphanages or kids running through the foster care system. I was adopted, and although I'm not an overtly religious or what-have-you type of person, I feel like there wasn't any other way that things could have worked out. I've imagined what it would have been like to have been one of my parents' biological children, but never about what it would have been like to have my own biological parents. I think this article has presented great discussion on adoption, but it fails to recognize where adoption has been successful as well as legitimate. Again, I say to look to the number of children placed in orphanages or foster care systems that often have no definitive parental figures. If there is corruption and baby stealing, then the problem is different from simply saying that adoption is stealing (and I know the author is not saying that, but some of the people who comment are, or at least are implying...) and it is something that has to be dealt with within each country - it's probably not something very easily solvable, and corruption like this probably will continue, but the least we can do is provide those children with homes and care.
This is an intense and thought provoking article. I have also agonized over my daughter's first or Kazakhstan family. A factor not mentioned in this article however, is that many families who search for birth families, at least in Kazakhstans, find there was a lot more than poverty behind the relinquishment of their child. Often birth families are dealing with severe mental or physical illness and drug addictions. It is not so easy to solve all of our children's first families problems by offering them a regular income.
Hi Another Adoptee,
I don't think the real issue is the headlines of this story or the implications of some of the comments. To me, anyway, the problem is that society and adoptive parents see themselves as saviors who have rescued a child. That is justification and avoids the fact that many parents were desperate themselves, be it infertility, single,
or some other reason to be a parent.
Is there any kind of charitable organization for people who would like to provide the few hundred dollars that it would take for some of these parents not to have to relinquish their children?
Thank you so much for sharing your feelings in such an open and honest way. There is an unrealness about international adoption that I can't quite understand. I felt it so much well I was "in country" adopting both
of my children. I love them so much...and I want it to be O.K. to have them..and somehow that "O.K." can only be acheived by meeting the woman who gave birth to them and telling me who they got their dimples from.
In the late 1950's when the US and Russia were being PAID to leave their occupied territories in Austria, those of us children in camps being shipped of to the USSR to repopulate were left in the camps when the Russians pulled out.
My three sisters and I were nabbed off the street walking home by RUSSIANS who thought we physically qualified for their pogroms, plunked in camps and were prisoners. Once the Russians abandoned thousands of us behind fences, the Americans showed up. One by one we were handed over to adopting American families. NO EFFORT WAS MADE OR ALLOWED FOR US TO BE REUNITED WITH OUR FAMILIES who were ALL local to where we were interned.
My sisters and I were scattered, never allowed contact for the rest of our lives. I myself have spent tens of thousands of dollars in several countries to no avail.
And NO, we are NOT GRATEFUL for the lives we were forced to "show appreciation" for by our "new families" who never stop "bragging" about how they rescued children that didnt' need anything more than be allowed a ride home.
As a mother of a child adopted from Guatemala, I believe many of the worries, concerns and thoughts voiced by the author could have been my own. Very thought provoking.
But let me state flatly to many of the responders who feel that families like our somehow are laboring under some savior fantasy, that is simply not the case with us or the scores of other adoptive parents I know. We long considered our options-domestic and transnational and chose the latter for many reasons, too personal and detailed to note here.
I also feel a heightened sense of responsibility to give to charities in GUA that help families and children in particular. I give to several, but I'm very proud of the work Safe Passage (Camino Seguro) does to help families living in the Guatemala City dump, from school to food programs to job training.
Guatemala gave me the greatest gift possible-the least we (and hopefully the thousands of other families like ours) can do is give as much back to it as possible. Will this keep others from having to relinquish their children for economic reasons? I hope so.
but as long as that nation-and so many others-deny women information/access to basic birth control and information, it's unrealistic to think that there won't be a continued need for parents ready, willing and able to care for the children of unplanned pregnancies.
To Jay: regarding single parenting. Funny, but I've read many, many articles that say kids that come from a single parent family do just fine and no worse than kids from a two-parent family. I happen to be a single adoptive mother and my child is VERY happy and stable! Single-parent families occur for many reasons: adoption, death, divorce and abandonment. Me adopting as a single was better for my child than having to go through the pain of seeing two parents fight and divorce or seeing one parent die. Children in single parent families do just fine and sometimes better than those with two parents!
You said you wonder how your daughter will feel when she reads this article..I hope you never allow her to do so and read that her parents contemplated giving her back?? As a mother of an adopted child myself, I couldn't stomach half of the article. Wow.
I wrote The Mothers Project -- telling the stories of the millions of "unwed" mothers of past generations who were froced to surrender their babies for adoption. They never got over the loss. Never. Please, please help young mothers and their babies. The demand for white infants is a billion dollar a year industry in North America. Girl/mothers are being "befriended" and schmoozed into "doing what's best for the baby." See "Prayer for Truth" -- my YouTube video about the moms who lost their babies in the Baby Scoop Era 40's - 70's. Young moms are at risk, still, today. So sad. Babies of moms who are not good mothers can be in Kinship Care -- with a good relative or friend.Foster care is bad -- states and agencies get a bonus for every baby adopted out of foster care (!!). Sorry to go on and on... just so important to make people aware of the role of money in all this. Women who want to adopt would really be wonderful mentors, instead, for mother AND baby. Help them ... help many of them. Celeste
It's because the kids that are offered by our US Foster Care system are generally so psychologically damaged that they can be dangerous. The list for "less damaged" infants and toddlers in the US is years long and birth parents change their minds over here at the drop of a hat.
You have bought the liberal media's agenda hook,line and sinker. In most 3rd World Countries, people are being born less rapidly than the death rate. We are NOT destroying the world through overpopulation, we are "destroying" it through liberal alarmism!
Many of us adoptive parents have taken children from lives of disease and poverty.
Let's take teens adopted as infants back to their 3rd world countries and let them choose where they want to grow up,mmkay?
This is a wonderfully thought-provoking story and I hope the more people realize adopted children suffer the profound loss of their birth families, something can be done to change this situation.
My husband and I adopted three older orphans from Russia. In our case, their mothers were dead and no adult family member had contacted the children from the time they were placed in their respective orphanages. This may be due to the poverty of their relatives as opposed to their lack of concern. In our son's case, we were told he and his older brother, who was out of the orphange, had no bond. However, we waited for two hours for the older brother to meet us at the orphanage. As soon as our 8 year-old-son saw his 17 year old brother, they ran toward each other and our son jumped up into his brother's arms. So much for no bond. We have kept in touch with the brother, exchanged photos and letters for the past six years.
We visited our daughters' orphanage when we were in Russia to adopt our son. Their cousin, who was also there, cried when we gave him photos of our daughters.
Our daughters suffered so many losses: the loss of their birth family, including their grandmother who had a heart condition; the loss of their birth mother who suffered anguish from the account my oldest daughter gave when they were taken away from her because of abuse and neglect; the loss of the care takers at the orphange who were kind and truly loved them; the loss of their friends at the orphanage who had become like family.
To answer another poster's question, we adopted from Russia because my husband and I are Caucasian and we wanted to blend into society as a family. Our children were the luck of the draw. But one of our daughters looks so much like my husband's niece that sometimes we cannot tell who is who in photographs; my son has my coloring but looks like my husband did as a child, our other daughter looks something like me -- I am part Slavik -- and has my husband's blue eyes. The two other children have hazel eyes as I do.
Do I think our children are better off with us than if we had left them in Russia? Yes. We have sacrificed a great deal to treat their emotional disorders -- one has bipolar disorder; the other two suffer from depression. Perhaps their mothers had the same afflictions but were unable to get treatment. We have also sacrificed tremendously to help them receive educations despite serious learning disorders. We cook Russian food and value their cultural heritage, but we also cook lots of other dishes, too. My son told me this year Thanksgiving just isn't Thanksgiving without turkey. (We had been discussing simplifying Thanksgiving dinner.)
I could not conceive a child, and everyone has to make a decision right for them, but when millions of children around the world need homes, isn't it the right thing to do if you can open your heart and bank account to help children in need of love and stability?
If I were running adoption ministries, I would do everything possible to minimize costs so more parents, including citizens of my own country could not only afford to adopt but could afford to raise these children who need help in overcoming trauma and learning deficits.
In response to another poster: since I have adopted my children, I have come to the realization that we do not blend in once my children start talking, and who cares if you blend in anyway? "Blending in" becomes a non-issue.
For those of you who have never adopted, I think your "opinion" is irrelevant! You have not walked the road and you don't have a clue what you are speaking about!
Thanks for this. We adopted from Russia, and tracked down the birth family. This gave our daughter great comfort, as well as setting her Russian mother's mind at ease. She wrote "I do not worry about whether she is safe and loved". A wonderful gift.
For another perspective--our birth children were in their teens when we took in a neighbor with three children who was struggling in a very unstable lifestyle. Within a month, she went to jail for past problems, two of the children eventually went to live with their fathers, and the third remained with us for seven years (he was three years old initially). His mom is a friend, and she felt that we could give him a better life. She has been involved off and on, depending on her own stability. This arrangement has been totally outside the system. Although we asked for legal guardianship, she never consented to that. She has toyed with the idea of taking her son home for the last two years, and on Thanksgiving weekend it finally happened. We of course are torn up inside...but I have to say that through the years we realized that all the soccer, piano lessons, trips abroad IN THE WORLD would still not fill the desperate need in her/our son for the love of his birth mother. He is comfortable with her, has an almost irrational loyalty to her, plus we had no legal right to him...so he has gone home. She begs us to stay involved in his life, which we definitely are doing. I know this must be a one-in-a-million situation...but we will always feel he is part of our family.
Many thanks to Elizabeth Sherman for sharing her experience and for writing such a powerful feature. It gives me faith in the power of integrity and diligence in such a challenging process.
Just like cereal, or soap detergent, there are many different varieties of adoptions. Different flavors, different sizes. I think the "product" most people are so against is the one where young people are being taken advantage of...where their offspring are very valuable commodities, and that someone is making money off of their children. There is the other variety where children are actually rescued. But, I think the whole issue/process/etc. has to come "out of the closet" so to speak. The whole store behind adoptions in this day and age has GOT TO BE BROUGHT OUT IN THE OPEN. I.e., 60 minutes, NBC Dateline, etc., needs to start reporting on this. I remember 20/20 did something about the dishonesty and stealing of children from Vietnam a few years back, and then you never saw/heard anything again. Maybe too many people higher up in the media industry don't want to acknowledge or face the fact that they too "stole" a child from an innocent victim?
