We were referred an 11 month old baby girl from China in the Fall of 2008.  The feelings of that day were so surreal – a lot of tears were shed over her pictures.  The pent up emotion of a 3 year wait came rushing to the surface.  A month later we were in China.  As we waited in the hotel lobby to meet our baby girl, I felt the exact same extreme excitement and anxiety as I did when I was watching our son being born in the hospital.  Our daughter was placed into our arms for the first time on November 2nd.  She was dazed.  She did not cry.  She had an eye infection and flea bites all over her face, and she was tired and hungry.  We were incredibly happy and she was more or less in shock.  The photos from that day tell the story that we couldn’t see while we were experiencing it.  We later found out that she was removed from her foster family that morning and bussed from the SWI to the provincial capital, where she was put in a diaper and a new outfit and promptly turned over to us.  I cannot imagine how terrifying that must have been for her.

Our dear little girl spiked a fever the next day and had a quick heartbeat that had the doctor concerned (I think she was sick when she was placed in our arms and on some type of medication that wore off.)  We were prepared and we nursed her back to good spirits and health with antibiotics, and showers, and good meals, and hot bottles, and love.  Her new brother got the first smile.  Her bites healed and her eye healed and day by day she revealed to us more of her personality.  Her appetite was amazing.  She was eating more food at each meal than our son.  She slept through most nights, tossing and turning and sometimes screaming in her crib – we could only imagine what was going on in her little head.  We started in on the attachment stuff right away, carrying her in a sling all the time, lots of communication, eye contact, and so on.

We have been home for 8 months, and our family is complete.  There have been ups and downs, but we have adjusted to one another – we have brought her into our life, and she has brought China into our lives.  She is now a healthy and happy-go-lucky toddler who loves to play and swim and eat.  She prefers her parents to anyone else and her brother vacillates between “I love you” and “I hate you” as older brothers do with their sisters.  She makes us laugh every day and we are so, so, madly in love with our daughter and could not imagine our life without her.

She is our daughter now, but she is not “all ours.”  She has a foster family in China that raised her well for 12 months and cares about her a great deal with whom we have been able to share photos.  More likely than not, she has a birth family in China – maybe siblings that share her square-shaped head and sport her “lucky ears.”  I wish I could know them and thank them.  I wish she could at least know of them.  I wish that they could know how happy and loved she is.

She will have a lot of questions, and for many of them the answer from me will start off “We don’t know for sure, but…”   We will fill her life with family and love, but I know there will be a part of her that will be not of our family but of China, of her birth family, and of mystery.  And her beautiful honey skin, her radiant Asian eyes, and her dark, silky hair will be reminders of that mystery.  I will do all I can to ensure that she is able to own her mystery and be proud.

However a family is built - through adoption or otherwise - there are unknowns and what ifs.  There is no “safe” way to go about this very serious business of making a lifetime commitment to love and care for another human being.  You make your choices, and you take your chances.  Adoption is complicated, and nothing is too scary anymore.

Thanks

Madonna in the course of her charitable work begins to help orphans in Malawi. She forms an attachment to one child and subsequently adopts said child. Now with an even bigger attachment to Malawi she continues to do charitable work and spends significant amounts of her fortune helping children. Assumedly she forms an attachment to second child and wanting to give her a home and family decides to adopt said child as well. In both adoptions she has done what is necessary to ensure the adoptions are legal. At the time she decided to pursue the adoptions both children appear to have been relinquished and eligible to be adopted. In both cases Madonna’s notoriety has resulted in complications and birthfamily getting involved where they were not involved in the care of the child previously. It is reasonable to question the motives of the birthfamily given the publicity involved.

I am in no ways a fan of Madonna using her influence and celebrity to skirt the rules a country sets up for their IA program, but I do not believe that Madonna should be harshly criticized for her actions. She is helping many many orphans in Malawi and can we in the adoption community really blame her for also wanting to give one or two specific children a permanent home? Do we really want to go down the path of suggesting that Madonna’s home is not a good home? WHat do we really know? Where does that lead?

Bottom line. I am prepared to see the legal process run its course and move on.

Mr. Peng, who started an ad hoc group for parents of stolen children, said some of the girls were sold to orphanages.

and

International adoption has become big business in some countries. Orphanage workers go out into communities to recruit children, luring parents to give up their youngsters with promises of education and three meals a day.

and

There is no legitimate rationale for keeping a child in an orphanage when a viable alternative exists, and yet the wait times for adoptive parents have been growing in many countries — with adoptions from China, for example, now taking up to three years to complete. Among the Chinese regulations is one that an adoptive parent cannot have a body mass index above a certain level. Perhaps a new study could compare those raised in orphanages with those raised by overweight people, just to make sure the priorities are correct.

and finally:

I believe that many people who are outspoken in emphasizing the desirability of domestic adoption over international adoption far outstate their case.  They get away with this because they ground their arguments using terms of reference that are politically difficult to challenge, i.e., racial and cultural identity and exploitation of the rich vs. the poor.  But to me it smacks of grandstanding and ideal worldism and I wish someone would call their bluff.  Their criticism of adoption practices are based on what is often an ideal distant future for many IA source countries…

“ideal distant future”

Those are the words that have been nagging at me the last couple of days. The implication that we should just accept the faults of current IA systems, that it is unrealistic or naive to expect better, is that really where we are in this world? Do we really need to just accept stolen children and bought off birth parents as the cost of finding homes for as many children as possible? I ask that question sincerely and maybe to some extent we do, but I simply do not believe that there is nothing that can be done today to minimize the occurrence of such things. What can I do personally? Not much, but I can at least put down in writing what I think should be done. Maybe someone will read this that is in a position of power in the adoption world and maybe change can happen. Maybe that is naive too, but so be it.

The Hague Treaty on Intercountry Adoption is  good start as far as it goes, but to my mind it is too generic and too subject to interpretation to truly be a guiding document for IA. So here is what I would like to see changed as a start.

Fees shall not be charged to adoptive parents for the purpose of funding the care of children in orphanages. This applies equally to both international adoptive parents and domestic adoptive parents. Funding models for orphanages should be set up such that there can be no financial incentive to find additional children to place through IA (or “adjust” the information of the children they do have available). Equally there must be no incentive for orphanage directors to keep children in their care for one day longer than necessary.

Would the above be hard to implement? Would there be negative consequences for the children?

The answer to the first question is an unqualified no in my opinion. For any program that I am aware of this could be done simply and immediately.

Answering the second question is a bit harder, yet on balance I think the answer again is a clear no, but since even for me this answer is less clear, let me explain why by answering a question I imagine people might ask.

Wouldn’t this result in a lower quality of care for children while they are in the orphanage? Maybe, but apart from the fact that I do not believe the standard of care is the responsibility of the adoptive parents, I also feel that countries like China have more than enough resources to ensure adequate care for children in orphanages. This may not be the case in poorer countries, but in such countries the downside of creating incentive to maintain a flow of children outweighs any advantages. I am also skeptical that in the absence of such fees that the quality of care would decrease. The only way to prove this would be to eliminate such fees and see what happens, but let me give one small example of how I come about my skepticism on this subject. Here is some text from an adoption agency web site:

Our new baby’s home will provide the ultimate in amenities. Each family will begin their time of bonding with their child in our “rocking chair room” which is to be built into the side of a hill overlooking the mountains - where the birds sing and where a trickling waterfall can be heard just outside the window, next to the pond.  Walking trails through the lush gardens within the grounds will provide total intimacy in bonding. Our on site guest houses will be built around the pond in a tranquil and retreat style setting. Our desire is to provide you and your family with the most powerful and memorable experience.

Now I don’t know how you react to this paragraph, but when I first read it I was shocked to be honest. The above paragraph and the remainder of the accompanying information screams at me that they are marketing a product and spending large amounts of money to do so that has nothing to do with the care of children. To be clear I am not suggesting for a second that the children are not being well cared for. All the evidence I have tells me otherwise. My only point is that it is not at all clear to me that the standards of care would be reduced if the funding model was adjusted to ensure that there was no incentive to maintain a flow of IA children.

Most commenters on the subject of IA agree that at worst it is a useful last resort to ensure children in need have families. Most commenters on adoption agree that there are ethical problems with many existing IA adoption programs. History tells us that good adoption programs can easily go bad and they invariably go bad as a result of greed. History also tells us that fixes get made only after problems have been going on for a fairly long time when the evidence becomes overwhelming.

My own conclusion is that changes can easily be made to existing programs to eliminate the incentives for corruption and that this can be done without sacrificing the quality of care for the children and at the same time reducing the occurrences of unethical adoptions. I also suspect that better funding models would result in more adoptions of all kinds with more children spending less time in orphanages.

http://www.cbc.ca/canada/story/2009/03/19/f-ethiopia-adoption.html

and the comments to it have got me thinking about any number of issues so I figured why not blog about them in a bit more detail.

Still, Terri Hambruch was upset because she had wanted to adopt an orphan. “I believe international adoption is the last option for a child. If there is anything else that could be done to keep a child in their country, in their home, then that’s what you do.”

This part of the original article prompted a few attacks on Ms Hambruch that still have me scratching my head. First of all, the quote provided might as well have been taken straight from the Hague Treaty on Intercountry Adoption. It is in fact the official policy of most, if not all, countries participating in intercountry adoption so it certainly is not controversial in and of itself.

Of course it isnt that simple and there is more to this. There are two main ways that children become available for international adoption and they are exemplified best by two of the largest IA programs. First we have the situation in China. There the children are  all “abandoned”. Abandoned in the sense that due to circumstance the parents were unable or unwilling to keep the child and left the child to be found (or not I suppose). The point being that we do not know the circumstances under which the child was left and in the Chinese system there is no hope for reunification with the birth family. Without adoption the child would be destined to an institutionalized childhood.

In Ethiopia there is some abandonment as well but often (I don’t know the exact statistics) the birth parents make the decision to “relinquish” the child. Due to circumstance (primarily economic) they are not or do not feel like they can parent the child and so they seek out an orphanage to place their child. Often in adoptions from Ethiopia the adoptive parents will meet the birth parents. Are there options for these parents other than relinquishment? That is a hard question to answer. In some cases I suspect not, at least none that would allow the child and family to survive.

So is there a meaningful difference here? Certainly in both cases we have a child that needs a home so why did Ms. Hambruch make the comment she did? I can not speak for her, but having been around the adoption world for a while now I know it is not an uncommon sentiment. Many feel distinctly uncomfortable with the idea of adopting a “relinquished” child. From what I can gather there is often a sense that they would be taking advantage of the economically deprived to fulfill a “selfish” desire to parent. The knowledge that the money being spent on the adoption alone, if given to the birth family, would allow them to stay together comfortably forever is a factor in this thinking I believe. There is also often a higher level ethical question raised. Do IA programs that involve relinquished children allow a deeper problem to persist. Without such programs would greater efforts be made to provide the necessary support to keep families together?

Obviously these question do not have easy answers and the fact that others feels differently is completely understandable to me as well. Personally I come down somewhere in the middle on this one and can understand both sides. I did find the attacks in the comments on this point distasteful though.

I have cross posted this to the forum for anyone that would like to comment/discuss. Please register if you havent yet. All views are welcome!

So why do people adopt? In my experience the answer in the majority of cases is that they adopt because they want to be parents. There is nothing wrong with this answer in my mind, it is certainly the answer I would give myself and I think this answer applies to those that become parents the old fashioned way as well.

So where is the problem?

Well in my travels through the online world of adoption I find myself coming across an attitude of entitlement more often than I would have ever expected. Maybe I am misreading the comments people make but so many seem to be more focused on what they are getting from being adoptive parents as opposed to what their children are getting.

So what are adoptive parents “entitled” to? Well in a legal sense we are entitled to all the same things as bio parents are. As for the rest, well we aren’t really entitled to much. I have come around to the view that as parents (even bio ones) we earn what we get. The difference is that for adoptive parents the work that goes into the “earning” is often more than for bio parents and often a whole lot more.

I am not sure I am being very clear here so let me put it another way. From the child’s perspective being adopted means that they have had a pretty rough start to their lives. Whether they are adopted as a newborn, toddler or older child they did not ask to be adopted and in the short term, adoption certainly means disruption and uncertainty for them. Do they owe their new adoptive parents anything? Certainly not at the beginning. After a year? Several years?

Parenting is hard work and it often brings great joy. What I try to tell myself is that the joy part is sometimes going to come from the effort I put into parenting, but it is never something I am owed. Choosing to be an adoptive parent is really all about making a commitment to a child and there is a lot of obligation that comes with that. Thankfully in the vast majority of cases I suspect adoptive parents get all the good stuff too, but I know it may not always be so.

Makes sense but here is some information that makes me question this assumption.

1. Canada suspends all adoptions from Liberia over a year ago over ethical concerns. Adoptions continue from the USA until just recently when the adoptions are stopped by the Liberian government.

2. A couple of years ago adoptions from Vietnam close in Canada but remain open in the USA, now the situation is reversed.

3. Adoptions from Guatemala to Canada stop a couple of years ago due to concerns. USA does this a couple of years later but seemingly only because the Hague treaty came into force.

How does one explain these inconsistencies?

Well there is this comment from E.J. Graff (journalist responsible for a recent series in the Washington Post) that worries me deeply.

Governments often do know what’s going on (you should hear what I’ve heard from some of them!) but they cannot act until they have an overwhelming amount of evidence of wrongdoing–much of which they cannot make public, out of conern for the families’ privacy. The stories I’ve heard of birthfamilies asking for their child back, after it was adopted to another country, just make the hair on the back of my neck stand up in horror.

I have no reason to believe Ms. Graff is just making this stuff up and since it fits quite well with the pattern of decision making that goes on in the IA world it is just very believable to me.

So what is behind statements like this? My own belief is not so much that people have a fear of sharing the parenting, but that they have a fear of sharing the love a child has for their parents. That somehow by entering into an open adoption they will get less “love” from their child.

Is this a reasonable fear? I can only speak for myself and say that I will continue to do whatever I can to make it as easy as possible for my daughter to grow to love her birthfamily and do not worry in the least that this may somehow diminish how she may feel about me.

http://www.gov.on.ca/children/english/infertilityAdoption/index.html