CBC Story on Ethiopia Adoptions - Part 1, Relinquishment vs Abandonment
This story
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.
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