How to Improve IA
A few bits and pieces from recent articles and forum comments got me thinking about this:
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.