West Not Impressed by Adoption Practices in Nepal

Lorraine

Nepal continues to be on the front pages of the international adoption scene. Last summer the UN allowed adoptions to open again in Nepal and approximately 60 children were adopted during that time, most to the United States. This was after well-documented cases of kidnapping and child-trafficking, and allowing children who had been left at orphanages temporarily to be adopted out of the country. Supposedly the unethical practices such kidnapping and faked papers had come to an end.

Finding the Families of The Lost Children of Nepal

Lorraine

Since I put the blog about Little Princes up on Friday, we have learned that
police have rescued 20 children from Mukti Nepal, a Maharajgunj-based orphanage, and arrested its operator after finding the children living in squalor and without enough food. The children range from five to fifteen. Six boys and 14 girls were kept in one room.  It seems clear that the orphanage was the dumping ground of one of the child traffickers in Nepal, and the deplorable conditions are often shown to Westerners as a sham to get money to "take care of the children." Instead, the cash goes into the traffickers' pockets and he looks for other Westerners to keep the money flowing. The following book review of Little Princes: One Man's Promise to Bring Home the Lost Children of Nepal explains how child trafficking operates in Nepal.

Call it what it is: Child Trafficking as "Adoption"

Pro-adoption forces do not want to call taking children from poor countries in great quantity: trafficking. They are wrong. It is child trafficking, plain and simple, and only the "not necessarily for sex" codicil applies; though as we know, sometimes it is for sex. But those cases are rare. Most people, one assumes, go to great lengths to get a child simply because they want to have a child, and treat that child as their "own."

International Adoption: Corruption as Usual

Mistake! Adoptions from Nepal only halted last Friday! (Not a month ago as originally reported here.) We so deplore the wholesale adoption of kids from poor countries to supply the American market with children. We do not contend that all such international adoptions are wrong; we believe it is better for a child to be adopted into a family anywhere than grow up in an institution. However, the pressure on poor countries to fill a worldwide demand from rich nations has led to all kinds of abuses, as the following report shows:

They Steal Babies, Don't They? for the Bull Market in Babies

Carla Bruni, the 41-year-old wife of the president of France says she is considering adoption. Now Bruni has a seven-year-old from a previous relationship, and hubby Sarkozy has three grown children from previous marriages.

You might think that might be enough for the singer/model/wife/mother/stepmother/wife of the pres of France. Oh no. "I'm not obsessed by blood ties," says Carla. Meaning: I want a kid, another one, you know for damn sure that I'll be able to get one. There are so many babies...available, aren't there? So many poor families/or wretched women without means who should give me one of their kids who will have a better life with us, here in the Palace.

Why don't you do the right thing and simply support one woman so she can keep her baby? Adopt them both, if you will.

Last night I heard that a friend's fiance is trying to adopt from Nepal. Why Nepal? Because China is pretty much shut down and especially if you are single, and Vietnam, where she had been investigating before, has just shut down (too many babies being traded for incubators, hmmm? as reported in Foreign Policy, also see previous posts) And Cambodia? Read about the deception that takes child away from their families (for $300) in The Washington Post. But Nepal, hey, that's a poor country that is still using babies as a cash crop. So this morning I googled Adoption in Nepal and found this swell statement at adoption.com:

Initially, we were planning on adopting a child through the state of New Jersey, but as we got deeper into the process and started talking to more people, we realized there were too many uncertainties about the birth parents' rights. Now we are planning on adopting from Nepal. But plans, we know now, are fickle.

Yeah, and we know how fickle those birth mother are. They might actually find a way to keep their children. They might want to be involved in the kid's life. They might never forget. They might...not die or go away.

and

We have been taking our application slowly. My husband Jonathan put the brakes on a few months ago, and he was right to. We had to be sure that our own relationship is so rock solid, we'll be able to open our home to a second child with grace. We've been seeing a personal coach, Michael....

So let me say this right here: Any kind of regulation that slows down the baby drain from birth/first mothers from poor countries, we are in favor of, just as various regulations in Bible Belt states have made it hard to get an abortion in there. We are not against adoption when IT IS ABSOLUTELY NECESSARY and even then, the adoption should never be a closed adoption, it should always be open, and adoption by kin (not genetic strangers, no matter how wealthy, straight, religious, etc.) should be explored first.

And we are not against open adoptions for kids truly languishing in institutions, for older kids who have been passed by, for kids with disabilities who have been neglected, kids whose prospects are truly dim.

So if there are rules that stop adoptions by single people, people over 40, left-handed people, right-brained people, people with a BMI over 20, gays, women with PMS, people with blue eyes, people who already have a child, whatever regulation you can think of to slow the steady and increasing stream of adoption...we are all for it. If it were truly difficult to adopt, if adoption did not seem like such a cool thing to do, maybe we would not have a celebrity such as Carla Bruni say, Hey, I think I'll adopt. Maybe we would not have had Naomi on the last series of The Bachelor tell Jason that she wants to adopt one day. Will either Bruni or Naomi adopt a special-needs child?

However, in the case of relative adoption when necessary, all bets are off, and those people ought to be considered first, no matter if they are gay, obese, left-handed, or whatever. Whenever possible, people have a right to grow up among people who look like them. People should not be traded around the world, around America, as if they were baseball cards.

Why do we feel this way? Why so militant?

Because all the adoptamania that has been blanketing the world of late, led by celebrities such as Angelina and Madonna and a long long list (Tom Cruise and Nicole, Hugh Jackman, just to name a few more) has created a bull market in babies. And that means that babies are being stolen (Guatemala, China, Cambodia, Samoa, as we just reported), mothers are coerced (Vietnam), and that leads to more pressure to find more babies for export. Nepal, a country of 26 million, is a very poor country. Look for it to be the next baby-export center. This is baby stealing, baby buying, baby kidnapping, no matter how it's gussied up.

And on another note, apparently MTV Real Life (which we were approached by several months ago to help them find a teenager who wants to relinquish; we declined, not terribly respectfully) is real soon featuring a story on a woman, who after three weeks, caved and agreed to an adoption. According to someone (the open-adoption facilitator who was involved), the film crew said it was the most poignant show they had worked on. Dam straight. The woman kept the kid for three weeks before finally giving up. I'm hoping at least one of the crew was hoping the woman kept her baby. But then, it would not have been the story Real Life wanted.

I remember walking off the set of one of The Today show in the Seventies when I first came out of the closet and a woman who worked on the show gabbed my arm and said, she too, had relinquished a child. Her son was twelve, she said. "You never forget, do you?" she said. I always wonder what happened to her, where she is today, if she ever found her son.
___________

As for our next post, look for a report from Mark Diebel, who is attending the Conference on Adoption Policy at New York University today. I hope to post it Sunday evening.

Good news: Intercountry adoption down again

Jane

This just in from the Associated Press:  "The number of foreign children adopted by U.S. parents plunged to the lowest level since 1992...Figures released Friday by the U. S. State Department for 2013 fiscal year showed 7,094 adoptions from abroad, down from 8,668 in 2012 and down about 69 percent from the high of 22,884 in 2004. The number has dropped every year since then."

What's the cause of this decline? AP lists several: Russia has stopped foreign adoptions. Ethiopian authorities have been trying to place more abandoned children with relatives or foster families. Other reasons come to mind: More South Korean women are keeping their babies, thanks to the efforts of Korean-born adoptee Jane Jeong Trenka and her supporters who have lobbied the

What makes a mother?

Unwilling mother Sherri Shepherd

As if we didn't already know, the whole "assisted reproduction" business is a mess, both from a legal and a moral standpoint. The latest escapades are those of Sherri Shepherd who lost her fight not to be a mother and Nick Loeb who is fighting to be a father.

Shepherd, a former co-host on The View, entered into an agreement with her then husband Lamar Sally and Jessica Bartholomew to have Bartholomew carry a child created through Sally's sperm and a donated egg. By the time the baby boy, Lamar Sally, Jr., was born eight months ago, Shepherd had filed for divorce, disclaiming responsibility for the child and refusing to pay support, leaving Bartholomew whose name was on the birth certificate on the hook for thousands of dollars in medical bills. "Not so fast" said a Pennsylvania court. "A deal is a deal. You signed on the dotted line and you're a legal mother, like it or not. Pay up!"

To Tell the Truth or Not, Continued: Sometimes I do, sometimes I don't

My coming out as a birth mother happened under quite different circumstances and back in the old days of the Seventies. Once I decided to write Birthmark (after my first marriage ended), the days of not being a birth mother publicly were over, more or less. I'd previously written two magazine pieces under a pseudonym about it.

I already knew how controversial the book would be when I met a prospective publisher for a drink in Manhattan one evening in the fall of 1978, and he brought along an editor with him, a friend as well as employee. This man, Arnold, did not know anything about me but when it became clear to him, BAM! the guy became extremely agitated, red in the face, practically spitting at me. WHAT RIGHT DID I HAVE! etc. I excused myself and headed for the ladies room; when I returned he had gone. It turned out that he had been raised in an orphanage and was more than a little angry with his birth mother. I'm not sure he was ever actually adopted. I felt he would have shot me on the spot had been possible. His friend had no idea he felt this way--or that he had been raised in less than propitious circumstances.

I turned 37 the summer before the book came out in 1979, and was sharing a house in Sag Harbor, where I live now, with other writers and editors. One woman I had never seen before walked up to me at a cocktail party and handed me a hand-written note with that little poem about "you grew in my heart, not under it" or however that goes and walked away, turning to smirk and stare back angrily. I never found out who she was, or whether she was an adoptee or an adoptive parent.

Talk of the audacity of what I had done--write a book about this taboo subject, that is, say that I had not forgotten my daughter and wanted to know her one day--made the rounds and the discussion, I would later hear from a friend who had been there, often became quite heated. So-and-so, I was told, pounded the table one evening in anger: What right has she? Who in the hell does that woman think she is? And all of this was further exaggerated when I wrote my first My Turn on the subject for Newsweek, for if news of the book hadn't reached you--and it was hardly a major publishing event--the Newsweek piece got people's attention.

But my friends were all supportive (only one of them a birth mother, and we were friends before our mutual reveal), and so I was largely insulated from nasty personal attacks. I told myself I had to expect a lot of criticism, but you can never insulate yourself enough. No one has a crocodile skin. Of course I was fair game during the publicity for the book. Most interviewers were sympathetic, but now and then someone who had been civil before the camera started rolling would turn out to be Raging Arnold in another guise. One adopted radio interviewer was so upset that he wore a full face mask--the kind they wear in Venice--during our half-hour chat to show his natural mother that he was going to stay hidden from her! Yet amazingly, this man--while he was plenty angry about being adopted--was not cruel to me.

That was then. Of course things have changed somewhat since then, and naturally, I do not like to make my feelings and status as a birth mother the subject of every conversation with someone new. I dread it when I am introduced, as one adoptive mother used to do, as the birth mother who wrote that book...because then there was no other conversation possible. I hate to talk about this issue at parties because a) it's not fun, and b) you never know what you are going to unearth. Once people hear this about you, they are likely to pepper you with questions for the next hour. (I stopped seeing that adoptive mother mentioned above much.) If I have to be polite to someone because she's the sister-in-law of a friend, and the sister-in-law is crazy curious, I will go along and do my best to educate someone on a subject that seems so amazingly foreign to them. But boy, am I then glad to change the subject! To get away!

So when new people I meet ask what I have written, I typically do not mention Birthmark, the blog, or any of my adoption-reform writings. Books on health and business, lots of magazine pieces on diverse subjects, I reply. I want to talk about gardening, backyard bird watching, movies, books, the sad state of book publishing, our mutual friends, whatever. When people--even acquaintances--ask what I'm working on now, I'm very likely (and so is my husband, if he's asked) to be coy and just say, Ahem, I'm not talking about it, even thought that sounds off-putting. Regular readers of FirstmotherForum know that revealing the subject even to people I felt quite close to has led to some pretty awful attacks, as I wrote about in previous posts. There and here and elsewhere.

About a dozen years ago when friends started adopting (and it is contagious), I had a tearful telephone discussion with one woman who was unable to get pregnant, and her husband really really wanted a child. They eventually adopted from China. A year later, I was sitting with a mutual acquaintance, and she said...X did it, I'm going to adopt, I'm going to get a Chinese baby. And so she did. And so did someone else we all knew, a year after that. A college roommate of X also adopted, this time a white infant who looks Irish and is being raised Jewish. Another friend's sister got two children in the last couple of years from Rhode Island. I walk into some dinner parties and immediately count three, four, adoptive parents and pray the subject does not come up. And so it goes in my world.

Like fellow blogger birthmother Jane, I do not talk about adoption with people who say they are going to adopt. I nod and look away and change the subject. I'd have to say that many of my friends in this adoption-YES! world do not know how I really feel. Adoption-reform pioneer Florence Fisher--the woman who really furthered our fight to open records by opening up the subject for discussion--once told me that if someone wants to talk about adoption at a party, she tells them, This is a party, I'm here to enjoy myself, this is not fun for me, I don't want to talk about this now. I've kept that in mind more than once and have used the same line myself. If they don't get it, I add, "Look, this was the more horrible thing that ever happened to me, it would be like talking about what it was like to be raped." That usually stops them cold. I can't say I've made any friends that way.

One time someone I know told me his daughter in college was doing something about adoption, could she email me? Sure, I said, thinking I might be able to educate someone. It turned out that she was writing a paper supporting this thesis: Why adoption records should stay sealed.

Cute, huh?

I xeroxed and sent her loads of material and told her taking that point of view was like arguing for slavery. Ah, I thought, I might make a convert. I never found out what she ended up writing--my offering probably got looked at and thrown out. Some months later we were at a big party together, and she pulled me over to meet another woman. "You two have so much in common," said the chirpy college student. "Lorraine has written a book about giving up a child, and you've [to the other woman} wrote a book about adoption..." Turns out the "other woman" was a adoption social worker. Then the college student walked away.

I thought of Florence and told the social worker calmly that giving up my child was the worst thing that ever happened to me, and did not want to talk about it. I did check out her book--it was not written with birth mothers in mind.

Yet saying nothing to friends who are pursuing international adoption is difficult now, especially as the information about kidnapping and various other nefarious means to get children for export is becoming known. For instance, we know someone whose fiancee is trying to adopt from Nepal. We spoke up a bit at dinner (fiancee was not present) at his house, but I could see right off that he was not ready to hear because he immediately said: Well, there are all those poor people in Nepal...Meaning: obviously, we ought to be able to get some kid from a poor family. Later, my husband emailed him and sent him a link to the UNICEF report about adoption from Nepal, that we wrote about here. We did not hear back.

But sometimes it just feels right to reveal. I once told a woman I'd met twenty minutes earlier I'd given up a child for adoption, and her eyes immediately glistened. Right. Turned out, she was a birth mother too, and we had a sweet, private conversation. You just never know. I guess you have to go with your gut.

As for Linda revealing her status to a woman she did not know at work, I can only say, Good job! If she is determined, the woman will probably find a way to adopt, but at least Linda let her know that kids don't come without strings, ancestors, other mothers and fathers. And lots of them are nice people you might know.

So like my fellow bloggers and commenters, being a birth mother is something I will readily cop to when I feel it will do some good, and like Jane says, it is easier being public about the issue without having to confront it one-on-one. But I don't want to be seen as a person who drags around a soap box with me.

Though to some, I am sure that is how I seem.

So it goes. --lorraine

Demand for babies leads to adoption abuses

It is the rare adoptive parent who, after adopting from overseas, can wrap her mind around the idea that "her" baby might have been stolen, sold or bartered to fill the huge demand for adoptable infants in wealthy nations, of which she herself was a part. 

Adoptive Parents Decry UNICEF's Humanitarian Position about Adopting Overseas

Lorraine

How does our culture promote adoption? Let me count the ways, and let me begin with the truly grotesque blog of the ultra conservative Washington Times called The Red Thread: An Adoptive Family Forum by Amanda Poe: "UNICEF's effective attack on inter-country adoption."

UNICEF's recent statement on inter-country adoption strongly states in no uncertain terms that children belong first with their families,

International Adoption Advocates Fight Back against decline in adoptions

Pacific Harbor Seals

Mother Pacific harbor seals leave newborn pups on the beach when they go into the sea to fish. Believing the pups have been abandoned, humans take them to aquariums or try to raise them themselves, often unsuccessfully. Mother seals returning to the beach to nurse search futilely for their babies.

I think of these seals when I read about international adoption. Thankfully, it has declined from a high of 22,884 in 2004 to 11,059 in 2010. Wide-scale corruption or other abuses has caused Ethiopia to join Cambodia, Guatemala, Nepal and Russia, in closing their borders while adoptions from China, the biggest supplier of babies, have been reduced.

Will NPR Report the Truth about International Adoption? It's legitimated kidnapping in many poor countries

Although Neal Conan introduced Talk of the Nation on Tuesday, April 7 by referring to the brouhaha over Madonna’s attempted adoption of a little Malawi girl, the program, “Why Did You Opt for International Adoption” was simply an international adoption promo piece.

The program perpetuated the myth that millions of infants and toddlers have been abandoned at train stations, along roads, or church doorsteps and are living in crowded orphanages waiting for generous American to take them home, and that the children thus blessed live happily ever-after in middle-class America.

Conan interviewed Susan Soon-Keum Cox, Vice-President of Public Policy and External Affairs for Holt International of Eugene, Oregon, the largest US agency specializing in arranging adoptions of children from poor countries, and Isolde Motley, adoptive mother of two IA children, former editor at Time, and co-author with Susan Caughman, editor of Adoptive Families, of You Can Adopt: An Adoptive Families Guide to be released in July 2009.

Cox and Motley reminded me of the old dope peddler in the Tom Lehrer song, “Doing Well by Doing Good.” Thus Cox, (who is well-paid from the money Holt rakes in pedaling foreign children for $35,000 a pop) and Motley (profiting from her status as an adoptive mother) told listeners that adopting a foreign child had the twin benefits of “building a family” and “saving a child.”

To her credit, Cox did dispel the notion expressed by some callers that adopting internationally kept those pesky bio-families out of the picture. She noted that many foreign-born adoptees including herself search for their original families and that some agencies encourage ongoing contact with birth families. Cox also stressed that prospective adoptive parents adopting a child of a different race will face difficult cultural and racial issues as the child grows up.

Interestingly, Motley and the adoptive parents who called in had biological children as well as adopted ones. Cox noted that infertility was only one of the reasons people adopted from abroad and adoption was contagious (my word). Once someone adopts, Cox said, their friends often decide to do the same. (Keeping up with the Joneses I would call it-- Lorraine adds that she has seen it spread among the Hamptons like …well, not quite like wildfire, but spread just the same.)

Neal Conan approached the topic much as he might have in discussing whether to buy an American or foreign-made car. He and his guests omitted any consideration of the parties most affected: parents who lost children to adoption and the children themselves. Indeed this may be a habit of NPR – when discussing adoption. A recent program on open records did not include a single adoptee; instead adoptive father and head of the Evan B. Donaldson Institute, Adam Pertman, spoke on their behalf. Maybe they would like to have us on as bigtime bloggers speaking on behalf of – adoptive parents.

I’m emailing TOTN suggesting it does another program on international adoption, as it claims that its coverage “must be fair, unbiased, accurate, complete and honest”. A good place to start to reach that goal would be to interview the authors of two recent articles exposing the realities behind the international adoption myth: “The Lie We Love” (Foreign Policy November/December 2008) by E. J. Graff and “Red Thread or Slender Reed: Deconstructing Prof. Bartholet’s Mythology of International Adoption” (Buffalo Human Rights Law Review, 2008) by Johanna Oreskovic and Trish Maskew. Graff is a senior researcher directing the Gender & Justice Project at Brandeis University's Schuster Institute for Investigative Journalism. Oreskovic and Maskew are attorneys. Maskew is also the founder and former president of Ethica, Inc, a non-profit dedicated to adoption reform. (See side panel here –Ethica is raising money to support Mercy in Malawi; let’s all chip in.)

Among their findings that we have reported here and here previously is that babies in many, if not all, countries are systematically bought, coerced, and stolen away – i.e., kidnapped--from their birth families. Nearly half of the 40 countries that are the top sources for adoption have at least temporarily halted adoptions or have prevented agencies from sending children to the US. Yet though this will prevent more children from being kidnapped, this policy was soundly criticized by Cox and Motley on the NPR program.

In reality, there are very few young, healthy orphans available for adoption around the world. Orphans are rarely healthy babies; healthy babies are rarely orphaned. Ninety-five percent of orphans are older than five, living with extended families that need financial support. The supply of adoptable babies rises to meet demand and disappears when Western cash is no longer available.

To add grist to the mill, a 2008 report from the United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF) unequivocally states that the intercountry adoption business in Nepal has created a culture of child abuse including the abduction, trafficking and sale of children.

Of the some 15,000 children in orphanages or children’s homes, a significant number of admissions in these homes are a result of fraud, coercion or malpractice, according to the 62-page report. Only four out of every 100 children adopted in Nepal are adopted by a Nepali family and many children put up for adoption are not orphaned but are separated from their families.

Let’s hope NPR does a report on that.

Joyce Maynard's adoption "disruption"

Lorraine

Joyce Maynard’s writing—and thus her, because her writing is her—has always irritated me, perhaps irrationally. She was too famous for celebrating the banal. But when the news that she disrupted her adoption of two sisters from Ethiopia became public the other day, my reaction was not to rub my hands gleefully and think Aha! The great comeuppance for that navel gazer! Instead I hoped that her celebrity and this public admission about a disrupted adoption would help stem what often seems like the wholesale exportation of children from one part of the world to another by do-gooders of all political and religious stripes simply because they have more money.

Far too many of them think that they are doing something noble by taking these poor children from the over-crowded orphanage where they find them. People in my large social net have adopted from Guatemala, China, India, Nepal, Romania, and Russia. In truth, I am not close to many of them. And it is undoubtedly true that in many cases, they are saving a child from an uncertain and perilous future and giving them a home in which to flourish.

Encouraging intercountry adoptions with hard cash

When half the faculty at Harvard and Boston College Law Schools endorse a bill that encourages poor countries to take children from their mothers and send them to the United States for adoption, you'd think something was amiss. We are talking about a bill  that offers financial incentives to poor countries to facilitate intercountry adoptions.

The learned academics in Boston did not do their homework. They signed a petition endorsing Sen. Mary Landrieu's Children in Families First (CHIFF) bill at the urging of two colleagues:  Prof. Elizabeth Bartholet, an adoptive mother of two from Peru and director of Harvard's Child Advocacy Program, and her former student and professor at Boston College, Paulo Barrozo.

Explaining Adoption Reform Issues to the Hip, Educated Masses

A couple of weeks ago I wrote about the reaction I get as a birth/first mother from people who are not familiar with adoption as it is and what's wrong with it, (Telling a Stranger What It's Like to be a Birth Mother), and how I frequently avoid the issue because it is rather wearing to have to jump on a soapbox and educate against possibly hostile reaction when you'd rather just kick back and relax. So here we are, Labor Day weekend, and good friends have a party, but a party with a fair number of people I know only slightly, or not at all.

Are Open Adoptions a Boon for Birth Mothers or a Scam?

Open adoption. The panacea that women who relinquish their children today can look forward to. And most private adoptions are open, I heard on NPR some time ago. So that sounds good right? I advocated for birth mothers knowing the prospective adopting family in Birthmark way back in 1979, when open adoptions were unheard of. Could not understand then why women who felt they have to give up their children could not pick and choose among prospective parents.

Well, today you can choose everywhere. Go to just about any adoption site and you find pictures of happy couples who hike and ski and are just the "perfect" parents for your child. You are young and vulnerable, without resources, can not possibly provide what a child needs; prospective adoptive parents are in their thirties and forties and fifties and are financially stable and possibly well off. They will give your child the horseback riding lessons you can only dream out.


 See...I want to Know how My Child is Doing...sent to me by Vanessa.

Those prospective adopters (calm down everyone, I'm just using this here and do not many any disrespect, no one is an adoptive parent yet, when the mother is choosing) can learn how to be appealing to women considering relinquishing through coaching by their adoption counselor at the agency, as well as through books on how to adopt. One such noxious book is Fast Track Adoption, which is basically a guide about how to game the system to get a kid from her mother. It has been reported that after this book came out and the birth mother of the author's child realized she had been swindled, she committed suicide.

But do open adoptions work?  A few Sundays ago, the Modern Love section of the New York Times--wait it was of course on Mother's Day!--ran a piece by Amy Seek called Open Adoption: Not So Simple Math that detailed the difficulties and pain involved in an open adoption. But what we hear less about in the media are the open adoptions that get slammed shut and the mothers simply ignored. On Facebook the other day someone wrote that 80 percent of "open" adoptions are eventually closed. We know that adoption statistics are incredibly hard to come by. We had several posts in April, 2010 about how adoptive parents did not want to or would not answer the question if their children were biological or adopted on the last Census form. So I wondered where did that figure come from? The woman responded that a friend, a birth/first mother, phoned Bethany Christian Services to find out why her open adoption had become "closed." The woman on the phone inadvertently said that 80 percent of all open adoptions they handle ended up closed. Eighty percent. The woman followed it up by saying that the agency had no idea why adoptive parents do this... Incidentally, Bethany bills itself as the largest adoption agency in the world, and they are "Christian" from the get go, and so supposedly the adoptive parents they have are honest, good people who will honor their promises...yeah, right. 

I personally know no adoptive parents in a supposedly open adoption. My acquaintances adopted overseas (China, 3; Guatemala, 2; and now, Nepal, 1, and one domestic, have no idea what that arrangement was) because it was easier, or because they wanted no connection with the birth mother. One of my friends, an editor at a major consumer magazine, said that another editor, a man, refuses to do any television spots for the magazine because, she told me, he said that he is an adoptive parent "and the birth mother might recognize me and then know how to find us." So much for that open adoption. Had to be an open adoption because...otherwise the birth mother would not have ever met him or seen his picture?


How else to shut "open" adoptions? In order to make it difficult for birth mothers to visit, adopters often choose mothers who are from some distance. If you live on one coast, the advice is, choose a mother and her baby from another coast, and since she's the one who's going to be paying for the visit...it just makes sense that a long distance and an expensive ticket is going to reduce the opportunity for visits with your/her child. 

I've also heard that some adoptive parents say that they would welcome a greater involvement of the birth mother in their child's life, but the birth mother does not follow through. I understand how frustrating that must be to those who do welcome the birth mother. But I'm thinking how hard it must be, as a birth mother myself, to visit your son or daughter and know that that's all there is. To know that at the end of the day, you are going to walk away and leave your child with the people he calls Mommy and Daddy. I can see that it would be heartbreaking. Damn, I felt let down and very blue when my natural granddaughter, who was adopted, had to leave after a successful week of getting to know her. I know what it was like after my daughter left after living with us for whole summers when she was in her teens. And that would be very different from seeing a toddler or young child; it has to be both better (because you know where the child is) and harder (because that's all there is).

The other thing I've heard about open adoptions is this: That the contract spells out, say three visits a year, with photos in between, or something like that, and includes the promise of more contact if the two parties agree. Well, the adopters are so interested in you and your child that of course you are getting along like a house afire, you see how happy you are making them with the promise of your child, you imagine the felicity will continue after you've given them your baby, but then, surprise! They do not want to be your new best friend; they see your mandated visits as intrusions and have no intention of fostering a deeper more frequent connection...so one day three or four years down the road your head is not in a fog anymore and you end up feeling duped into having given your child away. Because you've been had. More visits? Who are you kidding?

We posted a blog before by a birth mother who had this experience, and for anyone reading this who is considering an open adoption, please read: An Un-Open Adoption: Adoptive Parents Lie and Break a Mother's Heart. 

Since I started posting this blog today, I found a Legal Services site called Just.Answer and for $15 it said I could have an attorney research my question about open adoption. Are open adoption contracts enforceable?  I asked. The answer:

"A so called "ongoing contact agreement" is not really enforceable in any State in the U.S. Once your parental rights are terminated, the adoptive parents can decide who the child is allowed to have contact with. This means they can just ignore the contract.

"The bottom line is that it is not legally binding. It is an agreement between the parties, but it does not carry the weight of law."

So there you have it. Open adoptions are to a large degree a scam. The publicity they receive as being the answer to today's young birth mothers is largely just that, publicity. Relinquishing your child is a lifelong source of sorrow, no matter how it might seem to be the answer for the moment. I am not saying that in some cases adoption, or a permanent guardianship, such as the late Annette Baran proposed, is not the answer. In some cases it is the only answer. I'm just saying that birth mothers never get over it--even the ones who deny meeting their grown children who come searching later on. Annette was one of the co-authors of The Adoption Triangle, a ground-breaking work, one of the very earliest to open up the secrecy of early adoptions. The subtitle is: Sealed or Opened Records: How they affect adoptees, birth parents, and adoptive parents.

If are are a woman considering adoption, a good source to read is from the CUB website  "What you should know if you're considering adoption for your baby by Heather Lowe, a birth mother who surrendered around 2000.  http://www.cubirthparents.org
--lorraine

Added on Tuesday, July 20: Jane posted the following as a comment but it is too important to leave there and so is being included in the main post:

Jane Edwards said...

A few states, including my home state of Oregon, do allow open adoption, or as they are called "continuing contact," agreements to be enforced.

However, failure to comply with the agreement does not nullify the adoption. And there are many traps along the way.

The mother may be told by the agency that the agreement contains provisions (visits until the child is 18, for example) where the agreement says otherwise. The mother doesn't or can't read the agreement carefully. (Think used car warranty.)

The agreement may require that all contacts -- to set up visits, to exchange pictures and gifts, and so on go through the agency, turning the mother into a supplicant.

If the adoptive parents refuse contact, the mother must go to mediation before going to court. The adoption agency likely does the mediation and may sway the sessions towards the adoptive parents, trying to convince the mother to back off.

If the adoptive parents refuse mediation or refuse to allow contact after mediation, the mother has to hire an attorney to to petition a judge to enforce the agreement. She likely cannot afford an attorney. She is also faced with the reality that the adoptive parents may try to smear her in court. This of course will be harmful to the child.

The adoptive parents may move away and leave no forwarding address. Even if the mother knows where they are, she may not have the funds to travel across country. She may send gifts and cards but the adoptive parents may not give them to the child.

The adoptive parents may say negative things about his mother causing the child to reject her. (Think parents in a messy divorce.) The adoptive parents use the child's reluctance to see his mother an an excuse to cut her off.

Alternatively, the child may yearn for his mother so much that he is angry when she leaves and throws temper tantrums. This also gives the adoptive parents an excuse to cut her off.

I urge those working to reform adoption laws to go beyond the question of enforceability. To say simply "the problem with open adoption is that it is not enforceable" allows the listener to assume that if open adoption agreements are enforceable, the problems inherent in adoption would be solved.

It reminds me of the argument against capital punishment --
that an innocent person might get executed. States respond by adding procedural safeguards rather than abolishing capital punishment.

In other words, using a procedural argument leads to a procedural answer and avoids the essential question -- is this the right solution in the first place? I urge those in adoption reform to focus on eliminating unnecessary adoptions through assuring mothers have adequate information and sufficient time to decide.


______________
If you haven't looked at the comments at the previous blog, you may want to go back and read Mary Anne Cohen's poem about adoption pioneer, Annette Baran. She is one of the coauthors of that breakthrough work, The Adoption Triangle.

'De-facto parents': Another way to steal children?

Would-be parent Kelly Gunn

What makes a parent? How does money play into who ends up with legal rights when a couple separate?

The legal issues surrounding gay couples where one has a child or adopts one continue to be litigated one case at a time.  As with any couple who separate, the child becomes the battle ground, as is the case of Abush, a seven-year old Ethiopian boy.

He was adopted in 2011 by Circe Hamilton, She and Kelly Gunn, a successful business woman, began a relationship in 2004 and moved in together in 2007. They began talking about adoption that year and attended an event for would-be adoptive parents. Jane Aronson was one of the speakers. She is a pediatrician and adoptive mother who calls herself "the orphan doctor" and is a comrade-at-arms with intercountry adoption advocate and Harvard law professor Elizabeth Bartholet.*

Babies "confiscated" in China and sold as orphans to the western market

China, long a provider of babies for the burgeoning market in the U.S., has cracked under the pressure to keep up with the demand. Babies have been "confiscated" from poor families and sold as orphans for $3,000 apiece on the international market.

Though China maintains its one-child-only policy in an effort to halt population growth, rural families were allowed to have two, if the first child was a girl. But a third child? Then the poor farmers were required to pay a $3,000 fee, a charge completely out of reach for them. If you could not pay, you were forced to turn over the baby, which was then sold for $3,000, with the local orphanage and the corrupt local authorities splitting the fee.

Here's a snippet of the story you'll find here:

By Hyo-Jin Paik
Impunity Watch Reporter, Asia

BEIJING, China– An investigation by a Chinese newspaper found that about 80 baby girls in southern China’s Guizhou Province have been sold to childless families in the U.S. and Europe for $3,000 each. These baby girls were “confiscated” from families when the parents could not pay the $3,000 fine for violating China’s Family Planning Policy.

Chinese families in rural villages, unlike those living in urban areas, are allowed to have a second child to continue the family name and to help out with the farm if the first child is not a son. However, if the rural families have more than two children, they face a fine of $3,000, which is several times a farmer’s annual income. Accordingly, this is an unpopular policy among rural residents, and families in Guizhou Province who could not pay the fine had to hand over their babies to the local authorities.

Abandoned babies in China can be registered for adoption, but the investigation alleged that the local authorities confiscated the babies and then forged documents by labeling the babies as “orphans.” The adoption fee of $3,000 per baby was split between the local authorities and the orphanages. This type of foreign adoption program has been referred to as “Baby Economy,” and the local orphanages made huge profits.

This is not the first time child trafficking from China (or India)has been uncovered. We've previously written about the international trade in babies, all documented and published in magazines such as Foreign Policy and Mother Jones--from the poor nations of the world, such as Guatemala, Vietnam, India, Nepal, Russia, Kazhakstan and others. Because the baby economy is a cash cow for poor nations and demand is high, unscrupulous individuals will find a way to provide the goods--even when there are no babies available through honest means. Children are kidnapped, mothers are tricked into giving up their babies for what they think is a temporary time, papers are forged and children are stolen. Why? Because people are willing to not look deeply into where the children come from, or if they are indeed orphans.

What creates this market? People who believe that they are entitled to a child, simply because they can afford one, when nature does not provide. The comments of a prospective adoptive parent to the previous post (Banned by Adoptionvoices.com!) calling FirstMotherForum anti-adoption led me to give this answer to her and the others like her. We repeat, as we do so often here, that we understand that adoptions must happen in some circumstances. But today the demand for babies has irrevocably skewed the system towards adoption at any cost--to the mother, to the child.

While treatments such as DES years ago led to infertility among the children whose mothers took the hormone, a great deal of the pressure simply comes from a culture where it is seen as normal to wait to have children after thirty-five, after a woman's ability to conceive has dropped precipitously.

Sometimes adoptions are indeed necessary, but the demand for fresh, healthy infants today has led to the wholesale trafficking of children worldwide. If speaking out against that makes us anti-adoption, so be it. If speaking hard truths on sites promoting adoptions gets us banned, so be it. We are far too aware of the emotional fallout for both natural mothers and the children to support adoption as the common solution it is today for people wanting a child.

Yes, it is sad when one cannot have a child, but that does not entitle you to someone else's.

I write this today knowing that my voice is one of a few crying in the wilderness, that it will be heard by only a few, that it will offend some, and in the larger picture, our voices will be drowned out by the group-think of a generation. Sadly, the baby economy is completely integrated into society today, and I do not have the force of government behind me to change policy. And it will take a sea-change to alter attitudes.

But I will go on speaking and writing this until my last breath. --lorraine

PS: In an irony of magnitude, when I edited this post...up popped an ad for Spence-Chapin:

Adopt a Baby

Loving Families Needed. Domestic & Intl programs.

Spence-Chapin.org

Loving families needed? to fill the coffers of Spence-Chapin.

Should a natural mother be able to visit a child after adoption?

Where is my baby? 

"Working on a show: Should a birth mother retain visitation rights to a child she chose to place for adoption?"  That's the question over at Dr. Phil's Facebook page...and as I write there are hundreds of comments and nearly 500 shares.

The responses are all over the place, but a good number of them reveal the anger and ownership feelings of many adoptive parents, and even adoptees, to wit:

"No. You chose to put a child up for adoption and you have no rights after you sign that page."

How did the Romanian adoptees fare? Better than those left behind.

From a Romanian charity, see below

How did the Romanian children who were adopted by wealthier families in the West compare to those who were raised in institutions?

One of the complicated issues of international adoption is whether are children are better off being adopted into a foreign culture, thousands of miles from their original habitat, or left to grow up in institutions in their native country--if homes cannot be found for them there. Most often the institutions that would-be adoptive parents visit are gruesome hell holes; yet we do know that in a great many cases, the operators of these institutions keep them that way exactly to extract as much money as possible from horrified people of good will. Even when given the money to fix up the orphanage, the operators leave them as is to extract more money from visitors. And we know from reports from other countries, such as China and Nepal and Guatemala, that children are stolen to keep those institutions full of "orphans" to be sold to Americans.

It's a never ending cycle. That children were unconscionably warehoused in Romania during the Ceausescu (pronounced Chow-chess-cu) years, as we wrote about in the previous post, is without question, and surely, unless sold to be a slave or to be used sexually, it is better to grow up in relative comfort far away from home than be left to flounder in an institution.