Cultivating a Culture of Adoption

Jane

“Adoption is the natural result of our redemption.” I came across these words when I Googled “Culture of Adoption” looking for follow-up materials to my article “Does Adoption Run in Families?. The words came from an article by Carolyn Curtis, “Cultivating a Culture of Adoption”* in the Presbyterian Church in America’s web magazine.

The Child Catchers exposes the stench of international adoption--and domestic adoption too

Kathryn Joyce

Journalist Kathryn Joyce takes on domestic infant adoption and international adoption in her new book, The Child Catchers, forcefully demonstrating its unsavory realities, including how it exploits vulnerable mothers. While the general public may believe adoption is a win-win solution that saves children, builds families, and allows poor biological mothers to get on with their lives, Joyce portrays it as the billion dollar industry it is, fueled by money, religious fervor, the high demand for children, and misguided altruism. She backs up her claims with scrupulous research--visits to foreign orphanages and adoption facilities, interviews with adoption practitioners, narratives of adoptees and first parents, statistical data, marketing materials, and media reports.

Adoptionland: Brutal essays by adult adoptees expose the truth of intercountry adoption

The Vance Twins--Jenette on left and Janine 

With news that Vietnam is once again going to allow their children to be adopted out of country, reading a collection of essays by people who were uprooted and transplanted into new cultures is ice water on all those squishy ideals of what intercountry (or international adoption) does. The writers whose essays come together in Adoptionland: From Orphans to Activists portray the dislocation as wrenching and brutal, an experience that leaves a scar neither time nor distance can temper.

Though I am no fan of adoption in general I recognize that sometimes adoption is the best solution to a bad situation. But I have read enough about intercountry adoption to see it as

The Vance Twins: Raising awareness about adoption realities

Lorraine

Speaking up and speaking out about a controversial issue is always scary the first time. Adoption as we know it today has become highly controversial, as adult adoptees and first mothers have opened up about the painful effects of adoption, whether they are the ones who lost a child to be adopted, or the child who grew up in a family not her original one. 

Yet at the same time, with more people--straight couples, gays couples, single people--desiring to adopt, a several billion dollar industry world wide has grown up to serve that market.Those who want to adopt do not want to hear that adoption is anything other than a win-win solution. They imagine there are babies everywhere that need to be adopted, and such a baby will be the fix for infertility; at the same time many churches, both conservative and liberal, are part of the pro-adoption movement to "rescue" children from poverty.

Why I'm not bullish on celebrity adoptions

Sandra Bullock and adopted son, Louis

Now that actress Sandra Bullock's new flick Gravity has hit the big screen, she's looking to adopt again, according to the Hollywood gossip machine. Three years ago, Bullock, then 46, joined many other entertainers who took another woman's baby as their own when she adopted Louis named after the jazz trumpeter and singer Louis Armstrong because, like Armstrong, he was born in New Orleans. And frankly reading about the likelihood of another Hollywood adoption makes me a little ill.

The list of Hollywood adoptive parents goes back to the beginning of the silver screen and includes Bob Hope, Joan Crawford, Joan Fontaine, Constance Bennett, Al Jolson and Ruby Keller, Dick Powell and June Allison, Bette Davis, Cecil B. DeMille, Ronald Reagan and Jane Wyman,

Abuses in International Adoption: The Lie We Love

"Ethical and effective legislation and policy create families...reads the line under the flier for the Center for Adoption Policy's Sixth Annual Conference to be held March 6 at New York Law School.

You can believe they are not talking about the families the birth mothers create: they are talking about the big business in "creating" families by taking children away from their mothers, their countries, their culture. Elizabeth Bartholet, high priestess of the international kid-grab and a feminist law professor at Harvard, is the key note speaker; Joan Hollinger, of the University of California at Berkeley, and the reporter who wrote the proposed Uniform Adoption Act that included the wonderful provision that an adoptee's original record would not be open and available for 99 years--yes, you read that right--is moderating a panel of folks from the State Department; another panel is loaded with adoption attorneys and agency folks. Funny, I don't see anyone from any of the organizations that, ahem, think that maybe moving kids around the world is less than a stellar idea and leads to all sorts of abuses.

Missing from the speaker line up at NYU are triad member organizations or independent advocates for adoption ethics and reform such as Ethica, notes Gina Pollock, president of Parents for Ethical Adoption Reform (PEAR), which is sending three of their board members to be present in the audience. PEAR is hoping others with an alternative point of view, including some adult international adoptees will attend as well. (For more information, see http://www.pear-now.org/.

There's a part of me that would like to go and raise hell, but a) I'm not an expert on international adoption, and b) having been an "alternative" voice from the audience over the years, I know that it is extremely frustrating to sit there and then, when you do get to speak at last, be looked upon as something who just flew in from outer space. A voice from the audience is like a voice in the wilderness: not taken seriously. The best thing would be a group of international adoptees and birth parents to disrupt the whole proceeding. Now that would make news.

Yet there is hope that an alternative opinions regarding international adoption are beginning to be heard. E.J. Graff, associate director and senior researcher of the Schuster Institute for Investigative Journalism at Brandeis University wrote the following in the November/December 2008 issue of Foreign Policy:

Westerners have been sold the myth of a world orphan crisis. We are told that millions of children are waiting for their “forever families” to rescue them from lives of abandonment and abuse. But many of the infants and toddlers being adopted by Western parents today are not orphans at all. Yes, hundreds of thousands of children around the world do need loving homes. But more often than not, the neediest children are sick, disabled, traumatized, or older than 5. They are not the healthy babies that, quite understandably, most Westerners hope to adopt. There are simply not enough healthy, adoptable infants to meet Western demand—and there’s too much Western money in search of children. As a result, many international adoption agencies work not to find homes for needy children but to find children for Western homes.

Since the mid-1990s, the number of international adoptions each year has nearly doubled, from 22,200 in 1995 to just under 40,000 in 2006. At its peak, in 2004, more than 45,000 children from developing countries were adopted by foreigners. Americans bring home more of these children than any other nationality—more than half the global total in recent years.

Where do these babies come from? As international adoptions have flourished, so has evidence that babies in many countries are being systematically bought, coerced, and stolen away from their birth families. Nearly half the 40 countries listed by the U.S. State Department as the top sources for international adoption over the past 15 years—places such as Belarus, Brazil, Ethiopia, Honduras, Peru, and Romania—have at least temporarily halted adoptions or been prevented from sending children to the United States because of serious concerns about corruption and kidnapping. And yet when a country is closed due to corruption, many adoption agencies simply transfer their clients’ hopes to the next “hot” country. That country abruptly experiences a spike in infants and toddlers adopted overseas—until it too is forced to shut its doors.

Along the way, the international adoption industry has become a market often driven by its customers. Prospective adoptive parents in the United States will pay adoption agencies between $15,000 and $35,000 (excluding travel, visa costs, and other miscellaneous expenses) for the chance to bring home a little one. Special needs or older children can be adopted at a discount. Agencies claim the costs pay for the agency’s fee, the cost of foreign salaries and operations, staff travel, and orphanage donations. But experts say the fees are so disproportionately large for the child’s home country that they encourage corruption. (Italics mine.)

To complicate matters further, while international adoption has become an industry driven by money, it is also charged with strong emotions. Many adoption agencies and adoptive parents passionately insist that crooked practices are not systemic, but tragic, isolated cases. Arrest the bad guys, they say, but let the “good” adoptions continue. However, remove cash from the adoption chain, and, outside of China, the number of healthy babies needing Western homes all but disappears. Nigel Cantwell, a Geneva-based consultant on child protection policy, has seen the dangerous influence of money on adoptions in Eastern Europe and Central Asia, where he has helped reform corrupt adoption systems. In these regions, healthy children age 3 and younger can easily be adopted in their own countries, he says. I asked him how many healthy babies in those regions would be available for international adoption if money never exchanged hands. “I would hazard a guess at zero,” he replied.

ALEXANDER MARTINEZ/AFP/Getty Images

This is only a part of the delights that awaits at the site. Thank you E. J. Graff--and I will be posting more about this in the next couple of days. Follow this link to see an interactive map of which countries supply babies and which countries buy them on the open market. And be sure to check out the related photo essay. It will break your heart and...goes right to the heart of those celebrity adoptions so, ahem, dear to our hearts. You can also read the story at Reality Check and post a comment.

The other piece of good news is that the Buffalo Human Rights Law Review recently published a piece to counteract Bartholet's thesis that few abuses (i.e., kidnapping, baby selling) occur in nations that export most of the kids. One of the authors is the founder and former president of Ethica, Trish Maskew. We'll get into that piece later.

Kidnapping and Corruption in Chinese Adoptions

Jane

China, long thought to be squeaky clean in international adoptions turns out to have a history of corruption, according to David Smolin, one of the world's leading experts on international adoption scandals. According to Smolin, the decline in the number of Chinese infants arriving on U.S. shores since the Nineties as adoptees was largely due to the Chinese government’s curtailment of baby buying--

One Woman's Struggle with Adopting from Ethiopia

Continued from yesterday, Adoptive Mom Here Searches for Birth Mother in Ethiopia and written by a woman who desires to know if the children she adopted from Ethiopia were truly free to be adopted, and without parents. She prefers to remain anonymous:

Once we know the desires of the birth mother and father, we can move forward either way. I feel in my heart that she (the girl they adopted, who is between six and nine) should be with her birth family. Being in America is not the answer to a better life or happiness. Sure she is having fun...it's like she is in Disneyworld, but she doesn't have her family, so she is not really happy. Even though we live with modern conveniences, she misses her life the way it was there, she was happy with it because what makes a home is "where your family is". This is what I told my biological eight-year-old son to help him understand.
"These people are being deceived and their ignorance, culture and poverty are being taken advantage of. The Lord has showed me more and more that the best life for her is to be with her birth parents. I will soon find out.

At the same time we adopted the little girl, we also adopted a little boy who is four. He is not related to the girl. His situation is a bit different, but my daughter will also be checking with his grandmother to find out what she was told. When we met her, we gave her a framed picture of him and she took it and kissed it and hugged it. I don't know what she thought at the time, if she thought he would come back???? If he is to go back too, this will be even more difficult because he has bonded with our family more so than the girl.

If his story is the truth, his birth parents died and his grandmother was trying to raise him, and he was not in good shape physically due to malnutrition. Once we brought him home and put him on a healthy diet, he grew 7 inches and gained 12 lbs in less than a year. I do feel I have to give her the opportunity also of being reunited with him, just in case she was deceived so that she can have peace and understand that if he stays here, she might not ever see him again. We would like to have the luxury of flying back and forth, but it is a difficult and expensive journey to Ethiopia that our family cannot handle right now. We really didn't have the money to adopt and it set us back financially. Our daughter raised money for her mission trip, she is in the air right now on her way there.

I would like to help others if we go through this process, I just don't know what it involves right now. I have heard of a family from Australia who returned their child and they even go back to visit the child in Ethiopia, but this is a story I have heard second-hand, and don't know who they are. It scares me to think of what might happen, I am sure we will be attacked personally, but I don't really care. I just hope it doesn't turn into a big legal battle and cause our family more stress.

If this had happened to me as a mother, I would hope that somebody would show me mercy and grace and return my child. This is assuming that the birth family of this little girl has regret. If not, then we will have peace that we have to move on and help her deal with this emotionally.

To be continued. Tomorrow we will post the conclusion of what her daughter found, and how the family is dealing with it.

Then I found this story on another blog: Human Traffic 2: Ethiopia's Baby Trade written by an adoptee herself who spent ten months in Ethiopia. It is dated from 2007, but considering what we have learned about international adoption from poor countries, it is largely still relevant. The writer, Kate Jongbloed, then a student at the University of Toronto, begins:

The going rate for a baby in Ethiopia is $10,000 USD, through legal channels. I’m not sure what a black market baby will run you. It’s sometimes hard for me to wrap my head around a baby with a price tag....

Here in Addis Ababa, a new flock of mostly American adopters takes over the Hilton and Sheraton hotels every 6 months, staying a week before exporting their new children back to the West...Perhaps I sound overly harsh, and as an adoptee myself, I can’t be completely critical of the adoption industry....But it’s important to think about the overall impact of massive adoption from developing countries from a wider perspective.

Take, for example, Ethiopia. One of the five poorest nations in the world, Ethiopia faces brain drain of its wealthy and educated, creating hubs of diaspora in places like Washington, D.C. or Edmonton, and undermining the country’s potential for growth. I see mass adoptions to the West in a similar light. By exporting a chunk of the future generation of Ethiopians, we are only addressing the symptoms of the problem and perhaps mining the youth that will carry Ethiopia out of poverty. I also question why the children have to be taken away to the West, when it is entirely possible to successfully sponsor a child (and its community) without taking it away from its society and culture.

Then there's this: Media: Ethiopia revokes licences of nine charitable organizations from the Parents for Ethical Adoption Reform, dated only a few weeks ago:

Ethiopia revoked the license of nine orphanages (charity organizations) who they claim to be involved in ‘illegal’ activities of child rights abuse, APA learns here on Wednesday.

The nine charity organizations have been working to adopt children for the past few years to Europe and America. However, the office, which is in charge of registering charity organizations at the Ethiopian Ministry of Justice refused to give details as to what kind of illegal activities the organizations were involved with regards to child rights abuse. Child trafficking is high in Ethiopia where a good number of children are reported to be adopted illegally annually.The decision to revoke the license of the nine organizations was made while the government was undertaking re-registration of charity organizations and other NGOs that are operating in Ethiopia.

 As long as there are people who are desperate to adopt, in today's culture of adoptamania, there will be corruption, there will be child trafficking, there will be abuse. I frankly do not know how to stop it. But reading one woman's journey to find out the truth of the children she adopted--and open her mind to the possibility of returning them--gives us all hope. There must be more like her. There must be.--lorraine

Generations After Me Are A Part of Me

I have my own mitochondrial DNA. When it becomes a part of another person--no matter how that is done--that person is a part of me, I am a part of her or him, and will be for generations hence.

I have a granddaughter whom my daughter gave up for adoption. I only learned about her after she was born. I never met her. Yet she is a part of me and I am a part of her. I worry that she needs to know who she is, why she was available to be adopted, who her biological, genetic, real non-adopted relatives are. I wonder if her adoptive parents--genetic strangers--are good to her/good for her. I wonder if she has an ability to write and express herself. I wonder if she has flat feet. I wonder if she is allergic to cats and ragweed. She should know that several grandparents died of a heart condition, and that cancer is rare in the family. I wonder how she feels about being adopted, if she questions her identity, and where she came from.

However, the laws of Wisconsin, where she was born and adopted, deny me this information. I am left only with eternal questions. It is true, my longing to know this granddaughter is not as all encompassing as was my need to find my daughter. That ruled my life until I found her.

As regular readers know, my daughter--my granddaughter's mother--died last year, and even if she were alive, the state would not search for her daughter; only the adopted person can initiate a search, as I recently learned when I emailed someone in the appropriate Wisconsin agency. I do have on file my willingness to be contacted, and the news that her mother is deceased--information that will be given to her should she contact the state. This unknown young woman, born April 3, 1986 in Madison, named Lisa by her mother, is a part of me.

Though I cannot walk in the shoes of the childless who yearn for a child, simply saying, Here, take some of me and make a baby, and we'll go on living as if that individual has nothing to do with me, is against any and all reasonable laws of nature. Embryo adoption as well as egg and sperm selling--they are not "donations" since donations are just that, donated--are abominable prima facie. Though the urge or procreate is what continues the human race, the world has enough people in it without making more when nature is trying to put on the brakes.

With all we know today about the need to know one's heritage, we should not be cooking up people in laboratories who will never be able to learn from whence they came. If anyone doubts this, look up the websites of sperm-donor babies searching for their fathers and siblings. Go to a meeting of adoptees in search. Read their postings on the Internet. Talk to a late-discovery-adoptee and hear their pain.

The need to know one's roots is basic and universal; no one should be denied this. Laws that seal records of adopted people are abominations that go against the grain of reality, nature, any ethical standard. They are the remnants of a culture that condoned slavery.

Because someone wants to have a child, no matter how deeply felt the desire, no matter that the science makes it possible, does not make creating that life from this one's eggs and that's one sperm right. Because someone cannot have a child does not give them the right to someone else's, whether as a living baby or an embryo frozen in a tube.
--lorraine

PS: Aston, a friend who let loose one night about how selfish birth mothers are who search, and I have reached a rapprochement of sorts. He called, apologized, came over, we talked. He said he read the Donaldson study of adopted people and had gained some new insights, but if I made any headway on his harsh and unyielding attitude towards birth mothers (that we have absolutely no right to ever initiate contact, because that might be disruptive) is unknown. Aston is a church-going man, and--only when I asked for compassion for the birth mother's point of view--did he seem to respond positively and think it over.

I did use what one of our readers wrote: that adoptees are told they are selfish for searching because they might upset the birth mother's neat little life. That seemed to hit the heart of the matter: both sides being told they are selfish to seek reunion. (By the way, I've seen some new list of acceptable language [to adoptive parents, one assumes], and reunion is now verboten.) When the conversation started he seemed only to want to tell me that I should warn people that adoption was a subject not open to discussion, which seemed a bit boorish on his part. I have been treated better by hostile attorneys when I testified in court for adoptees asking for their birth records. Aston ought to try discussing the reasons against international adoption with our mutual friend who has a Chinese daughter. She gets apoplectic if you mention Emily Prager's name. (more on this later.)

Perhaps the good that came out of this whole disagreeable incident is that I was confronted head on the attitude of many today--many today in our legislatures--and because of our friendship and numerous connections, possibly I opened Aston's mind a bit to the concept of birth mothers other than Juno. And that would be a good thing. If only he were not the kind of person we encounter in Albany when we lobby for open records.

The I-Ching says: Work on what has been spoiled.

Making babies, just to make ends meet

By Sarah Williamson for the New York Times

Making Babies, Just to Make Ends Meet is a sickening commentary on the American way of the future of birth, as well as the title of an essay in the New York Times Sunday Review section. The writer, Susan Straight, writes about her neighbor, a woman of 39, who had been pumping breast milk for the baby she carried and delivered for a wealthy couple in their late 50s who, with four teenage sons, wanted a girl. "They bought the milk too," is what she says about the blonde and older couple for whom she worked for as a baby carrier. 

Egg 'donor' and child unite on 'Katie'

Jane

UPDATE on 6/12: Katic Couric successfully navigated the reunion between Britten Gilmore, her mother Janet Schreibman, and Brittan's "egg donor" JoLana Talbot and Talbot's two daughters. Couric and her guests minced no words in emphasizing the importance of knowing biological relatives and the joy of establishing a relationship with them. Kudos Katie! 

What we found remarkable was the complete openness of Britten's parents, who told her the truth about her origins when she was old enough to ask (apparently where babies came from), and continued to answer her questions as she got older. JoLana Talbot said everyone should have all the friends and family they could, and the Schreibmans spoke of expanding their own family. Hugs all around. Britten and her half sisters, especially Talbot's younger daughter, look very much alike. When JoLana mentioned "strong genes" we noticed that nobody winced. 

For the half hour that this story took up, little was asked of Britten's father, who is both her day-to-day dad and her biological father.  Wendy Kramer who, with her son, founded the Donor Sibling Registry spoke from audience, saying that since the registry began in 2000, it had made 11,000 matches. FMF assumes that the site is booming today. Reunion shows always lead to an uptick in search and reunion.
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