Adoptive parents prefer head-in-sand to real questions and reality

Lorraine

"For Adoptive Parents, Questions without Answers" reads the headline on the front page of the NY Metropolitan section of the New York Times, and I thought--talk about irony there, unintended by the headline writer, to wit: Boy, you ought to try to be a first mother who gave up in a closed adoption or an adoptee yourself. Talk about "questions without answers," such as, How is my child today? Do his adoptive parents make him drink hot sauce when he is bad and give him a cold shower, like that adoptive mother in Alaska who can't bond with one of her Russian "sons?" Is she at boarding school because there has been a divorce? Because she acts out too much?

Or conversely, Who are my real parents, the ones I was born to?

Corruption in Foreign Adoptions: China, Again

Jane

Once again, corruption in baby snatching in China is in the news: Chinese police rescued 81 children from a major child trafficking ring operating throughout eastern China. The rescued children, mostly girls, were from ten days to four months old. Another raid earlier this month resulted in eight children being rescued. Unless the children were

Is Scott Simon Angry with us?

Scott Simon, author of Baby We Were Meant for Each Other: In Praise of Adoption is upset over three posts* critiquing his memoirs and media appearances.

The gist of our posts was that while Simon found adoption to be “a miracle, the work of divine agency,” it is catastrophe in someone else’s life that led to the child being available to be adopted, and that this aspect of adoption is once again ignored by pleased-as-punch parents, which he and his wife claim to be.

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--

Maness Moms Equal Fatherless Children, Part 2

A further clarification regarding donor children, and the research of the Institute for American Values, after Jessica left a comment at the previous blog: Manless Moms Equal Fatherless Children.  (It was too long to be merely a comment.)

We know that the ideal two-parent family is impossible for everyone; we also believe that women today ought to be given all the help they can to be able to raise their children, with or without fathers. We do not encourage adoption except in extreme cases, and then never with sealed records. We at First Mother Forum believe that whenever possible children should full knowledge of who each parent is. This is an unalienable, unassailable right, and to deny it to anyone is to commit a grave moral failing.

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:

Adoptee's Daughter Opposes Searching for Grandmother, and other comments from pop culture

Sometimes I feel like a childless mother...to turn a phrase on its side. And as if everything we say is swallowed by the wind, so strong are the forces that push back up against us, so hungry is society for more children to adopt! The other night on The Bachelor--yes, I admit, I am addicted, even after a day when tears come way too easy I find that when I am watching I have a big smile on my face and how can that be bad?--anyway, Monday night the bachelor, Jake Pavelka, is all cuddly with "swimsuit model, Gia" and he asks if she wants to have children, and she says, Yes, two. And then I'd like to adopt one from China.

Run that by me again, Gia? 

Obviously nothing about the coercion and monetary rewards for "facilitators" who make babies available, nothing we and others in more prominent outlets have written about the corruption in international adoption has reached Middle America. Okay, I know the young women on the show are not MENSA material, but still--Gia's comment make me realize that we can not stop talking about this because the rest of the culture has not gotten the message. Instead, the prevailing belief is that adoption, and adoption, period, adoption without question, is this great wonderful good thing related to domestic bliss--like apple pie--that every good citizen ought to do.

As for search and reunion, we still have a long way to go, even with people who are not adoptive parents, even with people who are directly connected to adoption as in their mothers...our friend Linda Bolton posted the "I'm Legit" video on Facebook and got this response from a "friend" she expected to be understanding. Sympathetic, even. First the video and thanks to everyone who sent us a link:

Linda, I think I understand your issue. But there are lots of birth mothers who cannot, for various reasons, have contact with their birth children. Some of the reasons are valid, and heartfelt. My mother was adopted, so I do understand the struggle, but truly, your identity is your own. It comes from your life and your own response to it. Your biology is just that - biology. It doesn't identify you - only identifies your genes. Is it worth potentially destroying someone's life and family, so that you can find your birth parent? I'm conflicted on the issue, but if it makes fewer women opt for adoption over abortion, I'm not sure I can support it. I'm not necessarily opposed to abortion...I just know there are so many parents who want to adopt children - it's a shame to disincentivize [her word] young women from going full term because they're afraid their decision will come back to haunt them later in life.

Anyway, just a different viewpoint....I welcome your thoughts...Peggy

Linda: So of course I tried to educate her...

Peggy, I didn't know your mother was an adoptee. Wow. I can say with absolute certainty, and the data to support my statement, that the percentage of women who do not wish to have contact with their adult children is about or less than 5%. Should those 5% prevent the 95% of women willing and eager to know their adult children? You know I've been in the adoption triad since relinquishing my daughter 33 years ago. In fact, today is the tenth anniversary of our reunion, which she has chosen not to acknowledge; I haven't seen or spoken to her in 4-1/2 years. I do not personally know any birthmother who doesn't/didn't look forward to reuniting with her child. Not one woman I know who lost a child to adoption never received the promise of confidentiality, nor did they want it...in my case, I left a trail of neon-colored breadcrumbs to make it easy for my daughter to contact me if she desired (I didn't seek her, I wanted search and reunion to be her choice, since she didn't have a say when I relinquished).

As for women choosing abortion over adoption if original birth records were accessible, just another myth. Studies have clearly shown that in the six states where open records are available, the abortion rate did not increase, it stayed relatively the same or even declined.

And thankfully social mores aren't as stringent as they were when your mother was born, or even when I relinquished in '76 (my friends, our former classmates, simply asked me "Why didn't you just get rid of it?" The shame and stigma attached to out-of-wedlock births is nonexistent, thanks in great part to celebrities.

It is commonly recognized today that in most cases it is in the best interest of a child is to be raised in his/her family of origin whenever possible. I know many adult adoptees, I'm talking about people in their 30s through 60s and sometimes older, who are beyond frustrated by the fact that they have no knowledge of their family medical history because of some archaic law "protecting their mother's privacy." The only people being protected by the continued secrecy are the adopted parents who might feel threatened that families of origin will meet their children and decide to "steal them back" or some absurd thought along that line.

As for the adoption industry in general, there's a huge need for reform. It's all about supply and demand...and with the relaxed social mores there simply aren't enough infants to meet the need for all those couples aching to create a "forever family," another term coined by the adoption industry that I loathe, it's offensive to their families of origin.

Follow this link to NJCare to find a wealth of info about the NJ Bill that's been stalled for the past three decades. [Ed: And this one at Unsealed Initiative to learn about New York's efforts to change the law. And the many other blogs from various states that work towards reform of today's archaic adoption laws that violate the natural rights of the adoptee as well as the birth parent.] 
Thanks for sharing your thoughts, Peggy. I'm glad you did. :)

Never heard from her again.  A lot of my high school friends love Jesus, very conservative.  Mind you, on my profile I clearly state "bleeding heart liberal" for my political view....--Linda
_________________

Lorraine: Every now and then someone posts a very anti-abortion comment and tells us how generous we are for having given up our children. I assume they come from the same group-think as Peggy. Comments? We are open for discussion.

And if anyone can help me embed the I'm Legit video, please help! 

Trafficking reports raise heart-wrenching questions for adoptive parents

An adoptive mother who found First Mother Forum offensive posted some inflammatory comments to the previous post about the Women In Hiding website we wrote about the other day. She, as have others before her, said that we were a bunch of angry women with issues and that we could not call ourselves "mothers," because, well, because we were not. She also wrote:

There are such hateful references on this blog, accusing adoptive parents of stealing and buying babies. It's disgusting that a woman who regrets her decision not to parent then attacks the very people who gave the child a loving home and 24/7 care.

Her accusations have been gnawing at me since, and then came a news story (11/09/09) from the Los Angeles Times about people, including, Mark Brown and his wife, Nicki Genovese, who are plagued with the thought that their daughter from China might have been kidnapped:

They had just returned to Los Angeles in 2005 after adopting a Chinese foundling in south-central Hunan province when they read the news reports about trafficking. Police had arrested 27 members of a ring that since 2002 had abducted or bought as many as 1,000 children in Guangdong province and sold them to orphanages in Hunan.

The story makes clear what we have been trying, in our small way at First Mother Forum, to get out to the world, that child trafficking does exist, and it exists not only for sexual exploitation, but also simply to provide willing Westerners who want children to "complete their families," a phrase that always makes me sick in the knees because it almost always refers to adopting. The Times story notes that A U.S. congressional commission that monitors human rights in China said in a 2005 report that "trafficking of women and children in China remains pervasive," with many infants and young children abducted for adoption and household services. According to an estimate cited in the report, 250,000 women and children were sold in China during 2003. (Not all go to Westerners who get them "laundered" through seemingly legitimate agencies: some are sold for child labor, others to wealthy Chinese families who want a boy, or, in some cases, a girl to marry their son, because the Chinese one-child-per-family law and the adoption situation not surprisingly has led already to a shortage of marriageable young women. The message here? Mess with Mother Nature and you get a stiff kick in the behind.)

China has cracked down on many family-planning officials and orphanage workers found guilty of trafficking, with some violators sentenced to death or long prison terms, according to Chinese news agencies. But according to Jane Liedtke, founder of Our Chinese Daughters Foundation, a nonprofit organization that offers programs and tours for families with children from China, the United States has treated China differently from other countries. U.S. families, for instance, are not allowed to adopt from Cambodia, Vietnam and Guatemala because of evidence of trafficking or other corruption.

"As a country, we should come out and say the Chinese government has to demonstrate what it's doing to prevent" trafficking, she said. But she added that it would be tragic to close off adoptions from China because "there are still way too many children who need help."

The Canadian government opened an investigation in October after The Times documented numerous cases in which Chinese babies were confiscated from their parents by local government officials and sold for foreign adoption.

Some adoptive parents "looked the other way" when they heard reports about child trafficking in Hunan province years ago, said Liedtke. Now that trafficking cases have been documented not just in Hunan but also in Guizhou, Guangxi and other provinces, "people say, 'Oh, I didn't know. My agency didn't tell me. If I'd known, I wouldn't have adopted.' "

To that, Liedtke responds: "Oh, yes, you would have. You wanted a child." 

Do I wonder if any of the children whose parents I know who adopted from foreign countries (two from  Guatemala, three from China, one talking about adopting from Ethiopia) have children who were stolen? You bet I do. I think about it all the time when I see the kids, some of whom I've bought presents for.

What do I say to people who think we are accusing them of "stealing" children?  I'm repeating here what I wrote at the blog because we are First Mother Forum  need to make clear where we stand on issues (as so many accuse of what we are not):

Dear Anon:

While you may feel that we accuse adopting people of "stealing" or "buying" their children, we are not doing that directly because they are not telling someone to go out and, say, kidnap a young child for a fee. However, this does happen--and happen often--in poorer countries such as Vietnam (where women were told they could not leave the hospital with their babies unless they came up with an exorbitant amount of money) and Nepal and India, where cases of outright kidnapping have been proven, and in China, where government officials are now on trial for extorting children from their parents.

When the Guatemalan government investigated adoptions from a certain period of time in the Nineties, they discovered that over half of the more than 600 adoptions they looked occurred because the mother was killed for the purpose of taking the baby, or was kidnapped, to be sold to unscrupulous baby brokers who appear, to willing and anxious adoptive parents, as ethical adoption lawyers. Adoptive parents who willingly adopt from overseas without looking into why a country has so many children available then become part of the corrupt system, just as, say, people who collect stolen art without investigating its provenance.

Does that make the adopters liable? Yes. Yes. Yes. If you doubt this, simply do a search at firstmotherforum.com [it's it in upper right corner or the bottom of the blog] for "corruption in international adoption" or any of the countries mentioned, and you will be directed to the original source of these statements. You will find that you will end up reading publications such as Foreign Policy or Mother Jones, or directed to CNN and NPR. The stories do not get a lot of play in this country because the public does not want to know.

We have several adoptive mothers who regularly read this blog (see their posts above) and they know that we are not making this up, or accusing anyone directly of ordering someone to steal a child. But it happens. Adoption, particularly overseas adoption, is rife with corruption because there is a buck to be made by supplying the world with freshly-minted healthy babies.

As for adoptions in this country, religious organizations such as the Mormons and agencies with a strong Christian connection (such as Bethany) encourage women to give up their babies in large part simply to grease the wheels and keep the business of adoption going. You can even find websites that list adoption "situations" and show a price tag--white infants go for much more than African-American or mixed race babies.* Without "product," agencies would lose business and in fact, go out of business. And while you personally may be honoring your child's heritage and first/birth mother, many many adopting parents do not. In open adoption cases, they promise one thing and do another, and that is what happened to at least one of the people who has posted here. We do not hate those who adopt. We hate the system that takes babies from mothers and does not offer them the help they would need to keep and raise the child.

One last thought: you refer to the decision to relinquish a child as excruciating and selfless. Excruciating, right. Not selfless. And not "loving," as many adoptive parents like to say, and believe. If the most loving thing a mother could do was to give a child up for a better life, many, many poor mothers would be offering their babies freely. Giving up a child is totally an act of desperation, and surrender to what seems the obvious: that the mother does not have the money or the support system to raise that child. But she remains his or her mother for all her life. While you have been disturbed by much of what you read here, I hope this at least has made you rethink some of your assumptions. And if your son finds himself calling the other woman "mother," please accept that this does not diminish your role as "mom" and "mother" in his life. He knows he has two mothers, and I sincerely hope you can come to accept this with peace and equanimity.

peace to you--lorraine
__________________________________________
*With thanks to Osolomama for alerting us to this website. 

Question from Reader regarding Chinese Adoptions

A reader left a question and a comment last night on the post, Babies Confiscated in China and Sold as Orphans to the Western Market. She had "inherited" a Chinese adoptee when she married her husband, who had been the younger spouse in an earlier marriage. She wanted to know what anyone knew about Chinese adoptions in 1993.

While we will have a new and different blog up later today, I decided to post the question to our readers this morning. Here is Stephanie's comment/question:

 I have "inherited" an adopted child from China. She was originally adopted by an older woman and a younger man (now my husband). I often wonder how good the background check was on the birth [note: she originally typed in "adoptive" mother here, but I assume it was a Freudian slip] mother. I hear it is better today, but back in 1993 it was not so good.

I would never want to be without my Step Daughter, but I don't know what kind of good system that really checks backgrounds of people could have allowed that woman to adopt.

Does anyone know what the rules were in 1993 regarding china adoptions?

 Please leave your comment here. 

More News on China's confiscated' children; Officials say they were 'legally' adopted

More on the story from China where babies were "confiscated" and "legally" adopted overseas in 2006 and 2007, thanks to one of our intrepid readers. This from the AP in the Wall Street Journal where you can read more:

BEIJING – Chinese authorities have punished six government officials after three baby girls whose parents were still alive were sent to an orphanage in southern China that subsequently put them up for adoption overseas, state media and an official said.

Family planning officials in impoverished Guizhou province's Zhenyuan County sent the babies to a state-run orphanage during 2003 and 2004 without properly investigating their backgrounds, the county government said on its Web site.

Officials and relatives mislead the families who lost their children, but the number is the story is three, not the eighty reported earlier. Whatever the number, these children's adoptions should not be considered "legal." That's like saying, I kidnap your child in one state, go to another state and have the adoption validated legally by saying, Gee, this child was abandoned...and then I get the paper saying: This adoption was legal. Only in this case, it's a given that the children are not growing up in China.

What if the original parents want the child back? Poor peasants are not likely to get them back. Is the Chinese government doing anything about getting the children back? Or is the one-or-two child only policy means...end of story. The official word is that six Chinese officials were punished, but they were not named nor was the punishment specified.

Why?

I am having a hard time feeling user friendly about China. --lorraine

________

PS: On another note, regarding an earlier post about the gaga adoption sites (such as adoptionvoices.com) owned by Nathan G. William of Arizona, who owns a thousand domain names connected to adoption, we are hearing that people trying to post respectful, but, ahem, less than glowing comments about adoption...are not getting their posts up. Let's keep acting up. Thanks to Cedar for this latest information.

Good women seldom make history.

And again...Spence-Chapin wants to entice me to adopt...apparently they have loads of babies in need of homes...or they are in need of cash. This agency goes out of its way to appear to be great friends of the (birth/first) mothers who relinquish their children...but it seems to me from these ads, they are most worried about staying in business. Remember, babies are a cash crop for adoption agencies. Yes, I'm feeling cranky about this today. The ads are offensive.

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.

Anna Mae Update

I'm not feeling too perky today--just had root canal--but thought it was worth bringing the He case up since Reader Kippa found an update.

Anne Mae He is back in China but not happy about it, apparently. Her parents, Jack and Casey He, have split, Anna Mae is at boarding school during the week, and Anna Mae doesn't like the pollution! On that one, we can probably agree.

The story does not go into the protracted fight the Jerry and Louise Baker put up when the Hes wanted their daughter back. Though her father, Jack, was a graduate student, he and mother Casey apparently did not understand when they signed over custody, it would not be a simple thing to undo it. Apparently in China it is not unusual for family members to temporarily take care of a child, and the Hes understood the arrangement to be a similar one.

But there was never a permanent relinquishment agreement, nor did the Hes ever intend this to be an adoption. The agency--it was connected with some Christian group--was at fault for not making sure Anna Mae's mother, Casey, understood what was happening. Soon after her first birth, the Hes asked for Anna back but the Bakers dug in and had plenty of cash to throw at lawyers. Basically, their argument was that they had more money...and gosh, now the girl has bonded with us and we can't/won't give her back.

At one point, the Bakers took out a restraining order against the Hes. I spoke to the lawyer for the Hes before the Tennessee Supreme Court made its decision, and he said that cultural issues as well as bias against the poorer Chinese couple were at play as the lower courts let the child stay with the Bakers. For further complicate matters, Jack He was difficult and not likable enough when he gave testimony, and that further prejudiced the courts against him.

But basically, as the lower courts decided against the natural parents, it was another example of a prevailing attitude we often come up against: that money trumps blood.

Not on your life. --lorraine

And for a good time, read on. (And click on the green line to get your green backs.) This was what I found when I clicked on one of the ads below the Anna Mae story on the CNN website:

Billions of Dollars are given away every month by the Government. You can use this money to adopt a child, pay for college, start a business, invest in real estate, and buy a new home and much more. Many US Citizens are not aware of the billions of dollars which go unclaimed each year. The government and other organizations must by law distribute billions of dollars in 2009 to private citizens & organizations just like you. The best part is you never have to pay it back! Request Your Free Grants Kit to Claim Yours!

Adoption: The Movie

A new movie about being adopted appears to be right on, to judge from the trailer below and the other short clips you can watch at You Tube. It does seem to get at issues that adoptees rarely want to talk about becasue they are too painful, but sit there just below the surface.





And here's another heart breaker, about the adopted person not looking like their parents:


and last but not least...it's all we as first mothers know about adoption and yes, it won't be comforting to watch, but at least our feelings of yearning are validated by the other side: how the adopted person feels about being adopted. Although I probably won't be able to spring the $60 for the film, so I may never see it in its entirety, it looks to be a valuable tool in getting the message out: Adoption is always painful.



As I am in frequent contact with acquaintances who have adopted from China (five and counting), I wonder how many of them are able to want to understand what it is like to be adopted. I'm sure that the subtle message can not help but be: we saved you from a terrible life back in your world, aren't you a lucky girl? One of the girls is being raised back in Shanhai by her adoptive mother, Emily Prager; and at least one of the other mothers is somehow very bothered by that. The mere mention of Emily's name upsets her. --lorraine

Real Parents in the News

Hello Lifegivers! (I see we are still discussing the noxious terms at the end of earlier blogs. Well, why not?)

Photo by Ken Robbins

Just a short note this a.m to tell you that in the Adoption News Service today came a story from Vancouver, B.C., that referred repeatedly to "real mother." I cheered--at least not every writer and editor has gotten the memo that "birth mother" is an absolute PC must.

And the acquittal of a father who left his adopted Russian son in the back of a hot sports utility vehicle has the international adoption world buzzing....will the Russians tighten up on letting their kids go to Americans? Oh my...Now where do we get kids?

Another story about a Korean adoptee raised in Germany has this to say in the OhMy News (you gotta love the name of the publication):

"Miriam Yung Min Stein is not only harsh on her 'home country,' but also rants and raves about the institutionalized altruism that brought her to Germany, highlighting the dark sides of feel-good charity.

"I am not ungrateful, but international help makes me puke. People like Angelina Jolie or Bono make me puke."

While she knows that her German parents meant well and gave her more than she can ever return, it is also clear that the act of adoption affected her life in incalculable ways."

And ours too.

Which is why I hated hated the movie Juno so much. It made the whole situation--pregnancy, finding cool adoptive parents, flirting with the dad-to-be, etc.--such a nightmare for us. Because yes that kind of crap does inform public opinion about what it is like to give up a child. Cry once at the hospital and then..hooray, life goes on. The vapid BF stays.

And then we end up dealing with folks like my "friend," Aston. Got an invitation from a mom of a Chinese girl for a Christmas Eve party tonight in an email. She noted, incidentally, that Aston and his wife would be out of the country for the holidays and so we could come without hesitation...so the news of our frisson has indeed spread. Ah...life in the adoption lane....

Dear Significant Other Tony doesn't even want to know the reaction of another friend, also mom of a girl from China, because she's a bit more (actually a whole lot more) morally absolute about her take on life and is super sensitive about being an adoptive mother. She twice felt it necessary to correct me when I referred to Jane's "adoptive parents." As in: They are her parents. Said with stern face daring me to counter. I did not. But !@!%ing hell, I wish I had. For the sake of our conversation, she couldn't hold her tongue? Ah...off to brunch today and I am sure that the adoptive mother who had to correct Tony when he referred to my daughter as daughter, no modifiers, and say: "birth daughter" will be there. This is just after we got back from the funeral. I will do my best to avoid her. I'd have to have a lot of punch to ask her outright about her "adopted daughter."

Look, the two Chinese girls mentioned above are great friends and they do seem to be thriving, so though I have reservations about adoption in general, the likelihood that these two girls would have languished in a Chinese orphanage does not make me think that's where they should be. They have good parents and good homes. One of the girls was, in my opinion, traumatized by being in an institution for a year, and she has, with much patience and love, come a long way to being a normal teenager.

We are visiting my husband's family (a passel of niece and nephews and their kids) on The Eve, and then onto Pennsylvania to see my step-son and his wife and nine-year-old son on The Day.

The picture above? The photo on the Christmas card of photographer friend Ken Robbins.
--lorraine

Can Feminists Adopt and Still Be Feminists?

Can a feminist adopt in good conscience?

No, says one Korean adoptee. Read what Kathie Leo has to say about that in the Minnesota Women's Press.

While we talked about international adoption lately, and then we've had the surrogacy and embryo debate, we skirted around the issue of what makes these issues so distasteful: the caste system inherent in all such transfers of human commodity. Because that's what babies are in our current milieu: a commodity, just like electric shavers and cheap toys. It's cash that makes the export of infant human flesh such a thriving business.

Is France sending us their excess babies? NO. Great Britain? NO. The babies are coming from Third World, undeveloped countries where the women are too poor to take care of them--and thus wealthy white women swoop in and buy them. Yes, I use that word buy because cash is what makes the transfer of babies from one country to another possible. In China, the one-child-per-couple policy led to the massive baby-export business, so lucrative that today China has a problem with baby and child kidnapping. HBO recently aired a documentary about it, China's Stolen Children.

Where are the baby farms where surrogate mothers are willing to take on the job of bearing children for wealthy foreigners? India, a country where great poverty exists side-by-side with great wealth. Once some enterprising capitalist gets wind of this, more poor countries will be setting up baby-gestation farms.

And the same monetary principles, generally speaking, work in adoption. It is not wealthy girls and young women who by and large are offering babies to adopt; they are having abortions or keeping their children. It's girls and young women and mothers in poor families who can not keep them who say, Here, take mine, I can not afford to keep her. The humane thing to do would be to make it possible for the poor woman to keep the child. A few years ago, the sister of a friend adopted a child from an intact, but poor, family in Rhode Island. What is that if not baby-selling? Would it not have been more humane to simply help support that family?

This caste system is why we find surrogacy and egg donation for money repugnant. Why adoptions from Third World countries--or China--are so prone to abuses. I have, among my acquaintances, a far-left feminist law professor. But where did she adopt?

Guatemala.

Did she not see the apparent dichotomy in this act? Obviously not. Elizabeth Bartholet, a feminist law professor at Harvard, imported two boys from Peru. She showed up to be on the television when the Anna/Jessica transfer the wicked DeBoers (now divorced) back to her natural parents, the Schmidts (ah, also divorced) was going on. She and I had a shouting match on the McNeal-Lerher Report that day. The jacket to her book (Family Bonds), says that she "produced" one child (drum roll, please) then "endured her own struggle with infertility" for ten years before she flew to Peru to adopt, some eighteen years after her first child was born. Interestingly enough, her age--when she was "struggling" with infertility aka perimenopause--is not mentioned there. The timing had to be up to and into her forties. But because you want to have children beyond the reasonable time frame of your fertility and your body refuses does not make your lack of fertility a disease. It is, dear ladies, a reality of aging!

Yet the snarky Ms. Bartholet--who told me the research showing that adoptees were prone to more mental health problems than the norm was "garbage,"--saw nothing anti-feminist is taking boys from their poor country to give them a "better life."

For that is what is stated or implied in all adoption stories: that life that the adoptive family offers is better than the original one. Here's how Kathie Leo put it:

The story further implies certain suppositions about what "a better life" means. In this scenario, "better" clearly means American, but it also suggests wealthier, Caucasian, and most important, not with my birthmother. This notion of "a better life" has permeated adoption narratives since the practice began, often used as justification for its existence.

Amen. Ms. Leo's piece has more to say. It's worth reading. As for me, I tried for years to get a piece in Ms. magazine about birth mothers with the above theme. No luck. The feminists who were putting out the magazine had the mindset of Ms. Bartholet and friends. No--wait, they were Ms. Bartholet's friends.--lorraine

PS: Tomorrow we'll hear from Jane.

Foreign Adoptions Cont'd and Thanksgiving Leftovers

By Linda Bolton

Somewhere in my family tree is an ancestor whose big toes look like reverse quotation marks and they passed that trait on to me. I have spent the past five days recuperating from surgery to straighten out my big left toe; the right toe was fixed about 15 years ago--twice--so I know I need to be relatively immobile. Of course I'm 15 years older, so I'm not bouncing back easily--I've spent most of the week in my chaise or napping. Complete recovery should take three to six weeks, which means I get to wear this heavy boot with everything from pajamas to business attire. The upside is my husband cooked Thanksgiving dinner for two (and did very well) and is making a turkey soup with the leftovers, so I can blog.

When Lorraine asked me to write about foreign adoption, I replied with the following e-mail:

I'm no authority on transcultural adoption. I'd rather see kids adopted in their own countries, of course, but if there are couples who want to spend their life savings and beyond to parent kids who are supposedly in need, how can I argue with that? I certainly don't have the means, financial or otherwise, to do it. What I am opposed to are the Angelinas and Madonnas who use foreign adoptions as publicity stunts. Of course I have no idea what their parenting skills are like, but I read this Associated Press blurb online last week:

Madonna and Ritchie have agreed to arrangements for their children. Their two boys — Rocco, 8, and David Banda, 3, are likely to split their time between Britain and the US. Lourdes, 12, Madonna’s child from an earlier relationship, will remain with her.

What kind of parenting is that? What kind of message does that send to a 3-year-old boy who's already lost his biological family and his culture?

Two families in my adoption support group received Angels in Adoption awards related to their transcultural adoptions; I hope these parents are the rule more than the exception. One couple adopted three kids from Romania and another from Guatemala. They've had trips to their kids' homelands; some, if not all, met their families of origin. The parents were almost in tears when the told of meeting one family, who thought they were seeing a ghost...they believed the stories that children relinquished to adoption became organ donors.

The other couple, who joined the support group when I did over a decade ago, raised two sons and then started a second family by adopting two girls from different regions of India, just a couple of months apart, so they're almost like twins. This couple is devoted to these girls. For several years one of the girls couldn't stop talking about how she missed her birthmother, and the a-parents were at a loss, the kids were practically abandoned by the side of a road (strict Indian culture and all) and there's no paper trail. It's a 100,000 to one chance that these girls will find their birth families. But two summers ago they had a trip to India, visited both girls' birthplaces, and were able to visit one girl's orphanage. They dress in saris on Indian holidays, of course eat a lot of Indian food, attend culture camps. The girls seem like any other pre-teens (they like to tease their father, who embarrasses them with his lack of cool). In other words, they're just an ordinary family.

A while back(March 2006)Lorraine and I read a NY Times article about Asian-born female adoptees coming of age. They were all about 18, and most said they were American, not Chinese, and we speculated about their sentiments in another 5, 10 years.

As most birthmothers on FMF have posted, we're not completely anti-adoption, and not all adopters are the enemy, and sometimes adoption is the absolute only course of action for a happy ending. Everyone agrees adoption is/should be about the child's best interest, not the adoptive parents with money to burn, nor should adoption add even more trauma to the distressed birthmother facing what's probably the most difficult crisis of her life. If only we could stick to that premise...

If you're around tonight, be sure to watch 20/20 on ABC (10 pm EST). One of tonight's stories is about [drum roll] foreign adoption. The web site teaser line says "'I Didn't Want Perfect Children' Adopting from overseas has created more pain than joy for some parents." And the first thing I thought was "THAT should make foreign-born adoptees really, really happy."

Finally, I wanted to tell readers that I've taken their advice. While I was confined to my chaise I was able to get a jump start on my holiday cards. And while I was addressing envelopes, I addressed one to my estranged daughter. It's the same card I've sent to family and friends, a photo of my mantle decorated for the holidays that appears at the top of the blog; a perfect seasonal greeting. No note. In my "Happy Birthday, Sarah" blog [October 2008], TheRightThing responded with the following:

"For 39 years I didn't want my mother sending birthday cards to me, but she did anyway. She never sent flowers or included a gift...I hated the cards. In fact, I would throw them in the trash. Of course this was after I read them...Now, that we are back in each other lives, I wished I would have kept every card she had sent me.
It didn't matter then that she sent them, but it matters now that she sent them. She showed me that she still loved me by sending the cards..."

Hopefully, one day my daughter will share TheRightThing's sentiments. Hopefully, one day seeing my return address in the upper left-hand corner of the envelope won't send my daughter into panic mode. Hopefully, one day she'll be glad she kept every card I have sent her, it will matter to her that they were sent, and she'll realize that I stay in touch (or at least try to stay in touch) because I loved her then, I love her still, and I'll love her always.

Hope your Thanksgiving was abundant in every way.

Good news: Foreign Adoptions Decline

by Lorraine Dusky

The good news is that "Foreign Adoptions Drop Sharply" according to an Associated Press story that shows the continuing decline as some countries clamped down on foreign adoptions and other battled with allegations of fraud. The number of adoptions is down to its 1999 level. China is no longer in the top spot for adoptions, having given that to Guatemala, where fraud and child snatching appear to be rampant.

And then a few days later we had the story about the California couple who were trying to adopt from Guatemala when they saw that some paperwork had to be fake. A doctor's signed statement attested that DNA samples of the mother and baby had been taken on a day that the Jennifer Hemsley, the prospective adoptive mother, knew the baby was with her. To her credit, Mrs. Hemsley reported the discrepancy to the authorities, and thus was not able to bring the child to America. But how many other cases have there been when the adopters saw the irregularity but said nothing?

We first mothers have mixed feelings about foreign adoptions, and we will be posting our thoughts over the next week. But what I think we are all in sync with is that when we see a child that is from a different culture than the parents, we internally gulp. We think about a woman somewhere without a child. We wonder what were the horrible circumstances that led to her having to give up a child today. We wonder how the child feels about looking different from everybody around them. We wonder if their parents are really dead, if the child was really abandoned, if she really had been languishing in an orphanage. We wonder if the country made any effort to have her adopted in her native land.

And we wonder if the child was stolen.

The buyer's market in babies has led to all kinds of deceptions to get babies to feed the demand. There have been enough reported cases of kidnapping that we know there are many many more. Mirah Riben has documented this in her book, Stork Market. Yet we know there are children--older children, children with problems, teenagers in foster care--who desperately need homes here in America, and yet go begging for parents. But people don't want to take in those children. Most want healthy infants without strings, aka a first mother. Or they don't want an African-American child, which is why so many of ours were sent to Canada to be adopted. Maybe Obama's ascendancy to the presidency will have some impact on that, and that would be a good thing.

A recent book, The Brotherhood of Joseph, details the trials and tribulations of adopting from Russia, and though reading made me angry page after page, I had to see where it led. I certainly did not end up liking the writer, Brooks Hansen, but at least he was honest about his feelings.

Hansen is in love with all things Russian, exp. Prokofiev and he manages to work that into the little speech he gives to the judge about why the wanted to adopt from Russia, because he feels a special connection yadda yadda yadda....and I quote from the book here:

"There was some discussion of the birth mother as well, more than I was comfortable with. Katya [one of the emissaries they hired] kept taking notes but I tuned out a little, not because I was afraid of what I might hear or because I didn't want to humanize her too much [Oh really, it certainly seems that it the point] --or just that [meaning what, just that? Sounds like you don't want to humanize her but can't bring your pompous self-righteous soul to admit that you can't stand to humanize her because that would make you aware that somewhere out there is a mother without a child, that your child didn't come via The Stork]--but the whole conversation struck me as being a little too conjectural. Apparently they hadn't been able to track her down, so she was either out of the region or still 'indigent.' They'd used that same word back in July, but what did that mean? No address? Elizabeth and I had already discussed this. No address for a thirty-year-old would have meant something, but twenty-two? That could just mean you're sleeping on your friend's couch, in which case half of the 20-year-olds I've know were indigent."

He goes on at some length throughout the book about his love of all things Russian...and how they will let the child be aware of that (actually the kid is from Siberia).."his native land is a place we care about deeply and if he wants our help in finding it, [my ital] we will be there for him with full and open hearts as we intend to be there for him in all things. [Except possibly knowing his roots any more specifically than generally which is why you settled on Russia/Siberia anyway, your love of Prokofiev notwithstanding.] It was that birth mother problem, wasn't it?

Yet. Some of these children would be, one assumes, languishing all their lives in an institution, and I don't imagine that poor countries have very nice institutions. So I have mixed feelings about foreign adoptions. The two people I know--both older men--who spent most of their childhoods in institutions here in America ended up less than emotionally healthy. One is a recluse poet, the other someone who ranted and raved at me when he learned I had written a memoir about the pain of giving up a child.

I personally know so many adopted kids from elsewhere I sometimes feel like I'm trapped in a New Yorker cartoon, a figure with black thoughts over my head as I see the foreign faces coming at me like rain. Three Chinese teenage girls in Sag Harbor alone, or four, if you count the one whose parents are only friends of friends. A professional acquaintance who adopted from Guatemala. That's only a partial list. If I include the friends of friends, such as my real but tenuous connection to Mr. Hanson, it grows way longer.

What I do know is that because of the demand, babies are stolen from their mothers, mothers are coerced into giving up their babies, fraud is built into the system. And the commodity is human flesh.

My husband got a 2009 calendar put out by The Onion. One of the photographs depicts Chinese babies in swings coming down an assembly line. An American couple stands nearby, looking over the goods, presumably to pick out one to take home.

It's a screwed-up world.

--Happy Thanksgiving, y'all. --lorraine

On Guard: Adoptive Parent Approaching

My life is totally surrounded by adoption. Maybe because I live in the demographic (though I am slightly older than this) of women who had careers, delayed conception, were unable to conceive in their late thirties when they got around to trying, and then ended up adopting. This means that I almost never can go to a party of say, twenty or thirty people, without there being one or two adoptive couples present. Some of them are relatively good friends that I see often enough so that ADOPTION is not the first thing that comes to mind when they walk in.

But then, one friend's (an adoptive mother of a Chinese girl) college roommate is out for the weekend, and she too is an adoptive mother. With a kid as Irish-looking as they come who is being raised in a quite different religion. And bang, I see her, and I think: adoptive parent, how is the child, do they know who the mother is, do they ever think about her? And I wonder if the first thing the woman thinks of when she sees me is that I am a birth/first mother. Who found her daughter. I wonder how her son is faring, is he interested in searching, and I pray that adoption never comes up that evening. And I am on some sort of edge until we say goodnight, and relieved that I got through the evening unscathed.

And there's another friend--the divorced dad of an adopted Chinese daughter--whose new girlfriend, in her late 30s, maybe even her 40s, wanted to have a kid but waited too long and now...she's shopping countries for a baby. Our friend tells my husband that you can either get in line at the countries that allow adoptions, albeit ever more slowly, or you can go to the head of the line at countries that have not yet allowed international adoptions but are thinking about it. That's the route she chose, and is applying for a child in Nepal, which has not yet opened up to foreign adoptions. Our friend and his fiancee are not getting married, in fact, because it will be easier for her to adopt as a single parent rather than as a couple, because then the father-to-be has a Chinese daughter from an earlier marriage. Incidentally, my friend is in every way a great divorced dad. (This is certainly a plot line for a soap.)

And another friend is Arthur, adoptive grandfather to Emily Prager's daughter, who moved to China with her daughter. And of course there's my somewhat tenuous but real connection to Brooks Hansen, author of the despicable but honest, The Brotherhood of Joseph. His parents live nearby, and are good friends of a friend, who used to have us to dinner together...until I introduced myself as a first mother who searched, found, had a relationship. And there's lots of other friends of friends....

Because I'm 66, many of our friends have children who are of child-bearing age, and when I hear that someone's daughter, or son, is having a baby, I cheer inside, because then I won't be faced with having to deal with yet another adoption, so close, so personal. I won't be drawn into conversations I don't want to have, and I won't be the subject of gossip I don't want to be.

I was reminded of all this by a piece in Newsweek this week about how American interest in foreign adoption is as strong as ever, but the number has dropped ten percent due to countries such as Russia, Guatemala and China dialing back their programs or ending them entirely. I don't really know how I feel about that because poorer countries have used their children as a cash crop, and that has led to all sorts of abuses (baby-stealing, kidnapping, extortion from poor women), but at the same time, a kid who might otherwise grow up in an orphanage anywhere is almost certainly better in a home with someone who cares. Yes, of course, there are abuses, and kids end up frozen in freezers, and sexually abused, but that has to be the exception.

So, am I alone is thinking ADOPTIVE PARENT, Be On Guard! whenever I encounter one? Or am I just obsessed...? Inquiring first mother wants to know.

--lorraine