The Global Trade in Babies Continues to Boom

Lorraine

"First of all, the global baby trade is a market. Adoptive families pay a lot of money -- to the sending country, adoption agencies, and lawyers. For many years, South Korea was the leading sending country, and the hard currency it earned from international adoptions helped the country recover from the Korean War's devastation.

"Like any market, the unscrupulous find plenty of ways to make money. A child-buying scandal that erupted in Cambodia about 10 years ago drew wide media coverage. The European Union pressured Romania to place a ban on international adoptions, largely as a result of a report to the European Parliament by Lady Emma Nicholson. "Impoverished families were coerced and deceived into giving up their children who were then effectively sold on to Western couples under the guise of international adoption," Nicholson argued in a 2004 Guardian article."--by John Feffer, Co-director of Foreign Policy in Focus published at the Huffington Post.  

We don't simply like to link other articles or reprint them whole here (a violation of property rights) but the piece from which this is taken ought to be required reading for everyone considering adopting a child, especially a child from a foreign country. Furthermore, adoptive parents or prospective adoptive parents who stumble upon First Mother Forum are often shocked by our comparing adoption to a business industry subject to market influences, and so we will continue to publicize our sources.

But those who deny that the baby business, or The Stork Market, is alive and thriving to feed the market for babies in American and elsewhere are covering their senses with blinders. Books such as the recent Baby We Were Meant for Each Other, by an author such as NPR's Scott Simon, who was able to readily publicize the glories of adopting from China, and the continuing spate of celebrity adoptions, further push the demand for babies from wherever they can be bought. Write in "international adoption memoirs" at Amazon and up pops numerous accounts of how-to-do-it, and how great it is, and I suppose, all leave you feeling with the glow that the author is doing something good in the world. Just yesterday in the supermarket I stumbled upon a cover story about Eva Longoria from Desperate Housewives. She is divorcing--but there is a happy ending: Longoria is going to fill the void in her life by adopting a baby. Great. Lose a husband? Get someone else's baby to fill the void in your life. But I digress.

Guatemala, which we have covered in detail in the past, was once the largest per-capita source of children to be adopted, and the country's own government has found irrefutable evidence of baby-snatching, and sometimes even killing the parents to make the baby "available" for adoption. The children were handed over to government-run agencies for foreign adoption, and the Americans and Europeans who adopted them thought they had clean hands--no back -alley dealings, right?--and were doing a good thing, that is, saving a child. The reality is so far from the truth: instead, these adoptive parents had blood on their hands. As Feffer writes:

"The baby market is subject to the same neocolonial distortions that affect other commodities. Imagine a couple from Vietnam visiting the United States to adopt a white baby because they want to give the child a more spiritually rich life and save it from an existence poisoned by Wii, reality TV, and KFC. With rare exceptions, it's the poor countries that supply babies to the rich countries.

"Sometimes, the rich just swoop in and take from the poor. In Sierra Leone, after the widespread amputations that took place during the civil war, some staff of U.S. charities persuaded amputee parents to give up their amputee children for adoption "in a manner that seemed to combine aspects of bribery and kidnapping," writes Philip Gourevitch in The New Yorker. After Haiti's earthquake, the New Life Children's Refuge attempted to transport 33 alleged orphans out of the country to place with American parents. Not only did the transfer qualify as smuggling, since the Baptist activists didn't acquire any documentation from the Haitian side, but one-third of the children weren't even orphans. One child thought she was going to a summer camp."

At the same time that poor countries are being looted of their children, the great majority of the world's populations that are not even replacing themselves are in low-income countries. The trading of fertility rites on the open market--combined with the aggressive marketing of international adoption agencies and adoption advocates such as the Christian World Adoptions and other organizations that urge the end to the UNICEF 's recent statement that children first and foremost belong with their original families--could lead to an even more radical shrinkage of countries already below the replacement rate in such places as Moldova, Thailand, Lebanon, and Vietnam. (2.5 to 3.3 birth per woman is considered a replacement rate in non industrialized countries.)

International adoption is a sick system. It might be better called "child laundering," a phrase used by adoptive father and legal scholar David Smolin. He found that his two girls adopted from India had been stolen from their parents. I often feel like we at First Mother Forum are only putting our fingers in a dike after it burst. International adoption is everywhere and seen by many couples as a way to "build a family" without considering the full implications, and certainly not considering what the wholesale exchange of children from one culture to another means to them, or their birth/first/natural mothers and fathers.

But we are not going to stop. There are children who do need homes and families; they are in foster care right here in America. --lorraine
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If you leave a comment at Huff Po, please copy and leave it here too. The more you write, the more others may read.

And for a read about how some international adoptees feel about who they are, read O Solo Mama's blog: "You Are Who You Think You Are." O Solo Mama is the adoptive mother of an pre-teen from China who frequently is a welcome commenter here. She gets it.

When Disaster Strikes, Adoption Is Sure to Follow

The pictures coming from Haiti are devastating, and you know there will be children in need of homes, and before you know it adoption agencies and relief organizations will be setting up conduits to spirit children to the United States. Already Catholic Charities is in the act, according to the Miami Herald:

In a move mirroring Operation Pedro Pan in the 1960s, Catholic Charities and other South Florida immigrant rights organizations are planning an ambitious effort to airlift possibly thousands of Haitian children left orphaned in the aftermath of Tuesday's horrific earthquake.

``We will use the model we used 40 years ago with Pedro Pan to bring these orphans to the United States to give them a lifeline, a bright and hopeful future,'' Catholic Charities Legal Services executive director Randolph McGrorty said at a news conference in the offices of Rep. Mario Diaz-Balart.

``Given the enormity of what happened in Haiti, a priority is to bring these orphaned children to the United States,'' he said.

Archdiocese of Miami officials and other local organizations have already identified a temporary shelter in Broward County to house the children, McGrorty said.

And the comments left at the Herald say the same thing: adopt, adopt, adopt--how can I/we get a child. I do not mean to disparage many who are commenting there because truly they want to open their hearts and homes to children in need. Haiti is an incredibly beautiful country, verdant and vibrant; but poor, incredibly poor. I spent a week there in the mid Seventies and was struck by the friendliness of the Haitians, their colorful art, side by side with tin shacks, rundown bicycles, the lack of a country-wide sewer system.

We understand that for some children there will be no alternative but to find them homes in other countries, and the adoption diaspora will continue, but with a difference. Pedro Pan was clearly motivated by the Catholic Church to get the children out of the clutches of the anti-religion Communism of Castro's Cuba. Haitians are Christians--Catholics in fact, with a smattering, or more than a smattering of native voo-doo thrown  in; a large percentage are now evangelical Christians. But most of the children brought to this country will have families there, huge extended families that could care for them and let them grow up as they were born--if only there were aid enough. But here is how the story will end:

By the time it ended 22 months later, the unique exodus of children -- ages 5 to 17 -- had brought 14,048 unaccompanied Cuban minors to America, with the secret help of the U.S. government, which funded the effort and supplied the visa waivers, and the Catholic church, which promised to care for the children.The late Monsignor Bryan O. Walsh, a Miami priest, was considered the father of the [Pan Pedro] effort. As the children filtered into Miami and their numbers swelled, many went to live with relatives and family friends, but others were sent to Miami-Dade group homes and camps called Florida City, Kendall and Matecumbe. They were then relocated across the country to archdioceses in places like Nebraska, Washington and Indiana.

There, they went to live in orphanages, foster homes and schools until their parents could find a way out of Cuba. Sometimes the separation was brief; sometimes it lasted years.

And we know because of all that has happened before, the separations that for many the separations that lasted for years became a lifetime. I do not have an answer, I do not have close ties with anyone in government who I might talk to and suggest that wholesale adoptions should not be considered first, but last.

Yet I am sad. Why is the whole sale adoption of children, the reassigning of cultures, the first reaction? Why not a concerted effort to keep the children with their extended families?
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In the meantime, nut job TV evangelist Pat Robertson is blaming the earthquake and resultant disaster on the Haitians "pact with the devil." Truly the man is evil himself.  For more on the situation in Haiti, see Daily Bastardette's excellent blog on the matter.

Jane here: In a few months, Vietnam Babylift will celebrate the 35th anniversary of Operation Babylift where over 3,500 infants and children were taken from orphanages and their families to the US during the panic created when South Vietnam fell to the North Vietnamese. President Ford counted this as one of his proudest achievements. Others are critical, noting that many of the children were not were orphans. Sadly too, one of the planes crashed, killing over 100 children. The poignant PBS documentary Daughter From Danang chronicles one woman's journey back to her family in Vietnam. According to her mother, women were frightened by the Holt International Adoption Agency to give up their children. They were told the Americans would return with their children.