Putting the Brakes on Haitian Adoptions

Haitian adoptions continue to spill out into the news. On Saturday (1/23/10), 80 children left God's Children orphanage heading for their new American families, according to the Christian Science Monitor, "Haitian and American red tape suddenly cut." Exactly what we have been worried about, as per our previous post.

And our friend, Linda, reported in a comment to that blog that Frankie, the Haitian boy that Diane Sawyer met in Haiti, has come to the United States to live with David and Kim Rhodes, the American couple from Greenville, S.C., who for the last two years had been in the process of adopting him. (Watch the ABC follow up to the story here.) The report says that Frankie's mother left him a blanket and her perfume, and died a few days after childbirth.

Though we are extremely cautious on the subject of international adoption--given the corruption that accompanies it everywhere, as we have written before--the couple seem sincere in their desire to give a child in an orphanage a home. Kim Rhodes (I'm guess on the spelling here) first visited Haiti with a church group many years ago and was struck by the need, and so I am sympathetic to her impulse. The poverty I saw in Haiti when I was there as a journalist in the Seventies was staggering, while Baby Doc lived in the presidential palace (destroyed in the earthquake) and was busily looting the country, selling of logging rights that have today deforested much of the country. We look with a flinty eye on international adoption here at First Mother Forum, but we understand that an individual adoption may be a good ending to a bad beginning, and this adoption may be one of them. 

We are happy to report that more experts are cautioning that children not be lifted wholesale from the country so ravaged by a massive earthquake. As a commentator said yesterday on Good Morning America, there are reports of children disappearing from Haitian hospitals, and "child trafficking thrives in chaos." While the GMA cohost, Bill Weir, said that just about every woman he knows wants to adopt a child from Haiti (yes, he said that), Jane Aronson, the director of Worldwide Orphans Foundation, reacted with plenty of cautionary words yesterday. After giving the green light to those adoptions near finalization, she said that for the bulk of the children in Haiti, no matter how one responds to the pictures and reports of children walking the streets, the answer is "not adoption." My ears pricked up. She went on (and thanks to the DVR because I hit the record button at that moment I can give you her comments pretty much verbatim here). Aronson:

"There are wonderful solutions for children who have families--extended families, grandparents, aunts and uncles they have live with....Now people need to concentrate on helping keeping kids in their own country."

Weir then asked  how traumatic it was for a child to leave his or her native culture and come to America. Aronson:

"Kids are developmentally attached. Kids are--like your children, like my children--are connected to their families. That's developmentally appropriate. They are attached, their emotions, their psychology. They need to be with the people they care for and who care for them. To take them away from their families at this point is absolutely excruciatingly beyond words for me to even contemplate. (Italics ours.)

"What's important to remember is that children need to be with their families and communities at this time."

Where do we send the roses to Jane Aronson? 

Meanwhile, the European Union is not launching a plan to facilitate adoptions of child victims of the January 12 earthquake. According to a report from Deutsche-Presse Agentur, the idea was floated last week at an informal meeting in Spain, but the result was that the EU Commissioner for Justice, Jacques Barrot, announced that any such framework for adoptions at this time was premature. This followed a UN report that a "large number" of children may have been taken out of Haiti without following proper legal steps.

If you hit on link "international adoption" in the last line of the EU story reported above, you get an ad for an agency specializing in international adoptions, WACAP--the World Association for Children and Parents.

Excuse me while a black cloud of smoke forms over my head. If this were a graphic novel that's what  you would see.
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Another episode of Lux and Cate and Baze tonight on Life Unexpected. 9 p.m. Eastern and Central time on the CW. I'll be watching. Check for review tomorrow.

The Grief of Giving Up a Child to a 'Better Life'

Eventually we will turn away from Haitian adoptions, but below is the kind of story that bugs us, and it is representative of so many international adoptions: that there is a mother, a family, back home somewhere waiting. One can not solve all of the problems of the world, but one should make an effort to do what one can. And this to me, just adds to the misery of being poor and without resources. This story comes from WMUR News in New Hampshire.

A girl named Grace, adopted from Haiti when she was nine, is waiting to hear if her mother, Mimose Lubin, is alive, as she lived in Delmas, one of the hardest hit areas. In a one-story apartment. Grace now lives with the Winslow family of Center Barnstead, New Hampshire, who adopted her along with her brother, Jon, when he was two. His family lives in an area that is far away from the quake zone, and they are probably unharmed.

I am so torn when I read these stories: would the girl be better off with her mother? How did her mother feel about handing her over? How did relinquishing her daughter impact her life? But if she had not been sent to live in American, she might be maimed or dead. And the same is true of the boy, Jon.

Were the mothers crazy, or sick, were there no relatives who could care for Grace or Jon? I want to know. I imagine what these mothers were told--that their children would be better off, have a good middle class life in the land of milk and honey and unlimited opportunity, have a future not dreamed of if they stayed in Haiti. Yes, I am sure they were told that, and the mothers gave up their children for the promise of that better life. And soon--months, a year--there is no going back for any of them, mother or child.

I gave my daughter up, as did our readers, my friends, because we felt we were without resources. Yes, I gave up, we all gave up. We could not cope with a baby. We had no funds. Society told us we must do the right thing. My daughter was relinquished in a time when all cultural forces inveighed on me, telling me that a two-parent family, a middle class man and wife of "professionals" were the better parents. I'm not angry with my social worker, Helen Mura, because she did not lie, she did not sit there and tell me that I would be better off without the child, she merely listened and kept her box of tissues filled; I came to her with plans intact, the father a married man who did not want to keep the child--and oh how I think of Rielle Hunter and John Edwards and their "love child" when I read their story in the supermarket line. I came to Mrs. Mura at Northaven Terrace in Rochester, New York in my fifth month defeated by the winds of circumstance and society, and I did not put up a better fight.

In the end, my lover, my daughter's father, did not leave his wife in time to let me keep our daughter. When he did, two years later, it was too late, our daughter was gone. Did my daughter have the better parents, the better life? Certainly they had resources I did not have, but in the end, I don't think so. She was a textbook case of all the psychological problems that beset some adoptees, and she had the double-whammy of also being epileptic. And, oh yes, of being sexually abused by a grandmother's live-in companion. Triple whammy.

Because I have been focused on my career, now and then someone has said in the past, Oh, you did the right thing, you would not have been a good mother, you wanted a career too much.

I used to accept that, maybe it was part of the punishment, maybe it was part of their rationalization in a feeble attempt to make me feel better, maybe they just had to say it, but one day, my husband,  my dear husband who has always understood--we are going on 29 years this year--said, How do they know that? They don't know what kind of mother you would have been. You would have been a good mother.

That made me reconsider myself; it was a piece of putting back an ego that had been smashed. Sometimes, I'm sure I would have been irritated with a baby's demands, her epilepsy would have been a burden for us both, but you know, I know I would have been a good mother to a daughter I came to know and understand.

We were much alike, my daughter and me. I would be a different person than the career woman I became, that's all. Yes, I always wanted a career, I won't argue that point, but I did not know how much maternal instinct would roil up in me once I knew I was having a baby. I did not know how much I would want to keep her. I did not know how giving her up for a better life would ruin mine.

And so, when thinking about the situaiton in Haiti my head hurts and my heart aches. I want mothers to keep their babies, rich and poor mothers to keep their babies. I want the world to see that simply removing children from their families and sending them off to foreign lands and genetic strangers is not always the answer. I want the world to know that such relief is also the beginning of grief. --lorraine

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It's Unexpected, show about girl not adopted who tracks down her parents, starts tonight. 9 p.m., Eastern and Central time.

What of the Children in Haitian Orphanges?

More news since last night's post on Haitian adoptions. What will happen to the children that were in the process of being adopted? An estimated 50,000 children who were living in Haitian orphanages when Tuesday's earthquake hit, and between 800 and 900 of the children were in the process of being adopted by families in the United States. An additional 1,500 had been matched with European families, mostly in France and the Netherlands.

According to the Washington Post, the remaining children include many who might not technically be orphans but whose families could not afford to care for them, said Tom DiFilipo, president of the Joint Council on International Children's Services, a Washington-based child welfare organization that has taken the lead on negotiating their status with U.S. authorities.

So far there are no reports of deaths at the orphanages--more than 350 of them are in the country--but that is probably because everything in Haiti is chaotic as the country reels from a earthquake of a 7.5 magnitude. Water and food is scarce for everyone, and the children are in the precarious position of not having neighbors or nearby family members to look out for them. Most agencies have only a few workers taking care of many children.

To coordinate relief efforts, the Joint Council on International Children's Services has started a database of orphanages and known orphans on its Web site, http://www.jcics.org. The group hopes the list will eventually help it expedite moving the orphans from Haiti to the United States and Europe.

This is where it gets tricky: will there be a push for the wide-scale diaspora of the children? Obviously, yes. We understand the plight, but removing them from their homeland, from their extended families, from all that is familiar is not the simple matter that it at first appears to be. Experience has taught us that the wide-scale diaspora of children from their own culture is a much more complicated issue than the families who would adopt them, the social workers who facilitate the adoptions and the agencies who profit from them realize. There are plenty of reasons for tears here. It's almost certain that some children who have families in Haiti, and do not wish their children to be adopted, will be uprooted and transplanted in new families. The Post story continues:

In an e-mail Friday, Matthew Chandler, a spokesman for the Department of Homeland Security, said, "We understand the deep concern these prospective adoptive parents feel about the welfare of these children, and we are actively working to identify available options in light of the recent tragedy."

 We are giving what we can to Doctors Without Borders. 

And for more on the story, see The Daily Bastardette.