Finding the Families of The Lost Children of Nepal

Lorraine

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

West Not Impressed by Adoption Practices in Nepal

Lorraine

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

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

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

International Adoption: Corruption as Usual

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

Allison Quets: Birth-Mother? Surrogate Mother? No Mother?

Allison Quets, the Florida woman who pleaded guilty in 2007 to kidnapping the infant twins that she bore and gave up for adoption, was back in court today (3/25/09) before the North Carolina Court of Appeals seeking to have visitation rights reinstated. Quets was artificially inseminated with others' embryos and sperm, but maintains she was ill after severe medical problems during the pregnancy and signed the adoption papers under duress. She has fought the adoption for three years.

To make this very clear, as she is being called the twins' "birth-mother" on Wikipedia and elsewhere, Ms. Quets became impregnated with donated embryos and sperm. (Yet another way to be a birth-mother. With a hyphen; as almost or merely a surrogate.) As far as I can make out from the complicated chain of events, Ms. Quets planned to keep the children when she was impregnated at 47, but severe health issues forced her to relinquish the girls.

When her twin girls were 17 months old, she took them to Ottawa, following a visitation. She was apprehended in Canada a week later, and the twins were returned to the adoptive parents, Kevin and Denise Needham, in Apex, North Carolina, and her visitation rights were terminated. A Wake Country District Court judge dismissed her claims, saying she could not seek visitation because her parental rights have been terminated. She was also ordered to pay the Needham's legal fees. A ruling from the the North Carolina Court of Appeals typically takes about three months.

Ms. Quets had been a systems engineer for Lockheed, and is now working at a computer consultant and lives in Orlando.

When I first heard about this story, I thought she was the girls' biological mother; instead she is a woman who tried to become pregnant at a very late age, and ran into severe health issues during pregnancy, which is extremely common with pregnancies after 40. She spent five months on a feeding tube during the pregnancy. She had seizures shortly after the birth, and then came post-partum depression, during which she signed the surrender papers. The adoptive parents were recommended through a former boyfriend of Ms. Quets. At this point, she seems only to want visitation, but I can understand the Needhams' reluctance, as that is when she took the children to Ottawa in hopes, perhaps, of disappearing with them.

I don't know what to think about this mess. I do think that women who want to have children ought to realize there is a cut-off date to their fecundity, and 47 is past that. If more women did not wait until such a late age to get pregnant, single or coupled, there would be fewer families racing around the world looking for children to adopt, fewer children stolen off the streets in India and Nepal and you-name-the-Third-World-country to be placed in adoption agencies (holding pens) where babies are literally sold to anyone who can pay. The whole system is wacky. Stinks to high heaven. International adoption is often no better than baby-brokering.

My sympathy for Ms. Quets is not bottomless. In this last discussion of who is a birth mother, we did not include women such as Allison Quets, but that is what she is being called in the media. What do you, dear and gentle readers (yes, be gentle in your commentary, please) think? Of her? Of the situation?