Mamalita: An adoption book I can't love, a story that isn't for everyone

Three generations, three blondes

How thoroughly adoptive parents are quick to push aside the thoughts that the children they adopt have other families was brought home last week when an adoptive mother sent me her memoir. At her blog, she wrote that she thought the primary opinion of the general public towards adoption was turning negative, based partly on the article in which First Mother Forum is mentioned as part of the new "anti-adoption" movement. I left a comment; she emailed and sent me her book about adopting from Guatemala, a country with one of the most troubled histories regarding the trafficking of children. I was interested, but immediately on edge because no adoption story coming out of Guatemala is going to be easy for me to stomach. I know too much.

Mamalita, the book, by Jessica O' Dwyer arrives: Cute native girl on the cover with native dress. Okay.

The Baby Sellers portrays the dark side of international adoption

Kirstie Alley in The Baby Seller

Prospective adoptive parents who look to other countries to adopt because of a "shortage" of "adoptable infants" here in America, or who do so to avoid those pesky birth mothers who want "open adoptions," will find Lifetime's new movie, The Baby Sellers, unsettling. Premiered last night, the film is an absorbing depiction of the trafficking of infants from around the globe, specifically India and Brazil, to unknowing people who want nothing more than a baby to take home, no questions asked.

The story centers around a government agent (played by Jennifer Finnegan) who sinks her teeth into the trafficking of babies after a bust of one such ring ends with disappointment. She centers her attention on one agency called "Road to Love," run by Carla Huxley, played

Foreign Adoptions Aren't Plunging Fast Enough

Jane

“’The era of the boom time for international adoption, I think, has passed us by’” Adam Pertman, Executive Director of the Evan B. Donaldson Adoption Institute, told National Public Radio reporters Jennifer Ludden and Marosa Penaloza. To which First Mother Forum says: Good by and good riddence.

Since its peak in 2004, the number of foreign adoptions has plummeted from nearly 23,000 to less than 10,000 in 2010. Considering the known corruption in international adoption--and the 115,000 American children in foster care waiting to be placed--that figure is still obscenely high.

If kids are 'better off,' does it matter whether they are adopted or abducted?

Jane

“But aren’t they better off”? That’s the question that’s always asked when people learn about the possibility that a child adopted illegally may be returned to his original family. The unstated hubris is that children are always better off with middle class American families than say, with a single Dad in Virginia, poor parents in rural China, or a couple in impoverished Guatemala.

A Guatemalan Court has ordered that seven year old Karen Abigail be returned to her parents, Loyda and Dayner Rodriguez. If her adoptive parents, Jennifer and Timothy Monahan of Liberty Missouri, fail to return Karen by September 29, the Court will fine them $3,000 Quetzales (about $389) and order Guatemalan authorities to work with US authorities and the International Police (INTERPOL) to find Karen and return her to her real parents.

Demand for babies leads to adoption abuses

It is the rare adoptive parent who, after adopting from overseas, can wrap her mind around the idea that "her" baby might have been stolen, sold or bartered to fill the huge demand for adoptable infants in wealthy nations, of which she herself was a part. 

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--

Adoptive Parents Decry UNICEF's Humanitarian Position about Adopting Overseas

Lorraine

How does our culture promote adoption? Let me count the ways, and let me begin with the truly grotesque blog of the ultra conservative Washington Times called The Red Thread: An Adoptive Family Forum by Amanda Poe: "UNICEF's effective attack on inter-country adoption."

UNICEF's recent statement on inter-country adoption strongly states in no uncertain terms that children belong first with their families,

UN finds irregularities in Guatemalan adoptions--no surprise there

Lorraine

People who want a child--someone else's child--will stop at nothing to get one, apparently, even when the illegal practices are brought to light. The Associated Press is reporting that a United Nations anti-corruption commission has found irregularities in Guatemala's adoption program despite government efforts to prevent fraudulent adoptions.
The International Commission Against Impunity in Guatemala reports numerous cases of Guatemalan children handed over to foreigners

Doubly Damned by Adoption turns Victim into a Fighter

Janette Barcenas has been doubly damned by adoption, first when she was taken from her mother in Guatemala and brought to the United States and then when she lost her son to the American adoption system. Her loses have turned her into a fighter for adoption reform.

Janette contacted me several years ago. I’m not sure how she got my name – perhaps through Concerned United Birthparents. We met at a hole-in-the wall pizza place near my home.

Over pepperoni pizza and soda, Janette told me that she had given up her son through PLAN (Plan Loving Adoptions Now) a McMinnville, Oregon based adoption agency which has since shut its doors. (According to PLAN, it ceased operations because the bulk of its business was foreign adoptions and fewer foreign children were available due to the unwillingness of other countries to let their children leave, stricter immigration laws, and concerns by humanitarian organizations.)

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."

Adoption from India: 'Second' mother now runs orphange there

Our story from an American woman's quest to find the truth of her children, adopted from Ethiopia, resonated with a friend of ours, Dr. Michelle Harrison, an American woman who runs an orphanage in Kolkata, India. Before she did that, she adopted a child herself from India. We first became acquainted many years ago over the issue of using progesterone for PMS. I was a magazine editor and writer, and as PMDD (the designation for severe PMS) was the bane of my life, I was more than a little interested in finding out how to control the worst symptoms, and letting other women know. Michelle wrote Self-Help for Premenstrual Syndrome: Third Edition and I ended up interviewing her and quoting her. She was in Boston, I was in New York. 

Fast forward many years. We connected through Facebook and the blog; Michelle was involved in the Baby M case, befriending the surrogate mother, Mary Beth Whitehead, in 1986, and she posted here before: More on Baby M from a psychiatrist who defended her mother, MaryBeth Whitehead. We have never met face to face, but I feel as if I know Michelle. Here is her story, and her reaction to the previous posts about a family going back to Ethiopia to find the truth about the two children they adopted:

By Michelle Harrison

I have so much respect for the family who has adopted from Ethiopia, whose story has been told here over the last few days. (For the whole story, click on all three above links.) All I say for "this family" because I include the 17-year-old who went in search of truth for the children in her family. Yes, this story resonates for me in so many ways. 

I am the mother of a 25-year-old whom I adopted [from India] when she was two months old, from IMH in Kolkata. When I was in the process of adopting, I admit I was relieved I wouldn't have to worry about her mother showing up to reclaim her. But when my daughter arrived, that changed. I remember when she was a year old, on her birthday, wishing I could find her first/birth mother for her to know how her daughter's life was. The only information I had was that she was born to an unwed teenage mother and abandoned at birth in a nursing home. Twenty-five years later all we know is that we don't really know anything, because so many papers were faked, so many babies were switched around, so much money changed hands, and so many lies were told to us.

In 2000 when my daughter was 16, we went to Kolkata to visit the orphanage and allow her to get to know more about her Indian culture. She was keen to understand; I was eager for her to meet people in India who were working to improve lives. Through my work as a physician, I had contact with women doctors who ran a hospital in Kolkata. In retrospect, the next few years became a nightmare as we were victims to a scam perpetrated by the orphanage people, including their US representatives. 

We were told by the head of the orphanage that they had found her birth family. What joy! How amazing! You can understand our elation. I had just been through a year of surgery, chemo and radiation for breast cancer, and at the time thought I might be dying. I was more vulnerable then than I might have been, I wanted answers for her.

We believed we were getting the truth. The head of the agency told us they had found her family, and they concocted a tale of faked documents supposedly written when she was adopted to hide her real family. To make the story more believable, the woman who said she was her mother had been one of her caretakers, and we always had a picture of her. She had nursed my daughter. In time, the woman even produced her own child as a twin. So for a period of time we believed that she had found her first family--a mother, a twin sister, younger siblings, aunt, grandmother...and I bought a house for them to move to more suitable quarters, and paid for the education of the other children. We wanted to believe.  The whole story was a big scam and many people conspired to continue it, like the staff at the orphanage saying to my daughter, "Are you going to visit your mother today?" After nearly a year of believing this woman was my daughter's mother, as my daughter was learning Bengali, and she began to overhear things that didn't make sense. The story simply unraveled.

We came to realize that everything we had been told were lies. I later learned the staff had been threatened with firing if they did not perpetuate the scam. Several motivations were at work:  the orphanage had a reason to get these people [the fake family] off their payroll, including pensions due; their lawyer later told me they wanted to "get the old lady [the aunt] off their hands."  This same lawyer had taken part in the scam, as I gave him money to care for the family. Years later he would have the audacity to say, "I could have told you the truth, but you didn't ask me." But why would I  have asked for the real truth? He was the lawyer for the orphanage and I assumed he was telling me the truth. 

When the falsehoods were revealed, we confronted the agency, and we made several trips back to India. DNA testing proved there was no relationship between this family and my daughter. She has survived the emotional turmoil all this caused, but not without scars. Our relationship has survived, though I worry about a day when she will confront me as to how I could have been so stupid as to believe the lies. I wanted answers for her, yes, but I feel as if I truly failed her.

As I became aware of the lies told to us, I thought there must be other lies too. I investigated on my own, learning what I could about adoption in Kolkata. I now believe that--with only a few exceptions--adoption from and in India is a dirty, corrupt and lucrative business, behind a facade of humanitarianism.

Ten years later I live in Kolkata where I am mother to 12 girls who had been rejected for adoption. My home is called: Childlife Preserve Shishur Sevay, which is Bengali for "in the interests of the children."

 

Michelle Harrison and her family in Kolkata

I am still haunted by the question of the children who have not been adopted, for their lives are not good ones. "Orphan" is a term of shame. Marriage prospects would have been almost nil, especially with no dowry, and no family. They would not have been able to read. And while it is easy to romanticize "culture," for the abandoned children on the street, or those institutionalized, there is no "culture" as we think of it. Our girls had never even been inside a Puja pandal (a place of worship during the holidays). Orphans are outsiders, period. No one claims them. Nothing good awaits a young woman with no education, no family and no place to go.

I have also been haunted by the question of whether I had done the right thing in adopting from India. (My daughter thinks I'm nuts as this is NOT a question in her mind, especially after being hit with the reality of what her life in India would have been.)

Eventually, I came to live in Kolkata to open an orphanage for children who were too old, or too dark, or too handicapped for adoption. I wanted to see what I could do for them, without their losing their homeland, and culture. If they had been adopted into the US, the adjustment would have been horrible. And their futures here? They had none. The children have been with me for three years, orphans to whom I have become " Mummy." I have taught them how to read and write, something that would almost certainly have not been possible if they had not come to live with me. I am clear that I while I "mother" them, they have/had mothers before me, and they are to be honored always.

My girls with disabilities?  They would have NO chance here in India. Children in their situation would be far better in a country that is serious about rehabilitation. The resources simply are not available here. The professionals are not here in any significant numbers. For Kolkata, rated internationally as 17th among 17 cities in which to do business, everyone who can get out, does. I dream of being able to bring interns/teachers from the US, and I am educating the girls in English so this might be possible. Here with me, they know they are loved and cared for.

The story of the courageous family of the Ethiopian children told in the last couple of blog posts is really how it should be. We should know why our children have come to us. And they should know. The Second Family has the responsibility to get the information about the First Family at the time of the adoption, because often too much time passes to pick up the trail. And children need to know before "age of maturity" where they come from, why they are here, who are/were their people, their first families. 

As a mother I feel it is/was my responsibility to help my child understand who she is and why she is here--and to give her a true story about her life rather than allow her to have the fantasy that every adoptee has otherwise. Adopted people don't stop wondering who they are, or where they came from, just because the Second Family does not talk about it and does nothing. There is no "neutral" about searching, or asking questions, because saying one is "neutral" but doing nothing is simply keeping the door shut--and giving that message to the adoptee. That is not being neutral; that is actively saying: I can not deal with the truth of your life.

I cannot think of any other area of raising a child where we say: they will deal with this alone when they are grown.  That IS the rent-a-child mode. We adopt a child with a history, and that becomes part of OUR family history. Personally, I love the terms First Mother and Second Mother because they describe reality. I would truly love to be first mother for my child, but am not. She would love to be First Child, but she is not. She has an older sister who came before her. This is reality. Facing truth, speaking in real terms, has kept us close as a family.

Courage and integrity, the words that come to me over and over as I think about that family who went to great lengths to find the truth of their children's First Family, and their journey. 

_________________

Michelle's website is: http://www.travelingcloud.typepad.com/shishur_sevay/ and here is a book that is a collection of essays that examines the ramifications of trans-cultural adoptions.

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

More Stench Coming from Ethiopian Adoptions through Christian World Adoptions

New evidence that the unethical harvesting of children in Ethiopia by American adoption agencies continues comes from the public broadcasting system of Australia, ABC. The Joint Council of International Children's Services (JCICS), the agency designed to oversee the activities of American adoption agencies, is comprised of--guess what? adoption agencies themselves, and so while the JCICS has supposedly completed in inquiry into the Ethiopian adoption practices, they are refusing to release the results.

Last year, we learned about a dysfunctional, largely unregulated adoption industry operating in Ethiopia, where children were being harvested from families, some of them middle class. The families and the children were told they were going to America on a study trip and would be able to return home, but in fact, they can not return until they are eighteen, and then they must find the means to do so on their own, often after living with families here who adopt them. ABC's program, Foreign Correspondent, found that Ethiopian mothers were being tricked into surrendering their children, and that children were being pitched to adoptive families as being as young as seven--when, in fact, they were teenagers.

Some children arrived in the United States believing they were only visiting.

Ethiopia has not signed the Hague Convention on inter-country adoptions, but many American adoption agencies, including the infamous Christian World Adoptions (CWA) are allowed to continue doing business with corrupt officials in that country, and claim they have no blood on their hands. When one adoptive mother, Lisa Boe, spoke out about the long list of serious, life-threatening problems of the child she adopted--whom she was told was healthy--CWA sued her. This was after she lost a first child to SIDS, and is devastated that the child she is raising might not live long. 

Another family who adopted three sisters encountered huge emotional problems with the oldest--the girl was thirteen, not nine, as the mother, Kate Bradshaw, was told. When she and her husband, Calvin, complained to a consumer watchdog, CWA's response was to claim the Bradshaws were unfit parents and tried to have both their adoptive and biological children taken away from them permanently. Kate Bradshaw said the problem was ultimately cleared up, and they did not lose their children. The oldest daughter, Journee, ultimately went to live with Kate's mother in Iowa Falls, and attends high school. Here is what Journee Bradshaw told ABC:

"I’m trying to make other people’s lives better, because mine was horrible. I don’t want anybody to go through the things I did. What happened just happened, you know? You can’t really change the past but you can change the future for yourself and others – that’s what counts."

American adoption-reform advocate Maureen Flately claims that JCICS is stacked with adoption agency figures and does a terrible job of regulating itself: "We've really let the fox guard the henhouse,"she said. Quoting from the ABC story:

"They are the 'big tobacco' of adoption. They are a trade association that nominally espouses the highest standards but which is harboring the very people who have been involved in some of the biggest abuses in adoption - and they haven't laid a hand on them. The JCICS has one goal and one goal only, and that is to avoid federal regulation of adoption.

"Here is one of the biggest pieces of hypocrisy in adoption. If they're Hague-accredited, why are they doing business with a country that isn't a Hague signer? The answer is that they know they have much more freedom to do whatever they want to do and to bully people in countries that aren't Hague signatories."

ABC has a 27-minute video on the child trafficking accounts from Ethiopia with interviews with three American families that have spoken out against the agency that arranged their adoptions, Christian World Adoptions, and anyone interested in international adoption--from any country but especially Ethiopia--should watch. It is an eye-opening, chilling look at what can only be called child harvesting that is being touted as saving the children from starvation and prostitution.

The slick, double-talking "christian" attorney for CWA, Curtis Bostic, will make you ill. And it's all being done in the name of Christianity. Please take the time to see the video, at this link: Fly Away Home. And another shorter, but incisive, report comes from a CBS affiliate in Richmond, CNET-TV:


Watch so that the next time you hear that someone is thinking of adopting from Africa, you will be informed. Maybe you can save one mother from losing her child, and save one child from being harvested for families here who pay big money to fill their homes. I may be particularly sensitive to this issue because I live in a world where that nice young cousin of someone I know tells me at dinner that she is thinking of adopting: from Africa. What does CWA say about adoption from Ethiopia at their website? 

Our Ethiopia adoption program is one of CWA’s largest and most affordable adoption programs.

The cost, according to the CBS report is about $15,000. Harvesting children is good for business. --lorraine
________________________________
This link will take you to CWA's response to ABC where they basically deny, deny; and ABC's response. where they reaffirm their reporting. Telling is that the head of CWA, Tommy-Lee Harding.  has repeatedly refused efforts to be interviewed. CWA is based in Charleston, South Carolina. 

We want to have a family. Is Adoption ever a good solution?

Sometimes we get comments on earlier posts that are simply begging for a response, as was this one left the other day at the blog: They call me "biological mother." I hate those words.

I am a potential adoptive mother and am curious if, as mothers, you feel that there is ever an acceptable situation for an adoption. I very badly would like to raise a family and adoption is our only option. If we are successful in adopting, I would like for it to be an open adoption (if the child/ren's mother is interested in that).

I guess my questions are: IF mothers (and adult adopted children) see adoption as an acceptable situation, is open adoption generally the most desired choice (within the community of mothers who share feelings about such things)? Also, in your opinion what IS the most loving, sensitive way to distinguish to a child their parentage? It would be my desire to ensures/he knows that s/he is loved by both the mother who allowed him/her to be adopted and the woman who is raising him/her with love. Of course, as the child/ren's adoptive parent, I would want for him/her to call me mom (or some derivation) and still treasure the mother that allowed me to share the joy of motherhood.

I hope that my questions don't offend. I simply want to have the joy of a family and to instill a love in the child/ren I raise both for the family they lost and the family they've gained. I hope you can help as the opportunity for me to parent via adoption may be near. --Hayley

Let's start out about whether answering whether we approve of adoption in the first place, an issue that comes up here every now and then. We are not against all adoptions, but we want to insure that any adoption that does occur is done purely because a child needs a home, not because someone has a home she/he/they want to fill. There is a huge difference between the two. The pressure to find children to "build families" for people who knowingly postponed pregnancy past their fecund years has led to all sorts of abuses in adoption, particularly in the international marketplace for children, something we have written reams about here at First Mother Forum.

Because of the pressure to supply babies, and the money to be made from that, a whole culture of adoption has grown up here in the United States with little emphasis on how to help women keep their babies. Pregnancy crises centers are often places that might be more aptly called "shotgun adoption centers." At the same time, various church groups, such as the erroneously named Christian World Adoption, and a Mormon group that was found to be snatching children from Samoan families, and others have gone over seas to harvest children for the Western market. Fully half of the babies exported from Guatemala during that country's civil war were found to be have been stolen, as a recent government investigation revealed.

But these stories, while they are in the news, somehow do not filter down to many prospective adoptive parents, or society at large, and we end up as we are today in a culture that promotes adoption to the point where young women on The Bachelor start saying that when they want to have a family, they want to "adopt." When celebrities such as Madonna and Angelina Jolie make news when they adopt, again more people think that is a good way to fill their bare bassinets.

Given all that, Hayley, there are children right here in America who do need stable, loving homes. They are the children in foster homes whose natural parents can not, or will not, ever come back for them. They are the children who need homes. These are the children we hope you will consider adopting. And we know that there will legitimately be children with no resources in Haiti, but rushing to adopt there and remove children from their culture is not something we encourage.

We do encourage all young women who have babies to try to find ways to keep their children, as we have dealt with the grieving aftermath of having relinquished, and have heard the unhappy outcomes of many adoptions--from the point of view of the adopted. As an adoptive father, and a psycholigist, once said in a court case of a woman hoping to get her records unsealed: Adoption is always painful.

It is certainly always painful for the actual mother, the one who gives birth to her child, and it is always painful for the child to learn he/she was relinquished by someone for reasons unknowable, incomprehensible, reasons that always feel like abandonment to the child who becomes an adult one day. Adoption always leaves scars. We appreciate that in researching adoption you stumbled upon First Mother Forum, Hayley, and hope that we give you some food for thought, no matter what you eventually do.

You raised other issues, and we will deal with them in future posts.

Putting the birth family first in adoption

As our regular readers know, my daughter Megan was adopted by a Mormon couple and is a faithful member of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints. Her oldest child, Rachael is serving a Mormon mission in South America. Recently, I connected to the “Dear Elder” website which provides a mailing service for letters and packages to missionaries. “Dear Elder” sent me an email last week recruiting volunteers for Orphanage Support Service Organization (OSSO), “a nonprofit charitable organization that provides volunteer opportunities to serve … in over 10 orphanages in Ecuador for the purpose of providing them with various types of support…. Volunteers provide one-on-one nurturing to these disadvantaged children who might otherwise never realize their potential. “

Sounded good but my cynical nature took over. I checked out the OSSO website to see if the orphanages were really just a vehicle for proselytizing. Not so: “None of our projects or programs will be used to propagate religious or political ideas that are contrary to the wishes of the institutions in which we are working.”

Hmm, I thought, that’s good but maybe these orphanages are just staging areas for infants slated for adoption in the U.S. We at FMF have written about the rampant corruption in foreign adoptions, fueled in part by the desire of Americans to obtain infants without the annoyance of birthmothers.

OSSO’s office is in Rexburg, Idaho, where a branch of the Provo, Utah-based Mormon college, Brigham Young University is located. Idaho is, of course, also the home state of most of the wacky Baptists who tried to take 33 non-orphaned children out of Haiti.

As those in the adoption reform movement know, the LDS Church is sort of an institutiona non-gratis. The Church pressures single pregnant women to surrender their newborns to “Temple-Worthy” Mormon couples. LDS Family Services is a powerful opponent of legislation to allow adult adoptees to obtain their original birth certificates.

I wrote to OSSO and asked about its role in adoption. I received this amazing letter from Rex Head, the OSSO contact in Idaho.

“Our goal is to try and do what is best for each child.

When we receive a new child the very first thing we do is to try and find out about her family of origin. We often spend a great deal of time and resources determining if her family of origin is able and willing to properly care for her. If they are not we then see what if anything can be done to help that family become able or willing to care for their child. …. Sometimes we are able to return the child to her family sometimes we are not. If we do, we follow up to make sure the situation remains safe and supportive of the child.

We do not believe that poverty alone should be the reason to seek adoption as an alternative. For example one of the children in our care has a loving mother but is not able to support him as he needs to be supported because he is severely handicapped and caring for him is a full time job and she is very poor. We have tried to employ her in our orphanage but her temperament is not appropriate to work with a large number of children. So we have helped her find other employment. The demands of her job are such that she just cannot care for him during the week so he is with us during the week where he gets therapy, medical attention, good food etc. On the weekend he goes home with his mom and sister.

It is our belief that even the best orphanage is not as good as a good permanent family, so for those who cannot be returned to their families and it looks like the family situation is not likely to change in a favorable direction, or their family is unknown, we do the paper work and legal work so that they can be considered for adoption. We do everything possible to place her inside the country with Ecuadorian adoptive parents. There are however many many more children available for adoption in Ecuador than there are families wanting to adopt so if there are not Ecuadorian families wanting to adopt international adoptive families are considered. In our orphanage we have 22 children, 20 of them have disabilities….

Although we don’t do them [adoptions] ourselves we do allow them to happen even encourage them when needed. I appreciate your concern, and I am very aware of the great injustices done in the name of international adoptions.... There are about 50,000 international adoptions each year. It is a big business where much money is spent to find the youngest cutest healthiest whitest babies and sell them to the highest bidder. Sorry if that sounds rather commercial that is what it is. In some countries it is a very profitable export crop….

Please see the other side of the coin. There are 5+ million children living in orphanages worldwide. Most of them are full of children who are not young enough, healthy enough or white enough to be considered export quality and so the mainstream adoption world never knocks on their door.…. Those children have a right to a family that loves them and if such a family can be found it should be a crime of the highest order to keep the child and family apart no matter where the family lives.”

I almost cried when I read this letter. I thanked Rex and sent off a small check. You can donate to OSSO through its website, www.orphanagesupport.org.

One Woman's Decision NOT to Adopt from Ethiopia

A while back we posted a blog from Charissa who was planning to adopt three children from Ethiopia, but instead of rushing ahead, she did some digging and discovered that the agency handling the adoption (Celebrate Children International in Oviedo, FL) was more interested in supplying children to families willing to pay their fees than making sure of ethical practices in international adoption. We have written about corruption in international adoption several times (those links go to two posts, more to be found if using one of the search functions on our blog), and will continue to do so.

When last we heard from Chrarissa on December 1, 2009, and she was appalled upon learning that the children actually had mothers in Ethiopia. Charissa writes about deciding not to adopt the three children she and her husband were considering here, and tells the rest of the story in at Urbanfunnyfarm:

I wish I could have ended this story with "the children were returned to their families" but sadly that is not the case. We are absolutely heartbroken knowing these children are still orphans. We could have continued with the adoption, and I don't think we would have been wrong to do that. However, knowing what we knew, how could we look into their eyes years down the road and tell them the story of how they came to be in our family without feeling like we took part in their pain and rejection? The one thing that gives us peace and comfort in this is that the orphanage saw a problem too, and now the children are listed with a REPUTABLE agency who is carefully investigating each of the CCI cases.
She ends the post with some very good questions to ask fro all those considering international adoption.

Thank you Charissa, for your courage and doing the right thing. If we had a small part in helping you reach that decision we are gratified.--lorraine

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
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*With thanks to Osolomama for alerting us to this website. 

Korean Adoptees Fighting to Reform Adoption Laws in their Homeland

An amazing story out of South Korea the other day: Six Korean adoptees--adopted in other countries--filed an appeal with the Anti-corruption and Civil Rights Commission in South Korea last year to request a probe into irregularities in their adoption documents and possible illegal procedures at local adoption agencies, according to the JoongAngDaily in South Korea.  


These adult adoptees have returned to their homeland searching for their roots and in the process discovered that the agencies lied to their parents--birth and adoptive--about their adoptions, how they ended up at an agency and why, and what records are available. They are involved in a full-fledged battle to reform adoption laws and procedures, and amazingly enough, they’re getting help from some government heavyweights. If they succeed this would be the first case in the world we know of where adoptees returned to their original country and changed adoption practices through legislation.

The National Assembly in South Korea is taking up the issue, and the sense is that the country is embarrassed by the huge number of children that left the country during the great Korean baby scoop era: According to the Ministry for Health, Welfare and Family Affairs, 161,588 Korean children were sent overseas for adoption from 1958 through 2008. Korea is the world’s fifth-largest exporter of children behind China, Guatemala, Russia and Ethiopia as of 2007, according to World Partners Adoption Inc.
 
Again, if successful, the group of six will drastically change the landscape of domestic and international adoption in Korea. A lawmaker added that Korea “still has a stigma attached to it as one of the major exporters of children.”

There's more to the story, at the Korean newspaper website, and as a follow up to our report the other day about Korean adoption, we thought you might be interested. Hell, we thought this was amazingly interesting to anyone with any sort of adoption connection.

Can China be next? But we already know that six government officials are on trial there for offering for adoption to wealthy Westerners healthy girl children who should not have been available at all, who had parents who wanted to keep them. And then there is adoption corruption in Nepal, and Guatemala and India...where money is involved, child trafficking exists. And then there is the rush to have your children raised by "Christians" in Ethopia....does this give me a headache? Yes. Does this make me angry? Yes. Can this be stopped? Not so sure. Money talks. Money always talks. --lorraine

Harvesting Children from Ethiopia for Families in America

Harvesting children for profit goes on in poor countries all over the world. Ethiopia is one of the newest to cash in on this crop for export, a business spurred by Angelina Jolie's adoption of a daughter Zahara in 2005. According to a new report from the Australian Broadcasting Corporation, approximately 30 children a week leave the country to adopted in wealthier nations, adding $100 million a year to the cash-strapped economy. Consequently, the government has little to zero interest in stopping this flow of cash and so turn a blind eye to harvesting of their children.

And one of the most successful human trafficking scams is run by no other than the Christian World Adoption, included in yesterday's post decrying the closing of adoption from Guatemala. Yes, there true orphans in Ethiopia--up to five million--but the disgusting tactics of Christian World Adoptions encourages families and women to give up their children simply because they are poor. It's the crassest of proselytizing to raise new Christians; left behind with their tears and memories are the mothers, these women who are our sisters in sorrow and grief. Yet here is how the adoptions are sold at the Christian World Adoptions website:

Ethiopia Adoption

• Our Ethiopia adoption program is one of CWA’s largest and most affordable adoption programs.
• Infants, toddlers, children from ages 3 months to young teens are all in great need of loving, forever families they can call their own.

Ethiopia Adoption Program

Christian World is very pleased to be among the first U.S. agencies authorized and accredited to have an Ethiopia adoption program. The Ethiopia adoption program is our largest program, and each year we place over 200 children from Ethiopia with loving, forever families.

A recent documentary called Fly Away Children by journalist Andrew Geoghegan for the Australian Broadcasting Corporation shows the tactics used to convince women to give up their children. The women are promised updates and information every three months, only to hear nothing. The families who come to take their children are advised to come in and out of the country quickly so as not to be aware of what is really going on, or they send someone to pick up the child so as to not touch down in the country at all. Often children are advertised as healthy--videos you can watch on your computer are available--only to have multiple life-threatening problems.

As Geoghegan reports in Fly Away Children:

Across the city, hotel foyers have become clearing houses, departure lounges for many families and their adopted children. This is the scene in just one hotel in Addis Ababa. And the website You Tube is plastered with new parents’ home movies.

The crude reality is that children have become a big Ethiopian export....

Ethiopia is not a signatory to the Hague Convention which requires international adoption be used only as a last resort. So as a result, a completely unregulated industry has grown up. More than 70 agencies operate here, almost half are unregistered. Corruption, fraud and deception are rife.

The movie takes just under a half hour to watch but is worth your time--especially if you are thinking of adopting from a foreign country. Included is a family from Palm Beach, Florida who went to Ethiopia to take three children from their mother, a pastor and his wife, who were facing the empty-nest syndrome because their three sons were grown and gone. Why did it not occur to them simply to find a woman who needed help and support her so she could raise her own children? In most African countries, $25 to $50 a month will provide a family with a good living.These people live in Palm Beach, one of the wealthiest communities in the country, and it was obvious they could support several families if their goal was to actually help others. No, their goal was to fill their house with children. And certainly they are being congratulated and praised for taking all three siblings. But instead of helping, they put additional pressure on the suppliers to come up with more children to harvest for the American market. Do they piss me off? Oh yeah. Because it's all done under the rubric of "doing good" but they are Doing Bad by taking children who have a mother--but who is simply too poor to raise them. Christian? Hardly.

They might also consider helping the family, also featured in the ABC report, that ended up caring for a seriously ill child whose drugs cost nearly $750 a month. They were told the child they picked out of the sales lineup of photos was healthy, but instead has multiple problems, and they, quite courageously, are making do.

Parents who adopt from other cultures need to be absolutely sure that they are not taking stolen children, that the children they adopt are true orphans. But in their desire to have a child, many simply look away, and say, Not my child. If you don't think it can happen to you, read this story about a child kidnapped in India and sold for just over $300. He is being raised in the Midwest. The other day at the beach I saw a woman with two little girls, one obviously her biological daughter,the other obviously Indian. Who are her real parents? I thought. Was this another kidnapped child whose family wonders what happened to their beautiful daughter? And she was beautiful. A prime candidate for kidnapping.

The whole business of harvesting children to feed the international market for babies reeks of corruption and deceit and fraud. Call it humanitarian, and you are deluding yourself. Harvesting children from other cultures and countries is the whole trafficking of children. I am reminded of The Handmaid's Tale, Margaret Atwood's book about a class of women who are recruited to have children for others. Sadly, it has become a reality in our lifetime.--lorraine

Note: To make this even more sickening, when I edited this post as a reader suggested, I got an ad for Ethiopia Adoption...from an International Adoption site. As well as three other ads-just in case I had a baby to give up in an "open adoption." I'm going to give Google a piece of my mind.

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

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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.