Are all parents who adopt internationally saints? Tucker Carlson thinks Amy Coney Barrett is one.

Lorraine

Last night I tuned into Tucker Carlson on Fox who was railing against people who are railing against Supreme Court nominee Amy Coney Barrett for suggesting that her adoption of two black children from Haiti is not at least open to circumspection. Carlson went on a lengthy discourse about how terrible it was to attack her, or basically anyone, who had adopted children from another country. Period. Of course they were children who had no parents and would have pretty much starved to death if not rescued by people in America was his message.  

In the past we've posted here at First Mother Forum about the gross negligence and crass commerce that is involved in some adoptions from foreign countries. Parents take their children to orphanages during the harvest season, thinking they can go back and get them when it is over, only to find the children gone and adopted in a far away land. Parents are duped into thinking their children will get a good education in America, and come back to them prosperous, and take care of them. But of course they never come back. Or if they do, they are such changed people that even communication is impossible without an interpreter. 

The baby flow out of Guatemala was finally staunched after the government there did their own investigation and discovered that fully half of the adoptions during a ten-year period were corrupted with kidnappings and murders, falsified birth certificates, and fake relinquishment documents. As soon as corrupt adoptions from one poor country are shut down, they pop up in another. Religious organizations are often involved, giving the business a healthy sheen of benevolence and good works. 

Carlson of course mentioned none of this. His point was straight-forward: Amy Coney Barrett and her husband, as do all adoptive parents who adopt poor children from a foreign country, have near sainthood status. I don't know anything about the circumstances of the children the Barretts adopted. How carefully the backgrounds and extended family of the two children were checked. If adoption was truly the best option because, after all, it requires taking them from their native culture and dropping them into ours. All may check out for the Barretts and I am not passing judgment on their decision. Their faith appears to be a guiding force in their lives, and indeed they may have rescued children who needed rescuing. 

Rather than the personal defense of Amy Barrett's decision to adopt twice--once shortly after she discovered she was pregnant--that was irritating, it was Carlson's enthusiastic support of all such adoptions, and the sanctified glow that it gives all adoptive parents. Surely some deserve it. There will always be babies that need homes and parents other than the ones they were born to. But Carlson's pro-foreign adoption rant reminded me once again that adoption is still seen by a large percentage of the population as an uncomplicated act of charity, without all the questions and difficulties that lie under the surface for so many of the adopted, and yes, in some cases, the bewildered parents who never intended their children to be adopted. 

Numerous memoirs belie the falsehood of such unthinking support of such adoption. Recently I write an essay--actually two--for a new book by the Vance Twins, Janine and Janette, who have chronicled not only their own story about being adopted from Korea, but brought to light numerous heart-breaking tales from children adopted from many cultures. Tucker Carlson should take a look.--lorraine

On a personal note, I expect to have the second edition of hole in my heart finished soon. My husband had a knee replacement this summer, I'm involved in a local community project, and...I just let myself get distracted from finishing. But it's coming soon! 

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ALSO FROM FMF

Encouraging intercountry adoptions with hard cash

Guatemalan Army Stole Kids for Adoption

The Child Catchers exposes the stench of international adoption--and domestic adoption too

Adoptive Parents Decry UNICEF's Humanitarian Position about Adopting Overseas

Abuses in International Adoption: The Lie We Love

Senate bill encourages more international adoption

Deported Parents May Lose their Children to Adoption. Who's surprised? We are not.

Lorraine

In the last couple of days, a heart-wrenching story about a little girl named Alexa who had been separated from her mother by U.S. immigration authorities at the border crossing into Texas has popped up. She was just two--28 months old--at the time she and her mother were separated; the mother says she was forced to sign away her rights to her daughter. More than a year would pass before Alexa was reunited with her mother. Adoption came into the picture--of course--through the notorious Bethany Christian Services who, not surprisingly, placed her with a couple who ultimately wanted to adopt Alexa.

This sounds like the same old story we've written about before: Separate a child from his or her mother, find a willing couple, and soon enough, the couple wants to keep the child permanently. It's an  old story.

In this case, the girl's natural mother, Araceli Ramos Bonilla, was back in El Salvador without her daughter within ten weeks of arriving at the

The question that never goes away: Who do we tell we are first/birth mothers?

Lorraine

When do you tell strangers that you are mother of a child who was adopted--and then make them understand what you mean? That you are not the adoptive mother that statement might lead them to assume. You are the "other mother."

One would think that for me at least this question would be settled--after all, I wrote two books and more than three dozen magazine pieces, opeds, letters, etc. over the decades I've been involved in unsealing records for adoptees. So one might think I'd spill my story at any possible opening. Not so. Once in a while I meet someone who wants to know if I am "that Lorraine Dusky," and well, yes I am. Done and out.

But mostly I'm like everybody else, juggling this piece of information as a gauge what the response might me--mild

Dear First Mother Forum: Should we adopt through Gladney?

Lorraine

Dear FMF: My husband and I are new to adoptions. We recently decided we want to adopt due to fertility issues. I met a lady at the airport recently who recommended Gladney. I decided to read reviews online before contacting them. I did see on their website they ask for payment for the babies on a Huge sliding scale. So my question is.... do the mothers get a majority of that money? It seems that the center gets paid for the Medicaid and welfare benefits of the mothers, so what happens with the $40,000 the adoptive parents pay? I have a problem paying that kind of money with these horrible stories especially if the mothers do not profit. Could you give me advice? xxxxxinbrazil@gmail.com

Think all those separated children are going back to their natural mothers? Think again. Guatemalan woman lost her son in 2012

                                          David Stonner/Joplin Globe

Encarnacion Bail Romero with attorney Omar Riojas

Today's emails brought a link to the story of a Guatemalan woman--an illegal immigrant when she was taken into custody--who lost her child to adoption in the United States. It was a terrible, sad injustice done to her and her son when this occurred in 2012. I wrote several posts about the boy's journey from his mother,  Encarnacion Bail Romero to  adoption and the parents who fought her every step of the way, Seth and Melinda Moser of Carthage, Missouri.

Since America is in the middle of a large-scale problem of separating mothers and their children--one baby is reportedly nine months old!--the likelihood that all the

How adoption narratives encourage eternal separation of mother and child

Lorraine

Why do some reunions fail? Or never get started? So much has to do with how the adoptive parents have cleared the cobwebs away from the warm fuzzy feelings about adoption, and dealt with the idea of reunion as a positive that might occur someday. Others in the last two decades have participated in open adoptions, which began to be popularized slowly in the 1980s. My own daughter gave up a child in 1986, but even I could not convince her to have an open adoption. I believe it was because she was not strong enough to deal with the idea that by knowing who the parents were, she would still feel obligated to be involved. My daughter had a lot of physical and psychological issues due to her epilepsy, and I know she thought about suicide a great deal, so when she talked about her reasons later, I could understand. I'm getting off the track here because I wanted to dissect a piece about adoption that was forwarded to me today.

Three adoption stories: Anna Mae He and the words 'adoptive parents'; Chinese adoption, adopting from foster care

Lorraine

After a week in which two unremarkable but normal adoption memes unhappily reverberated in my life there was a bright light of relief, and probably not in the way you, Dear Reader, expect. First the negatives.

Recently reader Jay Iyer sent me a link to stories about the Chinese girl, Anna Mae He, who was fought over by her parents--a grad student and his wife, both Chinese and in the country on a study visa--and two Americans who wanted to adopt her, Jerry and Louise Baker. With the "help" of Mid-South Christian Services Jack and Casey He thought they were placing their daughter temporarily with the Bakers. For the Hes, it was a time of personal turmoil and financial need, added to by Anna Mae's premature birth that left them with a  hospital bill of $12,000. A temporary placement with another family did not seem unusual to the Hes' culture.

Canada to pay millions to victims of forced adoption in 'scoop' era

Lorraine

When will the awful news about international adoption stop? "Canada Agrees to Pay Millions in Lawsuit Over Forced Adoptions" read the headline in the New York Times yesterday. Indigenous children ripped from their parents and villages and sent to strange people as far away as New Zealand and Europe.

As we've heard in other adoptions of scale, the nonnative families the children ended up ranged from loving to abusive--but largely failed to educate them about their culture. What was told to the adoptee about their backgrounds--or why they ended up in a strange land--was left up to the families. You can imagine how that went.

Any little kid--many of them appear not to have been taken from their parents at birth, but when they were four or five--is going to wonder: What am I doing here? Where is my real family? My mother? My father? My sister? What are these people saying? Why is the food so strange? What did I do? Why why why? 

What babies learn before birth

Lorraine, Jane and "Britt" in the early 90s. We are all so happy.

What do babies learn from their mothers in utero? Apparently quite a bit. Scientists are finding that even the inflection of a baby's cry correlates to the sounds of their native tongue and that food preferences are instilled in the womb.

While the debate at an earlier blog post over whether giving up a child for adoption imparts an initial shock that psychologist and author Nancy Verrier has called a Primal Wound raged on, I heard the end of a TED talk on NPR. What I learned was that biologists continue to collect information proving how much a mother's diet, her voice, her speech, her mental health and general well-being influences the fetus, and thus--her baby!

What about those babies in....any-poor-nation?

The previous post dealt with the prevailing attitude towards adopting in America today--that there must be a lot babies who need adopting--when they aren't. Continuing that theme of What About Children Who Need adopting, today's post talks about going overseas to adopt:

In the quest to rescue children from deplorable conditions in another country, the number of children adopted from South Korea ballooned to more than 100,000. The exodus of babies began after the Korean War with the mixed-race babies left behind by GIs, but the flow of children didn’t stop when most of those children were settled in America. Exporting children to America became a cash cow for the country, and only lately has this become a national embarrassment.

NOW HOLT HAS ADOPTEE TOURISM 
Today, Holt International Children’s Services, the same agency that facilitated a great many—if not most—of the Korean adoptions, now advertises a side business of guided trips back to Korea for adult adoptees, who may be in search of their parents. If they are lucky enough to find them, now a language and cultural barrier separates parent and child.

Should a natural mother be able to visit a child after adoption?

Where is my baby? 

"Working on a show: Should a birth mother retain visitation rights to a child she chose to place for adoption?"  That's the question over at Dr. Phil's Facebook page...and as I write there are hundreds of comments and nearly 500 shares.

The responses are all over the place, but a good number of them reveal the anger and ownership feelings of many adoptive parents, and even adoptees, to wit:

"No. You chose to put a child up for adoption and you have no rights after you sign that page."

Korean adoptees are returning to their native land

After the separation: the persistence of roots

Stories about adoptees from other countries often talk of corruption in the system, of mothers being scammed into giving up their babies, of the angst of individuals raised in a culture not their own. But they seldom actually mention the grief of the birth mothers--or how the adopted individual might process it.

But a single sentence in a New York Times Magazine piece did it for me: "My life in the United States, no matter how good it was...never made up for my omma's grief."

How did the Romanian adoptees fare? Better than those left behind.

From a Romanian charity, see below

How did the Romanian children who were adopted by wealthier families in the West compare to those who were raised in institutions?

One of the complicated issues of international adoption is whether are children are better off being adopted into a foreign culture, thousands of miles from their original habitat, or left to grow up in institutions in their native country--if homes cannot be found for them there. Most often the institutions that would-be adoptive parents visit are gruesome hell holes; yet we do know that in a great many cases, the operators of these institutions keep them that way exactly to extract as much money as possible from horrified people of good will. Even when given the money to fix up the orphanage, the operators leave them as is to extract more money from visitors. And we know from reports from other countries, such as China and Nepal and Guatemala, that children are stolen to keep those institutions full of "orphans" to be sold to Americans.

It's a never ending cycle. That children were unconscionably warehoused in Romania during the Ceausescu (pronounced Chow-chess-cu) years, as we wrote about in the previous post, is without question, and surely, unless sold to be a slave or to be used sexually, it is better to grow up in relative comfort far away from home than be left to flounder in an institution.

Adopted from Romania, told her mother was dead, reunited via Facebook

Lorraine

Imagine such a world: Mothers ordered to have five children apiece; the government checking up on them at work and elsewhere to see that they were not remiss in reproducing, all in order to create a nation of "worker bees." All forms of contraception and abortion are outlawed. Poor, overwhelmed mothers were unable to care for their children, and they began to be warehoused in state-run homes.

Tens of thousands of children born under these brutal conditions. Though the children were not orphans, pictures of these benighted children made their way into the press. Largely advertised as orphans, many were adopted in the United States and the United Kingdom. When the children disappeared, mothers were told their children had died.

Adoptionland: Brutal essays by adult adoptees expose the truth of intercountry adoption

The Vance Twins--Jenette on left and Janine 

With news that Vietnam is once again going to allow their children to be adopted out of country, reading a collection of essays by people who were uprooted and transplanted into new cultures is ice water on all those squishy ideals of what intercountry (or international adoption) does. The writers whose essays come together in Adoptionland: From Orphans to Activists portray the dislocation as wrenching and brutal, an experience that leaves a scar neither time nor distance can temper.

Though I am no fan of adoption in general I recognize that sometimes adoption is the best solution to a bad situation. But I have read enough about intercountry adoption to see it as

At the hospital: The innate need to know who you are, the desire to return 'home'

Lorraine

At the hospital a certain night nurse and I bond over this story: Her husband was a foster child, never adopted so that the parents did not lose the cash payment from the state for him and his sister.* The father wanted to adopt him when the father was dying, but the man said: too late. He was told for years that his his mother had died, but intrepid wife (and my new friend) somehow did not believe the story. She knew her husband needed to have some information to close up the gap in his heart.

Through major sleuthing, and sending flowers to the people whom she knew had the information, my friend was able to learn the mother's name. Now she applied to every single state for the

Refusing to help kids here while trolling for kids abroad

Children in Nogales, AZ facility

About 40,000 accompanied minors and young children with their mothers from Guatemala, El Salvador, and Honduras have crossed our southern borders illegally since October. Another 12,000 have come from Mexico. These children and their mothers, hoping to escape the violence and poverty back home, have been herded into warehouse-like accommodations awaiting reviews by governments officials. They are confronted by angry mobs, demanding they leave immediately.

One might think that the self-styled child savers, those eager to bring poor children from poor countries to the U.S. for adoption, would be bending over backwards to help these would-be immigrants. One would be wrong.

Good news: Intercountry adoption down again

Jane

This just in from the Associated Press:  "The number of foreign children adopted by U.S. parents plunged to the lowest level since 1992...Figures released Friday by the U. S. State Department for 2013 fiscal year showed 7,094 adoptions from abroad, down from 8,668 in 2012 and down about 69 percent from the high of 22,884 in 2004. The number has dropped every year since then."

What's the cause of this decline? AP lists several: Russia has stopped foreign adoptions. Ethiopian authorities have been trying to place more abandoned children with relatives or foster families. Other reasons come to mind: More South Korean women are keeping their babies, thanks to the efforts of Korean-born adoptee Jane Jeong Trenka and her supporters who have lobbied the

Encouraging intercountry adoptions with hard cash

When half the faculty at Harvard and Boston College Law Schools endorse a bill that encourages poor countries to take children from their mothers and send them to the United States for adoption, you'd think something was amiss. We are talking about a bill  that offers financial incentives to poor countries to facilitate intercountry adoptions.

The learned academics in Boston did not do their homework. They signed a petition endorsing Sen. Mary Landrieu's Children in Families First (CHIFF) bill at the urging of two colleagues:  Prof. Elizabeth Bartholet, an adoptive mother of two from Peru and director of Harvard's Child Advocacy Program, and her former student and professor at Boston College, Paulo Barrozo.

Philomena: A forced adoption, a lifetime quest, a longing that never waned

The book, the true story

Most of you already know the bare bones of the story of the film Philomena: Irish teen becomes pregnant, ends up in one of the horrid Magdalene laundries, her son is forcibly adopted when he is three by rich Americans, and a half century later his mother--Philomena Lee in real life--wants to find him and comes to Washington with a journalist who is writing her story, his newspaper paying the bills.

I made sure I had plenty of tissues with me but in fact, only needed one. True there is sadness aplenty, but served up with levity and even a few comedic moments to relax the tension. Judi Dench, as Philomena, gives a masterful, believable performance as she talks about what happened to her, seen in flashbacks, and in how she portrays the woman dealing with reality today. She says she wonders if her son ever thought about her, because she thought about him every single day. You got that right, I was thinking. Every adoptee who doesn't already know the answer to that should see this film.