Millions of children around the world need a family period, or need a stable family or a family who can better meet their needs. For that reason, I believe in adoption, whether that means children are adopted within their own country or internationally. But where there's demand to adopt children, there's also opportunity for profit and that's where ethical issues present themselves.
No international adoption program has existed without scandal, including China. The Hunan scandal in 2005 nearly ended adoptions from China. After the scandal was exposed, adoptions from China dropped significantly, and the wait for a healthy baby immediately started to climb. The wait now exceeds seven years and most agencies don't accept new prospective adoptive parents into this program. Around the same time, whether due to what was happening in the traditional China adoption program, or just coincidence, China adoption authorities realized that families will adopt children with medical needs. These children, even those with minor needs, had until that point been considered unadoptable. Authorities started to encourage orphanages to prepare the paperwork for children with special needs in order to make them eligible for adoption. Now anyone starting the adoption process today from China goes in expecting and wanting to adopt a child with special needs.
Because the adoption scandal was fueled by demand for healthy babies, I've been wanting to believe that child trafficking is less likely in the special needs program. Children with deformities or who just look different face discrimination in China to an extent they probably wouldn't face in other countries. They're less likely to receive the services they need in school, or schooling at all. Job prospects and other opportunities are minimal. In addition, poverty and lack of resources and education mean that parents of children born with medical needs may not have access, or believe they have access, to the health care they need for their child. It's easy to believe then that the children with special needs who fill orphanages must have all been legitimately abandoned. After hearing the founders of Research-China speak at a recent event in St. Paul, I'm realizing that the reasons children end up in orphanages are a lot more complicated than they seem.
During his talk, Brian Stuy, founder of Research-China, dug deeper into the four reasons children in China end up in orphanages.
1. Abandonment
There are two main scenarios here, depending upon whether the parents are married or not. A married couple may abandon a girl either at birth or at an older age after finally having a boy, or they may abandon a boy with special needs. A single woman who decides to abandon her child will do so whether she has a boy or a girl, healthy or not. Like in many countries, being a single mom carries a huge stigma and will likely not receive the support necessary to help her raise her child. As a single mom, she is less likely to find a new partner, because the partner will not be permitted by law to have a child with her since she already has a child.
As awful and unfair as any of these scenarios are, they are what I think many adoptive parents hope is really the case about their child's beginnings. They hope that their child really was abandoned, like his or her file states, perhaps because of a medical need, or because of social circumstances the parents don't think they can overcome.
Research-China explained that in a true abandonment situation, the data from the children adopted from the orphanage will show three characteristics:
- Mix of boys and girls - As I stated above, girls and boys are abandoned in China, even if not at even rates. If a much higher percentage of children placed for adoption are girls though than boys, that's a red flag.
- Diversity of ages at time of abandonment - Half of abandoned babies are between zero and seven days old when they're found. However, not everyone who abandons a child will do so immediately. Many parents will try to parent for as long as they can, but then realize they can't meet the child's medical needs. Or they keep a daughter, try to get pregnant again, have a boy and abandon the girl. Or they want to keep the child, but a relative abandons the child against the parent's wishes. If more than 70% of babies adopted were supposedly abandoned between zero and seven days old, that's a second red flag.
- Diversity of finding locations - Abandoning children is not a coordinated effort. There aren't chat rooms devoted to the best places to abandon your child. Despite what it seems, abandonment in China is taboo, so parents don't advertise where they left their child. If only five to 10 "finding locations" are listed for all the children placed for adoption though a specific orphanage, that's a third red flag.
Like has happened in other countries, such as Cambodia where international adoption is still shut down, as families from the United States and other wealthier countries around the world began to adopt in larger and larger numbers, a demand grew for young healthy babies. In the Hunan scandal I reference above, children were not only outright kidnapped, but parents were also coerced, talked into, bribed or lied to in order for traffickers to have a supply of babies to funnel to orphanages. A "facilitator" might approach or befriend a pregnant woman and learn what her intentions are following the birth. Is she single? Are they hoping for a boy? In some cases, the facilitator "books" the baby before it's born. Orphanage workers were sometimes forced into child-trafficking by being threatened with loosing their jobs if they didn't bring in a certain number of babies each year.
International adoption is not completely to blame. Earlier in the year, China uncovered four child trafficking rings where babies were sold on the Internet. Orphanages may have been involved, but so are Chinese couples experiencing infertility.
To my dismay, we can't assume that the special needs adoption of today's China adoption program doesn't have the same problems or potential for problems as existed 10 years ago. Child-traffickers know there's now a demand for children with medical needs given that the traditional program so many international families had turned to is no longer an option, and parents of these children are even more vulnerable and could be convinced by a facilitator or even their own doctor that they don't have the resources to raise their child or that their child will have a better life raised by parents with more resources.
3. Authorities seizing children to enforce one-child policy
China's one-child policy is common knowledge, but when we think about orphanages, I think many of us assume that parents faced with no other options choose to abandon their children. Either they can't pay the fine or they need their one child to be a healthy boy. For parents who choose or end up with more than one child, I've read stories of fines not being strictly enforced, of others experiencing financial hardship when fines or suddenly applied or of those who plan for additional children by looking at the fines as literally the price you pay in order to have more than one child. What I had surprisingly not heard about given how much I've read about China family planning practices is of children being taken from families in violation of the one-child policy.
4. Fraud
Adoption of older children has created its own form of fraud. Parents are encouraged to send their kids to an orphanage where they're promised Western families will "foster" them, give them an education and teach them English. The children will return to China with better job opportunities and will be able to take care of their families.
Where does all this information leave Chris and me? I used to be relieved when I would read in the referral information that the child was abandoned as a newborn, because to me, that made sense. If the child is born with an obvious medical need like cleft lip and palate, the parents abandon the child shortly after birth in their only means of getting the medical attention the child needs. But now I'm not so sure what to think. I've been losing faith in trusting the medical information provided in the referrals I've reviewed and now I'll look at them with even more skepticism.
What keeps me going with wanting to adopt is the knowledge that there are children who truly are orphans and they shouldn't be left behind. Regardless of how they ended up in an orphanage, every child there deserves a family. No change in policies in China, or Hague convention policies or shutting down international adoption altogether will help the children already living in orphanages. While I'm confident I'm doing the right thing for a child by adopting him or her, I really worry about fueling the demand for more children to be trafficked by participating in adoption. But simply not adopting doesn't seem like a solution either.
As we wait to be matched, I feel like I can do nothing more than hope that our child's birth parents made their decision on their own. And then I can make a promise to our future child that we will do what we can to uncover the truth in his beginnings, however uncomfortable that will be for us as his adoptive parents.
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