While Melesech's life is materially better, her adoption has not helped those left behind. Her birth family is still, quite literally, dirt poor. So is her country. Other parents are still at risk for dying of malaria, dysentery, and other preventable and treatable illnesses. What Ethiopians really need is a government that is not strangling its development, and forms of aid that actually reach and help individual families. Failing that, is it right to spirit some of their children away?
Here's the rule of thumb: If you can get a healthy infant or toddler within a year, don't adopt from that country. Adopt, instead, from American foster care, or from countries that send abroad very few children, and when they do, the children who are available are older, or disabled, or come in sibling groups, or otherwise have had trouble finding new local homes. Or if you're adopting for humanitarian reasons, donate that money an organization that helps children stay with their families, or brings clean water and mosquito nets and medicines to their villages.
It's far more rewarding to love an individual child than to give to anonymous foreigners. I know; I'm parenting an adopted child. But no one wants to be complicit, even unknowingly, in defrauding a father out of his daughter.
Adoption Initiative Conference 2022
2 years ago
4 comments:
I found this op ed annoying. While much of what Graff has to say is valuable, she's behind the curve on what's happening in Ethiopia. Instead of shuttering its program, Ethiopia has slowed it down, cracked down on ethical offenders, and worked at promoting domestic adoption. It hasn't been possible to adopt an infant from there in less than one year since about 2008. Many agencies now say they will only take applications from families willing to adopt a child older than 36 months, because that's where the need is. Continued vigilance is required, and prospective parents need to educate themselves about the history of the program and current issues, research agencies etc but to just tell people not to adopt from there is kind of naive in its own right. Many people are going to dismiss her perspective out of hand for that. To recommend "countries that send few children" as somehow ethically superior is ridiculous. Ethiopia sent very few children when we adopted from there just 6 years ago. Ethiopia is under scrutiny now; all sending countries should provide that level of scrutiny to their programs and there would be fewer problems.
This reminds me of a comment/question made to me when my husband and Iwere adopting. Why weren't we adopting from the US foster system? It was also implied that we were racist and only wanted a white or Chinese child. I mentioned my husband's Chinese background, his desire to adopt from China and some negative experiences of friends attempting to adopt through foster care. I asked if she planned to adopt from foster care, she said not she could have her OWN children.........
I found this article annoying too. I'm not a charity - I am not in business to dole out money to make the lives of everyone in a village better. My choice to adopt was because I wanted to parent a child. I scraped together the money to adopt because I wanted to parent a child. Amazingly enough I didn't have $20,000 just lying around burning a hole in my pocket. But because I personally wanted something enough - to become a parent - I made myself scrimp and scrounge to get the money to adopt a child. I do not personally have enough motivation to scrimp and save up $20,000 to try to help a village full of people that I don't know. I'm sure EJ Graff is living on rice and beans and second hand clothes so that most of her income can go to help that hypothetical village. Good for her.
I think that issues of "social justice" cannot be overlooked when looking at international adoption. Most particularly when Americans adopt from Ethiopia. As the Op Ed reports we should be about the task of making Ethiopia a better place so that adoption is not necessary. Unfortunately, Ethiopia is in a child welfare crisis due to the HIV/AIDS pandemic which has left so many children without parents and the extreme povety felt by many familes in the country.If we had taken the advice of the op ed article our son would still be in an orphanage, alone, undernourished, and without a future. Today he is healthy active and doing well in American. In this case being "politically incorrect" was correct for our child and for us.
Post a Comment