Supply and Demand

The U.S. and Mexico have had a longstanding wrangle over who's to blame for drug smuggling and all its attendant evil of violence and crime and death. The U.S. takes the position that the problem is Mexico's -- if Mexico did not supply the drugs, there would be no demand. Mexico takes the position that the problem is the U.S.'s -- if the U.S. did not demand the drugs, there would be no supply.

While supply and demand are crass terms to apply to international adoption, the parallels are clear. Some argue that people from the West adopt so many children from abroad because there is a constant supply -- so many orphans abroad, created by poverty, war, famine, disease, and/or policies or cultural practices of the sending countries. Others argue that the demand from the West creates orphans, that it's the monetary incentive to adoption agencies and orphanages that creates orphans where orphans used to be simply poor children living with their families.

Take India, for example. Adoption facilitators would approach poor families and offer the families what would be a fortune to them, and a drop in the bucket to us, to relinquish the child. Isn't that the creation of an orphan?

What about Guatemala, where there have been some reports of women getting pregnant so that they can relinquish the child and earn the fee for international adoption, while the prevalence of baby-stealing is so great the U.S. requires DNA testing to match relinquishing mothers and children. Isn't this a system that creates orphans?

What about in China, where an entire village of women in Yunnan got pregnant in order to earn the fee for giving the child to an orphanage that would then get $3000-$5000 "orphange donation" for the child? And what about the children sold by traffickers and purchased by orphanages in China?Isn't that the creation of an orphan?

[I don't want to impose a moral judgment on women and families who make the decision to relinquish for a fee. In the midst of abject poverty, it may be seen as the only way for the family and other children to survive. Certainly, people have choices in life, and it's a choice even when it is a difficult one. But it's hard to find a "forced choice" to be free choice. The real problem is the traffickers offering this money, knowing its coercive force.]

I know that the incidents I've linked to above are not the whole picture, but there is little doubt that they are part of the picture. Babies with families are being turned into orphans so that they can be adopted by foreigners who will pay a great deal of money for that adoption. We don't know the scope of the problem, because purchased and stolen babies have the same paperwork as true orphans.

So what do we do about it? Do we end the demand to control the supply -- bar international adoption? Do we work harder at global aid for struggling families to end the supply?

The biggest response to both possibilites is -- what do we do in the meantime? Assuming that cutting the demand would end -- or seriously reduce -- the supply, how long will it take to do so? And even if we had the public will to increase international aid, how long will it take to trickle down to vulnerable families? And what do we do with all of those orphans in the meantime?

Ideas? Suggestions? Comments? Please share.

Domestic Adoption in Korea and Elsewhere

From a South Korean newspaper article entitled, "Even Fertile Parents Are Deciding to Adopt Kids":

Kang Eun-mi, living in Gwacheon, Gyeonggi, is happily married with three children: a 12-year-old son and two daughters, one aged six years and the other 17 months. Kang said she loves all of her children, though only one of them is biologically hers. Kang adopted the two daughters when they were newborns.

“I wanted my son to have siblings,” Kang said. She adopted her two daughters though she was still physically capable of bearing more children, she said. Kang has been open about adoption with her family, relatives and neighbors as well as her two daughters.“I see them as my own children. Sometimes I’m confused about which one is an adoptee and which one is not,” Kang said.

Kang is one of a growing number of Koreans who choose to adopt a child, in a slow but clear departure from Confucian norms that highly value blood ties and family succession. There is an old saying in Korea: “One shouldn’t take in a hairy animal.” It literally means that one should never adopt a child. This thinking has resulted in many Koreans orphans being sent abroad. But as times change, not only are infertile
couples adopting, but so too are fertile couples, such as Kang and her husband.

I wonder if the "same as" narrative is a necessary starting point for any society trying to overcome deep-seated attitudes against adoption -- adoption is the same as building a family through birth; there's no difference between raising a biological child and raising an adopted child. The article certainly seems structured to convey this message.

Or maybe the article is just reporting that these adoptive parents are simply at a common starting point for a lot of evolving adoptive parents -- we start out believing the "same as" narrative until our understanding of our children's loss of their first families leads us to accept the "different from" narrative. (So there will be no confusion, let me say: Yes, I believe that a parent's love for his/her adopted child and for his/her biological child is the same. But a child who experienced the loss of his or her biological family is "different from" a child who has not.)

Don't get me wrong, I think it's great that domestic adoption is on the increase in Korea, and that the country intends to end international adoption by 2012. I'm thrilled that Guatemala is encouraging domestic adoption, and that Russia is looking to international adoption as a last resort. I'm especially thrilled by the rise in domestic adoption in China. At least these domestically-adopted children won't experience the loss of culture that international adoption usually brings.

But I hope that other countries relatively new to "modern" domestic adoption (yes, I know many countries have ancient traditions of adoption, so I'm using "modern" adoption to connote the family-building form of adoption over adoption for inheritance purposes, or for labor purposes, etc.) can learn from the mistakes we've made (and are still making, I'm afraid) here in the U.S. (I've posted before about the "too many secrets" approach to U.S. adoption that ruled for decades, and that I think is so poisonous to the parent-child relationship).

I'm certainly encouraged by the openness of adoptive mother, Kang, in talking about adoption with her kids, her family, her neighbors. That contrasts so nicely with the report of another Korean family where the father preferred to let his parents believe that his adopted child was actually his biological child from an extramarital affair! And in China adoptive parents are using a trick not unfamiliar in the U.S. a few decades ago -- pretending a pregnancy and then claiming the adopted child as a biological child.

Maybe there's a different cultural meaning to keeping an adoption a secret in other cultures, maybe I'm guilty of Western paternalism, thinking that "our way" is the best way. But until I see studies to the contrary, I'm going to hope for openness about adoption world-wide!

Did I Steal My Daughter?

That's the title of another provocative article about possible fraud in a Guatemalan adoption, and exploring concerns about coercion in relinquishments. An adoptive family seeks for their daughter's birth mother to assuage concerns that her relinquishment was not voluntary.

That night I was changing Flora's diaper. "Who's my girl?" I sang as I pulled the tab taut across her stomach. She pointed at her chest and laughed, her dimples creasing into pinholes. Then she reached up to tickle my chin. "Flora Beatriz," I cooed. "You are one beautiful kid." Hearing myself say her middle name took me aback. Beatriz [birth mother], I suddenly realized, had chosen it, the only connection to their brief life together.

And that's when it finally sank in: Beatriz hadn't made a "choice" in the liberating way that our post-Roe culture thinks about reproductive options. Like any woman in the developing world placing a child for adoption, she'd buckled under crushing financial or social pressure—perhaps even coercion. I'd considered this before, but had always batted the thought away by telling myself that Flora was going to be adopted, whether it was we who stepped forward or someone else.

Walter walked in, flushed and sweating from wrestling with the boys, who were now happily digging into bowls of applesauce. "She's getting so big," he said. "She'll be talking soon."

His smile fell as he saw me crying. "Did something happen today?" I nodded. "I think Beatriz wants us to find her," was all I could say.
* * *
i was working on deadline the afternoon Susi's email flashed on my screen, a month after we had hired her to find Beatriz. . . . Her email relieved us of two worries: Beatriz had been hoping we would find her, and she had not been coerced into placing Flora for adoption. She thanked us for making it possible to watch her child grow up. She missed her, prayed for her, and wanted Flora to know that not a day passed when she didn't think about her. She said that before the adoption she was a bubbly person. Now she kept mostly to herself.

I'd nurtured a vague notion of a faraway woman grieving for her lost child. But as soon as an image of Beatriz sobbing into her pillow materialized, my brain concocted a counter-narrative, a story in which she was healing from her loss. A story in which not having to raise the child I tucked into bed every night freed Beatriz in some way.

Then one evening not long after the email arrived, Walter and I spent our date night at a reading of Outsiders Within: Writing on Transracial Adoption, an anthology that is a stirring and stern rebuke to the standard heartwarming adoption narrative.

Back in our car, Walter bowed his head. "We should give her back," he said.

I'd harbored the same thought, but the anguish on his face threatened me enough to push back. "We can't," I answered.

"Why not?" he countered. "It wouldn't take much money to support them."

"Because we are her family."

"She'd adjust."

"How do you know that?" It was an unconvincing dodge. We were friends with several families who had adopted toddlers; their kids were thriving. "How could we do that to the boys?" I insisted.

"We couldn't," Walter said.

"And how could we do that to us? I couldn't live with that pain."

"But why should Beatriz have to?" he asked.

So this presents another "what would you do" moment . . . .

What would you have done?

Here's the story of a brave woman who stopped a Guatemalan adoption when she became concerned that it was fraudulent:

Jennifer and Todd Hemsley had to give up their child to save her. Like thousands of other would-be parents, the California couple made a $15,500 down payment to a U.S. agency that guaranteed quick, hassle-free adoptions of Guatemalan babies. And like the others, they were caught in a bureaucratic limbo after Guatemala began cracking down on systemic fraud last year.

Many Americans with pending adoptions lobbied hard for quick approval of their cases, trying to bypass a new system designed to prevent identity fraud and the sale or even theft of children to feed Guatemala's $100 million adoption business. But Jennifer Hemsley did what Guatemala's new National Adoptions Council says no other American has done this year: She refused to look the other way when she suspected her would-be daughter's identity and DNA samples were faked.

She halted the adoption of Maria Eugenia Cua Yax, whom the couple named Hazel. And she stayed in Guatemala for months, spending thousands of dollars, until she could safely deliver the girl into state custody. Her decision could mean the Hemsleys — Jennifer is a freelance designer and Todd creates visual effects in the film industry — may never be able to adopt the little girl they nicknamed "la boca," or mouth in Spanish, in honor of her outsized spirit.

"It's so crazy. None of this makes any sense," Hemsley told The Associated Press. "I miss her deeply. There are no words." But she says it was the only thing she could have done, morally. "It wasn't even a choice. We did what I hope any parent would do: put their child first."

The Hemsleys say they had many reasons for suspicion. But the final straw was a doctor's statement that said DNA samples were taken from the baby and birth mother on a date when Hazel was with Jennifer Hemsley. She said her Guatemalan attorney told her, "Don't worry about it, you want the adoption to go through, don't
you?"
* * *
Prompted by the Hemsleys, Guatemalan investigators are trying to determine Hazel's true identity and have opened a criminal investigation into the people who vouched for her paperwork — from the U.S. adoption agency to Guatemalan notaries, foster parents, a doctor and the laboratory that said it collected the girl's DNA.
* * *
Guatemala's old, fraud-plagued adoption industry was still going full speed in June 2007 when the Hemsleys first held the 4-month-old girl. "It was magical and a gift, and a feeling beyond description," Jennifer Hemsley said.

But even before their case was turned over to the adoptions council, the Hemsleys were suspicious. The supposed birth mother disappeared after a brief meeting where she "had no visible reaction at all to the child," Hemsley said. Medical reports seemed obvious forgeries, without letterhead or doctor's signature. And during a critical hearing, Hemsley said, her Guatemalan advisers tried to pay a stranger to pose as Hazel's foster mother.

"Todd and I felt a lot like, 'Gee, is this really happening?' Maybe we should just look the other way and keep plodding along, because every time I tried to tell someone, nobody cared," Hemsley said. "I couldn't look the other way. I just couldn't turn my head."
* * *
If the Hemsleys had walked away, as hundreds of other Americans did after problems surfaced, Hazel would likely have been abandoned or reoffered for adoption under another false identity, Tecu [a fraud prosecutor investigating the case] said. Instead, Jennifer Hemsley stayed with Hazel for months, draining more than $70,000 from a second mortgage on their home and paying for a trusted nanny.
Finally, as a colleague of Ordonez threatened to take the girl away, she asked the adoptions council for a "rescue."

The new rules require authorities to consider Guatemalan citizens before Americans, and several dozen Guatemalan couples are in line ahead of the Hemsleys. But they aren't giving up yet. Jennifer Hemsley returned this month to Guatemala City, where she briefly held Hazel — now more than 19 months old — at a crowded orphanage. She emerged devastated. Crying and shaking, she said Hazel had open sores on her face and a cut on her head. Within hours, she managed to persuade authorities to transfer the girl to a better nursery while the case is resolved.

"I think about her every day," Hemsley said. "It's horrifying on many levels. It's
horrifying for Guatemalan women who may have missing children. It's horrifying
for adoptive families in the U.S. My parents are devastated over this. This affects our whole entire family, our friends, our neighbors."

It must have been an incredibly difficult decision. Do you think the family made the right choice? I do, despite the fact that it means the baby has been in limbo for so long. Any other decision would have condoned the fraud. But I don't know if I would have been as brave as the Hemsley family. I could only hope to have the courage to do the right thing.

Guatemala recruiting adoptive parents internally

Good news -- another country working on increasing domestic adoption and foster care:

At church on Sundays, Juliana Tocay fibs and introduces 3-year-old Katerin as her daughter. The truth is too complicated to explain.Tocay is Katerin's foster mother, making her family part of a much-watched test of whether this Central American nation can take care of its own needy children.After essentially closing off the pipeline that sent nearly 5,000 children for adoptions in the U.S. last year, Guatemala has launched an ambitious campaign to recruit foster parents and even adoptive parents at home. Only a few dozen families are participating and, as Tocay's experience illustrates, it will be a tall order to change the culture of a country that typically views only biological children as true members of the family.

Sounds like it will be a hard road, but I think it's great that Guatemala is taking first steps. Click here to read more.

More About Guilt

I've been enjoying the discussion in the comments on my last post about "Adoption Guilt" -- let's see what this one spurs!

When I decided to adopt, I really wanted to avoid feeling like a rich, white American woman oppressing dark-skinned women of the Third World. I can't even have a maid here in the States because it makes me feel exploitative!

And I didn't want to feel like I was CREATING orphans -- some argue that international adoption actually creates orphans, since demand always creates supply. So I smugly chose China. After all, China's supply of orphans wasn't about my desire to adopt (I was only taking advantage of the government's oppression, not oppressing anyone myself, if I had really thought about it).

China wasn't like Guatemala, where baby stealing for purposes of adoption was such a problem that the government required DNA testing to link the child with the woman claiming to be the relinquishing birth mother. And there were tons of stories about poor Guatemalan women getting pregnant in order to relinquish a child for money payments. And it wasn't like India, where there were scandals about baby buying, where adoption "facilitators" were offering desperately poor India women a pittance for their babies and then making thousands of dollars by placing the child for international adoption. [I'm not knocking anyone who adopted from other countries, just setting out my guilt-avoiding thought processes.]

But China was free from corruption, I thought. And then came the Hunan scandal, and a report of women in Yunnan Province having babies in order to sell them. And the idea that China is somehow different from other sending countries doesn't seem able to stand up to scrutiny.

So maybe guilt is unavoidable?! Now, these guilt-inducing thoughts are not something I ponder every day. It doesn't interfere with my joy in my children. But it's one of the reasons I spend so much time focusing on issues in international adoption.