A few interesting links

From the New York Times, Celebrity Adoptions and the Real World, from their Room for Debate series, featuring opinions from Elizabeth Bartholet, Harvard Law School; E.J. Graff, Brandeis University; Marguerite A. Wright, psychologist; David Smolin, Cumberland Law School; Diane B. Kunz, Center for Adoption Policy; Jane Aronson, pediatrician.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

From CNN, a profile of two quake survivors orphaned by the quake, Year later: New beginning for survivors. Money quote: "Like so many families of Sichuan orphans, they refuse to put them up for adoption but do not have the means to care for them, either."

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

From Slate, a photo essay about international adoption, The Orphan Trade: A look at families affected by corrupt international adoptions. The article is by E.J. Graff of "The Lie We Love" fame.

One Year Later -- Update on Quake Orphans

Xinhua News Agency reports:

The reason only 12 earthquake orphans have been adopted by new families is because authorities have been respecting the wishes of the children, the head of Sichuan civil affairs bureau told a press conference days before the one-year anniversary of the earthquake Thursday in Chengdu.

"Most of the orphans prefer to live with their family relatives, such as grandparents or uncle and aunt," Huang Mingquan said at the meeting. "The family relatives also strongly ask for the custody of these children," he said.

Sounds like the perfect solution -- after losing everything familiar, staying with relatives, people you know, seems like the best result. I posted before about a report suggesting that international adoption is not the right result following a crisis like earthquakes and tsunamis.

But I'm also not sure the Sichuan official's explanation is entirely accurate. Previous reports said that the only children who needed to be adopted were the 88 without relatives to care for them. It doesn't seem, then, that the reason only 12 have been adopted is that everyone else has relatives they'd rather be with. Where are the un-adopted 76 without relatives? And what about the previously-offered explanation that the reason placement is so slow is that many of the orphans are handicapped? (And no one has yet reported Jane Liedtke's explanation for why the quake orphans are not being adopted -- that they are considered unlucky.)

And what about the direct contradiction in the article above, with the Sichuan official also saying, "Other earthquake orphans, who do not have any family members or their family members were unable to take care of them, have been arranged to live in various social welfare institutions or boarding schools." So, we do have more than 12 orphans with no relatives, and they remain unadopted. It also seems that those 12 were adopted 6 months ago -- this November report said 12 quake orphans had been adopted at that time. Six months later, no more have been adopted?

Maybe the "respecting the wishes of the children" from the first paragraph is connected to children in boarding schools or SWIs -- they would rather stay there than be adopted by non-relatives? I could buy that explanation, especially for older children, if that's what the article actually said. But it doesn't; children's wishes is directly connected to staying with relatives, not anything else.

Color me confused. It seems that the good news is that the vast majority of the 630 children orphaned in the quake are in the care of relatives. More good news -- 12 children without relatives to care for them have found adoptive families. The bad news -- one year after the quake, 76 children have no families at all to care for them. And officials are not offering any explanation of why these 76 children have not been adopted, when 10,000 Chinese families came forward immediately after the quake offering to adopt.

Year After China Quake, New Births, Old Wounds

Back in October, I posted a report about how family planning officials were amending the one child policy to allow parents who lost a child in the Sichuan earthquake to have another child.

One expert was dubious that the change would actually result in new births:

[Steven]Mosher, [China expert (BTW, you can read my take on Mosher's "expertise" here)] who has followed the one-child policy since its inception and described it in his most recent book “Population Control”, went on to comment that "The natural human reaction to losing a child is to have a make-up child as quickly as possible. But this will not be possible for most of the couples who have lost children to the quake, regardless of what the government policy is. Most women of childbearing age have been sterilized, or their spouses have been sterilized. Unless the government begins offering free tubal ligation and vasectomy reversals to these poor people, there will be no more children."

Well, it seems that family planning authorities are doing those reversals. The New York Times reports:

One year after the earthquake in Sichuan Province killed about 70,000 people and left 18,000 missing, mothers across the region are pregnant or giving birth again, aided by government medical teams dispensing fertility advice and reversing sterilizations.

Despite this report of new births, the article paints an overall depressing situation, with the government ignoring calls for investigations of why so many schools collapsed and hoping that new children will quiet those calls. And the projected future of these "replacement" children seems bleak:

Just 45 days old and swaddled in pink, Sang Ruifeng already has a purpose in life: to bring to justice those responsible for the death of his 11-year-old brother.

Ruifeng will have to ensure, his father said, that the Chinese government gives a full accounting for why thousands of students died in school collapses during the earthquake that devastated southwest China one year ago.

The brother that Ruifeng never knew was among 126 students crushed to death in
Fuxin No. 2 Primary School outside this lush farming town.

“I don’t feel happy at all,” the father, Sang Jun, said about the birth of his new son as his wife bounced the baby up and down in a neighbor’s home. “I was telling my wife
today, if we can’t get justice, we’ll have our son carry on the quest for justice. This issue will be a burden on this child.”

* * *

On the edge of a wheat field here, Mr. Sang has built a new home to replace the one that crumbled during the earthquake. In one corner is a bedroom for his dead son, Xingpeng. Neatly stored inside are a framed photograph of the boy and his most treasured possessions — a fishing rod, white dancing shoes, a glass fish tank.

The new son will not sleep here.

“We’re going to keep this forever,” Mr. Sang said.

Thanks to Chinazhoumom of Chopsticks & Tabouli for the link to the NYT article!

Natural Disasters and Adoption as a Response

With the slowness of finding permanent families for China's quake orphans, I sometimes hear from people who wish China would make these children available for international adoption. I think this blog post responding to desires to adopt the tsunami orphans in 2004 is apropos:

Since the disaster, adoption agencies around the world have been fielding phone calls from well-meaning families wanting to adopt a child from one of the countries hit.

Adoption experts say the best thing people can do is to donate money to causes that directly help the children. They say it’s wrong to take a traumatized child away from the environment that they have grown up in.“Adoptions, especially inter-country ones, are inappropriate during the emergency phase as children are better placed being cared for by their wider families and the communities they know,” said the charity Save the Children in a statement released Jan. 6, 2005. International Adoption needs to be well planned. “The last thing they need to do is be rushed away to some foreign land,” said Cory Barron of Children’s Hope International, an American adoption agency. “We have to think of the child first.”

It's easy to feel that these children who have suffered so much should be placed in families immediately, wherever these families are, but it may be BECAUSE they have suffered so much that they should stay where they are. I'm glad that most of the quake orphans have been placed with family members, and that China is determined to find homes for the others in China.

Update on quake orphans in China

The BBC reports:

Only 12 children orphaned by the earthquake that struck China's Sichuan province six months ago have been formally adopted.

More than 600 children lost both parents in the magnitude-8.0 earthquake that left about 88,000 people dead or missing. But only a handful of these have completed official adoption procedures. Six months after the devastating earthquake, people in
Sichuan are still trying to rebuild their lives.

Quoting a senior official from Sichuan, the Beijing News said most of the orphans would be housed with relatives that were not killed in the quake. Other children will be adopted by non-relatives or live in orphanages.

Each child will receive 600 yuan ($88; £57) a month from the government until they are formally adopted or reach 18, the newspaper said.

The last report I posted about had only 1 or 2 of China's quake orphans adopted, so 12 is an improvement. And I don't see a problem with placing the children with family members, seems ideal, in fact. Previous reports said there were 88 children who were available for adoption with no relatives who could take them.

The Quake and the One Child Policy

Interesting report on how family planning officials in Chengdu are amending rules to allow families affected by the Sichuan earthquake to register illegal children and apply to have additional children:

The Chengdu Population and Family Planning Committee, located in Sichuan’s capital, said that families affected by the disaster can obtain a certificate to have another child, the Associated Press reports.

The Chinese government normally enforces its one-child policy by fining couples who have more than one child. However, the committee’s announcement said that if a child born illegally was killed in the earthquake, parents will no longer have to pay
fines, though previously paid fines will not be refunded. If a couple’s legally born child was killed but its illegally born sibling survived, that sibling can be registered as the legal child, the authorities explained.

* * *

[Steven]Mosher, [China expert] who has followed the one-child policy since its inception and described it in his most recent book “Population Control”, went on to comment that "The natural human reaction to losing a child is to have a make-up child as quickly as possible. But this will not be possible for most of the couples who have lost children to the quake, regardless of what the government policy is. Most women of childbearing age have been sterilized, or their spouses have been sterilized. Unless the government begins offering free tubal ligation and vasectomy reversals to these poor people, there will be no more children."

`Little Emperors' Surprise China Elders With Work at Olympics

Interesting article, made more interesting by the inclusion of only girls as well as only boys in the discussion of "Little Emperor" syndrome:

China's pampered, 20-something "little emperors'' surprised the nation with their hard work during the Beijing Olympics and the May earthquake that killed an estimated 87,500 people --showing that they may, after all, be capable of leading China to superpower status instead of just to the mall.

Since the 1980s, China's rapidly developing economy and policies limiting many families to one child created a generation of 200 million young men and women with unprecedented wealth and opportunities. In a nation with a tradition of conformity and a recent history of political radicalism, the "balinghou'' broke with both, spawning visions of adults obsessed with money, unable to stay married and negligent in caring for aging parents.

"Given another 10 to 15 years, the country will be in their hands,'' says Chen Xingdong, chief China economist at BNP Paribas SA in Beijing. "Are they perfect? No, but actually they are far better than people's original perspective.''

The balinghou -- literally "post-80s'' -- were born between 1980 and 1989 at the confluence of two massive social changes: the government's decision in 1978 to abandon isolationism and develop a market economy after the Cultural Revolution, and the adoption in 1979 of restrictions that reduced the average family from 2.9 children to 1.3 in urban areas by 2004.

Click here for more.

Only One (or Two) Quake Orphans Have Found New Families

This is sad:

CHENGDU: Four months after the disastrous Sichuan earthquake, only one of 88 orphaned children eligible for adoption has found a new home, Sichuan officials announced. Zhang Anyun, a 10-year-old pupil with the Hanwang Central Primary School in Mianzhu, was adopted by an unnamed couple from the provincial capital of Chengdu last Friday, according to Li Boshan, an official with the Mianzhu municipal bureau of civil affairs.The Sichuan provincial department of civil affairs announced on Aug 23 that qualified mainland families could adopt 88 children orphaned in the May 12 earthquake.One reason for the slow response is that many of the orphans are handicapped, sources from the department said.

Read more here. Another article says that 2 quake orphans have found new parents.

It's still early days, of course. The list of 88 orphans was released only a few weeks ago. Still, with reportedly 10,000 prospective adoptive parents in China stepping forward to express interest you'd think it could move a little faster than this.

It's particularly distressing juxtaposed with the media touting changing attitudes toward disabilities by the Chinese in all the Paralympics coverage.

Don't Forget Earthquake Victims

It's been a little over 3 months since the devastating earthquakes in Sichuan Province, and I think it's started to pass off our radar just a little. We made donations when it first happened. For weeks afterward, Maya would bring me any change she found (she was so proud of herself when she "found" all this change in the car -- right in the place where I put all my change for tolls, etc!) and say it was "for the earthquake." Zoe got a little frustrated with Maya stealing her change, too, and yelled at her, "Maya, the earthquake is OVER! They don't NEED your money!" I had to explain that it was because the earthquake was over that money was needed!

But like many humanitarian crises, I hadn't thought to do anything about it lately. But then I got an email from Half the Sky Foundation reminding me that help is still needed.

Click here to nominate Half the Sky for a donation from American Express. It doesn't cost you a penny, and if Half the Sky is in the top 25, they will be able to help kids in refugee camps in Sichuan Province, kids orphaned by the earthquake. There are only 4 days left to try to move Half the Sky into the top 25

Or go to Half the Sky to make your own donation.

If you know of other organizations soliciting donations for earthquake relief, tell us about them in the comments.

Thanks!