Adopted Twins Return to Russia for Homeland Tour

Now 18, and adopted at age 2, twins Jessica and Jennifer Allen return to Russia:

For the children of a Moscow orphanage, it was a glimpse of a life of plenty. For their visitors, 18-year-old twin sisters from California, it was an emotional return to a place where they once struggled to survive.

More than 16 years after an American couple traveled here to collect two malnourished 2-year-old girls named Galina and Svetlana, the identical twins — now Jessica and Jennifer Allen — have made their first trip back to Children's Home No. 13.

As Russia and the United States work out an ugly dispute over abuse of Russian adopted children, the sisters' story brings home how international adoptions can have a happy ending, and carries a message of hope to former Cold War foes still struggling to break down barriers of distrust.

The twins celebrated their Russian heritage as their journey came full circle last week.

"It's like, wow, we're from here," said Jennifer, formerly Svetlana. Her sister chimed in: "We're definitely Russian." The twins have high Slavic cheekbones but sound like typical California teenagers.

* * *

Little is known about the Allen twins' biological parents other than that their mother gave them up due to poverty. In the orphanage, their care was supervised by Irina, who still works at the home and greeted the girls on their return.

"It is so nice to see such girls, who were small and also pretty ill when they were taken, now turned into such beauties when they have grown up," said Irina, a stout woman with kind eyes and short, wispy hair, who only gave her first name.

"It is very nice because you feel that your work hasn't been wasted."

The trip to Russia was a graduation present. The twins soon leave the family home in Escondido, California, for college. Jessica, who won a hockey scholarship at St. Louis University, will major in nursing, while Jennifer will major in communications at the University of California.

Although they now have a better appreciation of their Russian heritage, they remain all-American girls.

"I feel more American because I laugh, and like to have a good time," Jessica said. "Everyone here's really serious."

Follow-Up Article from Caixin on Trafficking by Family Planning Officials

Caixin Magazine, Beijing, has published another article about the family planning officials taking over-quota children with more details about the case of Yang Ling, whose father Yang Libing is still looking for her, showing fabricated and forged documents created by the family planning officials to justify taking the baby to the orphanage.

Blogger Problems

Blogger is having problems, so they have removed all posts since Wednesday.  That explains why you haven't been able to find the last few posts -- you're not really losing your mind!

Hopefully things will be back to normal soon.

6:10 p.m.: Yay, the missing posts have returned as mysteriously as they disappeared!

China Birth Parents Sue to Find U.S. Adopted Son

From Global Times:

A father is suing an adoption center in Jiangsu Province to help him contact his lost son adopted by an American family through the agency in 1995.

Li Xuwen, 47, a resident of Wuhu city in Anhui Province, has been looking for Li Xiang for 19 years since the 6-year-old went missing in Nanjing, Jiangsu Province in May 1992.

"He was with his mother having breakfast on a Nanjing street but disappeared inside five minutes when his mother went to buy water for him," Li told the Yangtze Evening Post on Tuesday.

Then in 2007 Li found a record at a Nanjing police station that his son had been sent to Nanjing Children's Welfare Center two months after losing contact with his parents.

He was later informed that an American family adopted his boy in 1995.

To protect the adoptive family's privacy, the center is refusing to tell Li his son's new location or contact information, the Yangtze Evening Post reported.

"We strongly urge the service center to release the name of Li Xiang's US contacts to his birth parents as it deprived those parents of their right to information about the adoption as is enshrined under the law," Li Xuwen's attorney, Deng Peng, told the Global Times on Wednesday.

"We're aware the welfare center notified Nanjing newspapers with Li Xiang's information," Deng said, "but that's just not good enough as his parents in Anhui Province couldn't read the information back in the 1990s, when communications between regions weren't efficient enough."

Through Deng's contacts, Li has found out that his son is a graduate now and believes his parents had abandoned him 19 years ago.

"We're not asking the boy to come back to China," Deng said. "We just want to tell him his parents didn't abandon him and they want to meet him and explain this to him."

The Parenting Dilemmas of Transracial Adoption

From NPR's Talk of the Nation:

It's common for adopted children to grapple with questions about where they come from and how they fit into their new family. But those questions can be particularly hard to navigate when adoptive parents and children don't look alike.

Today, approximately 40 percent of adoptions in America are transracial — and that number is growing. In decades past, many American parents of transracial adoptions simply rejected racial categories, raising their children as though racial distinctions didn't matter.

"Social workers used to tell parents, 'You just raise your child as though you gave birth to her,'" Adam Pertman, executive director of the Evan B. Donaldson Adoption Institute, tells NPR's Neal Conan. "An extreme majority of transracially adopted kids ... grew up wishing they were white or thinking they were white, not wanting to look in mirrors."

Pertman's organization has conducted extensive research on transracial adoption in America. He says turning a blind eye to race wasn't good for anybody. "We don't live in a colorblind society," he says.

University of Chicago professor Gina Samuels — who is multiracial and was raised by a white family — has also researched the experiences of children of color who were raised by Caucasian parents. She tells Conan that parents who take a colorblind approach to raising their children often do so with the best of intentions.

"[It] reflects maybe how they hope the world will be someday," Samuels says. "But oftentimes what this ends up doing is having children [meet] the world — the real world — unprepared."

FINALLY!  A mainstream media outlet that actually has a transracial adoptee on the show to talk about transracial adoptees!  And Neal Conan actually solicits callers who were transracially adopted!

This is really unusual, which you know if you listen to media reports about adoption.  When I hear most panels put together to talk about adoption I'm reminded of Virginia Woolf's A Room of One's Own, where she discovers in the card catalog at the library that the only qualification for writing about women was to be a man!

Most American of Americans

Today I had a really awesome experience -- I got to be the keynote speaker at a naturalization ceremony!  One of my former students is an immigration attorney at Catholic Charities, and knowing that I had written about the presidency and the meaning of citizenship, she invited me to speak.  It was really amazing -- 71 candidates for citizenship from 36 different countries from Bosnia to Zambia.  It was so moving to see all these happy people -- a Chinese couple who had to be in their 80s, an older hispanic gentleman standing with two men who had to be his sons, a man who stood when his country of origin was named -- Ivory Coast -- and one remembers how it's tragically been in the headlines lately. 

And there was the appropriate pomp and circumstance:  a middle-school color guard so young as they solemnly presented the flag, the Star Spangled Banner mangled at the high notes by the crowd and America the Beautiful more easily belted out, the Pledge of Allegiance, short and to the point after the long and legally required Oath of Allegiance with references to potentates and mental reservations.  It actually made me all teary-eyed, which is pretty hard to do to cynical old me!

So anyway, this is what I said in my remarks:

Citizens, countrymen, my fellow Americans -- congratulations! Today, after years of hard work, study and waiting, you’ve earned the right to call yourselves Americans!

I’m honored to speak to you today. This naturalization ceremony is meaningful for me, too, for three reasons – my mother born in France and my two daughters born in China.

I was three years old when my mother became an American citizen. My mother came to the U.S. as an 18-year-old military bride following her husband to a new country far from family and all that was familiar. She brought with her customs and traditions from France – a Yule log at Christmas time, celebrating Bastille Day – that have enriched our lives, and she is a proud American.

I adopted my two children from China when they were babies. We have worked hard to keep their Chinese heritage a part of our lives in America – going to Chinese School each Saturday, celebrating Chinese New Year. That is not incompatible with being American, and they will tell you proudly today that they are Chinese American.

This ceremony today is a reminder for me of all they left behind, all that they have gained, and all that this COUNTRY has gained because they are here.

You, too, have left behind another country, another culture. But you bring to America history and traditions that enrich us all. What you bring to America is what makes America the strong and vital country that it is today. You bring new ideas, new ways of doing things. You bring a commitment to America’s future, having made a conscious choice to be Americans.

Have you been following the news about President Obama’s birth certificate? Some misguided people think he was born in Kenya instead of the United States. But the real question is why does it matter whether a president is a naturalized citizen from Kenya or a citizen by birth in America?

Because of a silly provision in the Constitution that requires the President to be a “natural born” citizen, a citizen by birth. That provision means that my mother and my children – and all of you – can’t be President of the United States.

Is it any wonder I call that a SILLY provision in the Constitution? [And that’s another wonderful thing about being an American, I can call the Constitution you just vowed to uphold “silly” without penalty!] It seems that the founding fathers thought being born in America makes you the most American of Americans. How SILLY!

I say naturalized Americans have a better claim to being the most American of Americans.

I was born in America. MY citizenship is just an accident of birth. You wanted to come to America. You wanted to become American. All I did was be born, not something I had much say in!

You had to study the Constitution. I had to be born.

You had to pass a test. I had to be born.

You had to take an oath of allegiance here today, absolutely and entirely renouncing and abjuring all allegiance and fidelity to any foreign prince, potentate, state or sovereignty. I was born.

You were investigated, interviewed, fingerprinted. Me? I was born.

You had to work and wait and suffer hardships I can only imagine to get where you are today. Again, just born.

All I did was be born. In comparison to your incredible journey, that seems like an awfully thin claim to American citizenship!

Seriously, though, the silliest thing of all is creating divisions between citizens. Regardless of how we got here, we’re all Americans now! And the United States Supreme Court has affirmed that naturalized citizens are not second class citizens. You are citizens, entitled to all the rights and protections that American citizenship provides.

One of my children’s favorite books is about a little boy adopted from Korea. He can’t wait for his naturalization ceremony where he will become an American, and, he’s sure, also get his “American” face. He thinks that he will become Caucasian when he becomes American.

Of course, he learns by the end of the book that his brown skin and Asian features are American! That the face of America is what’s reflected in this room. That regardless of race, ethnicity or national origin, we all belong to America. We are all Americans.

Congratulations to you, America’s newest citizens!

I speak in front of large groups -- my classes -- all the time, but I was jittery about this speech.  I so didn't want to screw up these people's special day by flubbing it.  I was thrilled by the number of new citizens who came up to thank me and say they appreciated what I had to say.  The man who told me I gave him "shivers" really made my day!

Actually, the whole experience made my day -- I think I've been smiling ever since, even through a long and contentious faculty meeting! So if you ever have a chance to attend a naturalization ceremony, grab that opportunity -- it will make you feel proud to be an American!

I Will Honor Her

At Bluegrass Moms, on honoring Chinese birth mothers:

“Can you imagine that someone just threw her away?” The someone they were referring to was my daughter's birthmother.

* * *

“I don’t look it at that way. She was not ‘just thrown away’. In a country where families can be fined one year’s salary for an ‘overquota’ child perhaps they had no other choice. Indeed, in a country where a male heir often is his parents' only ‘social security’ - daughters marry and leave but sons are bound by filial piety to stay on and care for the aged and infirm – what is a family to do?

Moreover, in a country where gender-determining-ultrasound and abortion clinics sit side by side on backstreets, though both illegal, the fact that our daughter was carried to term says something. In a country in which infanticide is often seen as a better choice than being prosecuted for abandonment, a life saved, albeit later left to be found, says even more.”

I will admit - we do not know the circumstances of our youngest daughter’s birth. (Because of China’s system of anonymous abandonment and adoption we do not even know who her birth family is.) And given mounting media reports surrounding child trafficking among orphanages, I am increasingly afraid to know.

But I do know that a woman conceived this child, carried her to term, and has been forever separated from her. That woman is my daughter’s first mother, her birth mother, a woman my daughter has grieved for and still thinks about, and that woman deserves a place of recognition in my heart.

IA & Language Development

Helpful post from a pediatric speech-language therapist and adoptive mom, giving guidelines for when it's time to seek professional speech/language help for an internationally adopted child:

When a young child is adopted internationally, her language will undergo a transition. For a period of time, she will struggle to communicate effectively in her new language. This is expected. However, during this period of time, there are clues in other areas of development that can provide insight into her potential for language development.  Even when a child is making a transition in language, we can still take a peek at her use of eye contact, play, and gestures.  Children who are adopted internationally may struggle to use verbal words at first, but their use of eye contact, play, and gestures should not be affected by the switch in languages. And because these areas of development are closely related to language development, they can help us decide if a child is at risk for a language delay.  If you, as a parent, have recently adopted a child internationally, you can check out these posts to find out what your child should be doing with play and gesture use. Find your child's age, click on the post, and read the sections about gesture use and play.

I sure could have used this! When Zoe was 18 months old and had been home 9 months I was soooo worried about her language development. She didn't really babble, she didn't try out words.  I had her evaluated, and they pegged her at 17 months in speech development!  All that worry for nothing.  Sure enough, she was one of those kids who didn't really talk until she could speak in full grammatically correct paragraphs!

New Report of Family Planning Officials Taking Children in China

In 2009, the LA Times reported family planning officials in Guizhou Province confiscated over-quota children and sent them to the local orphanage in exchange for a share of the adoption fees.  Now, there's a similar report from Hunan Province, reported in a Chinese magazine, Caixin Century, titled In Hunan, Family Planning Turns to Plunder:

On a long journey in search of his lost child, Yang Libing carries a single photograph. It's a faded snapshot of his daughter Yang Ling, who this year turns seven years old.

Family planning agency cadres in the poor mountain town where Yang Libing lived with his wife Cao Zhimei seized their daughter in 2005 and shipped her to an orphanage because they didn't pay afford a 6,000 yuan penalty – so-called "social support compensation" – for violating China's one-child policy.

The nearly three-decade-old policy limits parents to a single offspring with certain exceptions. Authorities decided that the family of Yang Ling had overstepped strict bounds imposed by family planners in their hometown Gaoping and Longhui County, near the city of Shaoyang in Hunan Province.

Local officials decided to take a tough – arguably inhumane – stand for central government population controls by claiming rights to the toddler and, as the parents have argued since 2009, allowing her to be sold into adoption abroad.

Not only did the decision to confiscate the little girl serve to punish the parents, leaving them with mere memories and a worn baby photo, but it also provided operating cash for the local government.

Indeed, a Caixin investigation found that children in many parts of Hunan have been sold in recent years and wound up, sometimes with help from document forgers and complacent authorities, being raised by overseas families who think they adopted Chinese orphans.

Read the whole thing -- it traces the money motive in birth planning fines and confiscations and shows how powerful birth planning authorities are.

After the LA Times article, one can't be surprised to hear of these confiscations.  What does surprise me, though, is that the story is being reported in China, in Chinese.

Adam Pertman on Post-Adoption Services

In the Christian Science Monitor, Adam Pertman, executive director of the Evan B. Donaldson Adoption Institute and author of Adoption Nation, writes:

While we have made significant progress in the realm of child placement, however, we have done embarrassingly little in an area that virtually every mental-health and child-welfare professional agrees is of nearly equal or even greater importance: providing post-adoption services and supports that would greatly enhance the prospects for these children and families to succeed.

* * *

Studies are unambiguous about the multiple, complex deleterious effects on children of institutionalization (orphanages), especially for prolonged times. Research is equally clear about the negative impact on children of temporary living situations (foster care), especially when they are shuttled from one home to another for extended periods. In other words, many of the boys and girls for whom we have gotten so proficient at finding new families need mental health professionals, educational supports, and other help in order to heal. And, because love does not in fact conquer all, their new families need resources and services to enable them to help their children.

When state and federal governments do not provide such assistance, they guarantee that some of these families will dissolve, while others will be relegated to lives of constant struggle, marital discord, sibling distress, school problems, unnerving trauma, and, sometimes, violence. It’s a tough message to hear at this time of strained budgets, but the simple fact is that the human toll of not providing supports – or of cutting them, as many states are doing today – is incalculable.

And the financial repercussions are huge as well, since taxpayers are saddled with enormous costs when children are thrust back into the foster care system, wind up on the streets, are incarcerated, and so on.

Here's a link to the Evan B. Donaldson Adoption Institute's report on post-adoption services.

China Adoption: Discrepancies in Statistics

Pound Pup Legacy posts about a discrepancy of 1, 618 children between what China reports as having sent abroad for adoption and what receiving countries report:

The finding of this comparison is very similar to the one we made in 2007. Again there are big differences between the figures provided by the authorities of the sending country, and the figures provided by the authorities of receiving countries.

* * *

Over the period 2005-2009, almost 7.5% more children were reportedly adopted from China, than China claims to have sent for adoption.

* * *

Is it too much to ask of the authorities in sending and receiving countries to properly count the children adopted internationally? With all the bureaucracy involved in inter-country adoption, how is it possible that 1618 children are unaccounted for?

So, any thoughts on what might account for the discrepancy?

Jolie Nervous About Adoption Themes in Kung Fu Panda 2

From Yahoo News:

Hollywood actress Angelina Jolie has revealed that she was nervous about how her adopted children would react to new animated movie 'Kung Fu Panda 2', because the story follows the main character's search for his biological father.

The 'Salt' star, who has lend her voice for warrior Tigress, took her six children with partner Brad Pitt to an early screening of the film, but admitted that she was wracked with nerves when they actually sat down to watch it.

"I wondered how they'd respond to the themes of the film. (We were) sensitive to see if there was going to be a big discussion that night about adoption and orphanages," Contactmusic quoted her as telling USA Today.

Though the couple was more than ready to tackle any tough questions about the subject after the movie, there was no need.

"That's because we talk about those issues at my house all the time, very openly. We've had those discussions so often, they're such happy, wonderful discussions," said Jolie.

Adoption was never directly mentioned in the first Kung Fu Panda movie -- panda Po's dad is a goose, so adoption surely is suggested.  And there's a point where the dad is leading up to telling Po a family secret, and we're led to believe he's going to reveal the adoption. . . and then it turns out to be the family soup recipe!  It will be interesting to see how the birth parent search is handled in Kung Fu Panda 2.

What do you think about the fact that Jolie has frequent discussions about adoption with her kids, "such happy, wonderful discussions?"

Happy Mothers' Day!

We had a great Mothers' Day, doing practically nothing!  That was a great relief after an EXTREMELY busy Saturday of helping my mom move into her new condo, rehearsal for the ballet recital next week, the usual Chinese School, and then the unusual -- the girls' first piano recital.  Whew!  Today we just hung around my mom's new place.  But as soon as we got home, the girls were eager to write their Mothers' Day notes to their birth mothers, and then burn the notes to carry their thoughts and good wishes to wherever their birth mothers might be.

There was an addition this year;  remembering our conversation on Tomb-Sweeping Day about the custom of burning paper replicas of things your ancestors might need in heaven, the girls drew pictures of things they wanted their birth mothers to have as Mothers' Day presents!  Zoe gifted her birth mother with an iPod playing happy tunes, and a cell phone so they could talk. Maya sent a Nintendo DS and a laptop computer, and my little fashion-conscious girl also sent a beautiful dress and matching purse (yes, I mean fashion-conscious!  This morning Maya told me the dress I was wearing "suited me" and that the blue-gray matched my eyes!  What 7-year-old talks that way?!).

Here's wishing that the smoke wafts to China, and carries the girls' thoughts and hopes and gifts to two deserving mothers.

And here's wishing a Happy Mothers' Day to ALL mothers, known and unknown, acknowledged and unacknowledged, near and far.

Happy Other's Day

No, that's not a typo.  Officially, the Saturday before Mother's Day is Birth Mother's Day.  I understand that the intention was good -- it was created by a group of birth mothers to recognize their role as mothers at this time close to Mother's Day (not that all birth mothers buy into it!).

But relegating birth mothers to the day BEFORE Mother's Day, as if we want to "honor" her and get it over with before we get to the REAL holiday for the REAL mom?  That strikes me as the "othering" of birth mothers.  She's not a MOTHER unmodified, whose motherhood can be celebrated on Mother's (Unmodified) Day, she is, as I've written before, "the Other:"

These representations of foreign birth mothers [as uncaring] allow us to divorce ourselves from the experience of these birth mothers, to minimize their pain, and to justify how much better off our children are with us than with them. So that we can continue to ignore them even as we internalize how painful the loss of these children would be to us, their relinquishment has to be seen as wholly voluntary, desired, accepted. We have to believe they have moved on, that they feel no pain. They are "the Other," the person who is understood only according to their difference from ourselves. It becomes very easy to do when the birth mother is from another country; we have a long history of "the exotic Other" as justifying all sorts of Western colonial intervention. "They" are just not like "us."


But we do it in domestic adoption, too, with birth mothers raised in the good ol' U.S. of A. We say, "She is a saint, she showed the ultimate in mother's love;" and then we follow up with, "I could never have done that." As Brian Stuy puts it, "Personally, I could not imagine ever giving up my child to another to raise." I don't think it's meant as a compliment -- it's not that she's so much more noble, so much more saintly, so much more loving than I, that I could never do that. She is different from me, she is less than me, she is "the Other."

We'll be celebrating all the mothers important to our family on Mothers' Day -- my mom, Zoe's birth mom, Maya's birth mom, Maya's foster mom, and yes, ME!  (No, moving that apostrophe isn't a typo, either.  I like Nick Kristof's suggestion that we celebrate all mothers, making Sunday Mothers' Day instead of Mother's Day.) 

On a much more personal and profound level, our Mother's Day has to be Mothers' Day. It's simple reality.  My children have many mothers, each important, each REAL. Even without knowing who they are or where they are, my daughters' birth mothers are an integral part of their lives. I'm not interested in creating a falsehood, that I'm the one and only mother in my childrens' lives.  On Sunday, on Mothers' Day, we will honor all our mothers, unmodified. No Happy Other's Day for us.

Should Adoption be a Reproductive Right?

Hmmm, from the Huffington Post, an attempt to link abortion and adoption from a different direction:

Many people assume, and anti-abortion groups insist, that giving up a baby for adoption is not only an easy choice, but a righteous alternative to abortion. It's not. First of all, it's unusual: less than 1% of women confronting unintended pregnancy today choose adoption. And for the birth mother adoption is difficult, often much more emotionally painful than abortion, according to many studies. With abortion, a woman almost always puts the decision behind her, and moves on; with adoption that can be considerably more challenging.

Yet abortion and adoption have a lot in common too. Just like women who choose abortion, women who make an adoption plan are subject to shame, coercion, misinformation, unfavorable laws, and the politicization of their choice. It is here that the reproductive rights movement may recognize a role for itself.

The pro-choice movement has already helped usher in a new era in adoption. Contraception, legalized abortion and the de-stigmatizing of unwed mothers helped create the environment in which birth mother rights could flourish. Birth mothers could take control of their pregnancy and its outcome. It allowed them to shape the way that their babies go into the world.

* * *

Adoption can be a painful choice but much of the difficulty is unnecessary. First, we should get rid of the misperceptions. It's safe to say every woman facing unintended pregnancy these days was born after the 1950s yet these women typically think of adoption in its vintage 50s form instead of its modern, kinder version. . . .

If a patient were deciding against abortion because of false information, as pro-choice advocates we would see it as our responsibility to give her the facts. We have a chance to do the same with adoption.

* * *

Birth mothers are often unknowingly dis-empowered at the most important point of the adoption process. When have you heard of one lawyer representing both sides in a legal agreement? Pretty much never, right? Well, it happens all the time in adoption and birth mothers are always the vulnerable party. . . . Reproductive rights groups would provide a valuable service to women by including them in the pro-bono legal work they already do.

* * *

There is tremendous need for more ethical standards in the field of adoption, just the kind long embraced by the pro-choice movement.

 Thoughts?

Korea: Single Moms' Day

From the Korean newspaper The Hankyoreh (English edition):

May 11 is “Adoption Day.” The government created the day in 2006 to activate for domestic adoption. Every year around this time, however, there are people whose hearts are cut to pieces. They are the mothers whose children were sent overseas. The Dandelion parents’ group is a group of mothers who were compelled to send their children overseas for adoption in the 1970s and 1980s. The mothers formed the group three years ago to commiserate, help one another and share information on their children visiting Korea. Most of the 12 members have been reunited with their children.

“It is another start. Because we cannot communicate due to language, I cannot explain, and even if it is a bit insufficient, I want to say it’s all my fault... Overseas adoption, to those involved, is a pain that must be endured for a lifetime.”

Noh Keum-ju (Noh Myung-ja), 52, the chairwoman of the group, said, “Before 2005, when I was reunited with my son, I did not even know the phrase ‘overseas adoption,’ and I assumed he was living in Korea.”

Noh continued, “Without my knowledge, my husband’s family sent my child to an ob/gyn and signed a statement relinquishing parental rights. Later, I found out the hospital sent my son to an institution, and the country [Korea] sold my child off. My world collapsed when I heard the news.”

* * *

May 11 is the first “Single Mom’s Day,” created by adoption and single mother groups. Noh plans to tell her story at an international conference that day at the Community Chest Auditorium hosted by Truth and Reconciliation for the Adoption Community of Korea (TRACK) and KoRoot, a guest house for overseas adoptees returning to South Korea.

“Society will only change if mothers like me show themselves more. I am a mother whose child was sent for overseas adoption, and a single mother. If a base is created so that single mothers can also raise their children, the nation’s concerns about adoption will also disappear,” said Noh. “We must lessen the pain that must be suffered to the day they die by those affected by overseas adoption.”

Kwon Hee-jong, a coordinator at the Korean Unwed Mothers Support Network (KUMSN), said, “70 percent of the mothers at state-supported facilities relinquish their children for adoption, while in the United States, the ratio of mothers who give up their children is just 1 percent.”

Kwon added, “It is absolutely necessary that we eliminate prejudices so that birthmothers can raise their children on their own and expand support before encouraging adoption.”

Noh is the mom whose story is told in the documentary Resilience.

Three Mothers

From Shannon, writing at BlogHer, an emotional recounting of her daughter's baptism and her daughter's first mother's participation:

Religious-minded people often praise adoption as some kind of uncomplicated good thing. Conservatives are convinced it rescues babies from abortion. (This is highly debatable to say the very least.) Progressives often assume it rescues them from unliveably terrible lives elsewhere. But the fact is, whatever else adoption may be, it is always, always, about grief. It can also about great joy, but it is always, without exception, about grief.

I had wanted to ceremonialize the joy, the love, the moment of making a family across blood -- family with child and family with mother -- but what sneaked in was the other truth about adoption -- the truth that it is not a joy to a mother when she cannot raise her own child. And our daughter’s mother couldn’t and can’t raise her child alone. For reasons that are not mine to share, she simply could never be a mother independent of a great deal of help -- the kind of help adoption alone could offer her in her particular circumstances, in our particular society. But that doesn’t matter. It doesn’t matter one whit whether she could or couldn’t do it herself. All that matters is that on a very real level -- open adoption or not -- she lost her baby the day she signed the adoption papers. And if she had not wailed primally about it before the baptism several months later, I am glad our family -- extended to the church congregation that day -- was able to give her a safe place to let that grief be heard.

Go read the whole thing! You won't be sorry, though you might want a handful of tissues before you go. . . .

'What's political about adoption?'

In opining on a bill introduced in the Texas Legislature to allow a "Choose Life" license plate, the pundit chides a legislator who says such a plate is "too political."  Hence the title of his piece, "What's political about adoption?"

What's political about adoption?  Linking it to abortion.  Despite his sentimental rhetoric about the joys of adoption ("think about the wonderful adopted children [you've] known"), he knows full well this license plate isn't about adoption.  If adoption was really the issue, wouldn't the license plate read "Choose Adoption?"

"The other side of adoption"

From the Sequim Gazette, a very interesting story about returning to Korea to meet birth parents and a project to collect letters from Korean childen to their birth mothers:

Sixteen years ago Rose Johnston got the best Mother’s Day gift ever: a baby boy adopted from Korea.

Zack Johnston was just 4 months old when he joined Rose and Craig Johnston and their daughter Katie Johnston two days before Mother’s Day in 1995.

This year, Rose Johnston is compiling a book of letters from adopted Korean children to their birth mothers — a way to give back to the Korean women who give up their children and never know if they are loved or how their children feel toward them.

In June 2010, Zack, Rose and Craig Johnston traveled with a large group of blended families to Korea as part of the Korean Ties Program.

“It was the first time we’d seen so many families like ours,” Rose Johnston said.

It was visiting a maternity home called Esther House that really opened the eyes of the Johnston family, especially Zack Johnston, to what these women go through in giving up their babies.

Zack Johnston said he wasn’t sure what to expect during the trip to Korea or Esther House.

“I was very confident that my family created who I am,” he explained. “But going back to connect with my birth country was good.”

He was adventurous in trying Korean food, including silkworms, raw octopus and sea urchin.

But he was shocked when he learned, while speaking to the pregnant women at Esther House, that their greatest fear was that their child would feel shame and hate them for giving them up.

Zack Johnston said he went into the experience not knowing what his birth mother went through and preparing himself emotionally not to be accepted by her. Instead he found the birth mothers were fearing rejection themselves.

Role of Asian Americans in the Civil War

So I'm sharing something I just learned about for AAPI Heritage Month -- from Voice of America:

Many people would be surprised to know that there were some Asian faces in the crowds of white and black soldiers serving in the American Civil War.

The participation of Asians, and in particular Chinese Americans, comes into focus this month as the United States marks the 150th anniversary of the start of the war.

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Even though there were only about 200 Chinese-Americans living in the eastern United States at the time, 58 of them fought in the Civil War. Because of their previous experiences at sea, many of them served in the U.S. Navy.

Only one Chinese-American soldier was actually born on American soil. The rest had come to the U.S. through the Pacific slave trade, adoption by Americans, independent immigration or the influence of missionaries.

Author Ruthanne Lum McCunn, an expert on Chinese-American history, says three Chinese-Americans rose to the rank of corporal in all-white units. “This might not seem like much but if you look at the way the armed services were operating at that time, it actually was significant,” she said.

Corporal Joseph Pierce, who as a child was brought to the United States from China by his adoptive father, fought in several major campaigns of the war including Antietam and Gettysburg. He was honored by having his picture displayed at the Gettysburg Museum.

“It is also important to remember that not all the Chinese who fought in the Civil War fought for the Union,” McCunn said. “At least five have been identified as fighting for the Confederacy,” she pointed out.

Two of these, Christopher and Stephen Bunker, were children of Siamese twins Chang and Eng, who had been brought to the U.S. to appear in the Barnum and Bailey Circus. The twins, of Chinese heritage, became prosperous, slave-owning farmers in North Carolina. It was not surprising, therefore, that their sons should fight for the South.

Hyphen Magazine shared the VOA link on facebook.  They are also doing a feature this month on unsung Asian American heroes.