Finally some truth in advertising. Here's reporter E.J. Graff on the international orphan myth:
We all know the story of international adoption: Millions of infants and toddlers have been abandoned or orphaned—placed on the side of a road or on the doorstep of a church, or left parentless due to AIDS, destitution, or war. These little ones find themselves forgotten, living in crowded orphanages or ending up on the streets, facing an uncertain future of misery and neglect. But, if they are lucky, adoring new moms and dads from faraway lands whisk them away for a chance at a better life.
Unfortunately, this story is largely fiction.
Westerners have been sold the myth of a world orphan crisis. We are told that millions of children are waiting for their “forever families” to rescue them from lives of abandonment and abuse. But many of the infants and toddlers being adopted by Western parents today are not orphans at all. Yes, hundreds of thousands of children around the world do need loving homes. But more often than not, the neediest children are sick, disabled, traumatized, or older than 5. They are not the healthy babies that, quite understandably, most Westerners hope to adopt. There are simply not enough healthy, adoptable infants to meet Western demand—and there’s too much Western money in search of children. As a result, many international adoption agencies work not to find homes for needy children but to find children for Western homes.
More from this excellent article:
Along the way, the international adoption industry has become a market often driven by its customers. Prospective adoptive parents in the United States will pay adoption agencies between $15,000 and $35,000 (excluding travel, visa costs, and other miscellaneous expenses) for the chance to bring home a little one. Special needs or older children can be adopted at a discount. Agencies claim the costs pay for the agency’s fee, the cost of foreign salaries and operations, staff travel, and orphanage donations. But experts say the fees are so disproportionately large for the child’s home country that they encourage corruption.
To complicate matters further, while international adoption has become an industry driven by money, it is also charged with strong emotions. Many adoption agencies and adoptive parents passionately insist that crooked practices are not systemic, but tragic, isolated cases. Arrest the bad guys, they say, but let the “good” adoptions continue. However, remove cash from the adoption chain, and, outside of China, the number of healthy babies needing Western homes all but disappears.
Read the article and then check out the Schuster Institute for Investigative Journalism for more information. Listen to Leonard Lopate's interview with the author, E.J. Graff, Associate Director and Senior Researcher, Schuster Institute for Investigative Journalism.
The only "bone" I could pick with Ms. Graff's excellent article, was "Outside of China". There have been numerous examples of baby stealing and smuggling by baby brokers. The adoption mythology of magically appearing baby girls showing up on street corners is nearly an iron curtain. Perhaps it was that way in the early 1990s, but it is not that way anymore. Try explaining that to the waiting masses of American PAPs.
ReplyDeleteI'd also like to point out, on the financial end, that because of the "credit boom" in the late 1990s & 2000s, AParents (such as myself) were able to borrow lots & lots of money to fund these adoptions. Easy money translated into an international adoption boom.
"In her discussion of international adoption, Graff focuses on adoptive parents’ desire for “healthy, adoptable babies.” Never does she mention that around 40 percent of adoption from China last year, the largest sending country for adoption, was of special needs children nor does she point out that most of the children adopted from Russia (also in the top five sending countries) are children with medical needs. These are not the parents searching for a “perfect child” portrayed in the article. And the fate of children with special needs in the developing world remains dire. They are a discriminated against minority who face a dire dearth of medical care and as a result, shortened, stunted lives."
ReplyDeleteDiane Kunz fails to explain that the majority of those people who chose to adopt a child with a SN were actually waiting in line among the other 25,000+ international families for a NSN adoption and had it not been for the corruption within the China program these families would have remained in the NSN route.
She does not explain as well that many of these adoptions were of children who had very minimal or fully corrected SNs as well as healthy older children with no SN.
Only when massive issues arose within the IA program and the Hunan scandal exposed how orphanages were obtaining children for the IA demand -- then things began to slow down with corrupt orphanages pausing their baby buying programs for a period. And even the Hunan scandal showed how damage control was done and minimal accountability was placed on the orphanages and the China program.
Now with the increase in donation and more buying power along with pressure to produce more children to alleviate the backlog of waiting families and the pressure from agencies that are now hurting financially, CCAA is working hard to get "all children's files submitted" and to “limit orphanages from placing kids for domestic adoptions”.
Infants will continue to be submitted for IA despite the millions of domestic families who desire or rely on adoption. International adoptions will be favoured over domestic adoptions inside of China due to financial reasons and this will sadly continue the epidemic of child snatching that is seen in order to fulfill the domestic demand.
Children found at the gates of the orphanage, found by orphanage staff, found by repeat finders or found in fictitious locations... this will all still continue because the political pressures and the billions of dollars will ensure that kids keep flowing.
Now we see much older children, who have living relatives in China who love them and cared for them, being submitted into the IA stream. Agencies are now going inside of China and working very hard to ease the children's concerns about IA. "Camps" that work to promote IA and to persuade these older children to make the decision to leave the families that they love and move across the world into another home with another family and another entire culture. All for the sake of money!!
If the older children do not want to be adopted then agencies should not be using solicitation and coercion to get them to agree to IA and they should also not be placing videos and pictures online to promote the adoptions of these children! Regulations and family requirements have been waived and fees “anonymously donated” to allow these children to fill the gap that the NSN infants left once the program began to crater.
I do hope Ms. Graff will one day have the time to revisit her article on The Lie We Love and explore the China situation much deeper. China is not removed from the same type of corruption found in other programs; the lack of access prevents this truth from being fully exposed.