Gingerly stepping into the muck and mire
posted in Adoption, Adoption News, Issues, News |When we adopted OmegaDotter, we had A Plan. That plan was to–as soon as possible, i.e., a year after signing on the dotted line for the dotter–apply for another adoption from China.
Well, that first year was…difficult. Having a baby in the house is life-altering, tiring, exhilarating, fun, wearing. And then I got laid off. Oops. So we decided to put it off another year. But then that next year, OmegaDad had some health issues that required all our attention. So we decided to put it off another year. Then we learned that OmegaDad’s health issues put us off the list for China, including the special needs list. So we sulked and dithered and dilly-dallied. We thought about other programs.
One of the other countries we thought about–for a very, very short while–was Vietnam. But it was never a real serious discussion. For one thing, it was much, much more expensive than China. And while our first year was chugging along, word was building that corruption was rife in Vietnam adoptions. In 2003, the U.S. put a total freeze on adoptions from Vietnam until it could be demonstrated that the adoption system had been cleaned up to the point where the U.S. Embassy could feel relatively assured that the corruption had been rooted out. In 2006, Vietnam and the U.S. signed a memorandum of understanding re-opening international adoptions from Vietnam to the U.S.
Almost immediately, problems began resurfacing. We’re talking mere months after that MOU was signed.
Things, IMO, went downhill from there.
Part of the problem was that the wait for adoptions from China had drastically slowed down. And some of the thousands of potential adoptive parents who were desperate for a child began to turn to other countries for an "interim" adoption–figuring that any adoption from another country would be finalized long enough before China got around to them that they’d still fit the qualifications (a year–or was it six months?! it’s never been quite clear–between adding any new child to the family). Vietnam had a reputation for being quick, if you were willing to spend the money, so families started queuing up.
And then, in October and November 2007, families who were trying to adopt from Vietnam started getting Notices of Intent to Deny from the U.S. Immigration and Naturalization Service (or whatever its official title is these days). The NOIDs were based on suspicions or indications that something was amiss with the proposed adoptions; that the children in question were not actually abandoned, not actually the children described by the documentation, maybe the result of baby-selling, maybe the result of kidnapping. The potential parents, alas, were already in Vietnam expecting to be able to bring their babies home, and the NOIDs stopped them cold. Many decided to simply stay in Vietnam with the babies until things cleared up.
Rumors began building in the Vietnam adoption community that the U.S. would not renew the MOU when it expired, in September of this year.
A week or two ago, the U.S. Embassy in Hanoi issued a "Summary of Irregularities in Adoptions in Vietnam", along with a "Warning Concerning Adoptions in Vietnam". The warning specifically states "recent field investigations have revealed incidents of serious adoption irregularities, including forged or altered documentation, mothers paid, coerced or tricked into releasing their children, and children offered for adoption without the knowledge or consent of their birth parents." The summary states that U.S. officials in Vietnam had investigated more than 300 cases over a six-month period; to give an idea of the percent of potential adoptions investigated, there were 828 adoptions from Vietnam by U.S. parents in 2007.
It seems pretty clear that this is not a witch hunt by U.S. officials. The stories in the summary make it plain that corruption and bribery are rampant in the process.
The problem is, of course, that potential adoptive parents are wildly emotionally involved. It’s practically impossible to expect potential adoptive parents to say–when confronted with an official piece of paper that claims that the baby you have been holding and cuddling and thinking of as your "own" for two weeks and that the Vietnamese courts have declared is your "own"–"Oh. You’re right. We can’t adopt this child–the evidence is too overwhelming that her birthmother was scammed out of her baby. Here. Take her back." So the adoptive families pull strings, and heartstrings, trying to get the NOIDs revoked, removed, the immigration visa approved, ogodogodletusgohomewithherplease.
I’d like to think (ahem. See my halo here? It’s nice and shiny! And I got it cheap!) that in that situation, OmegaDad and I would do what we thought was the ethical thing. It is, of course, easy for me to say; we are safe and sound and working on our dotter’s sixth year home with us, and even the rumblings of corruption in the Chinese adoption system seem to have cranked up after her adoption. And I have already said, in the midst of another post, that at this point, if someone came forward with evidence that her birthfamily had not abandoned her, I would fight tooth and claw to keep her with us…though I would also like to think (halo, remember?) that we’d do whatever possible to make sure we could take her to China on a regular basis to visit her birthfamily.
So when a good internet bud of mine forwards a plea to call, email, write, fax senators, congresscritters, and the INS/USCIS on behalf of one of the families who has been stuck in Vietnam since last fall, facing a second NOID, I am left unsettled and disturbed. My heart breaks for the adoptive parents. My heart also breaks, though, for the birthfamily. I feel I cannot, in good conscience, do any such thing without full knowledge of the particulars of the case (and I tend to suspect, given that the word is the INS/USCIS is going to issue a second NOID, that the particulars are pretty egregious). What if it’s the case where the birthmother’s baby was withheld from her by a hospital so that she would pay the hospital bill for a premature birth? Or the one where the birthfamily, fallen on hard times, was told by an orphanage official, "Hey–leave the baby with us for a while until you get back on your feet…We’ll take care of him, and you can take him back home when you’re better off and more able to deal with it…"? Or the one where the birthmother was a young single woman who was being housed in a maternity home, and told, after the birth, "Oh, by the way, unless you can pay us back the year’s income that it cost us to house you, we’re going to have to take your baby away…"?
In the end, I am sorry to say, it still seems to come down to money.
(For a very worthwhile read, go to Voices For Vietnam Adoption Integrity.)
