OmegaMom

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.)

It’s spring break week.  The dotter is at "camp" at her after-school care place, and they’re doing "Blast From The Past" as the theme this week.  Monday was the ’40s, Tuesday the ’50s, etc.  The kids are dressing up each day.  The dotter won for best dress-up on Wednesday–she had a mini skirt, a top with paisleys and funky colors, and a headband over carefully parted straight hair.

Tomorrow is the final day.  The ’80s.  Big Hair is my immediate response.  So we’ve purchased soft rollers and I plan to torture have tortured the child with them tonight, covered the result with a kerchief, sent her to bed, and plan to fill her hair with hair spray tomorrow.

From the back:

Looking winsome from the front:

Laughing:

Notice all the pink.  I spared you the picture of the dotter in her kerchief in her pink room.

I don’t really know how to do Big Hair, but we have a curling iron for Big Bangs and lots of hair spray.  I will display results tomorrow.

In the meantime…there’s talk of a Netherlands documentary about Chinese adoption, specifically that there are lots of folks these days who are having their kids kidnapped by government officials and dumped at orphanages.  There are those who are appalled and those who think it’s old news.  In the meantime, I sit here and realize that, while it was easier to think of someone reclaiming OmegaDotter when she was just a babe, she is firmly entrenched in my heart now and the thought of having someone tell me our adoption was null and void at this point would–yes–make me spend a lifetime and a fortune in court, fighting tooth and nail to keep her with us.  That aside, I will write up some thoughts on the issue tomorrow.

I first heard about it on Figlet’s blog.

Then I read about it on Bastardette.

And reading some comments here and there, I found this at Heart, Mind, and Seoul.

The gist, for those who don’t want to follow the links, is that someone put up a website purporting to be an adoption agency where lucky adopters who need organ donations can get two, two, two! for the price of one:  An adorable child (or baby or teen) specifically type-matched to be an organ donor.  Or you could even use the kids for sexual purposes (never said right out loud, but implied).

As Bastardette says, it’s satire.  I recognized this almost as soon as I started reading the intro.

And it’s thorough, complete:  it includes a child listing, it includes adoption prices, it includes "testimonials" from satisfied parents.

And it’s appeared on Snopes and been debunked pretty quickly as a hoax (what a surprise).

But, of course, some people take it seriously, so it was the brunt of horrified "OMG!  Have you seen this horrible, horrible website!" comments on a variety of adoption lists and sites.  I will admit that the horror came from those who thought it was real and those who didn’t but thought it was Not Funny At All.

Two viewpoints.  Both having their points.  Two viewpoints, what is more, that are held by bloggers and posters who I actually find interesting, intelligent, respectful.  So, what to do, what to do?  Do I stand by my original POV, that of chortling in dismay at the black humor and poking at various shibboleths, the send-up of both the entire adoption industry and those who treat children as commodities, those who would put different prices on children based on their color?  I thought it was hilarious.  Dark, oh yes.  Blasting, oh yes.  Searing?  Oh yes.  Creepy?  Oh yes.  But hilarious.  This is the view of people like Figlet and Bastardette.  But horrible?  Bad?  Evil?  Not humorous at all?  People like HMS and Chicagomama (I think) stood on that side.  So I find myself torn, a bit.

The one objection that I truly agree with–once I thought it over–is that it uses real children’s pictures.  It didn’t occur to me at first; I figured they were stock pictures, but even so, perhaps that’s a step over the line.  The website could be done with children’s pictures from the back, or in the distance, or blurred by soft focus, and the "profiles" handled by not having pictures at all, with the complete justification that various countries don’t allow pictures.

But some objections?  They make me roll my eyes.  "Giving people ideas" about adopting children for sexual purposes?  "Giving people ideas"?!?!  Please.  Let me just say "Masha Allen".  (For those who don’t know, Masha Allen was adopted as a child from Russia by a single man who managed to spend years abusing her, videotaping the abuse, selling the videotapes, and more.)  There are plenty of sick, twisted people who already use adoption as a covert method of obtaining children for sexual purposes.

Then there was "oh, noes, people will come up to us in (insert country of choice) and ask us if we’re adopting for organs!".  Dudes.  Read about the rumors of the destination of internationally adopted children that run rampant in some countries–Russia, Guatemala, even China.  While I don’t know if anyone has ever actually done that (it would be most difficult to arrange, I would think!), the rumors swirl around, fly up, get denied, die down, and then pop up again all over again.  There’s not much to do about it except educating, over and over and over again–which people who have adopted have to do anyway.

It’s been sneered at as the work of someone with an ax to grind–either against organ donation or against adoption.  No…ya think so?

It "portrays children as commodities"–well, guess what?  They are, in many cases, around the world and here in the good ol’ U.S.A.

And the thing is:  There are adoption agencies that push the hard sell almost as much as this fake website does.  I have seen ads for children to be adopted from Russia where the child is described as "sweet, obedient, willing to help around the house"–profiles that make it pretty obvious the child is being pushed as a family helper, or a maid, rather than a beloved child.  There are agencies that are pushing for adoption from Vietnam whose Vietnamese facilitators went right back to the old, corrupt methods of obtaining children as soon as Vietnam re-opened for adoption after the prior corruption hiatus imposed by the U.S. immigration service.  There are agencies that still tell potential adoptive parents who are looking at China that it will take 12 months to get a referral–not telling the truth about the three to four-year wait until after the PAPs are signed up and well into the process (some obfuscating the wait until after the PAPs have their dossier completed and logged in with China’s central adoption authority).

There are agencies and facilitators that regularly pressure potential birthmothers into adoption.  There are crisis pregnancy centers that funnel girls into maternity homes and "counsel" them into adoption.  There are agencies that whisk pregnant women over state lines into states where the adoption laws favor the adoptive parents much more, and birth fathers have hardly any rights at all.  There are still, in this day and age, pregnant girls who are hidden away from "the neighbors" by their families, sent off to other cities to have their babies in secret, alone and unsupported, just to hand them over to adopters who have lied up and down and left and right about keeping the adoption open–until they get their hands on that baby.

All this website does is to distill and concentrate a whole slew of ethical issues with adoption and paste them into one fictitious bundle, guaranteed to raise hackles, make people swoon with horror, and maybe…just maybe…make some people think about some of the issues that surround adoption.

So, I guess, in the end, while I understand the objections some people have, I side squarely with those who find it a brilliant satire.  I won’t link to it, but if you’re interested, do a search on "medical adoptions".

I found it first on Twice the Rice.  Then PAGent posted about it.  Then Figlet.

The gist:  a diplomat and his wife, while living in Korea, adopt a 4-month-old little girl (and choose, of all stereotypical names, "Jade" for her name).  When the girl is 3, they move to Hong Kong.  At that point, they have two biological children.  At age 7, they decide to abandon their child to the social welfare system in Hong Kong, apparently citing "culture shock" or "inability to integrate into our lifestyle" or "problem with our foods" or "inability to integrate into our family", depending on which story you read.  Oh, yes, and then there’s the fact that she hasn’t been made a citizen of the diplomat’s country, or of Hong Kong, so she’s still a Korean citizen–but she doesn’t speak Korean–but she’ll probably have to go back to Korea in order to be legally adopted out again.

Dudes, OmegaDotter is almost six.

I simply cannot imagine taking her by the hand, taking her to Catholic Social Services or the county borough welfare system, and saying, "Eh…she’s too much for us.  She doesn’t like to eat the same things we do.  And, geez, she still won’t sleep in her own bedroom, and does the Foot Thing, and bashes against us as a sign of love, and we can’t take it any more.  Find her another home."

I find myself desperately hoping that there’s more to this story, that this couple aren’t as clueless and obnoxious as it seems.  That the child was threatening their smaller children.  That she had RAD and this is the end of a years-long struggle.  Or something.  That the "she doesn’t fit into their lifestyle" commentary was made by a grumpy social worker without a clue, rather than coming from the mouths of the adoptive parents.

Powered by Qumana

Angelina Jolie to adopt yet again?!  So soon?!

Okay.  I tried, but I can’t restrain myself.

Look, I love adoption.  It brought us our darlin’ girl who is a constant source of amazement and amusement.

But…but…

Oh, man.  Give those babies a chance to settle in, learn their new homes and families, let the familial orbits have a chance to stabilize.  Please. 

Even if we could toss money around like so much confetti and run hither and yon collecting whatever babies and children caught our fancy whenever we felt like it…

We wouldn’t.

We’d let whatever child we adopted take the time to find a fit, to realize that this is home, give our child the time to bond and attach.  So many things I’ve read from so many places on attachment emphasize that it takes as long as a child has been in an institution to form a real, permanent attachment.

I hope it’s just a rumor.

Technorati: Angelina Jolie, adoption, attachment