Since writing the original artificial twinning post I’ve spoken to several families and read even more accounts about artificial twins and, based on the comments from the last post, I felt some clarity and expansion on the issue was in order.
The post was not meant to detail out the pros and cons of consensual adoption or parenting of unrelated same-age children. As a step-parent, I married into a family situation that involved artificial twinning and I have seen the benefits and consequences, first hand. I do not believe there is any right or wrong opinion on that particular issue. It isn’t right for everyone but it isn’t entirely wrong either, in my opinion. Since it was such a hot topic, however, I welcome anyone who would like to take a stab at submitting a post outlining the benefits and drawbacks of adopting non-biologically-related same-age (or similar-age) children.
However the original post was written specifically to overview the unethical practice of matching babies as twins that are not biologically related and then lying to families to try to pass them off as biological twins.
You might wonder what the problem is if the parents are homestudy approved for 2 or more children, if they have the resources to handle two at once, etc. Parents, through adoption, already have let go of their stakes in biology. Does the biological relatedness of “twins really matter?
It matters. A lot.
First of all, an agency that is lying to its families could be lying about all sorts of things. Lying erodes the integrity of the agency and the ethics of the program. It is not any better to be the beneficiary of one’s lies than it is to be the one harmed from one’s lies. Lies are lies, they do no good. Smaller issues have brought a country’s adoption program to its knees.
The Vietnamese government does not condone lying about such things and either does the U.S. Embassy. Recently an investigation of this very issue was conducted in one province in Vietnam. The results of which are unknown but the message is clear: passing off biologically unrelated children as twins is unethical and will not be tolerated.
Then there is the very real concern of the child or children who are victims of this practice. Clearly for twins to be passed off as biologically related there must be proof or an agency just goes on a wing and a prayer and hopes that the parents don’t ask any questions or read their paperwork thoroughly. If there is proof, that proof would have to be fabricated for one, if not both, children. Which child has the false history? How can a parent look their children in the face and tell them that they have no idea what the real circumstances of their pre-adoption history entail because the agency or orphanage lied in favor of passing them off as related? How can a parent assure their child or children that all means necessary were respected to insure a legal and ethical adoption when their histories were filled with lies and corruption? How does a parent decipher the lies from the truth?
A family may tell itself that all of that is irrelevant because they love their children and their children love each other. It may very well be irrelevant for the parents. It isn’t their tragedy, their loss. It isn’t a falsification of their own histories. It may very well be extremely relevant to their child or children, down the line. It is, in fact, living a lie.
I have heard some parents claim that it is OK because they are rescuing their children from a life of misery as orphans in impoverished orphanages. This is just self-justification. The lines to adopt infants in Vietnam are long and growing. If a child is a legal non-special-needs orphan under the age of 5, they will not be left behind. If your homestudy social worker and agency has not stressed this enough to you, let me do it now:
Adoption is not about finding children for families. It is about finding families for children!
As parents, it isn’t for us to put our own desires ahead of what is ethical or what is right for children. There is no “good enough justification for knowingly agreeing to partake in lying in order to adopt two children at once.
If you are hoping for a referral of twins, please do your future children a favor and ask all the necessary questions when those referrals come in.:
- How does the agency know that the children are biologically related?
- Will the orphanage agree to simple DNA matching to determine the relatedness of the children?
- How many twin referrals has the agency completed, to date?
- What were the circumstances of the children’s abandonment or relinquishment?
You may be waiting a long time for your referral; you may have been waiting even longer to build your family. It may be tempting to turn a blind eye and assume the best without any facts to back that up. But this isn’t fair to anyone. When parents blindly accept corruption as part of the program, they become party to that corruption and they endorse, through their actions, that very corruption. This is no way to build a family.
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