“Four years ago, he claimed, a stranger””a middleman in the adoption trade””came to his village and persuaded him to give up a child with the promise that she would grow up and send money to support him.
Can you guess where this happened? Where is this village, this destitute father, this “middleman in the adoption trade? Where are lies charading as promises for the express purpose of procuring children for international adoption this time?
Is it China? Guatemala? Cambodia? India? Mexico? Vietnam?
This time, this particular quote in this particular article is from a father in Ethiopia. His story is told in an all too familiar fashion by The Wall Street Journal, “Inside Ethiopia’s Adoption Boom.
The father, however, is not the focus of the article. His child, Mel, is. As far as I can tell, there was nothing actually illegal about Mel’s adoption. Her father willingly relinquished her; her mother had died of malaria and he was left with six children to feed and care for. After he brought her to an orphanage she was adopted by a family in Minnesota. Though he claims he did not understand the relinquishment was final and he did not place his daughter “to become someone else’s child but “to help me, he also attended an “entrustment ceremony,” a ritual in which a birth relative symbolically transfers the parental role to the adoptive parents where he met the adoptive parents and told them he knew what he was doing.
The U.S. adoption agency responsible for the placement gave monthly support to the orphanage Mel was in, but at a flat rate, not based on the number of children placed through their agency. While it might be preferable to completely divorce the agencies from the orphanages, it is certainly a better arrangement than many of those found in Vietnam in 2008.
“In order to obtain a license from DIA, an ASP had to strike an agreement with a provincial-level orphanage, specifying the donations that the ASP would make to the orphanage and a per diem rate that the ASP would pay for the care of each child for whom they arranged an adoption.
As a result, given the limited supply of young infants in orphanages, the directors and ASP facilitators began efforts to recruit new “orphans to meet the demands of the international adoption market”¦
What happened in Vietnam is not so unusual. The same (to an apparent lesser degree) can be said of Ethiopia:
“Ethiopia stood out with a wait time for a healthy child of only about 12 months. Western adoption agencies flocked to the capital, Addis Ababa. Across Ethiopia, local orphanages sprang up to meet demand.
Ethiopia is not a signatory to the Hague; neither was Vietnam in 2008. However Ethiopia has tried to step in to halt the corruption.
“Ethiopia last year began strengthening its oversight and for a few months slashed the number of adoptions processed. As of late October 2011, it had closed about two dozen orphanages suspected of irregularities.
Will it be enough?
What if they signed on to the Hague, as Vietnam has? Can we assume that all of the corruption previously seen in Vietnam will be gone because they are a Hague signatory? If so, why doesn’t the US just restart adoptions right now?
The official line from the State Department, issued in February:
“Despite Vietnam’s initiatives to strengthen its child welfare system and ensure the integrity of its domestic and international adoption process, it does not yet have a fully Hague compliant process in place.
Not yet. But soon? Dare we hope? And what exactly does a “fully Hague compliant process look like?
Here’s one thing I know for certain: “Fully Hague Compliant does not mean “100% corruption free. It can’t. It’s not possible. Read that WSJ article, and watch the accompanying video report, and then tell me how we erase all corruption. I read and watched with two perspectives in mind: as an adoptive mother and as an advocate for ethical adoptions. In the role of the latter, alarm bells rang when the father says he was induced to relinquish and that he still believes his child will return, educated and ready to support the family. As an adoptive mom, I couldn’t help but be sympathetic to Mel’s new mom, who says they never offered any money or made any promises other than a “someday visit with their daughter. “Something could be lost in translation” she says. And therein lies the rub.
Even with the best of intentions on the parts of both the first family and the adoptive parents, cultural and language differences practically guarantee misunderstandings. Now step back and remember that to all the other participants in the adoption process, it is, at best, a legal transaction. Government paper pushers, agency personnel, “middle-men, all with their own moral codes and reasons for participating in inter-country adoptions; is it possible for the Hague to hold them all to a perfect ethical standard? How? Can any of us even say with any certainty that we know what the perfect ethical standard is?
It’s a muddle. Conflicting needs, differing stories, ever-changing standards, consequences we couldn’t predict, an all-out muddle. And if you have adopted or you plan to adopt one day, you need to accept that reality, because it isn’t going to change regardless of where you plan to adopt from (and that includes the US). But let me be clear, when I say “accept I don’t mean “turn a blind eye and pretend it all doesn’t exist.
In the end, we have to strive for this: The best interests of the child. If we don’t look out for the best interest of our (future) children, who will?
Turning back to that article, while I see problems with the way that Mel was relinquished I also see everything her adoptive parents did to ensure the adoption was ethical. They used a well-respected agency. They spoke face to face with the father. And then they later went back to Ethiopia after the adoption to meet the family and see where their daughter was from. What seems clear to me is that Mel has parents – in two countries – who love her and want the very best for her. I’m not sure we can ask for any better than that.
What do you think? Have I set the bar too low? Too high? What standards would you like to see in place before the US allows adoptions from Vietnam to resume? Is there anything more we can or should be doing to protect and better educate relinquishing families? If you are planning to adopt, what steps are you going to take to make the adoption process as transparent and ethical as possible? Adoptive parents, what would you would do differently if you had it to do over again?
Update: For an opposing view on this same story, read EJ Graff’s, Don’t Adopt From Ethiopia. And then come back here to talk about it.
2 Responses
This is a very informative article, but I’m not getting that Mel’s father had his child’s best interest at heart. As someone who teaches in a poor city in the US, I see how children can become commodities for parents, and it sounds like that was the promise or understanding here. I think it is tragic when poverty forces families to make these kinds of choices, but I also think, without reservation, that the children are better off in economically stable homes where they are not expected to add the economic support of the family and have a change to develop strong, educated lives of their own. Without this opportunity, the cycle continues.
I’m not sure my comment went through, but as an afterthought, there are many who make the hard choice to give up their children in the US, or have the state make that choice for them. I can’t say that someone has to say, “I have no desire to have this child” to end up doing the right thing by allowing the child to have a stable life.