When Ok Chin was a child, her mother brought her to an orphanage. The family was poor, and her mother heard that the girl would get fed and clothed. Ok Chin would get an education. Maybe if the family's fortunes improved, she could rejoin her brothers and sisters.
What happened next was unexpected. Another little girl at the orphanage was scheduled for an international adoption when her birth family showed up suddenly and took that girl back home. But a family in the United States was waiting for their child. So the orphanage performed one of those swaps that figure in so many fairy tales. Ok Chin became Cha Jung Hee. Identification cards were changed, birthdates were amended, and photos exchanged. When Ok arrived in the United States, she tried to explain the situation to her new adoptive parents. But she only spoke Korean, and her adoptive family only spoke English.
The little girl's memories gradually began to fade away. Only later, as Deann Borshay Liem explains in her must-see autobiographical documentary, In the Matter of Cha Jung Hee, did the discrepancy between the initial photo of Cha Jung Hee sent to her adoptive family and her own photo taken before she left Korea provide evidence of the deception. Fortunately, Deann Borshay Liem had a loving adoptive family, and -- through considerable detective work -- managed to reconnect with her birth family. But her story illustrates some of the challenges facing the international baby trade.
First of all, the global baby trade is a market. Adoptive families pay a lot of money -- to the sending country, adoption agencies, and lawyers. For many years, South Korea was the leading sending country, and the hard currency it earned from international adoptions helped the country recover from the Korean War's devastation.
Like any market, the unscrupulous find plenty of ways to make money. A child-buying scandal that erupted in Cambodia about 10 years ago drew wide media coverage. The European Union pressured Romania to place a ban on international adoptions, largely as a result of a report to the European Parliament by Lady Emma Nicholson. "Impoverished families were coerced and deceived into giving up their children who were then effectively sold on to Western couples under the guise of international adoption," Nicholson argued in a 2004 Guardian article.
Guatemala, once the largest per-capita source of adopted children, sent one out of every 100 live births to families abroad. The government instituted a two-year moratorium on international adoptions in 2007 and found evidence that the rumors of baby-snatching were true. These abuses come on top of revelations that the army abducted at least 333 children during Guatemala's "dirty war," sometimes even killing the parents to deliver the children to government-run orphanages for foreign adoption.
The global adoption trade fluctuates not simply as a result of wars, natural disasters, and economic adversity. In 1990, even though by then a major developed economy, South Korea was still the largest sender country for U.S. adoptions. In South Korea, there has long been a stigma attached to children born out of wedlock or to ethnically mixed parents. In China, meanwhile, the one-child policy -- and the cultural preference for male babies -- pushed thousands of little girls into the baby trade and propelled China into the No. 1 spot for sending countries even as the Chinese economy expanded.
The baby market is subject to the same neocolonial distortions that affect other commodities. Imagine a couple from Vietnam visiting the United States to adopt a white baby because they want to give the child a more spiritually rich life and save it from an existence poisoned by Wii, reality TV, and KFC. With rare exceptions, it's the poor countries that supply babies to the rich countries.
Sometimes, the rich just swoop in and take from the poor. In Sierra Leone, after the widespread amputations that took place during the civil war, some staff of U.S. charities persuaded amputee parents to give up their amputee children for adoption "in a manner that seemed to combine aspects of bribery and kidnapping," writes Philip Gourevitch in The New Yorker. After Haiti's earthquake, the New Life Children's Refuge attempted to transport 33 alleged orphans out of the country to place with American parents. Not only did the transfer qualify as smuggling, since the Baptist activists didn't acquire any documentation from the Haitian side, but one-third of the children weren't even orphans. One child thought she was going to a summer camp.
Legal scholar David Smolin prefers to speak of "child laundering," a process by which "the current intercountry adoption system frequently takes children illegally from birth parents, and then uses the official processes of the adoption and legal systems to 'launder' them as 'legally' adopted children." Smolin knows from personal experience. He and his wife adopted two adolescent girls from India only to discover that they'd been essentially stolen from their birth family.
For the most part we try to do everything possible to obscure the fact that international adoption is a market. Adoption agencies paint a pretty picture of children saved and adoptive families enriched. Much of this is true. The international adoption business has certainly saved children from poverty, stigmatization, and even death. It has created thousands of hybrid families that are just as happy, sad, and complicated as any other family. But it's still a business, which suffers from all the problems of a business (and then some).
Sometimes the commodity nature of the process becomes impossible to miss. Earlier this year, a Tennessee woman put her adopted 7-year-old unaccompanied on a plane back to Russia with a note that read "I no longer wish to parent this child" -- just like he were a piece of defective merchandise that she could send back to the manufacturer.
Businessman Ted Turner recently proposed adding a new twist to the baby trade. Rather than pay families for their babies, he wants to do the opposite: pay them not to have babies. The global population is expected to peak around 10 billion people in 2050. More people will produce more carbon emissions, Turner argues, so an obvious solution is to control population increase the Chinese way: by adopting a one-child limit globally. Imposing such a rule would be neither popular nor feasible, so Turner proposes a market incentive system. By selling their fertility rights, poor families could profit by their decision not to breed. Turner's proposal sounds suspiciously like a modern eugenics program.
His proposal also comes at a time when close to half the world's population now lives in countries with fertility rates below replacement level, according to Nicholas Eberstadt in Foreign Affairs. The birth dearth in economically advanced countries -- Japan, South Korea, Western Europe -- is well known. But the "great majority of the world's populations with sub-replacement fertility in fact reside in low-income societies," Eberstadt writes. The trading of fertility rights on the open market -- combined with the aggressive marketing of international adoption agencies -- might lead to even more radical shrinkage of countries already below the replacement rate of 2.1 births per woman such as Moldova (1.28), Thailand (1.65), Lebanon (1.78), and Vietnam (1.93).
What Turner ignores, of course, is that Americans are responsible for nearly five times the global average for per-capita carbon emissions. Even the most environmentally responsible Americans have a carbon footprint twice the size of the global average. In other words, our consumption of things -- not their production of babies -- is the problem.
The solution to climate change, therefore, is obvious. The countries that have the smallest carbon footprints should adopt U.S. babies. We should send our children to Cambodia, Guatemala, and Moldova where they won't have such a damaging effect on the global environment. Reverse the baby trade now! It's not likely, however, that Ted Turner, the environmental movement, and the international adoption agencies will adopt this slogan any time soon.
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Mark Hyman, MD: Haiti: The Rubble Remains, the Wounds Still Fester
The women at http://www.firstmotherforum.com/have been writing about this international scandal for quite a while.
Why would anyone want to live with the family they are born to when that family is not so good? People lose their jobs, put their children in daycare and get divorced. It is a blessing when a solid church going two parent couple wants a child and is willing to pay the fees.
There should be more adoptions. This year the adoptino tax credit is over Thriteen Thousand Dollars - so if you are married and throught you could not afford to adopt - now you probably can.
I have a friend who was adopted into those very circumstances and she was raped by her adoptive father regularly from the age of 8 to 17 or so.
Do you think she was better off with her adoptive familiy?
If adoption is truly the best thing for the child, then why don't you give up your children to a deserving couple? I'm sure we can find someone in better circumstances (there's always someone in better curcumstances), so you should give them up to give them a better future.
Your perspective is logical and sane only when viewed through the eyes of western privledge. The adoption agencies have long abandoned the principle of finding families for children that need them. Now they operate under the idea of finding children for parents that want them. How sad.
Also, thank you, Mr. Feffer, for not propagating the "magic of international adoption" myth.
It's a blessing when families have to give up their children over a lost job? It's a blessing because someone will deign to buy their child from them instead of help them--and then turn their back on their continued poverty? Jesus was down with that? I don't think so.
People who are not Christians, married, and/or well-off also love their children. They love their children as much as and in the same way these "better" families love theirs. Their children love them too, and suffer when they are taken from them. If no abuse is involved, the Christian virtue would lie in helping these families stay together, not in tearing them apart. If you gain something by your action, that action is not charity, is it?
Jesus had empathy and compassion for the poor, for prostitutes, for tax collectors, for everyone. Those who would bring children to Jesus by robbing them of their families are ravening wolves:
"Woe unto you [...], hypocrites! for ye compass sea and land to make one proselyte, and when he is made, ye make him twofold more the child of hell than yourselves."
http://cchronicle.com/2009/11/what-does-%E2%80%9Cgotcha%E2%80%9D-mean/comment-page-1/#comment-14773
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Global warming, yes.
Environmental destruction, partly.
Suffering of a couple of billion people carelessly brought into the world, no.
If it is okay for all to talk about who is responsible for global warming, then let it be okay for all to talk about who is responsible for human suffering. Otherwise this resurgence of treating humans as chattels, of slavery through human trafficking and cruel employment practices will continue.
There are many countries and many cities heading for collapse because they cannot produce work for the young. Let us start assigning responsibility for this state of affairs.
Is aid from the West, the average tax-payer of the West paying for things, the rich of the Third World and the West should be paying for?
While money is the most basic motivation in this industry, attention should also be paid to the groups that believe they have been given a task, by God or otherwise, to put these children into what they consider "better lives". No one has the right to redistribute the children of the world, for any reason.
Adoption is such a gift to people that cannot have children, it's such a shame that these terrible practices are making it so much harder for people who want to bring a child into thier lives.
This reality is why the Adoption Tax Credit (which was sold as a method to help children "languishing in US foster care") applies to infant adoption and foreign adoption. Adoption is "sold" to the public as a way to help children, but in reality too many prospective adoptive parents want to adopt healthy babies, not the children who are already available. This leads to all sorts of corruption.
Why don't people adopt kids from their own nations? Sure there is the fear that your adopted child will someday go back to the birth parents but if you raised your adopted child well there is no way that child will not recognize the adopted parents as "real" parents even if they are in contact with their birth parents.
They looked into adopting domestically, but the cost (enormous) and logistics made it seem like they didn't really want those children to be adopted! Agencies that go to other countries are less strict about it. I know that's a dangerous thought, but in a practical sense, it makes it easier for loving families to bring a child into their lives.
I'll confess that I'm a little uncomfortable with the international adoptions because of the financials involved. I know exactly how our sons came to be adoptable. I know their biological mothers (fathers MIA in both cases). I would be uncomfortable without that knowledge in an international adoption...or at least without as much confidence in the accuracy of that knowledge. It's probably paranoid, I know.
It is up to an adoptee to decide who means what to them and my First Mother is certainly more than a uterus. I would be baffled if my Adoptive Mother said such disrespectful things about the mother who created me and who continues to love me to this day. "Real" parents? Are there fake ones? Are there fake kids? These words were designed to validate Adoptive Parents and direct adoptees on exactly how they ought to feel. Who is adoption about? The children? Or the parents?
What's the difference?
I have no problem with two Daddies - as long as they are committed to each other and their children and rear them to responsible adulthood - WAY more than I and many other adoptees got!
Giving a baby away is almost always an Economic decision - young women of means don't HAVE to give their babies away - witness Bristol Palin.
Adoption should be about Finding Loving Homes for Needy Children - NOT finding babies for Needy Homes!
Been there, my $0.02
If you have a child, how much would you sell him or her for? You wouldn't? But it's beautiful, and it's just so sad when women dare to keep their own newborns. Really, I want to know how big a "contribution" I would have to make to score your kid.
My parents paid about $200 for legal paperwork in 1965, because I was adopted through the state. Those days of easy access to healthy white infants are over, because very few women can be shamed out of their babies anymore. Again, unless the original family is abusive, this is cause for celebration, not lamentation. Adoption is wonderful for the newly formed family, perhaps, but it is tragic for the relinquishing family, and the child is caught in the middle of this.
Adoption was not supposed to supply people with babies. It was supposed to supply children with families.
Also, your racism and homophobia are showing. But you knew that.
"Businessman Ted Turner recently proposed adding a new twist to the baby trade. Rather than pay families for their babies, he wants to do the opposite: pay them not to have babies."
Why is it that businesspeople are generally unable to think outside the terms of money? This idea of Turner's is fraught with problems. Namely, how do you monitor the people that you are giving money to? I'd assume that if it were at all possible, that it would involve a lot more money.
A better idea would be to take that money that Turner wants to waste and invest it in education in these poorer countries.
Why? Because education is the silver bullet. Education leads to prosperity. Prosperity leads to lower birth rates.
Of course, this is a long-term, generational plan. Which is why no one will pay it any attention.
The solution to climate change, therefore, is obvious. The countries that have the smallest carbon footprints should adopt U.S. babies. We should send our children to Cambodia, Guatemala, and Moldova where they won't have such a damaging effect on the global environment. Reverse the baby trade now! It's not likely, however, that Ted Turner, the environmental movement, and the international adoption agencies will adopt this slogan any time soon.''
i fully agree with these last two paragraphs.