Whatever Things Are True: the Good, the Bad and the Beautiful in the World of International Adoption

The Nation Gets International Adoption Wrong, and It's Depressing

Oh my. First, Reuters Online puts out an adoption story with minimal fact-checking, and now The Nation publishes an opinion piece by Columbia Law Professor Patricia J. Williams that is so full of international adoption stereotypes it's depressing. In Save the Children? Professor Williams essentially says:

• If  someone wants to adopt for  humanitarian reasons, she should work for an NGO or just go "plow a field" instead.
• People are adopting out of "missionary smugness."
• International adoption is a form of human trafficking.
• "In many international and interracial adoptions, kids are raised to look down on their origins."
• Adopters see children as commdodities that can be returned.
• People want "exotic" children.
• People want to be like Angelina Jolie.
• Many white adopters prefer a damaged and "catatonic" white Romanian orphan to a healthy African American child.
• Adopters are selfish.

Where to begin? For starters, can I just point out that Romania's international adoption program has been closed for almost seven years? That may seem like nit-picking, but really, if Ms. Williams is unaware of the drama and turmoil surrounding the closure of that country, how deeply has she delved into the facts and specifics vs. opinion, prejudice and ideology on the subject?

There is so much real child welfare work to do, so many meaningful ways that international adoption can and should be improved.  Angelina Jolie is not the problem.

Please, if The Nation article bothers you as much as it does me, go leave Ms. Williams a helpful comment there. Let's talk facts.

International Adoption: It's Not All About the Money

One of the most passionate arguments against international adoption goes like this: large sums of money flowing from desperate, greedy Western parents drives a push to "harvest" children in developing countries, especially babies. This ugly scenario is in fact possible; in "Anatomy of an Adoption Crisis," journalist E.J. Graff examines US State Department documents concerning the adoption program in Vietnam that seem to prove that Vietnamese orphanages were "sourcing" and  "producing" children to meet demand. Many critics claim that if you take Western cash off the table, the number of kids proposed for adoption will plummet. This assessment has always felt willfully simplistic to me; the child welfare issues driving the global orphan crisis are far more complex than that. Case in point: the ongoing persecution of the Romani people, the gypsies of Europe.

In the past month, France has deported more than 1,000 Roma, forcing them back to Romania and Bulgaria, where they also face horrific discrimination and exploitation, as I've written in the past. The expulsion has ignited a firestorm, with human rights activists and European politicians calling for France to be booted from the European Union, and certain bloggers even comparing the French to the Nazis. However, as this article shows, Holland, Italy, Germany and Sweden have similarly harassed the Romani people and sought to drive them out. There is truly no place in Europe the Roma can go to live in peace.

The fact is that Romani children are disproportionally represented in Bulgarian and Romanian orphanages; many Roma also end up institutionalized in Russia and other Eastern European locales. Some of these kids land in the international adoption pipeline, a tragedy driven clearly by discrimination and European politics vs. demand created by foreign adoption money.

At one time, my husband and I sought to adopt from Bulgaria; we hoped for a Romani child. Had our Bulgarian adoption succeeded, we would have seen ourselves as responding to a humanitarian need; adoption critics certainly would have seen us as exploiting the tragedy of the Roma. The bottom line is this: Americans are not lining up to adopt Romani children, and yet Europe's orphanages are overflowing with them. A grasp of the total human rights picture and an international outcry is needed to protect the Roma and keep more original families intact.

To learn more, visit the European Roma Rights Centre.

Romania's Missing and Invisible Orphans

I just stumbled across a compelling article published last August in Vivid magazine about the current state of Romania's orphan population. Writer Stephen Maughan reports that the situation is murky; Romania was required to close all its orphanages in 2007 in order to join the European Union, but it's unclear where thousands of these children have gone.

Romania closed to international adoption in 2004 with unresolved adoption cases left in the pipeline. This kind of news must be painful for families who had been referred a specific child and still wait and wonder.