I am not the greatest writer so when I saw this post I knew I needed to post it. It says many of the things on my mind lately and it is a relief to know someone else thinks some of those same things.
"In Ethiopia adoption is not going smoothly right now. It's a problem that's been building steadily, as more foreigners have come in to adopt, and more agencies have been running, and not all of them ethically. There are some really horrible stories out there, stories about kids taken from parents who were told they were just going to school in America and would be back, many instances of falsified paperwork that claimed children had no parents, when in fact they had a parent very much alive who wanted them very much. In many countries, orphanages are like temporary care where parents bring children to be fed and cared for until they can reclaim them. This has also caused misunderstanding, when the permanent nature of adoption is not fully explained. There are also lots of stories told outside of the media, that you start to find when you go looking. There are some agencies that have huge red flags, horrible reputations (though many potential adoptive parents have no idea that their agency is bad).
Right now there's a big slowdown in ET adoption. The ET government has called for more scrutiny of paperwork and referral info, as has the U.S. side. There are now two trips required instead of one. And those in line to adopt are seeing their wait times stretch interminably into the future, with no sense of how long it will take.
Some are up in arms about it, writing protests and such. It's understandably painful if you're waiting for a child that's already been referred to you, or if you've been waiting years already and still don't even have a picture or the reassurance you'll ever have the child you've longed for.
I have very mixed feelings. The more I've read this year, the more uneasy I've become with many adoption practices, even those deemed "ethical." For example, it doesn't seem to me to ever be right for adoption to be the only option available to a family that is starving. There are places where local resources to keep the biological family intact aren't available, but international adoption is. There is money to be gained by running international adoption programs. That can be positive, in the form of humanitarian programs that are set in place by adoption agencies and government agencies. But when humanitarian programs only happen with the help of adoption-related money it seems questionable to me.
In too many countries, now possibly Ethiopia, as well, the demand for young, healthy babies for international adoption begins to outweigh the "supply" (never pleasant to think of children as a commodity, but they have become so in many places). And so people go in search of babies, and find them by all sorts of methods: coercion, lying to families about the contact they'll have with their children in the future, even kidnapping in extreme instances. Adoption programs in Vietnam and Guatemala were shut down due to corruption. It's a complicated thing, and people have written on this far more extensively than me.
On the forums and blogs people argue back and forth about whether this problem is systemic and unfixable in Ethiopia, or whether heightened awareness and new regulations can help reform practices and keep adoption open there.
Most people, even the strong critics, don't advocate no international adoption - just doing it very, very carefully, and with the best interests of the children at hand: not the adoptive parents, and not the governments that can benefit from adoption-related money. It remains to be seen whether Ethiopia and the U.S. will be able to reform the system fast enough to prevent it from shutting down.
Of course the problem is there are truly children all over the world in desperate need. Children who will not survive without intervention, without medical care unavailable in their birth countries, or without parents to keep them safe and off the streets; children who are ostracized due to disease like AIDS or because of the circumstances of their birth; children who truly have lost all birth relatives and who have no extended community to take care of them. The majority of these children are older, not cute babies. The majority have deep and painful scars that require much patience and skill to help heal.
We love Ethiopia. We are connected forever to B's birth family there, even though so many differences and so much distance divides us. I never, ever will regret her coming into our family. But I wonder every day how she will feel about all this when she grows up. And I wonder every day how her first family perceives all this, most likely very differently than we do.
With language and cultural barriers, there are many unknowns, and those unknowns cause uneasiness. I am unhappy, for example, that we currently have very limited contact with B's birth family, and what contact we do have is mediated. Do I think our agency was ethical? I'm mostly sure. I'd like to be more sure, and am working on learning all I can. Knowing her story, loving her, puts a face on this whole process.
Right now with all the uncertainties about the future of ET adoption, I ache for those who are still waiting for a child they don't have with them yet, but whom they love deeply. Friends of ours have been waiting five months since meeting their son in Ethiopia, waiting five long, excruciating months to bring him home - still with no end in sight. I remember the daily pain of waiting, the loneliness, the ache that no one else but waiting parents understood. There were days I thought I'd go crazy with the wait and the uncertainty - and we were lucky enough to be blessed with one child already. It's very, very hard. So I hope for a "happy ending" for those waiting, even though I feel now that nothing about any of this system of adoption is perfect nor ideal.
Ideally, no kids would be without families who love them, and no families who long for children to love would be without them. While we're at it, I have a really long list of other things I'd like to fix about the world."
Thanks Carrie!
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