Joyce Maynard's adoption "disruption"

Lorraine

Joyce Maynard’s writing—and thus her, because her writing is her—has always irritated me, perhaps irrationally. She was too famous for celebrating the banal. But when the news that she disrupted her adoption of two sisters from Ethiopia became public the other day, my reaction was not to rub my hands gleefully and think Aha! The great comeuppance for that navel gazer! Instead I hoped that her celebrity and this public admission about a disrupted adoption would help stem what often seems like the wholesale exportation of children from one part of the world to another by do-gooders of all political and religious stripes simply because they have more money.

Far too many of them think that they are doing something noble by taking these poor children from the over-crowded orphanage where they find them. People in my large social net have adopted from Guatemala, China, India, Nepal, Romania, and Russia. In truth, I am not close to many of them. And it is undoubtedly true that in many cases, they are saving a child from an uncertain and perilous future and giving them a home in which to flourish.

Joyce Maynard 

But when you dig deeper you find that it is impossible to know if the children would have been available to be adopted if there were not such a hungry market for children. In all of the countries mentioned above great crimes have been committed in order to supply the world market for children. Children have been stolen from their parents, ended up in crowded and nasty orphanages, displayed as hungry and dirty (which they are) and been offered, basically, for sale in the marketplace. Of course it is not called that; international adoption is scrubbed of dirty dealings and most people who adopt are oblivious to the reality of the system. Why don’t they do some research first? is a question of its own; they don’t because more than anything, they want a child to raise as their own.

We have become a culture that generally sees adoption of children from around the world as merely a good thing, not the complicated, difficult, painful, wrenching reality that it is. The two sisters Maynard temporarily adopted were 6 and 10 at the time she brought them from Ethiopia to California; had she looked into the facts, she would have learned that it is older children—just as those were--whose adoptions are the most difficult, and most often disrupted.

DISRUPTED ADOPTIONS--MORE OFTEN THAN PEOPLE KNOW

Disrupted is a nice word that means the adoption is “undone,” that the children end up somewhere else, sometimes back at the place they started. Maynard announced the failure of her adoption in a letter on her website, and stated she found another family for them in another city, with other children also from Ethiopia. I give her credit for not sending them on a plane back to Africa, as some distraught parents have famously done with their Russian adoptees.

How often are adoptions disrupted? More than most people realize. A U.S. Department of Health and Human Services review of what was known as of 2004 suggests that overall, 10-25 percent of adoptions are disrupted or dissolved, and that the rate tends to rise with the age of the child at adoption. According to the paper from the Donaldson Institute: researchers found that for children between 6 and 8, the disruption rate was over 10 percent, and correspondingly went up with age: for children between the ages of 9 and 11, it was over 17 percent; between the ages of 12 and 14, it was over a whopping 22  percent.

As she chronicled in a lengthy magazine piece in More, when she adopted the two girls, Maynard was 55, without a partner to share in their raising, and with three grown children. While she obviously has made a decent living from her writing, she is far from wealthy.  The girls spoke only a few words of English; she spoke no Amharic, their native language. By the time they were launched, she would be 70. The was going to be hard, and she knew it. Yet Maynard got caught up in the current cultural mantra that "all adoption is good, you are saving the world one child at a time" and went ahead anyway, writing that  “there was no experience in life I’d loved more than raising children. I had love enough for more, and a blind faith that love was sufficient to get us all through the challenges I knew would lie ahead.” (The piece has since been scrubbed from the Internet but one of our readers sent it to me.)

"Blind faith" is the problem here. Apparently what started out beautifully ended up a dastardly. There is no point in being harshly judgmental and piling on criticism of Maynard; I live in too much of a glass house to do that. I have not walked in her shoes. And I begin where I started: I hope news of her failure makes other people who think that adoption is a simple, loving act dig deep, do the research, and instead of adopting someone else’s child from a foreign environment, instead consider supporting a family to let them raise their own children, in their own culture.--lorraine
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From  FMF:  Harvesting Children from Ethiopia for Families in America
Guatemalan Army Stole Kids for Adoption
One Woman's Struggle with Adopting from Ethiopia
Madonna's Malawi charity fails and Ethiopian adoptions shut down to a trickle: Could there be abuse in the system?
More Stench Coming from Ethiopian Adoptions through Christian World Adoptions
West Not Impressed by Adoption Practices in Nepal
Returning a Child: It happens More than You Think