They Steal Babies, Don't They? for the Bull Market in Babies

Carla Bruni, the 41-year-old wife of the president of France says she is considering adoption. Now Bruni has a seven-year-old from a previous relationship, and hubby Sarkozy has three grown children from previous marriages.

You might think that might be enough for the singer/model/wife/mother/stepmother/wife of the pres of France. Oh no. "I'm not obsessed by blood ties," says Carla. Meaning: I want a kid, another one, you know for damn sure that I'll be able to get one. There are so many babies...available, aren't there? So many poor families/or wretched women without means who should give me one of their kids who will have a better life with us, here in the Palace.

Why don't you do the right thing and simply support one woman so she can keep her baby? Adopt them both, if you will.

Last night I heard that a friend's fiance is trying to adopt from Nepal. Why Nepal? Because China is pretty much shut down and especially if you are single, and Vietnam, where she had been investigating before, has just shut down (too many babies being traded for incubators, hmmm? as reported in Foreign Policy, also see previous posts) And Cambodia? Read about the deception that takes child away from their families (for $300) in The Washington Post. But Nepal, hey, that's a poor country that is still using babies as a cash crop. So this morning I googled Adoption in Nepal and found this swell statement at adoption.com:

Initially, we were planning on adopting a child through the state of New Jersey, but as we got deeper into the process and started talking to more people, we realized there were too many uncertainties about the birth parents' rights. Now we are planning on adopting from Nepal. But plans, we know now, are fickle.

Yeah, and we know how fickle those birth mother are. They might actually find a way to keep their children. They might want to be involved in the kid's life. They might never forget. They might...not die or go away.

and

We have been taking our application slowly. My husband Jonathan put the brakes on a few months ago, and he was right to. We had to be sure that our own relationship is so rock solid, we'll be able to open our home to a second child with grace. We've been seeing a personal coach, Michael....

So let me say this right here: Any kind of regulation that slows down the baby drain from birth/first mothers from poor countries, we are in favor of, just as various regulations in Bible Belt states have made it hard to get an abortion in there. We are not against adoption when IT IS ABSOLUTELY NECESSARY and even then, the adoption should never be a closed adoption, it should always be open, and adoption by kin (not genetic strangers, no matter how wealthy, straight, religious, etc.) should be explored first.

And we are not against open adoptions for kids truly languishing in institutions, for older kids who have been passed by, for kids with disabilities who have been neglected, kids whose prospects are truly dim.

So if there are rules that stop adoptions by single people, people over 40, left-handed people, right-brained people, people with a BMI over 20, gays, women with PMS, people with blue eyes, people who already have a child, whatever regulation you can think of to slow the steady and increasing stream of adoption...we are all for it. If it were truly difficult to adopt, if adoption did not seem like such a cool thing to do, maybe we would not have a celebrity such as Carla Bruni say, Hey, I think I'll adopt. Maybe we would not have had Naomi on the last series of The Bachelor tell Jason that she wants to adopt one day. Will either Bruni or Naomi adopt a special-needs child?

However, in the case of relative adoption when necessary, all bets are off, and those people ought to be considered first, no matter if they are gay, obese, left-handed, or whatever. Whenever possible, people have a right to grow up among people who look like them. People should not be traded around the world, around America, as if they were baseball cards.

Why do we feel this way? Why so militant?

Because all the adoptamania that has been blanketing the world of late, led by celebrities such as Angelina and Madonna and a long long list (Tom Cruise and Nicole, Hugh Jackman, just to name a few more) has created a bull market in babies. And that means that babies are being stolen (Guatemala, China, Cambodia, Samoa, as we just reported), mothers are coerced (Vietnam), and that leads to more pressure to find more babies for export. Nepal, a country of 26 million, is a very poor country. Look for it to be the next baby-export center. This is baby stealing, baby buying, baby kidnapping, no matter how it's gussied up.

And on another note, apparently MTV Real Life (which we were approached by several months ago to help them find a teenager who wants to relinquish; we declined, not terribly respectfully) is real soon featuring a story on a woman, who after three weeks, caved and agreed to an adoption. According to someone (the open-adoption facilitator who was involved), the film crew said it was the most poignant show they had worked on. Dam straight. The woman kept the kid for three weeks before finally giving up. I'm hoping at least one of the crew was hoping the woman kept her baby. But then, it would not have been the story Real Life wanted.

I remember walking off the set of one of The Today show in the Seventies when I first came out of the closet and a woman who worked on the show gabbed my arm and said, she too, had relinquished a child. Her son was twelve, she said. "You never forget, do you?" she said. I always wonder what happened to her, where she is today, if she ever found her son.
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As for our next post, look for a report from Mark Diebel, who is attending the Conference on Adoption Policy at New York University today. I hope to post it Sunday evening.