Foreign Adoptions Aren't Plunging Fast Enough

Jane

“’The era of the boom time for international adoption, I think, has passed us by’” Adam Pertman, Executive Director of the Evan B. Donaldson Adoption Institute, told National Public Radio reporters Jennifer Ludden and Marosa Penaloza. To which First Mother Forum says: Good by and good riddence.

Since its peak in 2004, the number of foreign adoptions has plummeted from nearly 23,000 to less than 10,000 in 2010. Considering the known corruption in international adoption--and the 115,000 American children in foster care waiting to be placed--that figure is still obscenely high.

THE HAGUE TREATY DELAYS ADOPTIONS
The NPR report, "Would-Be Parents Wait As Foreign Adoptions Plunge," features Barb and Mike Cannata who adopted an infant girl from China a decade ago. They decide to adopt again in 2007. They  ruled out China when they learned the wait would be at least three or four years. They looked at Guatemala, but adoptions there had been suspended because of a baby-selling scandal. Ditto for Viet Nam, which they tried next. Finally, they lucked out in Bulgaria where they settled for a two-year-old girl with a “speech delay.”

Pertman and the Cannata’s blame "delay" in adoptions on The Hague Treaty, which establishes common standards for all international adoptions, and on countries such as China and Russia--once large providers of babies for the international market--now strongly prefer that children be adopted domestically. Sending their babies all over the world turned out to be a huge embarrassment for the national pride of both countries. FMF views these delays as a positive sign. Less corruption results in fewer children snared into adoption.

According to the NPR report, adoption agencies have suffered as well. Revenues are down. Several of the biggest players—Lutheran Family Services and Children’s Home Society and Family Services--have had to curtail operations. Hundreds of smaller agencies have closed.

While portraying the Cannata's, other would-be adopters, and those who make their living off the misery of others as victims, the NPR report ignores the true victims--mothers who lose their children, and children who might have a better chance of growing up with their own mothers.

CHILDREN LANGUISHING IN "FOREIGN" ORPHANAGES LARGELY A MYTH

While Perman acknowledges that The Hague Treaty was “much needed and well-intentioned, ”he claims that it has left tens of thousands of children “languishing in foreign orphanages.” (Note: the orphanages are not foreign to the children in them, any more than the French language is a foreign language to the French.) As scholars such as E. G. Graff have shown, the claim that foreign adoption rescues “children languishing in foreign orphanages” is largely a myth--no question there are these children, but until the market tightened, they weren’t being adopted. The Cannata’s took the “special needs” child only when they learned there was a long wait for a Chinese doll.

Unfortunately, many of these children rescued by Americans have not fared well in their new "foreign" locales. According to the Digital Journal, at least seventeen Russian children have been murdered by their adopters and more have been sexually or physically abused. A couple of years ago, Tennessean Torry Hansen placed her seven-year-old adopted son on a plane alone and shipped him back to Russia. The clamor in the press, as well as tales of the murdered children, was too much for the Russians, and they drastically curtailed adoptions, shutting them down completely for all extent and purposes. As we've written here, writer Anita Tedaldi disrupted the adoption of a “special needs child,” a boy from South America, because he didn’t "attach" to Tedaldi and her family. More recently writer Joyce Maynard terminated her adoption of two sisters from Ethiopia, and found other homes for them in this country.

One of our readers, responded to FMF’s post about Maynard telling us that “You have no right to judge.” She and her husband adopted three Russian siblings ages 10, 11, and 12 after the couple was asked to be a “’host family’” for the children at a “’church summer camp in Florida.’” Writing under the cover of Anon, she denies that they are “do-gooders.” After five years, Anon tells us, the youngest two children are doing “ok.” The oldest put them through hell, “continually and deliberately harming those around her” and “putting them through a child abuse investigation.”

Anon didn’t tell FMF how they finally dealt with their daughter. Some parents resort to sending their misbehaving foreign adopted children to specialized (and expensive) “treatment programs,” often in rural areas. One such program is Montana’s Ranch for Kids; Russian adoptees constitute 10 of its 25 residents. According to the Huffington Post, Ranch for Kids has its own problems. It has been operating without a license since the State Board of Private Alternative Residential and Outdoor Programs refused to renew it in November 2010 for failing to conduct background checks on employees, (a scarlet flag in FMF’s opinion), failing to show the buildings are up to code, lacking a disaster plan, and having no statement on the rights of program participants. The Ranch’s owner, Joyce Sterkel, claims the Ranch does not need a license because in October, 2011, she signed an agreement with Epicenter International Missions Ministry, which works with lepers in India and is affiliated with a small church in Eureka, Montana. Her attorney claims that state law exempts adjunct missionary organizations from licensing requirements. Sterkel has refused to allow Russian officials to enter the ranch to check on the welfare of the Russian children.

ONE MAN'S EFFORT TO REUNITE CHILDREN WITH THEIR PARENTS
Fortunately, in addition to The Hague Treaty, others are trying to right the many wrongs in foreign adoption.  According to the New York Times News Service, Spanish doctor Jose Lorente, an expert in forensic genetics, has persuaded 16 countries, including Guatemala, Mexico, Peru, Ecuador, Brazil, Nepal, Indonesia, Malaysia, India and Thailand, to build DNA data banks of parents whose children were stolen or lost. When children are found, they can be matched with their parents rather than taken to orphanages or placed for adoption. Lorente sees DNA databanks as “playing a crucial role in preventing the adoptions of stolen children and in dismantling trafficking rings….So far, he says, the tests have been used in reuniting about 550 children with their families, most of them in Guatemala and Peru. The tests have also stopped more than 200 illegal adoptions.”

The NPR report should have but did not address the obvious answer for couples like the Cannata's--adopt American children who truly need homes. Adoption guru Adam Pertman could have directed NPR listeners to these children, and encouraged those wishing to help children languishing in foreign orphanages to donate to international relief organizations. Adopting American children would be not only be quicker, the children would come with financial and other support, as well as fewer cultural and language barriers.

FMF encourages those interested in adoption to check out AdoptUSKids, a service of the US Children's Bureau.

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 Sources:
"Would-Be Parents Wait As Foreign Adoptions Plunge"

Child Welfare Information Gateway: Adoption Statistics

The Lie We Love by E. J. Graff

The Daily Bastardette -- Russian Adoptions
"Abuse case jeopardizes adoption agreement between Russia and US"

"Ranch For Kids, Montana Adopted Kids' Ranch Denied License"

"Putting Genetics to Work to Find Missing Children"

From FMF:

Joyce Maynard's "adoption disruption"

Returning a Child: It Happens More Than You Think

For further reading about the impact of international adoption:

Somebody's Children: The Politics of Transracial and Transnational Adoption by Laura Biggs.
"A brilliant and wide-ranging book, Somebody's Children makes a powerful contribution to the study of adoption. The public policy implications of Briggs's work are stunning, and I hope this book will contribute to reshaping adoption practice in the United States."—Rickie Solinger, author of Pregnancy and Power: A Short History of Reproductive Politics in America


International Adoption: Global Inequalities and the Circulation of Children, a collection of essays edited by Diana Marre and Laura Biggs:

"A powerful and intelligent volume. Its attention to inequalities associated with class, race, sexuality, nation, and globalization, as well as its serious engagement of cultural ideas about kinship, make it a critical resource for scholars, students, practitioners, and others interested in adoption in the contemporary era."  Click on images for more information and to order.

"This lively collection of seventeen essays is devoted to variations on the theme of international adoption. The essays . . . present a comprehensive overview of a wide range of issues, with thought-provoking contributions on a variety of case studies from sending and receiving countries." -Giovanna Bacchiddu,Social Anthropology