clarification

There was a comment on my previous post regarding my thoughts on the referral process that I feel the need to address. In the adoption world, there's a whole lot of talk about "the orphans" whose families of origin could not care for them. But there's not a lot of discussion about who these orphans are exactly.

I think many people get a very specific image in their heads of a child with nobody else in the world when they hear the term "orphan". However, here is the current legal definition:

A child is defined as an orphan if (1) Both parents are dead or have disappeared; (2) The parents have abandoned the child; or (3) The sole or surviving parent is incapable of providing proper care for the child and has unconditionally released the child for adoption and emigration. The adoptive parent(s) must provide evidence that the child falls into one of these three categories. "Proper care", as applied in immigration law, means the sole surviving parent is unable to provide for the child's basic needs, consistent with local standards of the foreign-sending country.

This means that a good percentage of the "orphans" we are adopting not only have living relatives, but may have a living parent, and poverty is the main reason that these children are being relinquished. Furthermore, until recently, certain laws in some countries actually created incentives for parents to abandon their children rather than relinquish. All of this is deeply troubling to me.

There are, of course, true orphans. These are children who are living on, or underneath, the streets, begging for their meals. Young girls and women often turn to prostitution simply so that they can survive. But from my understanding, the adoption agencies aren't interested in these "lost children" because they wouldn't be as "marketable" to wide-eyed prospective adoptive families willing to wait in line for healthy infants.

I believe that the children who end up on the streets lack the ability to get themselves into care. Obviously if a parent relinquishes a young child directly to an agency, then that child will likely be cared for. But if a child's family has died and they are completely on their own, it is unlikely that they will even know where to turn for assistance, and so they end up on the streets.

My point is that resources that could (and arguably, should) be used to care for and find permanent homes for the orphans in the truest sense of the word are instead being spent reaching out to pregnant women and presenting the idea of foreign adoption to them.

And truly, what mother could resist the promises of guaranteed nutrition, healthcare and education for their children, even if the trade off is that they may never see those children again?

I need to also clarify the fact that the idea and finality of westernized adoptions are completely alien concepts in most parts of the world, and I wonder whether agencies are telling the families who relinquish their children that those children will one day come back. If the agencies are not explicitly telling the families this, then I wonder whether the families are inferring that this will happen based on their limited knowledge of the western adoption process. Either of these scenarios are problematic, especially if the adoptive families of these children are not informed that this is a part of the deal.

So ultimately I believe it is our responsibility to look at how our child requests, fueled by the power of our American dollars, impact the adoption agencies' ability and incentive to reach out and provide services to true orphans. I believe that's where the resources should be going, and those are the children that agencies should be most concerned with placing. Concurrently, I believe that other social justice agencies should be working to help families reach a point of economic stability and sustainability so that fewer families will be compelled to relinquish their children.