Anonymous wrote:You cannot ensure an international adoption is ethical. At all. Even if you investigate it with an third party person beforehand. In Uganda, Colombia, DRC, China, Ethiopia, Ghana, Vietnam, Liberia, Ukraine, Haiti, India: I know personally and through internet/blog friends that kids from all these countries have lies in their paperwork that parents only find out after they get home and things don't add up. The adoption industry profits from preying on poor families who need temporary relief and place kids in care centers while they are in between work, need access to water and health care, loving families who need help. Orphanages then sell the children to adoption agencies, who tell parents they are "saving children." Parents think they've done humanity a good deed, they got their awesome multi racial Christmas card, everyone weeps at the beauty, but it's built all on the destruction of a family, who wonders where their kids are and if they will ever see them again.
The agencies preach the lie to the families (first and adoptive families) "the kids are better off!" to justify it. These are the people making the money. Their job is to convince birth parents to not take kids back, that they are incapable of doing so, and their job is to make adoptive families feel like heroes. This is what they sell. And we want to parent so badly we buy it hook, line, sinker.
I am a parent whose children had paperwork full of lies. And more than six of our close adoptive family friends children ALL had lies in their paperwork. We all have open adoptions and communicate with family, and some of those family members were claimed as "dead" on the papers. We all pay thousands each year to stay in touch and paid thousands to investigate. Lots of folks are totally happy with their international adoption. But I think those people are the ones who take the kid they feel entitled to because they want a "no strings attached" pretend first family doesn't exist experience. They want a kid. They think the child will not remember or care about the devastating loss. So they don't question, investigate. They just move on.
I learned my lesson the hard way. Kids care. They miss their families. They will do their homework when they are old enough. They will find out they came from real people, real families, often very in tact families.
I know it's hard to face but there is no country, no adoption agency that is safe. Anyone who says that hasn't investigated their adoption or read adoption forums about parents going back and meeting the "dead" family members, and adult adoptees who feel totally betrayed by the lies their story was built on. Anyone who says "we had a good experience" doesn't realize that adoption agency workers are all nice. That has NOTHING to do with how much adoption undermines family preservation efforts in poor countries.
And if you think "I will fix that, I will adopt an infant so they don't remember! I will avoid all this conflict and plug my ears and close my eyes!" We adopted an infant too. Her anxiety, loss, trauma, her experience growing up and not having birth family, birth culture, birth country affects her every day.
International adoption, and I say this as a hypocrite, is based on kids losing their families often orchestrated by the folks who profit from it. And the kids, who are supposedly now "better off" are not a big fan of this fact when they get older. Especially if their parents are unwilling to move to an area where their child isn't a minority in classes, at parks and on sports teams.
Take it from someone in the trenches. It is not a great time. I would highly recommend running away from all international adoption. The rabbit hole is so deep. And don't let anyone convince you that it "is different in this country!" Anyone who says that is selling something. Even if it is their attempt to hold on to their peace of mind.
I would only ever recommend foster adoption. And yes, the kids are often traumatized by their neglect and loss. But so are kids from international adoption. So are sometimes kids from infant domestic adoption. We, as adoptive parents, need to stop pretending that the connection between birth mother and father and child is negligible and not essential to our child's sense of self. If we were parents, and our kids were put in another family to be raised away from us, could we even get up in the morning? Can we bear the idea of that kind of severing?
It's not small things. And many of these kids are not orphans. We learned the hard way.
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