Hamas War

Thursday, April 15, 2010

Adoptions, Not Simple and Rarely Idyllic

There has been news recently about an American mother who returned her adopted son to Russia.  The headlines make her sound worse than Cinderella's evil step-mother, but I have no doubt that the situation is much more complex.

A few months ago, the news was full of condemnation of the Toyota Car Manufacturers for selling faulty cars.  Everybody's sympathy was with the car-purchasers.  Now, granted that a child isn't a car and a car isn't a child, but these foreign adoptions do have a connection to a buying  a car or any other large major  purchase.  There's marketing, and lots of money changes hands.  The "product" is a child, and the adoptive parents, like any other wise consumer, do their best to investigate the health and condition of the child.

In recent years it's very difficult to find a normal healthy baby, from a healthy mother, to adopt.  Desperate parents to be end up having to accept toddlers and even older children, or no child at all.  The older the child is, the more difficult it will be for the child to adjust to the parents' life-styles.  As a mother of adult children, I must certainly admit that my and my husband's biological children chose their own ways.  We had them from day one and nine months of pregnancy.  So imagine how hard it is to take a child who has already adjusted to the norms of an orphanage and have a totally unknown genetic and nutritional background.  The lawyers, agents, orphanage administrators etc can and do sign whatever they need to give the child to wealthy foreigners.  Of course, not all the adoptive parents are wealthy by the standards of their home society, but if they have enough money to privately adopt a foreign child, they look plenty rich when they visit that orphanage.

When people first receive their child behavioral problems are usually excused by language difficulties, different foods, customs and other perfectly acceptable reasons.  As time goes on and parents have their children examined and assessed by experts they're unpleasantly surprised to discover that their children have major and incurable conditions.  In some cases they never would have adopted the children.

They're all human beings, the parents and the children.  The children aren't guilty, but sometimes the parents just can't handle the burden, and neither can the community.  You don't keep a problematic child in a cage.  And if the child suffers from a neurological condition, she/he's always able to control behavior.

It may be easy to tell adoptive parents that they must accept the child, just like a parent whose child is born with serious problems or suffers as the result of an accident or illness.  That's not really fair nor accurate, because in today's world, doctors and society encourage the abortion of imperfect fetuses.

Adoption is very risky.  Children aren't like new cars and washing machines which can be sent back to the factory.  They're more like "used cars" which frequently come with unpleasant surprises.  Don't be naive.

6 comments:

Hadassa said...

Shalom!
I have several questions:
Are parents who adopt foreign children over the age of one year required to have basic speaking skills in the child's native language? Are the adoptive parents required to learn about the child's culture? Is the child taught a bit of his/her new language before being put on a plane? How easy is it for lawyers and adoption agencies to withhold facts from prospective adoptive families with impunity?
I agree with many of the people commenting on the linked article: Why are foreign children being adopted when there are American children in need of a home?

Batya said...

As far as I've read over the years, there aren't too many American kids for adoption, mostly it's fostering. Some celebrities have been adopting black kids, but many white people don't want a different race. That's why the Russian and eastern European kids are so popular.

A friend who adopted a few from eastern Europe had to spend a few weeks, learn some basic words in their language. The kids picked up her language very easily showing good survival instincts and intelligent but then a host of other problems.

Keli Ata said...

Adopting healthy white infants in the US is extremely hard unless a couple has a private adoption. Rather than adopt a healthy black infant (also not easy because the majority of black moms, even single) decide to raise their babies.

Why aren't more American families adopting here? Red tape, the desire for a healthy infant and a white one. There are plenty of kids in foster care longing for parents and a stable life.

All of which make foreign adoption very attractive--they can get healthy white infants or even older children. The downsize in all of the adoptions from Russian orphanages is that the older kids have major attachment disorders from the relative lack of human contact.

Add to that the trauma of whisking an older child away from the only place they've ever known as home and bringing him/her to a foreign country where they don't speak the language.

I read an article once stating that kids from foreign countries should receive some sort of sedation for the flight and for a while afterward--the entire ordeal is extremely traumatizing and some kids don't recover from it.

In the case you wrote about, it was a single mom trying to manage all of this alone.


Pity she didn't receive more support and resorted to sending the poor, already traumatized kid back to Russia alone. Should single parents even be able to adopt foreign children knowing the challenges it entails?

Batya said...

A lot of these babies/children from Eastern Europe and the states, too, aren't healthy because of the mother's alcohol intake and bad nutrition.
When poverty is the impetus to give a child up for adoption, there's a good chance that the mother didn't eat well, and for sure the infant/child doesn't get the best food.

Hadassa said...

Shalom!
I've heard about the low number of healthy young children available for adoption in America, but some of the foreign children haven't been exactly babies either, and Batya mentioned here that they're not so healthy. Adoption agencies and parents would save themselves a lot of grief if they limit adoption to children under the age of one. I'm surprised that a single mother was allowed to adoption a Russian boy, especially a boy, that age.
I know two single women in America who adopted Chinese baby girls, thereby saving their lives. That seems to me to be a logical system of adoption.

Batya said...

I know of single wwomen who've adopted Eastern European pre-schoolers and a baby or toddler. It's risky.

Even local adoptions can be very problematic. Sometimes the entire community suffers.

Sometimes it is a dream come true. I don't know what I would do if I didn't have my biological kids.