What if you were stolen?

The NYT published an article on an adoption scandal in China.  To make a long story short, the Chinese government has determined that at least 16 children were taken from their families by a provincial government and sold to orphanages to be adopted.  The adoption market in China and many other countries is a lucrative business, and it can be even in the US.  As the book I reviewed in 2008 but didn't publish until yesterday discussed, coercive adoption practices were common in the US in the mid-20th century.

One thing that resonates with me so deeply is a sentence my birth mother wrote to me in her very first letter, her response to me seeking her out:

The extent of [our] relationship I want to be your choice, seeing as you didn't have a choice 30+ years ago.

It seems to me that missing from a lot of the discussions about adoption, the practices of adoption agencies and governments involved in international adoption is the fact that the child in question is not a commodity but a human being.

From the NYT article:

The [adoption] process connects birth parents, child and adoptive parents in an unequal relationship in which each party has different needs and different leverage.

It isn't that adults involved in the adoption process forget the humanity of adoptees, but more that they believe that they can know what will be best for a child who cannot speak for herself yet, nor for many, many years.  And the narrative of adoption as passed down to the child being adopted is that the adoptive parents have saved the child and have been saved from a lonely childless life by the child.  That you are lucky to have been adopted, lucky to have been wanted, lucky to have the life you have.  A life in which you had no say in choosing.  In some cases, adoptees are told they should be grateful.  Grateful.  Again, for something you had no say in at all.

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I can't say that I know the differences between being an adoptee and being raised by your birth parents.  I read stories, but as is so often the case, the negative stories are easier to find -- happy people have fewer stories they need to share, I guess, or they share them more softly.  I only know my life story.

My adoptive parents are good people (well, were, in the case of my father).  They wanted to be parents and couldn't do so biologically.  They had an excellent adoption counselor who helped them know how to be adoptive parents -- how to tell my brother and I this part of our story that would respect our feelings, our needs, and our curiosities, and help us understand what it meant to be adopted.  We were always told that if we wanted to seek out our birth parents, our adoptive parents would support us.

But you know, searching is harder than that.  I wrote a letter to the agency when I was 17.  I thought about it over the years.  I talked to a birth mother when I was in graduate school -- the wife of a mentor, and the topic just came up.  She was one of the girls who went away, and adoption was not a choice for her -- it was just what happened -- but when her child sought her out, she was glad to meet her and know her.  In her case, her daughter was a bit of a mess, and her life took her away from my friend eventually.  One of my good friends has an extended step-family including a step-sister who surrendered a child for adoption and refused to meet the child when she was tracked down.

I considered all of that and more when I was deciding what I wanted for my life.  When I decided to search, I decided I could be okay with rejection if it came.  I decided that I wanted to explore this chance to find out my origin story, that I wanted to open this door of possibility and see what happened.  I was scared that I would find out that my existence was painful for her, that surrendering a child had in some way ruined her life, that I was a secret that, now revealed, ruined anything in her life today.  I was scared that my search would be a negative for her.

And what I found is a story so much bigger than I thought.  Not only bigger in scope -- my birth mother's life neither started nor ended with me -- but also bigger to me than I thought.  I have something like 8 or 10 cousins who know of me but have never met me.  Now I know of them, too.  It is possible that I have half-siblings.  But she was happy to hear from me, to know I was well, to have the chance to get to know me.  It was better than I had dreamed could be possible.

Knowing that my own feelings about my origins were so complicated -- in a domestic adoption with reasonably complete paperwork -- I wonder about the NYT article's choice to include no interviews with adoptees in their story.  One birth parent is mentioned; several adoption agencies are quoted; several adoptive parents are interviewed.  Many of the adoptive parents do not seem to want to know the truth of their children's origin stories right now, and it's understandable, as the fear of raising a child who was kidnapped to be sold to you undermines any of the "good" in an adoption story -- the idea that you are raising a child who would have no home but for you.  It's a scary, world-changing thought.  Denial is much safer.

The author asks,

For now, though, is it the parents’ duty to ask those questions? Or is it for children to decide, in time, how much they want to know?

To that I have to answer -- it is the duty of adoptive parents to know as much as they can about the system they are participating in.  When profit margins and greed can create a system where children are sold to parents who want them, rather than families found for children who need them, the entire system of adoption is corrupted.  When the goal is to find children for parents who want children, rather than to find homes for children who need them the whole field of adoption becomes suspect.  No one is entitled to adopt a child.  Adoption agencies have no real motive to stop these practices.  Most agencies have only the best of intentions, but it may benefit them not to dig too deeply in certain situations.  The children themselves cannot often tell the truth of the situation.*  This leaves adoptive parents to look beyond their own wants and desire for a child and a family and really understand the politics and problems, to think deeply about the system in which they are participating, and to think ahead to the future when your child will be asking you questions about their family of origin and how they came to be in the world and with you.  Because they will ask.  We always do.

*The article briefly mentions a heart-breaking story wherein two girls were old enough to report, presumably when they learned the language to do so, that they had been abducted from their families.  That was 6 months after their adoption and relocation to the US.  No one was able to translate this for their adoptive families before then, and it took that family another 6 years to find the girls' families.