The Price Of Foreign Adoption

On a recent episode of Curb Your Enthusiasm, Larry runs into a married couple and their daughter, a young Asian girl. Larry makes a slightly racist remark about whether or not the girl has a predilection for chopsticks over forks. The couple are of course totally offended by the comment and brush off in a hurry.

The scene left me doubled-over of course, but afterwards I was reminded of an interview on CBC Radio’s As It Happens with Carol Off. She interviewed a mother from Nova Scotia, Cathy Wagner, who adopted a Chinese girl, now four years old but only a baby at the time. She and her husband had looked into adopting a child in Canada, but were told that it could take up to seven years for them to adopt. The couple already had one child, seven years old at the time, and made the decision not to conceive again naturally due to the mother’s epilepsy. Understandably, they did not want to wait another seven years to adopt a new child so they began the process of adopting a child from China. They paid the hefty $3000 (U.S.) donation fee and went to China to pick up their daughter.

When they arrived at the orphanage, however, it became apparent that no one was taking care of the child as she had shown signs of deprivation. After exploring further, Wagner discovered that orphanage had made $520,000 U.S. from foreign adoptions, and the circumstances behind her daughter’s arrival at the orphanage were not what she had been led to believe.

The cost for adopting a child in China is expensive, but the process is faster, and the amount of lost or abandoned children is higher. The perception is that these children were simply abandoned by parents too poor to raise them, or worse, that because of China’s one-child policy and tradition of son preference, given up for adoption out of some sexist dislike of girls. The reality, however, is far more complicated and even frightening.

An article by Barbara Demick in the LA Times last September revealed a shocking amount of Chinese families who were duped, coerced or even threatened by family planning authorities into giving up their children. The officials’ job is to levy heavy fines on families that violate the one-child policy, but it’s illegal to actually take their children away. One Chinese mother whom the LA Times interviewed, Yang Shuiying, said family planning officials waited until her husband had left the home before coming and taking her child.

From the article:

"In the beginning, I think, adoption from China was a very good thing because there were so many abandoned girls. But then it became a supply-and-demand-driven market and a lot of people at the local level were making too much money," said Ina Hut, who last month resigned as the head of the Netherlands' largest adoption agency out of concern about baby trafficking.

The whole process seems sketchy when you think about the $3000 donation, which must be made in unmarked $100 U.S. bills. A donation is not as accountable either, making it easier for a corrupt official to cover his or her tracks. And given the demand for foreign adoption from the west, such cases are becoming less rare, particularly as more women like Cathy Wagner and Yang Shuiying are willing to speak out.

“Did she spend nine months in deprivation because I was waiting in line for her?” Wagner asked. “That’s still a heavy burden for me… I hope I didn’t create a victim of the process.”

I would not fault the adoptive parents for trying to adopt a child from a developing country. Indeed, Wagner’s shock at discovering that her daughter may have been stolen and determination to find out more behind the circumstances of her abandonment should be applauded. But cases like this are not unusual, and raise serious questions about the ethical nature of foreign adoption. Could you really go through with adopting a child from China if there was a chance it was stolen? As I see more and more celebrities parade around their children from China, Cambodia, and other developing countries, I can’t help but wonder if they’re contributing to the problem.

No doubt there will continue to be children abandoned or given up for adoption for whatever reason, as well as parents with the means to care for them willing to pay a large sum to adopt them, but there needs to be a transparent system in place so that no family has to go through what Yang Shuiying and Cathy Wagner went through. The price is too high.