The Loss of a Dream...
When a Country Closes to Adoption From Abroad
By Sheena Macrae
Why Adoption From Abroad?
For many adopters in the western world, domestic adoption has proved fraught. Children freed for adoption may still (within the parameters of court judgements) be subject to birthparent rescinding their consent to adoption. Contact issues prove overwhelming. And so in recent years increasing numbers of prospective parents have moved to intercountry adoption where there seems a need for families - underlined by private international law culminating in the Hague Convention - for children who might otherwise languish in orphanages or poverty in birthcountry.
And so in the years since World War II intercountry adoption has grown exponentially. The numbers of children moving from the states of the Former Soviet Union, the South Americas and the People’s Republic of China to the United States of America in the last fifteen years or so are astonishingly high. Adopters have tended to move to sending countries where there seem to be many children available for adoption and where the program surrounding that adoption is smooth, facilitated by interlinking agencies
The Cost of Adopting from Overseas
Yet there are those who say that western families wishing to adopt from abroad has produced a new cost in adopting. They argue that it has created a demand for available children which goes far beyond the numbers of children in fact freely available for adoption. They argue also that western demand denies domestic adopters a chance to adopt available children. It’s a fact that certain countries over the last few years have been closed to adoption from abroad because it has been shown that children were being made available for adoption – for profit. It’s a fact that children were being stolen, or ‘seduced’ for money, from birthparents, or sold to orphanages (with or without the consent of parents). In some cases western agencies were making money in making children available for intercountry adoption.
Most prospective parents are aghast at this. They simply have had a desire to offer a child in need a share in their love and a space in their family. Often when a country closes to adoptions from abroad there are adopters caught waiting in line for a referral for their longed-for child. How do prospective adopters cope with delays and shutdowns in sending countries? It’s been suggested that long delays in making referrals might indicate a country ensuring that its foreign adoption program is ‘clean’, but that’s cold comfort to some families. And how do families cope emotionally and practically when a country closes to adoption? How do families cope if their hoped for SECOND child can’t ‘come home’ because of closure – how do they tell their first child from that country?
The Emotional Cost of Country Closures and Delays in Referral
Homestudies are predicated on the country from which families wish to adopt. There should be a commitment to that culture and language if the prospective parents are to be able to support the child’s identity as is partially defined by their ethnicity and the culture they were born to have….
Delays in referral when a country ‘slows down’ tend to make prospective parents hyper-anxious. There’s a fear that the hoped for certain path to adoption will be torn asunder. Parents often can’t think beyond the child they have already envisaged in their hearts, and for whom narratives of connection are often woven long before any concrete information about a real child is sent. Destiny is invoked, or at least a right to have a child once the Homestudy is over and the agency fee paid. Many parents can’t think beyond ‘the right to adopt’ as opposed to what’s enshrined in private international law – that adoption must serve the best interests of the child involved.
BUT – in order for prospective parents to morph into committed adoptive parents, there indeed has to be a degree of commitment when things are still tenuous. Prospective parents have to be committed, involved, able to ‘see themselves’ parenting the child they hope to parent long before any referral is made. It’s this ability to commit to a dream that underscores a lot in intercountry adoption. So it is unfair perhaps to be harsh when prospective families urgently long for their dream child.
But when a country closes through infraction of private international law… the Hague Convention… what then of the dreams of parents? How easy is it to lose the dream of a child? How easy is it to switch that dream simply to another stream of available children? From another country? What do parents do? What is practical and pragmatic? How do parents mourn the loss of a child that was a dream – and move to another dream? Do parents think of why a country may close? Or simply feel they have been robbed of the child ‘meant’ to come to their family? How can all of this be dealt with?
With anger, determination, pragma, tears and a commitment rather than a need to offer a child a home?
What Can be Done When a Country Closes?
