The Year International Adoption Became the Latest Fashion Statement

Hardly a day seems to pass by nowadays without some emissary and entourage from a well-heeled location somewhere in the west jetting off to some third world country and returning days later having effectively bought themselves a shining bright new baby. These actions in themselves has in a rather brutal way highlighted one of the great iniquities of modern life

It is hard not to view these incidents as just this year’s fashion statement on behalf of the rich and famous.

Last year it was “let’s all campaign against the brutality of hunting animals for their fur” and this year it’s a case of lets take our obscene amounts of money and go and buy a baby from Africa.

There are several issues on different levels here and on one hand we have to accept that it is every child’s right to live in a happy, stable and loving family unit where possible, a right that is sadly all too lacking for about 95 percent of the worlds children. On the other hand you have to accept that in some cases money isn’t necessarily the Universal Panacea for the World ills that we sometimes believe it to be.

More often than not there is an upsurge in this sort of activity right after some natural disaster of almost biblical proportions has wiped out either entire coastlines or communities built out of brick living on some geophysical fault line somewhere have suffered a massive earthquake.

In itself there is nothing wrong with this supposed outpouring of communal generosity but sometimes you have to try and view these activities from the other side to obtain a better rounded picture of what is exactly the best course of action to take here.

Adoption experts say the best thing people can do is to donate money to causes that directly help the children. They say it’s wrong to take a traumatized child away from the environment that they have grown up in. “Adoptions, especially inter-country ones, are inappropriate during the emergency phase as children are better placed being cared for by their wider families and the communities they know,” said the charity Save the Children in a statement released Jan. 6, 2005. International Adoption needs to be well planned “The last thing they need to do is be rushed away to some foreign land,” said Cory Barron of Children’s Hope International, an American adoption agency. “We have to think of the child first.”

Perhaps that is the problem with so many designer international adoptions nowadays the parties involved don’t necessarily think of the interests of the child first rather a case of satisfying the maternal longings of people who should know better and most cases don’t.

Perhaps now would be a good time to start to implement and effect that change.

Stephen Morgan
http://www.articlesbase.com/education-articles/the-year-international-adoption-became-the-latest-fashion-statement-67275.html

Adoption…a Long Journey

The arrival of the exotic child seems to happen with ease, as if one had miraculously given birth.  From Angelina to Madonna, babies appear with no explanation, probably delivered by an enchanting stork in front of the door of one of their residences.  One can, at last, tell our children that babies are born in cabbages or brought by the magical bird, without having to lie!

This exhibit leaves a bitter taste in the mouth of all of those who, each year, fight to gain the right to become parents.  They have been dreaming about their future child for ages, they have desired him/her with great ardour and they would be willing to move heaven and earth to accelerate the process which, luck be with them, will allow them to love a little abandoned human being.

In France, each year, thousands of files pile up on adoption agencies’ desks and remain unresolved.  Expecting parents are attached to their phone or to their letterbox with the hope of seeing some light at the end of the bureaucratic tunnel. Some are being rebuffed bluntly, sometimes even insulted.  Only 4/5,000 couples succeed annually.  It is not surprising to read anger in their eyes when they see the stars’ babies in the papers!

In Great Britain, international adoption is even less democratised.  About 350 couples only are successful each year, and this after 2 to 3 years of administrative hell, inquisition and intense frustrations.  British spouses wishing to adopt a foreign child are being penalised and made to feel guilty by the “system” which does not like the idea of welcoming an ethnically different child.  And despite months of intrusion in the very private life of the contestants, no one even thinks of checking on the good treatment of the infant whilst settled in his/her new family!

The adoption principle is fabulous in itself when, however, it respects strict ethical criteria.  How many times have we heard of all the scandals linked to overseas adoptions?   I am thinking about the children “bought” from their parents in Hanoi or elsewhere or those kidnapped from their birth mothers and relocated in orphanages by dishonest lawyers, especially in Latin America, and all those that have appeared from God knows where!  The Hague Convention, which was launched in 1998, is, fortunately, aiming to protect adopted children and to insure a legal adoption process, even if some countries have still failed to ratify it.  There are still many improvements to be made to fine-tune a still fractured process.

The most distressing is to know that, throughout the world, millions of infants are rotting in often sordid orphanages, some little stomachs are crying of hunger, and that, like my adorable four year old daughter would say, some hearts are shouting very hard to find a Mummy!  Meanwhile, government officials are neglecting completed files by desperate parents, social workers are wondering how much the prospective parents’ car is worth and how their intimate life is and councillors dare to point their fingers to those who decide to go beyond the local frontiers to locate a child! 

This step achieved, the challengers still have to face the bureaucrats in their child’s country of origin, and scrupulously count the forced “donation” in dollars that will enable them to fully become legal parents.  This is without mentioning the donation from the heart offered to the orphanage and that will somehow get lost in the pocket of a crooked director.

How can we not be cynical, when reading the glossy pages of the magazines which hang around waiting rooms and that boast the last fancies of the superstars, pretending “it is all for a good cause?”  Some of them don’t even go and fetch their last acquisition!   It is infuriating…

Marjorie Paul
http://www.articlesbase.com/news-and-society-articles/adoptiona-long-journey-669571.html