Adoption can be a wonderful thing. Couples, or even financially independent single people, who want a family have the opportunity to give children with nobody a family and a secure future, while they get to reap the emotional benefits of having a child. But everything has its dark side, and while adoption as a concept is an excellent solution for one of the most horrible ills of the world, there are problems we need to keep in mind, especially with international adoptions.
The first, of course, is child trafficking. There have been many cases where children from disadvantaged families have been stolen and sold as part of adoption rackets. The paperwork that most of us take for granted – birth certificates, medical records, the process of applying for a passport and other legal documentation that make sure that your existence is a recorded fact, making you as a person trackable if necessary – isn’t the norm for the poorest people in the world, including in India.
There have been terrible stories of how children are stolen from families, or how families give their children to adoption agencies under the belief that the children were only going to the US to be educated, not for a permanent adoption, or of how children are sold to middlemen who then go on to sell the children to adoption agencies or connected orphanages for a profit. While there are plenty of stories from India regarding this, India is not alone in having children stolen. This is a problem across Asia, Africa and South America, and certain parts of Europe, like the Romani.
The second big issue with international adoption is the romantic view of adopting a child from a poor country. After all, Brangelina did it, and look at how happy they seem to be! There are lots of problems with this. The first is that people who actively seek international adoptions don’t often have the slightest idea what they’re getting into. For many of these adoptions, the children are not infants – they are toddlers or very young children, and they need to adjust to an entirely different life when they’re brought into a different country by their adoptive family. Often, these children have emotional and behavioural problems. They have great trouble accepting their new way of life, not to mention immense guilt that they suddenly seem to have plenty of what the people in their pre-adoption life need. Especially if their adoptive family has other children, this becomes a huge hurdle. So what do they do? Well, in the US, especially, this is where it gets really horrifying.
There have been plenty of records of online forums where parents of adopted children put up requests for ‘rehoming’. This means that the parents post messages saying that much as they love their adopted child, they simply cannot deal with it anymore and cannot adjust to the major upheaval in their lives due to the child’s behaviour. They look for ‘rehoming options’ – where they will sign over the guardianship of the child in question to somebody else online. In short, since the child in question was not behaving according to their romantic and idealised concept of the grateful and loving adopted child who looks at their new parents adoringly, they look for other options. There are no official background checks for these ‘new parent applications’ apart from what the adoptive parent might consider necessary. There are no official background checks into these new parent-applications – they might have criminal records, have a history of problems that make them unsuitable for parents, or could even be predators. The story of a woman who adopted a Russian child and then put him on a plane back to Russia because she ‘no longer wished to parent this child’ made headlines and contributed to Russia clamping down on US adoption of Russian children.
A year ago, Reuters did an investigation into this phenomenon and they found some horrifying results. They found that putting their adopted children up on a Yahoo bulletin board for a guardianship exchange is not illegal in all of the US, and that even in states where prospective new guardians are required to be vetted by authorities if the handover involves crossing state lines, a lot of authorities were unaware of this. There are no practical safeguards in place for internationally adopted children in the US – there is no system by which any authorities check on the welfare of the children after the adoption process. While adoption agencies need to be specifically approved if they are to facilitate international adoptions, in many ways, they are, in essence, self-regulated.
There is a new bill being tabled in the US called CHIFF (Children In First Families Act) which, last heard, has run into opposition. The bill intends to reshuffle responsibilities, putting these adopted children under the human rights department. There is opposition from some child welfare officials, who feel that while this might benefit adoption agencies whose revenues have been declining, this would do adopted children, especially ones who are illegally/unofficially rehomed, absolutely no favours.
Even when all the safeguards in place can be assured to have no loopholes and all organisations ensure that the spirit of the laws are respected, international adoption is a problematic situation. The ideal solution, surely, is to ensure that all children born within our country are wanted and taken care of, and to make sure that adoptions within our country work seamlessly. To reach this utopian scenario, we will need significant improvements in women’s and children’s rights, as well as better sex and contraceptives education for everybody, especially women. We shouldn’t have to ship our children off to developed countries as fashionable accessories to be passed on to somebody else when they turn out to be too much trouble. We definitely should not have to make an industry out of it. But until that utopian day comes around, we must accept the responsibility of making sure that Indian children adopted into other countries are legally taken care of, not passed on like untrendy shoes.
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