A little adoption history and pontificating

A little distance is always good before writing on a tough subject. I think I can tackle this rationally now, though I may step on a few toes. We'll see.

As some of you may know, yesterday the State department issued a notice saying that China, as of the end of August, has closed their intercountry adoption program. This is across the board and regardless of whether a family has been matched with a child or not. This has been exceedingly hard news for the Chinese adoption community. 

I think I need to fill you in on some background before I continue because I realize not everyone lives in this world. (This is an extremely cursory and very simplified history.) China began allowing intercounty adoptions in 1992. Since that time, more than 160,000 children (most were girls) were adopted around the world; ~82,000 of those children came to the US. The process was centralized and a fairly predictable process. Once a family assembled their dossier and had it logged-in, they could usually be assured of being matched with a child and travelling within the year. These were mainly healthy infant girl adoptions. 

This is also the time that there were many other counties who were allowing intercounty adoptions... Cambodia, Vietnam, Guatamala, and Ethiopia were the other sending countries with fairly high numbers. But unlike China, these processes were more unpredictable and riddled with child trafficking. Every single one of these countries closed due to ethics issues and most are still closed. Vietnam is currently open, but it is a very small program and the country closed and reopened multiple times over the years. China remained stable, but because of its strict requirements in regards to income and age, not everyone qualified. 

Then around 2005 the well-oiled machine hiccuped. Predictable timelines suddenly weren't so predictable. Instead of a set of dossiers being matched with a child in batches sorted by month, it became batches of days. Potential adoptive parents went from thinking they would be travelling within a year of being logged-in to hoping they would be matched by the second year of waiting. Two tracks of families were created... these willing to adopt a child with a medical need and those waiting for a healthy child. The wait for an older or special needs became much shorter. Eventually it became clear that those waiting for a healthy infant girl would ultimately be disappointed. 

In the late oughts, the program had become exclusively older children and special needs. In the twenty-teens, as care centers became populated more by children with special needs, China became looser in their requirements. This is where we entered the China adoption picture because we in no way met the requirements previously. The process wasn't quite the assembly line that it had been, but it was still fairly predictable. 

This is how things carried on until the spring of 2020 and Covid changed the world. As with everything, adoptions suddenly halted. Not only was there no travel, there was no movement at all. The offices which processed dossiers were closed. From families waiting to travel to those who had just had there application accepted, everyone was stuck with their hoped for children across the world. 

And they waited and waited and waited. The world began to open up and life returned to normalcy, but there was no movement in terms of adoption. Also at this time, foreign NGO's who ran foster homes, (at least those that were left, this has been a long, ongoing process), were told to return the children they were caring for and close up shop. Then in late 2023 and early 2024, a few of the hundreds of families waiting to travel were given permission to go and complete their adoptions. There was hope that things would start to move again, but ultimately travel approvals sputtered to a stop. There was more waiting.

And then yesterday was the announcement that adoptions were done. My heart truly does break for those families who were caught, who waited for so long hoping things would open, and will now never bring that much longer for child home. I know first hand that the waiting can be excruciating. Having hopes dashed that you worked and saved so hard for is a huge source of grief on so many levels. I'm truly sorry that there was no grandfathering for people in process. If you are one of those families, I'm so sorry. You will probably want to stop reading here because I'm sure you are not at a place where you are ready to hear what I'm going to write next.

I have to say that none of this has come as a surprise. I'm actually more surprised that it took so long to get to this official decision of closing the program. For years the number of  children who have been approved for adoption has been shrinking. Requirements had started to become more strict again with less willingness to bend. The program had just become much smaller. 

We also cannot discount the fairly major societal changes which have been happening within China. The one-child policy ended and with it the need to chose between a daughter and a son. There has been a rise in domestic adoptions and another adoptive mother has written that she was aware of the beginnings of a program to encourage special needs adoptions. And let's not forget China's plummeting birth rate. China for the average citizen is very different from the 1990's. Children are a country's best resource, so I'm not sure anyone should be surprised at China wanting to keep them at home. 

Adoption is not always rainbows and happy trees, and I'm afraid this is sometimes forgotten in the rhetoric. Adoption is trauma born from trauma. And if a child is also losing their language and culture then that is yet another layer of trauma. Are there also good things? Yes, of course. A stable, loving family is every child's right. And as much as I love and adore my five adopted children, I grieve for the losses they have endured. I fully acknowledge I am their third best choice. The first would be to stay with their family of origin, the second would be to be adopted within their own culture, and then there's us. And I will also admit to sometimes wondering if we did the right thing by them, but my crystal ball is broken and there is no way we can sort out the what if's. All this to say that adoption is complicated with no easy answers about what is ultimately the best. 

This has become long, even by my standards, so I'll skip the paragraphs about white saviorism, model minorities, and the pervasive belief in the 90's and 00's that Asian children didn't have behavioral issues as you would find when adopting out of foster care. Maybe another time. 

If I've learned anything from our years in the adoption world and meeting the people who cared for our children, it's that they love their children. And if you see a country that has a large number of children in care, that often has nothing to do with how much a child is loved and everything to do with societal forces that cause parents to have to make unthinkable decisions. We in the US have absolutely no leg to stand on if we're going to play the "we love our children more than those people over there" game when we repeatedly allow our children to be gunned down in their schools. Why would another country want to send their precious children to us? And make no mistake, a sovereign country has every right to determine it's own policies on its children. We in another country have absolutely no right to another country's children and lobbying our government to step in and say we do is hubris to a high degree.