Quotas for cutting the number of placements

We have now received (unconfirmed) information that the cuts of placements as decided by the Ethiopian Government is implemented by a quota which is operated for each adoption agency. Apparently the government aims to limit the number of placements to 2 adoptions per month for each agency. German agencies are therefore hardly affected since the total number of adoptions per agency was not much higher. The much larger U.S. American agencies are likely to be hit more severely.

Moreover, the reasons for the measure are not only the manipulation of paperwork and document in preparation of the placement. Also the attitude and behaviour of adoptive parents in Ethiopia, which were perceived as sometimes condescending or even degrading seems to have triggered the decision.

International Open Adoption

While in Germany open adoption has now informally become the standard, this is not the case in international adoption. Why actually? Thinking from the perspective of the child, which should be at the centre of all placements, contact with the first family is a valuable if not integral part of their identity.

The current practice so far largely prevented contact with the first family. Sometimes it is possible to meet the family of the child, when picking it up. But even that is not a compulsory part of the programme. Adoptive parents are rather discouraged by agencies who point out that the first family could ask for money, or express their expectation that their children would provide for them from Germany. One would rather avoid these scenes by not meeting the family. This abrupt cutting of ties with the first family is compensated at a later stage when parents or the agency take them to the country and visit the orphanage. Then it is usually too late to get in touch with the family of origin: many contacts are lost, much has happened in the family, grandparents have died and children are born. Families might leave their villages and move on.

It is time to change the practice. Liaising with the first family should play a much larger role in the adoption process. The careful documentation of family relationships and face to face contact prevent corruption and child trafficking. It makes it much harder for traffickers, orphanages and agencies to cover up shady deals. In addition, a permanent contact helps to deal with identity issues of the child. This contact can take the form of regular exchanges of reports and photos - and if it is only a card for Christmas and birthdays. A search for one's roots is largely redundant, if the roots are always known. Nagging questions about the reasons of the adoption can be made easier and also answered if the addressees are tangible.

So far there is hardly any structure for this. Therefore, adoptive parents must take action themselves. The first step in the direction of open adoption is taken at the point of the pick up of the child. If the agency is unwilling to organize a meeting, parents should persist and only accept good reasons (e.g., violence and abuse in the family).

The meeting with the first family should be well prepared. If possible, it should take place in two separate parts. The first part is about getting to know each other and saying farewell to the child. It is quite appropriate to give small (not expensive, but attentive) gifts. The family can give the child their blessing and thereby facilitate a good start for the new family. The adoptive parents get an impression of the family and learn a lot about their child. The child learns that her first family has trust in her new parents.

In a separate part, there should be a meeting in a quiet atmosphere and in the absence of the child. In that meeting the family history with names, birth dates and places of residence, as well as the relationships, major events and diseases in the family are documented in detail. This is also the moment to check out inconsistencies in the social report. Conversely, adoptive parents should be prepared to pass on the own family history including address and phone number to the first family.

What to do if the child was found abandoned? Here, the search for the first family is the starting point. This is significantly more difficult but not impossible. A visit to the site of abandonment is important - for reasons documentation for the child, but also to ask questions. You can leave business cards and hire a searcher to find clues to the origin of the child. Beware, this is not easy in a country like Ethiopia but a mere attempt can show agencies and authorities that one does not lightly accept abandonement reports. Tipps for such a search in China you can find here. 

In the long term, open adoption is the only ethical way in international adoption. When children are placed in a new family, they have two families. It is time to accept this and learn how to handle it. 

The Myth We Love

'The lie we love' was published in the winter of 2008, in Foreign Policy Magazine. The journalist E.J. Graff analyzed the myth of the millions of abandoned children (babies) in orphanages in poor countries who are waiting to be saved by Western families. The myth was that in reality most children in orphanages have parents and are either sick or older; the babies who are adopted have been placed for adoption with dubious methods or through trafficking. The culprits are not the adopting parents who have good intentious but are largely naive, but middle men (and women), orphanages, authorities and agencies which demand and earn high fees in the transaction of placing children for adoption.

There is enough evidence for this argument. Baby trafficking took place in Guatemala and more recently in China. Child abductions are known from India and Nepal. There are unscrupulous orphanages in most countries, that place children abroad. Reports like this are useful for alerting the public and making clear to those concerned that the public has an eye on their practices.

At the same time, scandalizing reports like this cover as much as they unveil. They aim to mobilize rather than  inform. They emphasize on the fraud and pars pro toto insinuate that fraud is endemic in the system as a whole. By doing so they perpetuate another myth.

The other myth is that international adoption is an unregulated industry. (The use of the terms 'industry' and 'markets for babies' in these reports are deliberate innuendos to highlight that children are treated as commodities.) This is a popular but false assertion. Any adoption recognition of a foreign court by a German, any visa application and naturalization of internationally adopted children is mediated by the state and highly regulated. German courts regularly reject requests for legal recognition, if the procedures do not fulfill German standards of adoption and alternative forms of care were not checked. This hurts the families, but it is enough to make agencies taking the existing regulation more seriously. 

The same is true for the US. If the American embassy staff  feel "uneasy" with many visa applications (Graff, p. 65), then they have a duty to act. And in contrast to the myth of unregulated industry American embassies have acted in the past. Last year, 80 adopting families were stranded in Nepal due to embassy action; currently Cambodia is in the spotlight. Countries have been completely closed for IA by receiving countries due to corruption and trafficking. As a result, there are steadily falling numbers of adoptions and more and more countries closed for adoption despite the myth of a networked and seemingly profitable industry backed up by a powerful political lobby.

The point is not to excuse any trafficking or corruption in international adoption, which clearly takes place. There are too many irregularities and corrupt middlemen in many procedures. The existing regulation via  issuance of visas and recognition procedures of court is too indirect, bureaucratic and often painfully slow. This is undisputed. However, the image of an unregulated industry entirely governed by greed, corruption and lies is equally a myth - just like the millions of orphaned babies waiting to be rescued. It is an image that is portrayed as a counterpart to the idyll of the loving adoptive family in a world full of scandals. The truth is, as is so often, somewhere in the middle: complex, complicated and less suitable for a good story.