While I don't intend to write exclusively about adoption issues, this IS National Adoption Month, so........ This is a time to focus on building families through adoption. Our family is one made whole by adoption. Recently, there has been much controversy about international adoption, which is how our family came together. Our daughter is from Guatemala.

UNICEF, believe it or not, is one of the strongest voices in getting international adoption closed down in many countries. Their mantra “a child should grow up in his or her birth family and birth culture” is one that, in a perfect world, would make a lot of sense. In fact, I can wholeheartedly agree with that statement, but only when there is a just world, and, as you know, we’re FAR from a just world at this point.

Adoption plans are made for many reasons. When I was in high school (way back in another century,) if an unmarried girl or woman got pregnant, and the pregnancy was carried to term, an adoption took place. Unmarried moms didn’t raise children. That was due not only to the toughness of raising a child on one’s own, but also due to the social stigma of having a child out of wedlock. That stricture still applies in a great many other countries (I saw a stat that said something like 90% of the adoptions from Korea came from unmarried moms there.) Divorce was rare 30 years ago, so two parent families were the rule, and few people could imagine intentionally raising a child on one’s own. Things have certainly changed in the US- 50% of marriages end in divorce, many times people who thought they’d be raising a child with a spouse or significant other find themselves abandoned and raising children alone, so here, raising a child unmarried no longer carries the social stigma it once did, but it IS still very hard. Single parents who don’t have extended family to help often really struggle to raise their children. Domestic adoption from those who made an adoption plan during pregnancy is way down.

The majority of domestic adoptions now are from foster care, where children have been removed from their homes for a variety of reasons. It could be as simple as neglect, or as awful as sexual abuse. I’ve had friends adopt through Child Protective Services (CPS), which is free, by the way, and I’ve got a friend who is currently trying to adopt through CPS. Here’s the problem I have with that- CPS seems hell-bent on reuniting families, which, while noble, is just not always the best for the children. CPS sees children as something that “belongs” to a biological family. I see children as a gift from God, to be protected and loved. IF that can be in the biological family, that is great, but if not, there are literally thousands of people in the world who want to raise a child, who will love and nurture that child, who won’t neglect or abuse the child. NO child deserves to be treated like a commodity and ping ponged back and forth between foster home and bio home. I’ve got a very hard stance here- if I was empress of the world, when someone abused a child (and I don’t mean just a spanking, but true harmful abuse), there would be no second chance. Children deserve to be loved and nurtured, period! I salute those of you who are foster parents to these children, but the craziness of taking children out of bad situations, spending a few months in foster care, then thinking the parents have “changed” and putting them back and then yanking them out again a few months later. Children should not be yo-yoed, but they’re still treated like a commodity that belongs to those who produced them, and that is not always in their best interests. There is a significant number of youths who are homeless who were foster kids, bounced around and having no permanent home. Where do they go when they age out of the foster care system? The streets are often one of their alternatives.

Now, to international adoption, which, just as in domestic infant adoption, has had some fraud, and even one fraudlent adoption is too many, but to shut down this avenue of hope for so many because of a guilty few is just wrong, INHO. We lost our first referred child when it turned out that the woman who presented her as the biological mother was actually no biological kin at all. The US has long required DNA tests of the child and mother, and this one proved that they were not biologically related. The Department of Minors in Guatemala took little Flor de Maria, and told us that we had “no legal right” to know anything about where she was taken. The woman was taken into custody, but nothing happened to the attorney or to the agency and that is where the problem is. I have long maintained that if agencies were told that if they worked with an unethical attorney, both the attorney and agency would lose the ability to process adoptions that that country for one year the first time, and, if there was a second time, it would be a lifelong ban by the US Embassy (which processes most of the adoptions in the world) to the agency, any of the principles in the agency (meaning they couldn’t simply change their name and keep working) and for any attorneys in the firm. That threat to their livelihood would have stopped fraud, but the Embassy wasn’t willing to do that. They’d give a little 2 or 3 month ban to an attorney, but the other attorneys in the office could continue processing. It is really so frustrating, knowing there are thousands of children who need a family, but whose biological family no longer as the right to make an adoption plan so that their children have a chance at not growing up, for example in Guatemala, in a country with one of the highest under 5 mortality rates in the world, and where on any given year 50% of the children suffer from severe malnutrition, which starves not only their bodies, stunting their physical growth, but also starves their brains, making them mentally disabled. UNICEF says that poverty shouldn't be a reason for adoption, and again, if it was a perfect world, I'd agree. However, the US helped to facilitate a vicious 36 year civil war in Guatemala, which didn't end til 1998. The country is still struggling, and now is in the grips of drug lords. There is also a very bad drought going on, and subsistence farmers are not being able to grow enough to feed their families. Children are the ones suffering the most.

I’ve got friends in Guatemala with a medical clinic; they say that women frequently come to them with their babies and small children, asking them if they can get them adopted into the US, although he has never been involved in adoptions. They’re seeing their children starve before their eyes, and they want something better for them, but that “better” is no longer available to them. There is much racism in Guatemala towards “browner” people, and I have to wonder how much that plays into this. In India, there was a woman working very hard to stop adoptions there, who was quoted as saying something to the effect of “what right do these lower caste children have to a better life?” Hard to believe, isn’t it?

When we met our daughter’s biological mothers, she thanked us over and over for adopting our daughter. She talked about how her daughters still in Guatemala could never even dream of the life that this daughter had. Her older daughters had been born at home, and she couldn’t afford the few dollars it took to register them, so according to the law, they didn’t exist, which meant they couldn’t even go to school (if they could find the clothes and shoes for it.) We gave them the money to register the girls and told her we hoped she got them into school, but we don’t know for sure if that happened. When you’re struggling to survive every moment, it is hard to plan for the difference having an education will make in the future.

I was reading on an anti-adoption site the other day and it just makes me so sad. A comment was made about “the big lie” that adoptions are happy occasions, but it isn’t a big lie- it is a part of the truth- it is a happy occasion when a child comes to parents who are prepared to parent and to love, and also sad for the mother who may never see that child again, but who has chosen adoption for a “better life” for the child. Too many parents are not willing to be open and honest about their adoption. Our daughter met her birth family when she was 4 years old. We’ve always had a photo of her and her bio mom in her room; along with one of her and her foster mom and sister (they raised her from 2 days old to 8 mo.) I’ve had people ask me if we’re going to tell her she is adopted. HELLO! It is pretty darn apparent she isn’t our bio child, and I’m always stunned when I’m asked, not only for that obvious reason, but because I can’t imagine not telling her, even if she looked like us. We include her birth family in our prayers every night, and she will sometimes talk about her birth family, and how she wants to study hard in Spanish class so that she can talk to her sisters directly when we get to see them the next time. Another friend of mine who adopted from Columbia and Guatemala put it best when talking about whether to meet the birth family or not. Leceta said “you can’t have too much love” and I can’t agree more.

When an adoption takes place, there is much sorrow as well as joy, but I can’t help but think of the baby in the Bible when King Solomon discerned who was the actual mother of a child by telling his soldier to cut the baby in half to give each mother claiming it some. The mother who had borne the child said to give the whole baby to the other mother, rather than to harm him. Adoption is like that- whether it is because the bio family can’t nurture the child because of poverty or other reasons (sometimes a new man in the house and he doesn’t want his money to feed some other man’s children), they are giving the whole child to another so that, not only will the child not be harmed, but that the child will have a chance at a better life. It isn’t that they don’t love their child; it is often that they love them so much they’re willing to sacrifice having them in their arms to give them a shot at a life where their talents can be nurtured. That is love greater than most of us have. When we contacted our daughter’s bio mom and sent her photos of our family, she said she was so excited- she’d never expected to hear from us, and although she prayed every day that this daughter would be safe and loved, she just didn’t know. She kept thanking God for allowing her to see our (and in her and us) child again and in getting to see how healthy and loved she is. It was a tough meeting, lots of tears, (from her and me,) but it was a good kind of tears. She knows first hand how much we love our daughter, and our daughter knows first hand she was relinquished out of love, not because she wasn’t wanted. That’s important.

Sometimes children are cruel- saying things like "you're adopted because your "REAL" parents didn't want you!" First of all, please teach your children that we are the REAL parents- there is nothing artificial about me- I hold her when she cries, we snuggle when we watch movies, we celebrate good things and commiserate about bad ones. She has a first family, who lives in Guatemala. Some folks call them "birth families" or "biological families" or "first families"- all are correct. "Real" however, is not! Also teach your children that adoption is a gift, as surely as their birth to you was. It isn't about "not wanting", but, rather, about wanting "better" for their children. Whether it is the teen who isn't prepared to be a parent now, or the family in China who isn't allowed to have that second child, or the family in an AIDs-sticken country in Africa who wants their young relative to be raised in a family rather than an orphanage, or the mother who simply can't afford to feed another child, and sees better opportunities for that child elsewhere, as painful as it will be to the first mother, it is about making a better life for the children. Some people do that by immigrating to a country with more opportunities (legally or not.) Sadly, as adoption closes is so much of the world, immigration to other countries may become the only way for that better life. Teach your children that adoption is about love- the love of the first family to provide a more stable home for their child, and the love of the forever family, who brings this child into our homes, born not of our bodies, but of our hearts.

People often say "bless you for adopting", but, believe me (most days, anyway) she is a much bigger blessing to us that we could ever be for her!

As we celebrate National Adoption Month, I hope that you will read some of the wonderful adoption books to your children. They help to explain that it is just another way to build a family, one that gets to have more people who love that child. While adoption is about loss, it is also about growth and gaining a whole new family to love the child. When we're honest with our children, we can help them navigate the loss pathway, and hopefully help them come out stronger and more sure of the love they hold from both their first family and their forever family.