The Children Money Can Buy

by Anne Moody

  I wonder if a few hours together could really overcome long-held beliefs and fears. I certainly hope so, for the grandmother’s sake.

  There are other concerns that no amount of reassurance can properly address. I remember Jocelyn’s pleasure at meeting a girl who had been adopted from Colombia and how it quickly turned to horror when she heard more of the story. This girl and her twin sister had been placed with their American adoptive parents as babies, and although they grew up knowing they had been adopted, they had been given only very basic information about where they had lived prior to the adoption. As teenagers, they had undertaken to find out more about their history and eventually their efforts led to a return trip to Colombia and a meeting with their birth mother.

  Their adoptive parents must have been supportive, at least enough to have allowed and funded the trip. But instead of the happy and reassuring visit they all hoped for, the sister’s worlds were rocked by what their birth mother told them. She said that she had never consented to the adoption and that she had mourned them ever since the day they had been taken from her. I don’t know if the birth mother meant to give them this idea, but the girls came to the conclusion that their adoptive parents must have been complicit in their “kidnapping” and were therefore responsible for the birth mother’s suffering. Needless to say, all family members were in crisis.

  I encountered a similar situation recently in which a young woman who had been adopted from Vietnam as a child sought out her birth mother. She too was told that her birth mother had never consented to the adoption. In fact, the birth mother said she had been tricked into it by someone who had taken the girl to an orphanage without her knowledge. The birth mother said that she went after her child immediately, but it was too late because her daughter had already been sent out of the country. The young woman had a good relationship with her adoptive parents and didn’t question their ethics in adopting from Vietnam, although she did question the ethics of Vietnamese adoption overall. The biggest difficulty for her now came from the fact that along with the tremendous empathy she felt for her birth mother, came a little doubt about the story she told. The young woman had been about five years old when she was adopted and she had frightening and chaotic memories of her early childhood. She also had memories of being in a children’s home for what seemed to be a very long time, possibly even several years. It is certainly possible that, despite some inconsistencies, the birth mother was helpless to reclaim her child and, as it was with the Cambodian grandmother, the details of the past were obscured by hardship.

  These are heartbreaking stories, and enormous harm has been done to all of the people involved. The birth mothers’ losses are obvious and irrevocable. The adoptive parents’ relationships with their children have been jeopardized, and the children have been thrust into emotionally painful and confusing positions. But it’s highly likely that neither the birth nor adoptive parents were uncaring or untruthful; children who have been adopted in these circumstances shouldn’t have to decide whom to believe or have to declare allegiance to one side or the other. Unraveling their histories may prove to be impossible, and it is unrealistic and unfair to expect either birth or adoptive parents to account (or atone) for everything that happened.

  As it was with the birth father of Madonna’s Malawian son, the birth mothers from Colombia and Vietnam denied that they had wanted their children to be adopted. But when the question to the birth father was rephrased to ask if he had agreed to the adoption, he acknowledged that he had and that he felt unhappy about people questioning him and interfering in his decision. I wonder, if the questions were rephrased to these two birth mothers whether their answers might be more nuanced.

  I think it’s safe to say that virtually all birth mothers would answer the question “Did you want your child to be adopted?” with an emphatic and honest “No.” Of course they didn’t want to find themselves and their children in this situation. But if you ask birth mothers the question, “Did you want your child to have a life you weren’t able to give her?” the answer might then be different.

  It is undeniable that there are kidnappings and other abuses in international adoptions and that some adoptees are destined to hear tragic stories when they contact their birth parents. There are also birth mothers in both domestic adoption and international adoption who deny agreeing to an adoption because they are afraid their children won’t understand and will feel unloved. It seems less risky and more sympathetic to tell a story about being victimized by individuals than to try to explain all the complicated and painful circumstances, including victimization through poverty and hardship, that led up to the relinquishment. Clarifying these situations in international adoption is greatly complicated by the fact that people are usually speaking either with extremely limited mutual language or through an interpreter. Conversations that are already extremely delicate in nature are further burdened by the logistics of communication, and there are numerous opportunities for misunderstanding.

  There is general consensus that children are best raised in the country and culture of their birth. Even among families created by international adoption, there is widely held agreement that, in an ideal world, their child would not have needed to be adopted and would be living happily with his or her birth family. But is living happily with one’s birth family really an available alternative for the majority of children who are adopted internationally? People would probably also agree that, in an ideal world, children who need to be adopted would find families in their country of origin, thereby retaining their cultural heritage. But is that a realistic expectation? Historically, very few families in “the placing countries” (China, Korea, India, Ethiopia, Guatemala, etc.) adopt, usually for reasons based on cultural beliefs and personal economics.

  The lack of emphasis on in-country adoption in the placing countries has also been influenced by the fact that out-of-country adoption brings in far more money, providing little incentive for local adoption agencies to use their limited time and resources to encourage domestic adoptions. If that makes them seem like cold-hearted businesses, focused only on profits, please consider to what use those profits are put. In all but the corrupt agencies, that money is used to provide for the children in their care.

  International adoption brings money from wealthy countries into poorer countries, and this in itself is certainly not a bad thing. When the adoptions are carefully regulated by reputable agencies, a portion of the adoption fee is used to provide care for children who are in need but who for one reason or another are not going to be adopted. These may be children who are older or have special needs, or they may be children whose parents cannot provide for them but do not want to relinquish their parental rights. These parents hope that their children can be cared for and educated in a children’s home or some similar facility, then be returned to the family when they are older and better able to take care of themselves.

  Most reputable adoption agencies attach a required “donation” to their international adoption fee that is earmarked for the care of such children, and adoptive parents are generally happy to have their money used for this purpose. It is hard to understand the reasoning of someone who dismisses this gesture as no more than a display of wealth and power. It is even harder to understand what the critics of international adoption feel should be done instead for these children.

  We can hope that in the future, there will be another source of funds to support children in need, and there will be more domestic adoptions in the placing countries. Korea has been working hard to increase its own domestic adoptions since the 1990s, with limited success. Someday, in-country adoption in these countries may be more widespread, but that is not the case today.

  The arguments against international adoption, in their assumption that children should always stay in their countries of origin, remind me of my long-ago conversation with Charles (the social services director) and his insistence on always working to reunite the family.
Both are laudable goals, worth pursuing, but sometimes, for some people, they are simply not attainable.

  It is a fact of international adoption that children leave their country of origin in order to come to a wealthier country. It is also true that, if life was fair, birth parents would never feel they needed to relinquish their children because of poverty, war, natural disaster, and other hardships. But life isn’t fair, and many people the world over do relinquish their children for those reasons.

  Birth parents in other countries also relinquish children for the same reasons that children are relinquished in wealthier countries: cultural disapproval of single parenthood, physical or mental health concerns, substance abuse, or feeling that adoption serves the child’s best interests. Birth parents in other countries who relinquish for these reasons deserve the same consideration and respect for their decisions that we are finally learning to give birth mothers in the United States. There are also situations in which birth parents in other countries are abusive or absent by choice. Assuming that every adoption in other countries is caused by conditions beyond the birth parents’ control or desire is simplistic reasoning.

  People in both the placing and receiving countries who actually work with the children understand that we need to do our best for each of them. They also understand that even when everyone works their hardest and every possible safeguard is in place, some adoptions don’t work out for the best. Sometimes children end up in bad homes with adoptive parents who are abusive, troubled, or unloving. Sometimes they end up with parents who are none of those things but are still somehow just fundamentally the wrong parents for that particular child. When this happens, it is tragic—just as it is when this sort of dysfunction happens in biological families. These problems are not unique to adoptive families; they are just more noticeable and more remarked upon than they are in birth families.

  But what about all the happy adoptive families? The vast majority of families created through international adoption fall into this category, and they cannot be expected to be overly concerned with the “political correctness” of their relationships. Adult adoptees from this sort of family are busy going about their lives, as are most people, focusing on their family, friends, jobs, and other interests. While having been adopted is important to them, as is their racial and cultural heritage, it does not dominate their lives.

  There is presently an outspoken group of Korean adult adoptees who object vehemently to having been separated from their birth families and sent away from Korea as children. Their unhappiness deserves careful attention, but it is interesting to note that many of the particularly outspoken and poignant members of this group had been adopted not as babies but as toddlers or young children. They were undoubtedly traumatized by the losses they experienced; some of them were old enough when they were adopted to remember the families they lost. There are also people in this group who reported growing up in unhappy adoptive families or in racist communities. Others have reported that their parents had been loving but essentially clueless regarding their children’s need to learn about and identify with their cultural heritage. While their parents were not unkind, and their families were not unhappy, the children felt isolated both racially and emotionally. It is not surprising that people from these sorts of families would conclude that international adoption causes harm. But most international adoptees have had different experiences and have reached different conclusions about the ethics of allowing children to be raised by parents who do not share their race or culture.

  Once again, I am reminded of Charles’s maxim to “always work to reunite the family.” In theory, I never disagreed with him, nor do I disagree with those who oppose international adoption in theory. In an ideal world, children would never need to leave their birth families or their birth countries, and that ideal world is one we should all be working to attain. But the real world is full of children who need to be safe and loved right now, and they should not be asked to put their lives on hold while we wait for a perfect world.

  * * *

  1. Tenthani, Raphael. The Associated Press. October 26, 2006. http://washington post.com.

  2. “Malawi Labels Madonna a ‘Bully’ after Recent Visit.” April 11, 2013. BBC News. http://bbc.com.

  3. Jegwa, Peter. “Madonna Betrayed Us over Our Daughter Mercy.” December 1, 2014. Daily Mail.com. http:dailymail.co.uk.

  4. Powers, Srey. Special to CNN. September 18, 2013. http://cnn.com.

  31

  The Ethics of Foster Care

  Years ago, on a lovely June evening after ten-year-old Jocelyn’s first piano recital, I was happily listening to the teacher’s little speech of congratulations to both students and parents when something struck me as amiss. She told the children they had worked hard and done well, and she told the parents essentially the same thing. It was all very pleasant. Then she talked about the “Mozart effect,” often cited by people who maintain that children who study music also do better in school, and she pointed out that all of her piano students excelled academically. It was an atmosphere replete with the kind of self-congratulation and self-satisfaction that accomplished children can bring out in their parents (and to which I am highly susceptible), but this time something felt wrong.

  As I listened to the piano teacher, it occurred to me that her students, and my daughters, talented and hardworking and wonderful as they are, are “children money can buy.” Their successes in music or academics or athletics or whatever are certainly not unearned, but I think it is important to understand that they have not been earned on an even playing field. These children have been given a huge assist in the form of music lessons, accelerated classes, special coaching, and so on ad infinitum. Even more significantly, they have been given the message that they are destined for success, not only at the immediate goal but at life.

  Certainly there is a downside to all of this in the form of pressure, but it is definitely preferable to the type of pressure faced by children from the foster care world. Children without a stable home life need to work hard all day every day just to maintain their equilibrium in that tremendously insecure world—a more difficult endeavor than practicing piano and playing your recital piece well or stressing out about which college you’ll get into. And society rarely recognizes or congratulates them on their efforts.

  I am distressed by the tendency to attach moral virtue to the abilities and accomplishments of children of privilege, as though their successes result simply from the combination of good genes and hard work. While it is certainly appropriate to value the child’s efforts and his or her particular skill or achievement, it is nonsense to attribute it to moral superiority. What about the moral superiority of the child who goes to his fast-food job every day, even though he despises it, because his family needs the money? This child gets virtually nothing in the way of acknowledgment from society. Instead, he gets poverty-level wages, which make it clear that neither the job nor the person who holds it is valued.

  The young person our society admires is the one who, because he can afford not to work, is able to spend a gap year before college volunteering somewhere or on an extended trip. We’re even more admiring of the child whose family has spent countless hours and dollars on turning him into some version of an Olympic hopeful. We completely ignore the fact that the world is full of equally goodhearted, talented, hardworking, and deserving kids who will simply never have these sorts of opportunities to excel or even to discover what their special gifts might be. The adults in their lives just aren’t in a position to nurture and fund their talents and dreams.

  Raising children with advantages is expensive for families, but raising them without advantages is far more expensive to society. Even without considering the hardships to the children themselves, the social costs to society of raising children poorly (poverty, crime, substance abuse, teen pregnancy, joblessness, etc.), are obvious.

  Consider the
cost of doing a good job of supporting a child in foster care compared with the cost of maintaining an adult in the prison system, not to mention the cost of the legal system that put him there or the cost to society of his criminal actions or untreated emotional problems. Prisons are full of people who were once in the foster care system, and—unlike in foster care—the state doesn’t stop paying for their care when they reach the age of maturity.

  We ought to be motivated to improve the lives of children in foster care simply by the self-serving desire to save money down the road when we don’t need to confine them in jails or institutions later in life. We ought to think about the various benefits to society when crime and mental illness are reduced. Doesn’t it seem a good idea to spend a bit extra on a child (perhaps even for things like piano lessons or athletic coaching, but certainly for things like therapy, tutoring, and adequate support for foster families) in the hope that it might improve his prospects for the future? Giving these kids the sort of assists from which more privileged kids routinely benefit might boost their confidence in ways that would have all sorts of beneficial repercussions.

  Of course, I know that piano lessons aren’t likely to turn a traumatized kid in foster care into what I have described as a “child money can buy.” That’s not the goal, anyway. I’m not concerned about them becoming musicians or athletes or acquiring some other specific skill. I’m concerned about nurturing their spirits.

  What I want money to be able to buy for the children in foster care is a share of the security and self-esteem that other children enjoy. I want it to buy some of the social, emotional, and practical skills that will help these kids succeed in the world, both as children and as adults. It’s not too much for them to hope for or to expect, it’s not too much for society to provide, and the benefits to everyone would be far-reaching.