Troubled

The new rules that China plans to institute for international adoptions have been on many people's minds lately. We've had some interesting discussions with friends about how the changes would affect us if we chose to try to adopt another daughter from China. We calculated our BMI's immediately upon hearing the news (we're both in the ideal/healthy range), but that's irrelevant. Basically, we're out until 2012, barring a kidney rejection episode, which would make the process impossible for us. For some reason organ transplant recipients are ineligible for 10 years post-transplant. That seems odd to me, because the organ survival rate increases dramatically after 3 years post-surgery, then levels off pretty much until well past ten years. It seems like it would make more sense to require transplant recipients to be 3 years post surgery. There must be some factor I'm missing.

What really troubles me is how the news is being portrayed in the mass media. Paula Zahn, never one of my "reliable sources" anyway, has outdone herself with poor journalistic integrity with her recently aired piece on this topic. There's a transcript here that you really must read to understand why I'm so dismayed. http://adoptioninfoaccuracy.blogspot.com/

After reading this transcript (I was sleeping when this piece aired, but detest Paula enough that I never watch her show anyway) I did some online naptime research into foster adoption statistics. I learned there's not a great deal of information available on adoption/foster adoption past 1995. But here's the gist:

About 500,000 kids are in foster care in the U.S. in any given year. Less than 5% are under one year old.

88% of children in foster care are NOT eligible for adoption because their birth parents have yet to have their parental rights terminated.

That means only 12% of the 500,000 kids are available to be adopted on any given year - that's 60,000 kids. 44% of these kids are white, 43% are African-American very few are Asian-American.

About 65-70% of those kids, 1/2 of whom are white, are adopted by their foster parents.

That leaves about 1,800 kids left to be adopted by people outside the family or foster system.

There were something like 22,000 International adoptions last year - with less than 7,000 from China.

So, unless we wanted to become foster parents, our chance to become adoptive parents through the foster system would be very slight. The foster/adopt process is frequently protracted, also, since the birth parents are, as they should be, given many chances to clean up their act before their parental rights can be terminated. The system believes firmly that the best place for a child is with his/her biological parents up until the very second they agree to a termination of their rights. Jon and I agreed our hearts were too tender for this process after watching what friends went through in trying to adopt two older boys whose mother was unable to provide for their safety and well being. Visitations were confusing for the children, court mandated phone calls were upsetting, especially when the mother would call high on drugs late at night. The boys had suffered serious and repeated abuse for a long period of time before they entered the foster system.

Other options for domestic adoption were to go through religious organizations--not something we wanted to do since we aren't particularly religious and thought it would be hypocritical of us to say we were simply to become family--or to try to find an open adoption. We didn't want to do that either - for a variety of reasons, mainly that we are neither one of us interested in complicated emotional and legal entanglements with strangers.

On the other hand, China appears to have a number of children who don't have families and need them. They have an exceptionally well-run, efficient system for connecting parent-less children with parents who want children. The process is clear cut and fairly swift. If you meet their requirements, you can get in line and at some point they will call your name and connect you with a child who needs you.

As for the specious arguments made by Zhan's guests about why American parents are choosing Chinese girls over American children of different ethnicities, they barely deserve comment. They are based on stereotypes that are unfounded. All children are beautiful and doll-like. Almost all children are remarkably resiliant and have limitless potential. Almost all babies are smart - and if given love, good nutrition, nuturing and exposure to situtations that feed their minds they will be smart, and they will be successful. Our expectations of a child adopted domestically or internationally would be no different and our hearts are big enough to love any child of any ethnicity.

Why did we choose China's program? Because we had some love to spare and wanted to be parents sooner rather than later, and we wanted to get through the adoption process with our tender hearts intact.

That's all.

Cheryl