Dear Madonna: About that adoption. . .

Dear Madonna -

First of all, congratulations on being one of the world’s most visible single moms. You know I’m a fan. Always have been; always will be.

I hear you’re adopting a second child from Malawi and the hearing is today.  My only child is also adopted, from China, and every day I’m grateful for her presence in my life. I know the joy that is bubbling up in you even now as you prepare to be a mom again. That’s what it feels like for us.

I read that you want your second adoption to have the support of the Malawi people and government. As your first adoption was ruled legal, it would appear that your chances are pretty good.

But I don’t want to speculate on your day in court. My wish is for something a little different–that you get the chance to spend time with Mercy’s uncles and hear about their drawn-out decision to let Mercy be adopted.

Decisions that take this much time–two years–are not always decisions. Sometimes they’re just giving in. In the world of adoption, it’s important to know the difference.

For us–the adoptive parents–the future beckons when we go home with our new family. That is every adoptive parent’s privilege. You know the feeling–the buoyancy, the optimism. The new life together. It’s usually all-win on our side.

It’s a different story for our children’s first families. Even in situations where everyone agrees to the adoption, there is no forgetting the loss. Brian Stuy once interviewed two women in China who abandoned their girls. Both mothers said that while they would not undo what they did, they thought of those daughters every day.  Ten years ago, I barely dwelled on that reality; now, I can’t stop thinking about it. Sometimes we just can’t bring ourselves to ask the questions. . .

I know your intentions are honourable and that you will do your best to give Mercy a great life. Ultimately, this is your decision. If you do adopt her, I hope you can help her stay connected to her first family through letters, photos, and trips. At the very least, I urge you to clarify what this family thinks about this adoption. What does it mean to them? Do they anticipate that Mercy will return? Who are you to them?

Can an uncle still be an uncle?

As with everything, it’s impossible to know what someone’s thinking unless you ask. Good luck, Madonna. Stay in the groove.

Your fan, Jess

Filed under: adoption, fatherlessness, kids , adoption, Brian Stuy, China, fan, Madonna, Malawi, Mercy, uncles

Sexting: DA bent on charging kids with kiddie porn

I really getting anxious about this minors and sexting thing. Today on James Marsh’s blog there’s an update on a Pennsylvania case in which a bunch of kids texted nude and semi-nude pics of themselves and were charged with violating child porn laws. Of the seventeen kids charged (all minors), all agreed to take a 10-hour class on sexual violence in exchange for having the charges dropped and avoiding the sex offender label.

All save three girls. Their parents (supported by the ACLU) have filed a suit accusing

the Wyoming County DA of violating the three girls’ First Amendment rights and seeks a court declaration that the images “are not child pornography or any other crime.”

So here’s how sordid it turns out some of these pictures are. According to the lawsuit, one is a waist-up shot of the two girls lying side by side wearing their bras. One girl is flashing a peace sign and the other is on the phone. The second shot shows a year-old photo of another girl coming out of the shower with a towel tied around her just below the breasts. No genitals or sex acts are depicted. Clearly, no coercion was involved.

Listen–I gotta tell ya. Just last week I found out that some kid in my daughter’s Grade 6 class took a shot of a boy’s bum. Now just imagine what might happen to us if someone had decided on the spur of the moment to yank down his pants. I wouldn’t want the DA’s damned re-education program either. Apparently, he created it, and it’s clearly intended for young people who show a propensity for sexual violence.

Why can’t these people get it into their heads that this behaviour–stupid and unthinking as it is–is NOT a marker for future sexual violence?

Exhibit A (from the girls’ module)

Homework: Write a report explaining why you are here.

Explain: What you did.

Why was it wrong?

Did you create a victim? If so, who?

How did what you did affect the victim? The school? The community?

Exhibit B (boys’ module)

 Session 2 – Sexual Violence Spectrum

Objectives: Further understrand what sexuyal violence is – its prevalence, victims, perpetrators, impact, and costs.

To recognize the spectrum of actions which make up sexual violence.

To recognize that sexual violence is about power and control.

According to the lawsuit, the girls are now freaked out by the idea of taking any pictures of themselves in a swimsuit because the DA could come after them. Given what’s gone down in this case so far, it doesn’t seem far-fetched.

I really can’t begin to think what this would do to my child if it ever happened to her. MY child spending time in prison and saddled with a sex offender label. The way kiddie porn legislation works in both the US and Canada, this is a real possibility following any smart-ass sexting escapade that your kid may be doing unwittingly, unthinkingly, for a complete lark, just on a dare, ad nauseum. Even if you just receive the offending photo on your phone, you can go down in a sting. All it takes is one DA with a bee in his bonnet and not an ounce of common sense about kids and technology.

So do what I advised last time I blogged about this. Talk to your kids. Tell them it’s insane, but tell them not to do it anyway. And follow James’s blog on the subject. What he predicts next (tongue planted not so firmly in cheek): going after the kids in Grade 4. Children making victims of themselves. Yeah, right.

Filed under: kids, life , ACLU, child porn, kiddie porn, law suit, minor, nude, semi-nude, sex offender, sexting, Wyoming County DA

International adoption: No shades of grey in child trafficking

There is no doubt that children are being trafficked for the purposes of international adoption. (Sorry, you’ll have to pay about 7 bucks to read that last article.) For many adoptive parents (prospective or current), this is a genuine dilemma. If you adopted from China and are so inclined, you can

• get a report from Research-China on your child’s orphanage
• learn if your orphanage has been identified as one that paid money for orphans (mine is, but not at the time I adopted)
• learn whether your adoption timeline coincides with any known scandals or corruption.

I ordered mine last weekend. What will I do with it? Well . . . read it and mull it over. What I actually do is anybody’s guess. Simultaneously I joined a Yahoo group to begin searching for my daughter’s original parents. It’s all just information at this point. . .but someday it could open a door to something significant for my daughter. I know this sounds terribly low-key but that’s not how I feel. Overwhelmed. Excited. Curious. Cynical. At this stage of the game, my daughter’s feelings about her first parents are not all that visible. She told me for the first time a few days ago that she would like to know more but she ended the conversation quickly. Underneath are many feelings that I’m certain she is confused how to deal with. I’m not pushing. One day at a time.

In thinking about the challenges of international adoption over the past few months, I’ve been especially interested in the trafficking issue. Certainly it seems that trafficking, and not outright kidnipping, is the mechanism in most of the corruption. It did irk me, in fact, that when Scott Carney was interviewed about his Mother Jones article about over 100 cases of suspected kidnapping by Malaysian Social Services  in Chennai, he then went and applied the terms “kidnapping” and “forged paperwork”  without qualification to “China, Nepal, and Africa.”  

That’s quite a stretch. Outright stealing of children carries a lot of risks; trafficking, not so much, and it’s easier to justify and cover up. What amazes me, though, are adoptive parents who are willing to excuse trafficking if it’s not outright kidnapping–hanging around the hospital waiting for kids to be born and offering the parents money for relinquishment (especially if they can’t pay medical care); paying an honorarium to a person who brings an abandoned child to an orphanage; rewarding orphanage employees with perqs and bonuses if they locate babies for that orphanage.  The thinking seems to be that these children are being saved from something really bad and the activity shouldn’t be judged through western eyes.

Here’s a typical spin on this issue from one (I’m assuming) adoptive parent:

 Maybe such monetary incentives to get involved are needed to save lives. I doubt many average Chinese citizens would take a day off from work to deliver an abandoned child to an orphanage and under go questioning by the authorities. The problem with exposes such as this is that they assume all people paid to deliver children to the orphanages are doing so in a criminal way or nefarious reasons. How many are just trying to make a living and seeing a need? I find it hard to believe that every person who is paid a finders fee for turning in a child kidnapped or received the child illegally. I guess the law is more important to some people than the lives of the abandoned children.

If I try to deconstruct what this person is thinking, the conclusion has to be that he or she thinks there’s a giant surplus of adoptable babies for foreigners if only they can get them to the orphanage. A lot of research says that is not necessarily so.

As a community, we can’t excuse any trafficking, and we can’t shy away from the label either, like this person did:

Would there be a better substitute for the word “trafficking”? It’s hard to tell but the more I look at it, the substitute word could be the old word “abandonment”. What is happening is still the abandonment process, it has morphed, however, (in some cases) into a moneyed process.  If we eliminate the use of the word “trafficking” does that make what is going on right? -NO. But perhaps it will help us examine what is happening more realistically.

(Incidentally, both posts quoted relate to China.)

OK, I can’t figure out where this guy’s head is at all. The answer is no, there isn’t a better word for trafficking than trafficking. Trafficking applies to international adoption, whether this guy likes it or not. Abandonment has not “morphed” into a “moneyed process.” It’s been inched out by trafficking through the economic forces of demand.

I have no easy answers and I’m not trying to piss on anyone’s adoption parade. Obviously, I’ve got my own issues. But let’s keep it honest.

Back to mulling and thinking.

Filed under: adoption, kids, life , Africa, babies, China, corruption, demand, international adoption, money, Mother Jones, Nepal, orphanages, Scott Carney, trafficking

Oh God, one more

I clearly don’t have much of a life.

Filed under: cats , Bun Bun, PhotoFunia, Vogue

The Bun Bun, Tsarina of Mother Russia

OK, I can’t stand this. Check out this program and have some fun tonight.

Here’s Miss Bunsy supervising the proceedings in Moscow.  Putin has a lot to live up to.

Filed under: cats, life , Bunsy, Moscow, PhotoFunia, Putin

Should overweight kids be removed from their parents?

A couple of doctors have written a piece in the Medical Journal of Australia saying that obese kids would benefit from being taken into care.

Yup–removed from their parents and placed in treatment.

(By the way, this news is a little old because I started this draft post and then left it. But I suspect it will happen again.)

I keep thinking: what would I do if it were me? There isn’t a downright skinny person living in this household (with the exception of the Bunster who clocks in at a featherweight 2 1/2 pounds), and the mere thought of someone showing up to escort my child forcibly into treatment makes me puke.  

At what cost?

Admittedly, they are referring to cases that are quite serious (one of the patients in question was 110 cm (3 1/2 feet) and weighed 40 kilos (88 pounds) and parents who seem resistant to making changes.

It isn’t the first time someone has recommended this loopy idea. In the UK, a member of the National Obesity Forum said that kids who are very fat should be treated like abuse victims and removed from their families.

Hasn’t anyone told these folks what it does to kids to be removed from their parents? These experts should sit down with some foster kids for a few hours and come up with a better solution.

By the way, has anyone seen the research pointing out the higher risk of obesity in kids of single parents? Interesting theories but none of this stuff is inevitable. But oooooohhh, isn’t it just the way.

Filed under: cats, kids, life , abuse victims, overweight kids, parents, removal, treatment

Tainted by international adoption

Hot on the heels of the Mother Jones article about baby-stealing for adoption in India, the CBC put the pedal to the metal with its own investigation of international adoption–Buying Babies: Adopting Babies Overseas as well as a story on adoption from Ethiopia.

Now, I didn’t see the series so I won’t comment on it directly. But what I did read carefully were the reader comments by adoptive parents left at the CBC website. (You can access them at the links in the second paragraph of this post.) These reminded me of the comments left on the China Adopt Talk website following the airing of China’s Stolen Children.

In both cases, many prospective parents find such shows intolerable and write them off as crap. Others plead for balance and understanding. Still others say that flying halfway around the world with cash sewn in your underwear is neither creepy nor nefarious because kids who need homes get them. They say they’re not sure where all the money goes but “the government keeps tabs” on it. They talk about putting up with almost anything, including escalating costs and Byzantine bureaucracy, to make a family. In each statement, a partial truth but not a perfect one.

But one thing everyone’s agreed on: they’re not baby buyers. No way, no how. 

One reason I haven’t posted for so long is that I’ve been thinking a lot about this idea and my own adoption journey. And to the question, Who’s responsible for perpetuating the corruption in international adoption? one of the answers has to be: any adoptive parent who keeps on paying, myself included. 

Corruption in international adoption may not begin with us, but we are definitely the gas in the car. As Patricia Meier and Xiaole Zhang said in their current article about child trafficking for adoption in China:

Somebody made money each time a baby changed hands.

And why was that? That, my friends, was because of the big kahuna at the end of the line: the $3000US fee “orphanage donation” handed over for each child.

By us.

One helluva incentive to increase supply to meet demand.

Now lookee here. I wouldn’t undo my adoption for anything and neither should you. I will also not apologize to the moralists in the anti-adoption movement. We are parents; our families are real; we love our kids and they love us. But everyone involved in international adoption needs to step forward and say the practice needs reform and let go of some of the myths. In China, the country with which I am most familiar, this may be admitting that

• there is a diminishing supply of healthy girl infants suitable for IA (check out Brian Stuy’s excellent post on this topic)
• thousands of children are being trafficked;
• the money fuels corruption
• nobody really knows where it goes

Adoptive parents: please support Ethica and to check out the articles on that website. I also urge every parent of an internationally adopted child to take a Midol and stop being offended at the baby-buying label. We all start out with the best of intentions; we all end up in the place where we can choose to ask questions or shut our eyes and drink the Kool-Aid. Even if you’re convinced your adoption is corruption-free, don’t lose sight of the deep flaws in the system. We could be an incredibly powerful lobby if we would just let ourselves be a little tainted too. I fail to see how you can’t have both things–a family and an inquiring mind.

Filed under: adoption, critical thinking, kids, life , Buying Babies, CBC, China, corruption, Ethica, international adoption, Patricia Meier, Sold into Adoption, trafficking, Xiaole Zhang