It’s also National Adoption Awareness Month culminating on Nov 17 which is National Adoption Day. November is also the month we met our daughter in Vietnam and subsequently adopted and completed our adoption, returning home on November 15, 2006.
Adoption Awareness. What does that mean to you?
As I have been reading about Adoption Awareness month I have had a growing discomfort with it. Adoption is a huge business in the US and abroad. US citizens complete X international adoptions and X domestic adoptions a year. Rarely do you meet someone who is not touched by the adoption triad in some indirect or direct way. So what are we hoping to make people aware of?
The more I read, the more I listen, the more I immerse myself in the world of Adoption, the more I talk to all members of the triad, the more confused I get about adoption as an option. Talking about this stuff is not popular. I have noticed that, as I advocate for children’s rights, I am more and more likely to be labeled “anti-adoption”. But I don’t *feel* anti-adoption. I feel pro-child. Is there a difference? Can one be both pro-adoption and pro-child? I know I would love to complete another adoption in the future but I also know that the more I learn, the more unlikely that seems. But the desire is still there.
When I think of Adoption Awareness, I guess it looks a lot different than parties and termination of parental rights in my mind. It makes me sick in the pit of my stomach when I hear about people who celebrate themselves and the Heros they are for being “willing” to adopt and “save” a child. Adoption Awareness Month seems like a celebration of entirely the wrong things. It seems a slap in the face of the fact that every adoption brings with it profound loss. How can we celebrate that?
What I’d love to see is a month of awareness for unadoptable children. Children who are stuck in the fostercare system, possibly forever. Children who are living in orphanages becuase their families are too sick or have too few resources to bring them home. Chlidren who are too sick and countries that will not consider children with major or minor special needs to be “worthy” of adoption. These are the children who keep me awake at night.
Most countries with adoption programs, including the US, have waiting parents. Very few have waiting children. The rate of private domestic adoption has declined dramatically in the last 30 years as pregnant women have access to better contraceptive and, yes, abortion. The stigma of single and young parenthood isn’t what it used to be. And although foster families are badly needed, the goal of the state is, and should be, reunification. Adoptions out of China are creeping so slowly that parents may look at a 5 year wait to adopt if they start now. Vietnam is oversaturated with parents hoping to adopt and this kind of oversaturation frequently leads a supply-and-demand style corruption that we are currently seeing affecting adoptions not just in Vietnam but worldwide.
I know, I’m totally a party-pooper.