Adoptions, Not Simple and Rarely Idyllic

There has been news recently about an American mother who returned her adopted son to Russia.  The headlines make her sound worse than Cinderella's evil step-mother, but I have no doubt that the situation is much more complex.

A few months ago, the news was full of condemnation of the Toyota Car Manufacturers for selling faulty cars.  Everybody's sympathy was with the car-purchasers.  Now, granted that a child isn't a car and a car isn't a child, but these foreign adoptions do have a connection to a buying  a car or any other large major  purchase.  There's marketing, and lots of money changes hands.  The "product" is a child, and the adoptive parents, like any other wise consumer, do their best to investigate the health and condition of the child.

In recent years it's very difficult to find a normal healthy baby, from a healthy mother, to adopt.  Desperate parents to be end up having to accept toddlers and even older children, or no child at all.  The older the child is, the more difficult it will be for the child to adjust to the parents' life-styles.  As a mother of adult children, I must certainly admit that my and my husband's biological children chose their own ways.  We had them from day one and nine months of pregnancy.  So imagine how hard it is to take a child who has already adjusted to the norms of an orphanage and have a totally unknown genetic and nutritional background.  The lawyers, agents, orphanage administrators etc can and do sign whatever they need to give the child to wealthy foreigners.  Of course, not all the adoptive parents are wealthy by the standards of their home society, but if they have enough money to privately adopt a foreign child, they look plenty rich when they visit that orphanage.

When people first receive their child behavioral problems are usually excused by language difficulties, different foods, customs and other perfectly acceptable reasons.  As time goes on and parents have their children examined and assessed by experts they're unpleasantly surprised to discover that their children have major and incurable conditions.  In some cases they never would have adopted the children.

They're all human beings, the parents and the children.  The children aren't guilty, but sometimes the parents just can't handle the burden, and neither can the community.  You don't keep a problematic child in a cage.  And if the child suffers from a neurological condition, she/he's always able to control behavior.

It may be easy to tell adoptive parents that they must accept the child, just like a parent whose child is born with serious problems or suffers as the result of an accident or illness.  That's not really fair nor accurate, because in today's world, doctors and society encourage the abortion of imperfect fetuses.

Adoption is very risky.  Children aren't like new cars and washing machines which can be sent back to the factory.  They're more like "used cars" which frequently come with unpleasant surprises.  Don't be naive.