I recently caught up on a movie that I have been intending to see for a while, Ben Affleck's "Gone, Baby, Gone". IMDb outlines the movie in this way:When 4 year old Amanda McCready disappears from her home and the police make little headway in solving the case, the girl's aunt Beatrice McCready hires two private detectives Patrick Kenzie and Angie Gennaro. The detective freely admit that they have little experience with this type of case, but the family wants them for two reasons - they're not cops and they know the tough neighborhood in which they all live. As the case progresses, Kenzie and Gennaro face drug dealers, gangs and pedophiles. When they finally solve the case, they are faced with a moral dilemma that tears them apart.
The issues confronted by the characters of the film are ones the Chinese adoption community is also beginning to confront: What is in the best interest of the child when trafficking or kidnapping is involved? Is it better to keep children in China with birth parents that may lack financial resources to raise them, or allow them to be adopted by financially secure parents in another country?
The power of "Gone, Baby, Gone" is the light it shines on our propensity to judge others. "My sister [Elaine] is unstable; she's on crack and a danger to my niece," judged Amanda's uncle. She probably was, but as Casey Affleck's character points out, none of that matters. "Does it make you feel better? Telling yourself you did it for the right reasons? That you took her to be saved from her own mother?"
How many of us adopt recognizing that even though we will be taking a child from her birth country, her heritage, her culture, all of that is right because "we're just trying to give a little girl a life."
What should be our response, as an adoption community, when we learn that China's children are purchased by the orphanages? Do we sit in judgment, comforting ourselves by believing that any family that would give up their child for money doesn't deserve to be her parents anyway? When we as a community are confronted with growing evidence of trafficking, and in some cases kidnapping, to obtain children "for better homes," do we rationalize this away, or do we demand it be stopped? Casey's character states it most succinctly: "It wasn't your life to give. Elaine is her mother. If you thought she was a bad mother you should have gone to Social Services. Short of that she's her mother and that's where she belongs."
Casey's character is then told to go home and wait 30 years, that he would see more clearly how the world is in that time. Since he hadn't already called the police, the antagonist confronts Casey with words that have been considered at one time or another by many adopting families concerning improprieties found in various international adoption programs, including China's:
"Deep inside you you know it doesn't matter what the rules say. When the lights go out and you ask yourself, 'Is she better of here or better off there?' you know the answer! And you always will. You can do a right thing here, a good thing. Men live their whole lives without getting this chance, you walk away from it, you might not regret it when you get home, you might not regret it for a year, but when you get to where I am I promise you will. I'll be dead, you'll be old, but she will be dragging around a couple damaged tattered children of her own, and you'll be the one that has to tell them you're sorry."
But it is a false premise. One can't see the future, one can't know another's fate. Certainly people like Oprah Winfrey would argue that the conditions one is raised in does not determine the kind of person one will be. Casey's character recognizes that fact:
"You know, maybe that will happen. And if it does, I'll tell them I'm sorry and I'll live with it. But what's never going to happen, and what I'm not going to do, is to have to apologize to a grown woman who comes to me and says I was kidnapped when I was a little girl and my aunt hired you to find me, and you did, you found me with some strange family. But you broke your promise and you left me there. Why? Why didn't you bring me home? Because all the snacks and the outfits and the family trips don't matter. They stole me. It wasn't my family. And you knew about it, and you knew better, and you did nothing. Maybe that grown woman will forgive me, but I will never forgive myself."
Many adoptive parents hear echoes of their own child's voice in these words.
The antagonists in "Gone, Baby, Gone" were entering a deal with the devil: To allow parents to be judged outside the bounds of the law is a Pandora's box that few parents should want opened. It might allow members of my family, for example, to judge me as a danger to my children because I don't subscribe to the religious principals that my family feels have eternal consequences. Might they not view the consequences of my parenting to be as dangerous as Elaine's drug use? Perhaps. But do we as a society want others to make those kind of judgments?
Ultimately, Casey's character decides in favor of the law: There is a way to protect children. The law speaks against kidnapping a child, even if it is felt to be in the best interests of the child. Whether it is the law of the town, or the International Law of the Hague Agreement, it is the law that all of us must respect. "I did what I did for the sake of the child. Alright, for me too," responds the antagonist. I appreciate his impulse, but I reject completely his actions.
