Adopting "Children in Plight"

Today's announcement that China will now begin officially adopting children with living relatives to foreign families may seem like a new policy for many outside the adoption community, but this program has been quietly taking place for years. Families of older children from Luoyang, Henan, one of the "trial" provinces, have known about such a program there over a decade. What can be hoped is that with this official acknowledgement an accurate awareness on the part of birth families and adoptive families will be possible. In the past this has not been the case.

Abandonment patterns suggest such programs have been going on for years in orphanages scattered across China. Children adopted from these orphanages seem, in nearly every case that has been investigated, to have been relinquished by birth parents or other birth relatives to the orphanage under the guise that their child would simply be educated in the orphanage school and returned to the family at the end of their schooling. This "education program" is pitched by orphanage officials as a way to have the expenses of raising the child subsidized by the government, and having the child receive a good education, usually in the "big city". For parents struggling to provide these opportunities, such an offer is hard to resist.

Only after the child has had its papers submitted by the orphanage for international adoption and is about to be internationally adopted are the birth families made aware that their child will be leaving China. The orphanage officials then pressure the child's guardian (parent, grandparent, etc.) to sign over guardianship to the orphanage. "You want your child to have a good life, right?" and other such manipulators are used to coerce the family into giving up their child.

In the past, all of this was done behind the scenes. Adoptive families were not told their children had been relinquished to the orphanage by their birth families; rather, they were given adoption paperwork stating the child had been found "abandoned" in a park, railway station, or found wandering the street. Birth families were deceptively told that their child was going to the U.S. for an education, and would return after graduating to get a good job and take care of the family. All of the players in the adoption were deceived into believing the adoption was something it was not.

Perhaps that will change now that the Chinese government is officially embracing the adoption of "Children in Plight". Perhaps birth families will be told when they relinquish their children that they will probably never see them again. Perhaps adoptive families will be told that the child they are adopting had not been abandoned, but had been relinquished by its birth family with the expectation that the child will return to China one day to reunite with their birth family. Perhaps all the parties involved will be truthfully told the true nature of the adoption they are undertaking.

And perhaps a tiger truly can change its stripes.