Saving International Adoption

Irene Powell, Mark Montgomery

Description

Choice Outstanding Academic Title of 2018

International adoption is in a state of virtual collapse, rates having fallen by more than half since 2004 and continuing to fall. Yet around the world millions of orphaned and vulnerable children need permanent homes, and thousands of American and European families are eager to take them in. Many government officials, international bureaucrats, and social commentators claim these adoptions are not "in the best interests" of the child. They claim that adoption deprives children of their "birth culture," threatens their racial identities, and even encourages widespread child trafficking. Celebrity adopters are publicly excoriated for stealing children from their birth families.

This book argues that opposition to adoption ostensibly based on the well-being of the child is often a smokescreen for protecting national pride. Concerns about the harm done by transracial adoption are largely inconsistent with empirical evidence. As for trafficking, opponents of international adoption want to shut it down because it is too much like a market for children. But this book offers a radical challenge to this view—that is, what if instead of trying to suppress market forces in international adoption, we embraced them so they could be properly regulated? What if the international system functioned more like open adoption in the United States, where birth and adoptive parents can meet and privately negotiate the exchange of parental rights? This arrangement, the authors argue, could eliminate the abuses that currently haunt international adoption.

The authors challenge the prevailing wisdom with their economic analyses and provocative analogies from other policy realms. Based on their own family's experience with the adoption process, they also write frankly about how that process feels for parents and children.

Sujets

• Vie de famille
• Parentalité et Éducation des Enfants
• Sociology
• Economics
• Business
• Law

Informations

• Publié par: Vanderbilt University Press
• Date de parution: 30 janvier 2018
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9780826521743
• Langue: English
• Poids de l'ouvrage: 1 Mo

Extrait

SAVING INTERNATIONAL ADOPTION
SAVING INTERNATIONAL ADOPTION
AN ARGUMENT FROM ECONOMICS AND PERSONAL EXPERIENCE
MARK MONTGOMERY and IRENE POWELL
Vanderbilt University Press
Nashville
© 2018 by Vanderbilt University Press
Nashville, Tennessee 37235
All rights reserved
First printing 2018
This book is printed on acid-free paper.
Manufactured in the United States of America
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data on file
LC control number 2017005438 (print) | 2017037251 (ebook)
LC classification number HV875.5 .M66 2017
Dewey classification number 362.734—dc23
LC record available at lccn.loc.gov/2017005438
ISBN 978-0-8265-2172-9 (hardcover)
ISBN 978-0-8265-2174-3 (ebook)
For Kurt, Gibrila, and Isata .
CONTENTS
Preface
Acknowledgments
Introduction: Why Is International Adoption Collapsing?
Isata’s Story, Part I: A Tale of Moral Hazard in Adoption
1. The Obvious Benefits of International Adoption
Isata’s Story, Part II: To Save a Daughter
2. Whose Culture Is Being Defended?
Isata’s Story, Part III: Birth Culture Shock
3. Is It Culture or Race?
Isata’s Story, Part IV: An Unlikely Background for Raising Black Children
4. Walking While Black (WWB)
Isata’s Story, Part V: From an All-Black to an All-White World
5. Trafficking Jam
Isata’s Story, Part VI: Why Won’t You Tell Us Where Isata Is?
6. Is Adoption Too Commercial?
Isata’s Story, Part VII: TCH Responds to the Charges of Deception
7. Objections: Won’t Less Regulation Make Things Worse?
Isata’s Story, Part VIII: After the Reunion
8. Repugnant Ideas That Became Mainstream
9. Adoption: Joy and Sadness
Notes
Bibliography
Index
PREFACE
Isata
In 2001, seven-year-old Isata was placed in an orphanage in Freetown, Sierra Leone, by the people she thought were her parents—although later she would be told otherwise. 1 One day, after about a year in the orphanage, Director Diane called Isata into her office to explain that Isata would be going to America. Another little girl, three-year-old Sia, would go with her and would now be her sister. Isata burst into tears. “I already have a sister,” she told Diane. A few days later, the staff dressed Isata up and did her hair. She first took a scary helicopter ride to the Freetown airport, then a plane to Senegal. Near midnight in the air terminal in Dakar, the two exhausted girls met the white man, Jason Sibley, who would be their new father. Later that day, they had lunch with Jason, who “seemed pretty nice.” The next day, the two girls left with this man on a long, long plane ride. Isata was suffering from typhoid fever and slept almost the entire way from Senegal to Portland, Oregon.
Eventually they got off the plane in America, where their new father told them they would now meet their new mother. Their mother was a tall woman with pale skin and reddish hair, and as soon as she saw the two little girls she started crying. “She doesn’t like us,” Isata thought.
Isata and Sia spoke Krio, a pidgin of English that is the lingua franca of Sierra Leone. During the first few days in Redmond, Oregon, where Jason and Beckie Sibley lived with their two new daughters and an adopted American son, Isata absorbed as much as she could of the language she heard. After a week or so she knew enough to tell her adopted parents the thing she most desperately wanted to say to them. She looked at the adoption papers with Beckie and pointed to the name written right after “Isata.”
“That not my name,” she said. The adoption papers gave the wrong last name she told them.
As Isata’s Krio gave way to English, she told Beckie and Jason that she already had a mother and a father, plus three brothers and a sister in Sierra Leone. She could not understand why she’d been “given away.” But the orphanage had told Beckie that Isata’s parents were killed in the war and that the child had been placed in the orphanage by relatives. No honey, Beckie told Isata, those people you remember were your aunt and uncle, not your mom and dad. Isata insisted that this wasn’t true. She still had a mother and father. It broke Beckie’s heart that her daughter was so traumatized by loss that she’d had to reconstruct her own memories to make them bearable. In an interview years later, Isata told us that “at some point I even began to believe they were my aunt and uncle.”
Until she found out she had been right all along—ten years later when her birth family found her on Facebook. So, what was the true story of Isata’s placement in the Freetown orphanage?
BETWEEN CHAPTERS THROUGHOUT this book we will use the story of Isata Sibley to illustrate some of the problems with, as well as the benefits of, international adoption. In telling this story, we are able to get the viewpoints of the child herself, the adoptive family, the birth family, and even the adoption facilitators who arranged her placement with the Sibleys. Some names have been modified to protect people’s privacy. The problems illustrated by Isata’s story, among other factors, are contributing to a steep decline in the number of orphaned and vulnerable children who find permanent homes with American and European families. Between 2004 and 2013, the number of children adopted internationally fell from more than forty-five thousand to twenty thousand. 2 This book is an attempt to explain why this has happened and whether anything can be done about it. Isata’s story will help illustrate our view that the issues causing the implosion of international adoption are not inevitable. Instead, they are largely artifacts of the way the international adoption system is organized and regulated. As we shall argue, a different type of system—and an example of such a system exists—could avoid many of these difficulties.
How We Came to Write about International Adoption
We did not intend to write this book; it kind of slipped out, you might say. In fact, it feels strange to have written any book, as our careers have been mostly about crunching numbers. In any case, we set out to write a different book, not a book about international adoption, but a book that explored our family’s links to Africa. The connections were several. In 1963, when Irene—hereafter called Tinker, as she has been since birth—was eight years old, her family spent time at Cuttington College in Liberia, at that time the only liberal arts college on the continent. 3 Her father went to Cuttington on a Ford Foundation grant to help the college develop its business and economics program. Tinker, her mother, and two older brothers had to return home mid-year when it appeared that her mother was pregnant. (Tragically, the pregnancy was misdiagnosed—she died from colon cancer within a year.) The first Liberian Civil War (1989–1996) mostly destroyed Cuttington’s campus and spread into Sierra Leone in 1991, ostensibly making the boy who would become our youngest son, Gibrila—everyone calls him GB—an orphan. And these disparate African connections drew our oldest child, birth daughter Mary, to Rwanda after she graduated from college in 2007. She first taught at a girls’ middle school run by an American foundation, then was employed by the Akela Foundation to help train women to enter the tourist industry, and now teaches school in Kigali.
As economists, we were aware, of course, that development in sub-Saharan Africa seemed to have utterly stalled. In Iowa, Tinker taught her Economics of Developing Countries students that many African countries are as poor today as when the colonials finally left, over half a century ago. Year after year, Mark showed his environmental economics students graphs of rising per-capita GDP, rising per-capita food consumption, rising per-capita sanitation, rising per-capita nearly everything. But while living standards were rising all around the world, Africa seemed to be stuck.
When we decided in 2000 to adopt for the second time—having had Mary in 1985 and then adopting an African American infant, Kurt, in 1991—Africa seemed a good place to find a child in need of a home. Besides the poverty and lack of development, it was then at the peak of the AIDS epidemic. We were astounded to discover that of some fifty sub-Saharan African countries, only three regularly released children for international adoption: Sierra Leone, Ethiopia, and Liberia. News stories abounded of African children losing both parents to AIDS, of grandmothers raising a dozen orphaned grandchildren, of young children living on the streets. Why weren’t more of these kids coming to America? Everybody knows a family with an adopted Korean or Chinese child; where were the Africans? In the crass language of economics, the continent was bulging with excess “supply” of needy children; American couples were “demanding” adoptees from China and Guatemala to the tune of thousands of dollars per kid. Why weren’t more children coming out of Africa? Pride and prejudice? That is, African pride about caring for its children, American prejudice against people with black skin? Surely both played some role. But how could adoption, even if it could only save a tiny fraction of them, bypass an entire continent overrun with orphans? 4 We began trying to sort out the riddle of African adoption—that is, the riddle of African non -adoption.
Our Own Journey to Adoption
For brevity, this preface presents a somewhat smooth and streamlined version of our two adoptions; Chapter 9 describes a road that was considerably bumpier logistically, morally, and emotionally. How did we construct our family? Mary was born to us in 1985. If there was some moment when we decided that our second child would be adopted, we don’t remember when that was. We were brought to that decision gradually by a combination of factors. Mark was teaching environmental economics and had entered his (short-lived) neo-Malthusian period; he felt squeamish about expanding the world population. Tinker’s pregnancy with Mary was grueling. In any case, we wanted mo