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Archive for the ‘Adoption’ Category

Ann Fessler, Xinran, and other news

Posted in Adoption, Adoption News, International Adoption on January 29, 2008| Leave a Comment »

We’re getting close to the end of the month, so I’ll pass along some bits of adoption-related information I’ve been collecting lately, starting with Ann Fessler and Melissa Weiler Gerber on the 35th anniversary of Roe v. Wade.

With no access to safe, legal abortions, an estimated 250,000 to one million women each year resorted to unsafe abortions that were responsible for an estimated 40 percent of all maternal deaths during this period. Women who did not want or were unable to obtain an abortion were under tremendous societal pressure to conceal and deny their pregnancies. They frequently were shunned by their families, friends and schools. More than 1.5 million such women during this period were secreted away to maternity homes and host houses where they were hidden until they gave birth and surrendered their children for adoption, often against their will.

(If you’ve not yet read “The Girls Who Went Away”, I strongly recommend it as a vital lesson in history, if nothing else. I wrote about my personal experience as a pregnant teen in the days before abortion became a legal option, and the series can be found at the following links: part one, part two, part three, part four, part five, part six, part seven, response from Ms. Fessler, some follow-up.

These were all written while I was at Adoption dot com, but even though I hate to send that terrible bunch of abusive jerks any hits, I am still very proud of a lot of my work there.)

A new Yahoo group has been started for Adoptive parents of children with Cerebral Palsy. You can find them here.

And a new blog has been started in Seattle by a women who has been writing about her life as a cancer survivor and is now preparing to adopt. Her first post on the adoption blog is here, and her cancer survival blog is here.

Here’s a story about another messy situation involving a surrogate mother, if you have the heart to read about complicated issues where everyone can lose.

On an up note, however, there is this article from the Jakarta Post about Xinran of “Motherbridge of Love” fame, author of “Sky Burial”, “The Good Women of China”, talking much about food.

We then ventured into that tender terrain of identity, of how a person living in another culture survives; for a sense of belonging is surely fundamental to the human condition and something we often overlook.you consider yourself a typical Chinese mum?” I asked, thinking that there is nothing typical or ordinary about this vibrant woman. “I think I am lost,” she replied. “In China they think I am western and in England they see me as foreign. I sometimes feel like I am a wild animal being brought up in a human zoo, like I am living in a double culture. It is a bit of a struggle. Honestly, I don’t understand the language so well. And even China is changing so rapidly. Between brothers and sisters, in just three years, there can be so much difference. “

And also from China, this very interesting article on how some Chinese are managing to revolt quietly and without attracting too much attention from their repressive government.

The sudden “strolls” by thousands of office workers, company managers, young families and the elderly in this sleek financial hub are the latest chapter in a quiet middle-class battle against government officials. The protesters are going about their mission carefully, and many speak anonymously for fear of retribution in a country that stifles dissent.

Speaking of repressive, here’s a story out of Pakistan that should have everyone jumping up and down and making so much noise … but, gee, that doesn’t seem to be happening.

The Lahore High Court on Friday handed over a girl to her parents after recovering her from the city’s Darul Aman. The court handed over the girl after her parents assured the judge that they would get her married off to the Darul Aman’s superintendent, as the girl had wanted.

A “Darul Aman” is like a women’s shelter … sort of … so running away and ending up there is a common enough situation in many cultures. This being Pakistan, however, getting hitched to the guy running the place rather than going home with dear old Dad sounds like a good plan.

Sheesh. Rock, meet hard place … devil, there’s the deep blue sea.

Perhaps this is a good time to point toward the top of this post and ask people to think about the rights of women and how damned hard they are to come by.

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Law suits and open records … a question

Posted in Adoption, Adoption News, The United Nations on January 28, 2008| 3 Comments »

I mentioned in a news roundup post a few days back a story about a Canadian woman who had slapped her elderly adoptive mother with a lawsuit claiming her adoption had been conducted under fraudulent circumstance and that she had suffered “emotionally and financially” because of it.

It is back in the news in an expanded version that suggests hideously nefarious circumstances in that case and others.

A report on violence against women from the United Nations Economic and Social Council, refers to the case of an unmarried woman who gave birth at Toronto’s Mount Sinai Hospital in 1970. The 2003 report says Tina Kelly was reportedly told by her doctor that the baby boy had died and that she was not allowed to see its body.

Kelly later realized she had never received a copy of the death certificate, the report says. The hospital’s records indicated her baby went home with her.
She later reunited with her son.

Kelly allegedly discovered her child had been put up for adoption and that her doctor had accepted a bribe.

A Quebec search and reunion worker says that she believes “false claims of stillbirths were common in her province” during the “baby scoop era”, and there are apparently many who agree with her assessment, as other examples are given in the article.

Thanks to patient addressing of adoptee issues by readers, some of what had been slipping under my personal radar no longer does, so the last paragraph in this report brought me up short and has my conspiracy detector beeping.

Marge, an Edmonton adoptee who has long searched for her birth parents, said she fears the lawsuit will discourage the government from increasing access to adoption records.

Is it possible that there’s an element of spin happening here? Could it be that some of the attention this topic is getting now, or possibly even the lawsuit, has been inspired or manipulated to impact the fight for open records?

I certainly don’t mean to suggest that bad things didn’t happen, but in this world where much contention pits one against the other, often in confusing ways, it seems worth a wonder.

And, by the way, has the UN stated a position on adoptee rights and open records?

Anyone … ?

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Adopt a fetus (just like a cow, wow!), and adoptee rights in NJ

Posted in Adoption, Adoption News on January 26, 2008| 8 Comments »

In what appears to be a gee-whiz-why-didn’t-someone-think-of-this-ages-ago, forehead-slapping moment, a writer for a previously undiscovered (by me) online publication out of Canada has presented what she sees as THE solution to “a large portion of the abortion problem”.

Ready for it?

Transoption!

And it works like this:

There are women who find themselves pregnant when they don’t want to be. There are other women who are trying desperately to get pregnant but can’t. What we need to do is match the two groups up and transplant the unwanted fetuses of the former into the wombs of the latter in a form of pre-birth adoption. That way, pregnant women can cease to be pregnant without killing fetuses, and would-be mothers can adopt infants without having to comb the world for them.

Apparently, this works with cows … although comments to the contrary are rife following the article … so how big a jump could it take?

Simple, heh? Easy peasy.

But, hold on a minute …

Aren’t we forgetting something? Oh, yeah … children aren’t calves that grow up to be cud-chewing, slow-witted burgers-on-the-hoof, so even if this process is medically feasible there just might be a few niggling issues of ethics and identity involved.

Funny how the end product … the children, fercryinoutloud … can be completely left out of the equation, isn’t it? Okay. Not funny, especially when it happens as often as it does.

Speaking of the kids, there is hopeful news coming out of New Jersey as a panel in the State Senate unanimously approved a bill that will allow adult adoptees access to their OBCs.

Rapper and adoptee rights advocate Darryl McDaniels (DMC) gave testimony in favor of unsealing birth records, saying: This is really about identity and truth of a human being’s existence.

Once again, I’m confused by those who take the opposite stance:

Marie Tasy, executive director of New Jersey Right to Life, said she and a coalition of other opponents would continue to fight the legislation. “This is not a compassionate choice at all.”

Huh?

Where do self-proclaimed “Right to Life” people meet this issue so abruptly that they feel the need to fight legislation in favor of open records?

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ArtRage: Vanessa Beecroft, “Art Star”, and the Sudanese Twins

Posted in Adoption, Adoption Advocacy, Adoption News, Angelina Jolie, Celebrities, Celebs, International Adoption, tagged on January 25, 2008| 8 Comments »

It’s no surprise that the adoption world is easily offended when babies are used as props, since a good part of the debate that fumes mightily has everything to do with children posed as possessions to be wrangled over. But it could be argued that kids are not only “property” in the yours, mine and ours sense, but also in the theatrical sense, being that they can be quite handy for setting a scene or revealing character, and they look great posed between the dog and the tree on Christmas cards.

Who doesn’t attempt to position a child adorably for posterity, frame the results to gaze gleefully in perpetuity from the family room wall and send copies off to Granny, and maybe even to parenting magazines with the certainty that a wide audience is prepped to awwwwww? Being that there’s no shortage of kids being dragged from audition to audition in hopes of being the next Daniel Radcliffe, putting kids through their paces for the sake of “art” wouldn’t seem to be considered objectification of obscene dimensions. Would it?

Art being art, objectification and obscenity would both fall within the realm of beholders’ eyes, as what’s art to one is shit to another, and vice versa.

Take for example the paintings of Turner Award-winning artist Chris Ofili whose medium of choice is elephant dung.

How about the centerpiece of an exhibition in London correctly and descriptively titled: 21 Anthropometric Slabs Made Of Human Faeces By The People Of Sulabh International, India, or a shit retrospective in New York that featured “a dense concentration of scatological art dating from 1961 to the present,” some made from the real thing?

Now that we’ve established that art can be tasteless and still considered worthy of the title, and of people paying loads of money to bask in its glory, we can perhaps approach Vanessa Beecroft and the fuss being made over her, her breasts and Sudanese twins.

Ms. Beecroft is a star. An art star. She is not known for being nice or sensitive or caring or generous or … pick a pleasant adjective, any pleasant adjective you would attach to someone you’d like to spend time with. Vanessa Beecroft is not that person.

She is, in every sense of the word, a piece of art (see above). She is her own work, as her eating disorders attest, and with that always in mind, well into promoting Vanessa for Vanessa’s sake, even to the point of having a film made about having pictures taken of having the experience of having a conscience.

This debacle involves photographs of herself breast feeding twin Sudanese infants, a prompt that has immediately been sucked with relish into the black hole of celebrity adoption media spin:

At times Beecroft’s behavior is appalling, her motives and methods highly questionable, but it is difficult to turn away, and the more you watch, the more you wonder: What is best for these African children — to be adopted by a wealthy vain celebrity, an Angelina, a Madonna, a Vanessa (who admits she is a little crazy), or for the babies to live with their relatives in a hut, and take their chances with poverty and disease?

Yeah … like that’s what this is all about.

This is a woman who left her breastfeeding child at home in L.A. while she took off on a self-serving art quest to Africa, and if anyone is thinking the breastmilk-and-black-babies thing was a spur of the moment happening they are seriously missing something.

With a film budget and all to worry about, it makes sense that Vanessa would pull out all the stops on hype, and how better to get coverage outside the wacky art world than to slap the “celeb adoption” card on the table that issues press passes?

And, of course, it worked. Why wouldn’t it? There is no point, but why should there be? it’s art, and for art’s sake.

As Beecroft says:

“I really enjoyed this criticism. It is what I work for. I want people to exercise their thoughts, and I provoke with this image. Because the image was intentional also, not only a souvenir. But it had an intent to provoke. So I was happy with this reaction. That is part of my work. To create a little bit of irritation for the audience.”

The photographs are for sale for $50,000 each.

Here’s the link to her site where you can see the poster for the film … boobs, babies and all … an perhaps make an offer on a print … ?

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Orphans, Ethanol, Kashmir, Korczak and Jong

Posted in Adoption, Adoption News, International Adoption, The United Nations, tagged , , , , on January 24, 2008| 4 Comments »

Reading the news this morning has been a bit like trying to study individual players’ techniques and philosophies of tennis while watching four courts of Wimbledon play all at the same time; there’s lots going on, it’s all related to issues that touch adoption, but the range is huge and the approaches are all over the place.

I’m taking the “sublime to the ridiculous” trail, beginning on a high note and ending with a dull thud …

And starting off with this story on an adoptive dad with a great idea for helping orphans in Vietnam toward self-sufficiency.

It’s ethanol that forms the basics of a plan to build a community for Vietnamese orphans that would be ” both economically and environmentally stable.”

“You look at any orphanage throughout the world and they’re holding their hand out, saying we need more help, we need to have money for clothes, we need to have money for food,” Miller said. “Or, if they say they’re self-sustaining, they had just enough food for last year, but next year is coming.

“Rather than provide additional funds to institutions that really aren’t as effective as they need to be, we’re trying to come up with a new model,” he said.

He’s looking at sugar cane as the material used, with growing it and refining it as the sources of income, and has business plans in the works for 15 other countries once the Vietnam project takes off.

Anyone interested in more info, or in pitching in on this effort, can visit the Orphan Communities site here.

For a less hopeful look at the lives of orphans, this report on orphanages in Kashmir and the “special homes” that sometimes replace institutional care is informative.

“Orphanage culture is the last resort for those who have none to look after.” But, Dr Rauf observes that such institutions (special homes) are encouraged by certain elements “with an aim to amass wealth.” According to him, earlier special children were taken care by the society itself. “As their number increased, institutions were encouraged. Putting a group of children in a house is an easy way to collect alms from the people. Whereas organizations who work for the welfare of such children in their home-setting do not find it easy to collect donations from the people,” Dr Rauf said. He added that society is not much supportive to the organizations who work for mentally and physical challenged people and lepers as it is for those working for special children.

Because of the war zone nature of Kashmir, orphans whose parents were considered militants are very often left out of the care loop altogether. It’s a rough world up there, cold and prone to shaking, where thousands of kids struggle to make it from day to day with no help at all.

Unfortunately, sugar cane won’t grow in that climate.

Having recently written a fiction piece on the tragedy of the Warsaw Ghetto … yes, the story I won First Place for (blush) … this story in the New York Times caught my eye.

It’s a story about survivors, Jewish orphans who were at one time under the care of Janusz Korczak and are now in their 80s, living and remembering and honoring in their homes in Israel.

Right up until the time that Korczak accompanied the children in his care into the gas chamber at the Treblinka death camp in 1942, he was the model for good sense and caring.

Korczak said it was the job of adults to help translate the world to children, suggesting that a child be approached at times like “a foreigner who does not speak our language and who is ignorant of our laws and customs.”

The United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child was drawn from his theories.

From that example of how differences can and do take beauty and love and turn it to murder and hate, we finish today on abortion … well, Erica Jong’s Huffington Post blog on abortion history.

Again, in the eighteenth-century, my favorite period in English Literature, (at the dawn of the modern era–but before Louis Pasteur), accoucheurs (the precursors of obstetricians) killed many women with the microbes they unknowingly carried from the sickbeds of other patients. There was a great political struggle between midwives, who only dealt with women, and doctors who treated everyone, because the doctors wanted their monopoly.

Many women died of infection–like Charlotte Bronte–or nearly died like Mary Shelley. Women’s health had always been a political football in the supposedly “civilized” Christian era. Many midwives (always specialists in women’s health) were burned as witches throughout modern history.

Although Ms. Jong’s words make an interesting read, it’s the comment section that has me passing along the link. I find so much of the “discussion” horrifying and can almost not believe that some of the attitudes expressed survive in this world.

Like the bigotry of this:

If women were equal to men they wouldn’t have been subservient through out history. Yes, you can sight the exceptions, but it is a rule simply because it is true. Why lie to yourselves about this? Is simply nature.

Or the simple idiocy of this that apparently buys the bogus Beethoven crap that has been put about by those out to manipulate simple idiots, most who wouldn’t know Beethoven from Barry … Manilow or Gibb:

The body of a woman it’s a sacred place,why she would stain it with innocent blood of a fetus which has also his own body that temporarily can’t live outside his mother body and with a soul from even the moment of his conception ? Every woman should decide whatever she likes regarding her own body,but not about her fetus life which has a body distinct from hers,only when his not viable or is threatening her life she could abort her pregnancy,even there are lots of mother which are deciding to carry their unborn children till their natural delivering term;think at Beethoven,her mother decided to deliver him against all odds and what artist would be missing for the entire world otherwise.Every woman should be,for the fetus of theirs,a loving mother not a heartless terminator.

And that, people, was the dull thud I mentioned earlier.

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Let’s talk about China

Posted in Adoption, Adoption Advocacy, Adoption News, Cambodia, International Adoption, The United Nations, tagged , , , , , , , on January 22, 2008| 8 Comments »

I’ve been writing about international adoption for a few years now and have to admit that I have never quite managed to get a handle on prevailing attitudes toward adoption from China. Some might suggest that this is a result of obstinacy on my part arising from the fact that I adopted from Cambodia and therefore lug around some crate of sour grapes that flavor my perceptions of programs in countries that are touted to be “clean”, and a bit of that is, perhaps, applicable.

(There is no doubt that I feel Cambodia was singled out for reasons that have nothing to do with suffering by comparison to any imagined purity or transparency in other corrupt nations, and without my understanding that some do seek the domino effect in putting an end to international adoptions forever and everywhere I would be very confused about the specific treatment one crooked little Southeast Asian country continues to receive. That being said, however, I would insist that the real world predominance of corruption should not be a reason to sentence children to short and miserable lives in the countries they happened to have been born in, but rather continue to offer the option of adoption to some while working to eliminate corrupt government practices on a much wider level through effective use of global organizations that should be addressing these issues directly. The UN, for instance, could be using its multi-billion dollar budget and the clout it buys to exert real pressure, rather than continue to pussyfoot around dictators, conflicts, blatant human rights violations, dirty politics and ruling-for-personal gain, and rather than simply pulling the rug out from under children in the name of easy expediency and cheap press.)

It does seem, however, that adoptions from China tend to be bathed in some rarefied light structured to convey a sense that, because the country has imposed hoops it chooses to jump through, all is kosher in the adoption process there. Adoptive parents with Chinese-born kids have been accused of carrying a tinge of “my adoption was cleaner than yours was”, and of sticking up for China’s system even when faced with strong evidence that the country is every bit as crooked, or more so, than others.

There is, at the moment, a fight going on in the UK between Channel 4 broadcasting and the Chinese embassy in London over a documentary that is scheduled to air in early October. The program (or “programme”, as it is to Brits who are quite fond of extra letters for the sake of tradition) is about child trafficking within China and is reported to quote a UN consultant saying that “at least 70,000 young children a year are sold or stolen in China.”

The trafficking is, apparently, not international adoption-related, but about internal problems caused by the one-child policy.

The programme makers filmed undercover in China, speaking to parents who had had a child stolen or had sold a child, and to traffickers. More boys are taken than girls because they will grow up to earn more money. Most are taken for childless couples, although some are sold into prostitution.

The Times carried what appears to be a fair piece on the situation, saying that the “Chinese are angry that they are not being given an advance screening of the documentary, which claims that the trade in stolen children is widespread.”

I had come across the story, so was surprised to see it referred to in a very different color on one of the adoption groups I read, posted by a parent that had adopted from China, that suggested the story was “fed” to the press by Amnesty International, hinting at some sort of plot to sling the mud of child trafficking in the direction of the Chinese government.

The theme was picked up by a few other readers who apparently got the story only from the provided link that led to the “tabloid Sunday Mirror”, indicating also that there was some concealing of sources going on, as if a suggestion that 70,000 children “kidnapped there every year and traded on the black market” was an outrageous claim, and only made to discredit China in its run up to the Olympics.

(Others pointed out that this sort information was valid and should not be dismissed out of hand and voiced concern over such issues in China.)

If we could for a moment include adoption in the bigger picture instead of giving into the temptation to remove it from the shelf that contains all the issues that stem from the system of government in China and stand it alone in the middle of the room as if it exists in a vacuum, it seems a very good time now to shine a bright light into many corners in that vast and complex nation.

The run-up to the Olympics has created an opportunity for many organizations to focus on China in the hope that some changes might be inspired by the extra attention, but unfortunately it seems that so far nothing much has been sticky enough to overcome the propaganda machines’ Teflon from both China and the IOC.

A year ago, Reporters Without Borders officially opposed holding the Olympic Games in Beijing, saying, in part:

The world sports movement must now speak out and call for the Chinese people to be allowed to enjoy the freedoms it has been demanding for years. The Olympic Charter says sport must be “at the service of the harmonious development of man, with a view to promoting a peaceful society concerned with the preservation of human dignity.” Athletes and sports lovers have the right and the duty to defend this charter. The IOC should show some courage and should do everything possible to ensure that Olympism’s values are not freely flouted by the Chinese organisers.

Just this week there has been press coverage of an Olympic torch-style relay through all the countries that have seen genocide in an attempt to draw attention to China’s support of Sudan.

Unsurprisingly, the Cambodian government wasn’t one bit happy about Mia Farrow showing up at Toul Sleng (now the Genocide Museum in Phnom Penh, but formerly a torture center that saw thousands suffer and die) to gain international attention for this effort to “push Beijing to pressure Sudan into ending the violence in Darfur”. Cambodia gets a lot of money from China and has no intention of jeopardizing future funding for the sake of a waste of time like human rights violations.

(I had to chuckle at the interior ministry spokesman’s take quoted in AFP: “The Olympic Games are not a political issue. Therefore, we won’t allow any rally to light a torch.)

That China is now a powerhouse is not a question, but what sort of power it wields most certainly is. And whether or not anyone cares is another.

Not rocking the adoption boat, on one hand, or jumping up and down hoping it sinks under the weight that comes with tossing every bit of dirt in the country into it no matter how unrelated in reality on the other, are both unhelpful, as is going all rah-rah because the Olympics are coming to town.

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Corporal punishment or murder: Too close to call?

Posted in Adoption, Adoption Advocacy, Family, The USA from the outside in on January 21, 2008| 8 Comments »

“You don’t know you’ve crossed the line until you get accused of crossing the line.”

That right there is a line crossed, as far as I’m concerned.

It came from the mouth of a guy named Jeffrey T. Schwartz in defense of one Cesar Rodriquez.

Whether Cesar Rodriguez, who is accused of beatings and abusive behavior that killed his 7-year-old stepdaughter, could not have known he had crossed a line is a matter for a jury to decide. He has admitted that he routinely beat Nixzmary with a belt, hit her with his hands using “all my force,” threw her on the floor. He has admitted duct-taping her emaciated 37-pound frame to a chair and binding her with bungee cords.

What he hasn’t admitted to isn’t reported.

The story in the NY Times points out that laws in that state, and all the rest of them for that matter, are “vague on corporal punishment.”

Hello?

On what planet, other than LegalBullshitWorld, is there dense cloudiness between grabbing a toddler and swatting her on the bum when she tries to run out in traffic and holding a kid’s head under water, beating her savagely, and forcing her to use a cat’s litter box for a toilet?

After all, that’s how Mr. Rodriguez was raised … at least according to Mr. Rodriquez and Jeffrey T. Schwartz … and look at what a fine specimen he turned out to be, so there’s a defense made in some version of legal heaven (which would by definition of ‘self-cancelling phrase’ have to indicate some pact with some devils).

Crossing a line? There is no case of crossing a line here. This is rappelling down a precipice (or repelling, actually), slogging across a vast Sahara of crushingly bone-dry nothingness, then pulling up ten miles of cliff face with nothing but fingernails. One can not possible be confused with the other, and the fact that, indeed, the two are confused, blurred, smudged, smeared, massaged, manipulated, into fitting under one banner is disgusting.

Another child is dead, and before she was dead she was tortured … for years … and those doing the torturing, her mother and her mother’s husband, got away with it right up until the time they snuffed the last of life from this little girl.

This is no special case, no rare occurrence, but just an example with a name of daily events.

And no wonder, when society deems torture “crossing a line” when it is perpetrated on a child.

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Naked Ugliness

Posted in Adoption, Adoption Advocacy, Adoption News, International Adoption, The United Nations, The USA from the outside in, tagged , , , , , on January 20, 2008| 9 Comments »

How many mornings start off with a sense of despair as I open my computer to learn what has happened around the planet as I slept the night away peacefully in the bosom of my beautiful little family? Far too many.

The world is for more people than not a terrible place of unimaginable pain and suffering where each day brings yet another hurdle to jump or cross to bear … one after the other until there is no more jumping or bearing to do.

The headlines give indication of misery enough, but my mind always wanders a bit further down the road and often ends up dwelling on whatever impact the attention-grabbing event that leads a report has on the children caught somewhere way down the story and living the consequences of religious fanaticism, ethnic intolerance, political unrest, greed, corruption and all the other horrors self-imposed by the human race upon itself.

Occasionally, a news item addresses the effects on innocents directly, as was the case in this article. Although designed by the United Nations propaganda machine for self-perpetuation and circulated through IRIN, the UN’s “humanitarian news and analysis” branch of the Office for Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs, the report does manage to pass along information without too blatant a tooting of its own horn … mainly because there is absolutely NO reason to credit the organization with anything positive under this circumstance … or make a begging plea for additions to its bulging coffers.

The story is on how the unrest in Kenya is impacting the vulnerable in the country, widows and orphans.

When the violence broke out immediately after the election, at least two of the people we support were killed by rowdy youths in their homes. One of our widows was attacked and her home was torn down to the ground; she was very lucky to escape alive. One child-headed household had their home invaded – they were chased away and when they came back everything had been stolen.

This, of course, is one tiny example in a country where millions are at risk any time the boat is even slightly rocked, so precarious is the semblance of stability.

Kenya has long been held up as a positive example of democracy in Africa, a model for other countries more obviously in danger of a rapid downward spiral into chaos. But Kenya has been corrupt as hell for years, and no one with the slightest knowledge of the place could pretend not to notice that the average Kenyan has been getting screwed by their government for decades while the powerful are creaming off the top and living like royalty.

With Zimbabwe just down the road a piece getting a complete pass from the “global community” on everything from its flagrant violations of human rights to blatant corruption, where could impetus possibly come for rising above?

Does the world care? Face it, folks, the answer to that is: Not really.

Pretending otherwise appears to be an unhelpful practice that works pretty well to keep the levels of hell stable for the majority while the minority takes expensive vacations.

Think about this …

At the moment, the population of the USA is somewhere around just over 300 million. Although numbers are hard to come by, USAID estimates that by 2010 25 million children in the world will have been orphaned by AIDS alone (Some suspect this number is a low guess, with estimates up to 200 million circulating.), and although that pandemic does take a hefty toll, added to numbers of children losing parents to other diseases, alcoholism and drug abuse, grinding poverty, famine, violent conflict, the total global population of children forced to fend for themselves could easily approach the number of people living in the United States in any given year.

Orphans, of course, aren’t the only people suffering … billions of children with parents suffer alongside their mothers and fathers … yet no small number of humans blithely go through their lives under the illusion that life is relatively fair … and is meant to be so … and that for the most part justice somehow prevails. Decisions on everything from product purchases to elected official to laws addressing adoption tend to be based on the false sense that happiness is a logical consequence of life for everyone finding the wherewithal their own bootstraps should provide, so consequences are slow to come to those living off the backs of the downtrodden … and that is often not only an expression, but a reality … and remedies too often have more to do with alleviating the little guilt that comes with plenty than actually addressing the real issues others face every day.

Forcing ourselves to wake up and smell the toast is a first step to taking the problems on full frontally, as we will never come to grips with something we have refused to see in all its naked ugliness.

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Abortion rate report

Posted in Adoption, Adoption Advocacy, Adoption News, Family, The USA from the outside in, tagged on January 19, 2008| 1 Comment »

The Guttmacher Institute released its latest report on abortion numbers in the US last week, and because they are down to the lowest rate since 1974, the report is getting press.

The latest figures are from 2005, and the study found a 25 percent drop from an all-time high of 1.6 million in 1990, although still adding up to more than one in five pregnancies being terminated.

A convoluted issue that has long been hijacked by various factions looking to provide traction for wider agendas, abortion is, to say the least, a contentious topic.

Having experienced an unplanned pregnancy in the days before Roe v. Wade, I feel I have more than a little right to my own take on abortion, and I have aimed some writing at it in the past, albeit in tandem with work on adoption.

I am always made very uncomfortable when a direct link is drawn between adoption and abortion, as the hot potato of the first can’t help but be backlit by flame throwers targeting the second, and adoption burning to a crisp in the crossfire is far too dangerous a potential to let the connection weld without comment.

The idea that adoption is a likely consequence of restraint against abortion feels intuitive to many, but is very shaky ground and seems unhelpful in the extreme when trotted out before someone in the dire circumstance of a crisis pregnancy.

Unlike the stereotypic picture of the clueless knocked-up teen … that was me in 1969, thankyouverymuch, when birth control was illegal for anyone under 18 … 61% of women who have abortions in the US are mothers, half have two or more children, and additional children may be considered a cause for compromising care for existing kids.

Without being asked directly, several of the women indicated that adoption is not a realistic option for them. They reported that the thought of one’s child being out in the world without knowing if it was being taken care of or by whom would induce more guilt than having an abortion.

I’m guessing that explaining a full term pregnancy not resulting in a new addition to the family would be an issue, as well.

Clearly, the answer is to prevent as many crisis pregnancies as possible, and education and availability of contraceptives are the keys to this goal.

For those interested, I freely admit that had abortion been a legal option for me in 1969 I would not have chosen it, just as I did not choose to relinquish my daughter. Both facts relate only to me personally and neither are laudatory, but rather simply a reflection the cumulative process that made me me at that given point in time.

If I had found myself pregnant in 1974, the last time the rate of abortions was as low as it was in 2005, I would have carefully considered and very possibly opted for an abortion. At that time I was a divorced 23-year-old struggling to raise two kids on my own, working three jobs to make ends meet, taking classes as I could. Luckily, I dodged that bullet.

I will not get into the abortion fray here, as I have more to address on this blog than leaves time for that endless loop, but I will mention a couple of niggles I can’t keep my mouth shut in front of …

Speaking authoritatively on abortion takes a uterus.

Beethoven was not the third or fifth or whatever offspring of a syphilitic tuberculin.

The more power women have, the better the world gets.

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News Roundup

Posted in Adoption, Adoption Advocacy, Adoption News, International Adoption, tagged , , , , , on January 18, 2008| 3 Comments »

Starting with Guatemala and the ever-shifting adoption sands there, Kelly from GuatAdopt is reporting that the new government has already commenced replacing some members of the Central Adoption Authority with new appointments.

Good? Bad? Neutral? Who knows? But you can follow the story on the site.

I have not before seen news on issues of women and children coming out of Yemen, so this story from the Yemen Observer drew my interest and held it.

Illustrating poverty, the low status of women, and the lack of legal backing and support, the report offers a peek into some very difficult lives:

“My husband died, and he left me a substantial inheritance, but my older brother took it and refused to even give me money to feed my daughters,” said Sameha Ahmed … “

Also from the Arab world, this on a case of child abuse in Saudi Arabia that is horrific, and with horrific consequences.

A Saudi couple, convicted of murdering a nine-year-old girl in 2006 after torturing her for a year, were executed here yesterday.

What a world we have …

And another story that proves just what a mess it is, this on trying to send a kid to school in Zimbabwe.

Thousands of parents also got a rude awakening this week as they tried to buy new uniforms for their kids. Primary school uniforms are Z$56 to Z$70 million. Socks alone can set you back Z$15 million. The cost of a secondary school uniform can be as much as Z$130 million. The addition of a blazer costs Z$500 million. This in a country where only about 20 percent of people have formal employment, bringing in an average income of about Z$15 million a month.

You’d think someone might suggest that uniforms may be one bit of the burden they could jettison for a while, but that thought doesn’t seem to be occurring to anyone.

For a look at treatment for the mentally ill in China, if you can stand it, click here.

“I kept my son in an iron cage for more than six years,” says 53-year-old Zhang Meiying, in Gaomi City, Shandong province. Ms. Zhang earns about $1.60 a day working at a small factory that collects scraps of fabric and resells them to factories as cleaning rags. She couldn’t afford to hospitalize her son, who is around 25, at a cost of about $500 a month. So, when he grew increasingly violent, she decided to build a cage at home to restrain him.

Neighbors donated iron rods. When the cage was ready, Ms. Zhang asked three young men to tie her son up as he slept and put him inside. She remembers his screams. “I was afraid to see it, so I left,” she says.

And also from China, this report on the Christmas Eve arrest of orphans who were living with an “underground Protestant leader”.

According to a secret document of the Chinese communist party of Hubei province, which was leaked to the West last November, there is a campaign underway in China to “normalise” the underground Protestant Churches by offering them two possibilities: either join the Movement of the Three Autonomies (the Protestant communities led by the patriotic associations) or be suppressed.

And finally … and I am sorry about the tone of today’s news, but it’s not my fault so much in the world sucks … this about a 44-year-old adoptee who has slapped a $500,000 law suit on her 71-year old adoptive mother, claiming that her adoption was fraudulent and that she “suffered emotionally and financially.”

Ah, if only all adoptions could be to the wealthy, heh?

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