Category: Adoption Page 3 of 8

I Hate That There Has To Be Adoption

On September 23, 2018

It happened again last week. I was saying good night to one of my children, chatting nonchalantly, when questions about birth parents, seemingly out of nowhere, entered the room like Dementors. The moment became sacred as we whispered in the darkness, and inevitably turned into deep, wracking sobs through my child’s body.

I’ve been in this place before, so I wasn’t surprised, though I can never keep back my own tears when it happens. It’s not often, but it’s agony.

We’re not shy about adoption in our house; it’s woven into the fabric of our family. But most of the time, we’re just an ordinary family and I forget (and they forget, I think) that there’s these shadows that lurk behind my children. That as happy and nutty and normal as we are, our family was created out of loss. And grief.

I knew this, of course, before becoming an adoptive parent, but did I really know it? I was so fixated on the rescue and the redemption that it was easy to just skim over the grief.

It didn’t take me long to understand. When Grace (my oldest, who gave me permission to share this) was just 18 months old, she fixated on a Dora the Explorer book. It was only five pages long, and was the story of a baby bird who lost his mommy. Dora helped the bird find her, with Map and Boots, of course.

The first time we read that book, Grace was fascinated. She wanted to read it again, and then again. The third time through, my sweet little toddler burst into tears over the little bird who was separated from his mommy. Is she seriously crying over a Dora book? I thought. But yes, she was. Because when we got to the last page, when the baby bird was happily reunited with his mommy, Grace became obsessed with that last page. She showed it to me over and over and over again. She adored that last page.

She could barely talk. At the time I thought it was impossible that this incident could be related to her adoption. But as the years went on, and I grew to better understand my children and the nature of adoption, I really believe that silly little story scraped against a raw wound inside of her–even at 18 months old.

In Love Thy Body, Nancy Pearcey writes about how modern culture scorns the biological family. If the biological body no longer has an inherent purpose in gender or marriage, then it has no meaning in a family. A family is therefore not created by biology, but by a contract. But contracts can be broken when they are no longer convenient, and who steps in that gap? The state. She writes, “Statism has been a recurring theme in treatments of the family since the dawn of Western culture. To an astonishing degree, Western political and social thought has been hostile to the role of the family in proposed visions of the ideal society. Secular intellectuals from Plato to Rousseau to B. F. Skinner to Hillary Clinton have been enamored with the idea of putting the child directly under the care of the state. The totalitarian regimes of the twentieth century—erected by Hitler, Mussolini, Stalin, and Mao—all sought tight state control of education, down to the earliest years, to inculcate unquestioning acceptance of the regime’s ideology.”

But even if we don’t go into the realm of philosophy, up-close-and-personal reality shows us that as much as we try to convince ourselves otherwise, biology matters. More than one of my children have begged me through tears, Isn’t there a DNA test I could take that would show me who they are? Don’t we all get teary over adoption reunion stories? And as I read recently in the article Dear Anonymous Dad, even kids born by sperm donation aren’t satisfied until they know where they came from. Pearcey writes, “We rarely reflect consciously on how much our identity is shaped by being integrated biologically and genetically into an extended family.” That is, we don’t reflect on it unless we’re one of the ones who don’t have it.

So as an adoptive mom who is walking alongside kids who grieve what they have lost, I also grieve over the flippancy that my culture treats biology and its bonds. In an age of Tinder and no-fault divorce, more and more kids aren’t being raised by biological parents. Yes, God can redeem any situation, but let’s not pretend the brokenness isn’t there.

Of course, I still love adoption. Pearcey writes, “The bonds of biology train us to extend love beyond biology.” But I hate that there has to be adoption. I think coming to that realization has made me a better adoptive parent. Sure, I weep happy tears over the little girl who finally gets a family. It’s beautiful. It’s redemptive. It’s extraordinary. But we can’t minimize the loss and grief that got her there. As much as I am a cheerleader for adoption, I’ve learned that I also must advocate for preventing the need for it in the first place.

Infertility and the Privilege of Motherhood

By Amy Medina

On May 15, 2017

In Adoption

It took me a while to realize how lucky I am, given my circumstances, that I got to become a mom.

When Gil and I concluded early on that babies weren’t coming the natural way, we were left with the adoption route or the treatment route. We were in the States at the time, so we planned to start the treatment route, but I got pregnant–the one and only time. It only lasted seven weeks, and by the time the dust had settled, we were on our way to Tanzania again, so there wasn’t time to start treatment. Adoption had always been “Plan A” for us, even if the biological option had worked out, so there wasn’t much question that we would start that process in Tanzania. And 10 years later, we have 4 beautiful children.

I look back now and think about how my life could have gone a completely different way. I’ve never birthed a child, but God gave me a husband who was enthusiastic about adoption. That’s not true of a lot of other husbands. Treatment wasn’t available in Tanzania, but adoption was–and it was ethical and hardly cost anything and there were good orphanages who kept careful records on their babies. That’s not true of a lot of other countries. I could have found myself 40 years old, infertile, and in a country where adoption wasn’t possible. But I didn’t.

A friend recently asked me to share about my experience with infertility with a friend of hers. I told her I would be happy to, but I might not be the best person. Yes, I did go through a miscarriage and a couple of years of taking my temperature every day and crying every month. But I have been so fortunate. I often think of the women in many other cultures whose husbands divorce them for infertility. Or those who can’t afford treatment or can’t afford adoption or who would love to adopt and their husband says no. Or those who mortgage their house to pay for treatment which lasts months or years, and there’s only pain and never joy. Or those women who long for children, but a husband never materializes.

Infertility has helped me understand the privilege of being a mother. Kind of like how I didn’t really understand the privilege of electricity until I had been without it for 12 hours a day for months at a time. I know that there are many who long for motherhood and for one reason or another, are never granted the privilege. That could have been me.

Of course, as any mother quickly realizes, motherhood is not all lollipops and rainbows–quite the opposite, in fact, when the lollipops make the child go berserk and the rainbows appear scrawled in crayon on the living room wall. Motherhood is a dying to self, pure and simple, a laying down of one’s life and desires and peace and ambition in sacrifice for these small ones who ruin your pretty things and make you want to hide under the bed. It’s no wonder, really, in our ultra-independent culture, that so many women these days are choosing to reject motherhood altogether. Maybe they need to hear more voices telling them that in losing your life, you actually gain it. More than you ever dreamed.

But for those reading this today who do dream, who long and wait and who dread Mother’s Day, who want nothing more than crayon scribbled on their walls, know that I mourn with you too. And I pray that as God brought redemption into my life, may He do the same for you — in one of its many forms.

I said that it took me a while to realize how lucky I am to be a mom. Of course, I don’t believe in luck, but in God’s providence. I’m humbled to contemplate this story He wrote for me.

It’s been 10, maybe 15 years since I’ve been with my Mom on Mother’s Day. How blessed I am to call this godly, generous, faithful, sacrificial woman my mother. And my friend.

My four with the apron they made me. They made an acrostic out of my name:Amazing

Mom

Yo!

We Have Not Learned Our Lesson About Adoption Corruption

By Amy Medina

On February 12, 2017

In Adoption

Sometimes I think I am a glutton for punishment.

I keep clinging onto vestiges of hope that maybe international adoption can work in developing countries. But I am drawn like a bug to a zapper when I see books like this one:

Finding Fernanda: Two mothers, one child, and a cross-border search for truth by Erin Siegal

And yes, I felt like a zapped bug. This time, I got to read 312 pages describing (in sordid detail) the stinking cesspool that was the Guatemalan adoption industry. And an industry it was, since at its height, thousands of children were exported from this tiny war-torn country every year. In fact, for several years, 1 out of every Guatemalan 100 babies were sold to America. And while thousands of American families fawned over pictures of “their” children, fixed up nurseries, and prayed desperate prayers, the millions of dollars being sent to Guatemala were being used by adoption agencies, lawyers, judges, and orphanages to manipulate, buy, or just plain kidnap children away from their mothers.

And the pit in my stomach just continues to grow.

As I’ve said over and over, I wish it wasn’t true. I so desperately want to support all international adoptions–I really do. And it would be one thing if collectively the American Adoption Community looked at Guatemala and said, Wow, we really learned our lesson. We won’t ever let that happen again. But the hardest part about all of this is that America still has not learned its lesson. It still is turning a blind eye.

You might have read the post I wrote last year called Children Are No Longer For Sale in Uganda. After Uganda’s adoption industry turned into its own cesspool, the Ugandan government finally got in control of it and passed some new laws. Perhaps the most significant of those laws is that any foreign adoptive parent needs to now foster the child in Uganda for one year before adopting.

So you can imagine my surprise when I read the following on the United States Department of State website last week:

What does this mean? It means that some American adoption agencies are trying to get around the one-year fostering law by finding Ugandan families to “proxy foster” the child….until the requirement is supposedly met and the American family can swoop in and take the child back to America.

What?

WHAT?

How clear does Uganda need to be? How spelled out do they need to make the law? It’s even written in English. You must live in Uganda for at least one year to adopt a child. Is it really that hard to understand? But hey, I guess if Madonna is able to ignore adoption residency requirements, then anyone can.

Some will say, Well, adoptive families wouldn’t be able to get away with it if it wasn’t okay. Really? Then they obviously have never lived in a developing country before. They have absolutely no idea the depth of the corruption that they are enabling, that they are contributing to, in the name of rescuing a child.

Sigh. I’ll say it again:

If you’re feeling called to adopt,choose a Hague-Convention country. Do your homework; don’t just trust your agency. Ask the hard questions. Read the country’s laws for yourself. Support adoption reform. Remember that adoption corruption is rampant and you cannot assume the best.

Please, please, America (and it really is mainly America), let’s learn this lesson.

Waiting on the God Who Acts

By Amy Medina

On November 27, 2016

In Adoption

I was washing dishes, and Grace was practicing her Bible verses for class.

She rattled off Isaiah 64:4: Since ancient times no one has heard, no ear has perceived, no eye has seen any God besides you, who acts on behalf of those who wait for him.

And tears sprang to my eyes.

Suddenly I was taken back to ten years ago. Gil and I had been through a miscarriage and two failed adoption attempts. We were desperate to be parents. We had been matched with Grace in May of 2006, and we had flown up to Northern Tanzania in June to meet her. At that point, we thought it would be just a matter of days before we would be able to bring her home.

But the days stretched into weeks which stretched into months. I flew up to Moshi three more times to try to get things moving. We believed the problem was with an evil social worker who was preventing the adoption, but now that I understand more about Tanzanian culture and how adoption works here, I know that the delay had just as much to do with the mistakes of the orphanage.

We were asked if we wanted to just give up on this baby and choose another. But we were committed to the child who would become Grace Medina. As long as it took.

All of our adoptions have had snags and disappointments, but the months of waiting for Grace were the hardest. I wasn’t just waiting for another child, I was waiting to become a mother. I closed the door of her half-decorated nursery and couldn’t bring myself to go in.

One day in late October, I was asked to substitute teach for fifth grade at HOPAC at the last minute. I quickly scanned over lesson plans as the kids came into the room. The first lesson of the day was in Bible. And it was on Isaiah 64:4.

I remember very clearly that as the students and I discussed the implications of God’s sovereignty in waiting patiently for Him to act, that I felt like I was talking to myself as the words came out of my mouth. I was waiting for Him, and He would act. I could have that confidence. I left the classroom that day with a new perspective.

Just two days later, we received the letter that allowed us to go pick up Grace. And that beautiful promise was ingrained on my heart.

In the ten years since then, the Bible curriculum at HOPAC has not changed. So when Grace–now in fifth grade and almost 11 years old–stood in my kitchen and recited the verse that quite literally is entwined in her story, it was a holy moment.

That night, I told Grace this story of that verse. I did wait on Him. And He did act. And no one has ever seen or heard of a God like Him.

The Conflict of International Adoption Reform: Why Are Agencies Trying to Stop It?

By Amy Medina

On November 5, 2016

In Adoption

I am pro-adoption, and have four adopted kids of my own.

I am pro-international adoption, when it’s done the right way.

I have lived 18 years in African countries, including 12 in Tanzania.

I have witnessed first-hand the corruption in international adoption.

Please keep these these things in mind as you read this.

If you are in international adoption circles, you probably have heard about the adoption reforms currently being proposed by the US Department of State. Your agency might have circulated a petition on social media for you to sign, protesting the new regulations. You might have read an article insisting that the new regulations will ruin international adoption.

So today, I hope you’ll read this article, where I give my support for these new regulations.

This is why.

1. The new law would give the State Department the control to accredit agencies for specific countries.

Imagine you are a consular officer working in a United States embassy overseas. You know that international adoption is illegal in your country, or that it is full of corruption. Yet, when an application for a US visa for an adopted child comes across your desk, there is very little you can do besides grant the visa. If some of the documentation looks fraudulent, as long as there is a genuine adoption order included, you really can’t change anything. And if you do try–let’s say you launch an investigation that delays the visa–then the American family will promptly call their local US government representative–who will make your life hell. Yes, this is how it works.

Many people don’t realize that adoption agencies routinely work in countries where they are not licensed by that government or where adoption is blatantly illegal. Or, in some countries, a government will license a few agencies, but then dozens more unlicensed agencies will work “under” each licensed agency.

Up until this point, it has been extremely rare for the US government to shut down adoptions in a particular country, even if corruption is rampant. They just haven’t had that power. This new regulation would give them the authority to regulate which agencies (if any) work in a particular country. This is needed and necessary.

2. The new law would prevent agencies from paying orphanages for the care of children matched for adoption.

Imagine you are the manager of an orphanage in a third-world country where international adoption is booming. Fundraising is difficult and time-consuming. But every time a child in your orphanage is matched for adoption, you receive $300 a month until that child goes home (which can take up to a year). Awesome! What a great source of dependable funding….especially since most people in the country live on less than $2 a day!

This is a massive conflict of interest.

When orphanages get paid for adoption, then why would they do to the more difficult work of reuniting children with their families?

When adoption becomes lucrative (especially in a poor country), then children become a commodity. When children become a commodity, then orphanages go out and “search” for more children to fill their beds.

Sure, I get why adoptive parents are anxious for their referred children to have excellent care during the months they are waiting to bring them home. But what they don’t realize is that many times these “mandatory donations” (now that’s an oxymoron!) are actually counter-productive. Once greed and corruption sets in, that money is much less likely to actually go to their child’s care. Money should never be a motivator for orphanages to participate in adoption. If they can’t get their funding a different way, then they shouldn’t be caring for children at all.

Countries approved by the Hague convention already ban this practice–and for good reason. I wholeheartedly approve our government’s decision to stop it across the board.

3. The new law would require more levels of accountability for agencies over the people that they work with (and pay) overseas. This would also allow the US government to regulate what agencies are paying their overseas “partners.”

What most people don’t understand is that agencies must be accredited in the United States, which requires them to have certain standards for potential adoptive families, to have a certain level of financial transparency, etc. But that accreditation only regulates the American side of adoption. There are no regulations for what those agencies do in other countries. They have absolutely no accountability for what they do–unless the other country regulates them. But when these agencies come into a country with their massive money, the other country is pretty much going to let them do whatever they want. And this is where corruption, abuse, child trafficking–etc–all run rampant.

This is why six US agencies (maybe more) are working to facilitate adoptions in Tanzania–despite the fact that international adoption isillegal here and that there is no way to license an agency in this country.

Honestly, I don’t know if this particular law is the answer to the problems in international adoption. There are other parts to the law–like requiring parents to attend foster care classes in their state–that might not be good solutions. But this I do know: The US government needs to be able to regulate the activity of US agencies overseas–because no one else is. Whether or not this law is the answer to that problem, I’m not sure. But this conversation needs to happen. And the international adoption community needs to listen.

I can hear the protest: What if this means less children get adopted?

I hear that, and I feel it. What it means is that we need different solutions. We need to understand that international adoption is a solution for a very small percentage of the world’s vulnerable children. Maybe we need less adoption agencies and more “family reunification” agencies. Maybe we need less orphanages and more community development programs. Maybe instead of pushing foreign governments to allow Americans to adopt more of their children, we need to instead push them to promote domestic adoption.

Now that would be something worthwhile to fight for.