Why China?
Today the goal is to get our application and homestudy application in the mail. I thought I was all prepared to do this during nap time, but I was sorely mistaken, only because my husband also decided to nap during nap time, and I’m missing his signature on at least 4 documents. Fie.
So why China?
We started our journey doing a lot of research. We had intended on adopting domestically. But there are a LOT of hurdles to domestic adoption, the biggest which is probably this: the US foster care system is primarily created to reunite families. Not to create new ones.
This means (to us) that our adoption would always live in a state of jeopardy if we didn’t adopt a newborn (and we don’t need a newborn- they will always find homes). The reality is that it’s not a sure thing, even after the paperwork is completed (and that paperwork takes YEARS), that your child will get to stay with you. The birth parents can always fight to get “their” child back.
So we started researching countries. ALL of them.
We were surprised that you can only adopt from certain countries. And some countries are only open to certain other countries (we can’t adopt from Canada or England, for instance). Some countries will only allow their children to be adopted to their own citizens (Italy, Slovenia). Some countries require multiple extended visits before you can bring your child home (Peru, Kyrgyzstan), which exponentially drives up the overall cost of an already expensive adoption. And many African countries lie about the ages of the children available for adoption, and you come home with a child years older than you requested. And we learned that there is a horrid black market for child “buying” which is why it’s important to go through an agency that is knowledgeable and accredited by Hague (which is a treaty to help stop the trafficking of children).
So we had to decide what was important to us, and narrow down from there.
We decided we wanted to adopt from a country that was stable in their adoptions. Where children were medically checked out and treated. Where there were few visits required, and less risk of in-country extortion. And where the children NEEDED homes.
In China, the orphan situation faces two major problems:
- It’s illegal to abandon a child to the government.
- You must pay for all healthcare up front.
This means if you are a poor farmer, and you give birth to a child that may have a cleft lip, or a crossed eye, cancer, or is deaf… you are forced to make a horrible choice: keep the child and know that you will not be able to help them get better due to lack of care, or abandon your child in a public place, hoping someone will find them before it’s too late, and that an orphanage will take them in and get them the care they need.
So if you choose option #2, you will never know what happened. And that child will, at the very least, spend a year in an understaffed orphanage, with no parent to attend to them while they cry, recover from surgery, praise them when they meet a developmental milestone, etc. They say that orphanages are eerily quiet, as the children have learned that crying does not help. For every 3 months a child lives in an orphanage, they are delayed behind a typical child 1 month in development. So a 3 year old would be closer to the developmental age of a 2 year old.
And once a child reaches their 14th birthday, they are no longer eligible for adoption. As the Chinese as a people are quite superstitious, this means this child may never get married or hold a good job. Happy effing birthday.
So China jumped high on our list, as the process seems to be streamlined, the orphans are many, and the need is great. From start to finish, it’s supposed to take about a year. And, in a completely random choice of events, the agency we decided to use, AAC, adopts from the province my family is descended from. So it’s entirely possible our child will ACTUALLY be related to us. ☺
