The ‘Enabling Violation’ of International Adoption

By DRUCILLA CORNELL

The Stone is a forum for contemporary philosophers on issues both timely and timeless.

TAGS:

ADOPTION, CHILDREN,FAMILIES, HUMAN RIGHTS,PHILOSOPHY

On April 24, 1993, I legally adopted my daughter in Asuncion, Paraguay. I will never forget that day. I was a complete nervous wreck. Our adoption was being expedited because the first free elections in decades were to be held that spring, following the 35-year rule of the dictator Alfredo Stroessner, who was ousted in a military coup in 1989.  There was much uncertainty as to whether the election would even take place, and concern that another military coup might prevent it. Tanks were in the street, and there was a sense that the country might well fall in to a civil war.

It is not only adopted children who lack the traditional family narrative.

Against this background, adopting a baby might have seemed like a small issue. But in fact, all the opposition parties agreed on one thing: they would quickly stop all adoption to the United States, and indeed, in 1995, a law was passed to suspend adoptions from Paraguay until there had been a complete overhaul of adoption procedures.

I will never forget — having always considered myself a progressive person — the night my hotel was surrounded by demonstrators protesting against us for stealing Paraguayan children. I was staying in a hotel whose guests were exclusively United States citizens adopting Paraguayan children. I tried to comfort myself by remembering how scrupulous I had been in working with my Paraguayan lawyer to follow all the rules and procedures that were to govern adoption under the old regime. But of course, the old regime was a dictatorship, and completely corrupt. So how could we really be sure that we had not fallen into a corrupt situation, one in which the children being adopted had not been given up willingly by their families, or at the very worst stolen and trafficked?

I had read stories about children being stolen from their parents; these stories were all over the press at the time I was in Paraguay. And of course, the issue is still with us today. Recent news stories reporting the abduction in China of children for international adoption have again brought to light the flaws and complexities of a system (or many systems) by which children are adopted. They have also raised questions about the ethical responsibilities of those systems and those who participate in it.

I still believe that I legally adopted my daughter, but only because I was able, by paying a friend of my daughter’s birth mother under the table, to get as much of her story as I could, including that she had legally put her daughter up for adoption. There were many other difficulties that at times almost overwhelmed me, including the ill health of my then-daughter-to-be, who urgently needed medical care, which could only be provided by the solicitation of bribes.

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The adoption of children is an act fraught with innumerable intersecting personal histories and motives. While not traditionally known to be a topic of philosophy, it is in fact deeply intertwined with many of the most fundamental issues of the discipline — personal and political freedom, self-determination, free will, and of course, human rights.

Central to all of these matters is the issue of the child’s best interest, or more broadly, children’s rights. An international treaty, the Hague Convention on Intercountry Adoption, which the United States ratified in 2008, has gone some way toward establishing protections for children and parents in the adoption process. But of course problems remain.

Leif Parsons

There is a voluminous literature arguing that the act of child adoption itself constitutes a trauma. For example, the writer Betty Jean Lifton argued that no matter what adoptive parents do, an adopted child has undergone a foundational trauma. I have argued against that position because for Lifton, biological connection is the only way for a family to constitute itself through a foundational narrative of belonging. On that view, an adopted child will necessarily be robbed of such a narrative, and will be without answers to basic questions like “When did mommy meet daddy?” and “What happened on the day I was born?”

But of course it is not only adopted, children who lack such narratives. Those who do not live in conventional heterosexual families  are also cut off from them. The normalization of the heterosexual family — mommy and daddy and baby makes three — does not describe the majority of families. If one narrative of family belonging  — in this case traditional heterosexual — is treated as the only valid one, it cuts off other possibilities for other stories of how one becomes a family and belongs to a family.  Thus, the very argument that adoption is foundationally traumatic shuts down possibilities that would allow adopted children to tell different family stories and be part of different kinds of families. The argument itself becomes exclusionary.

In my own writing on adoption, I have emphasized the importance of what I call the “imaginary domain,”  both within the United States and in the context of international adoption. The imaginary domain is an aesthetic idea that represents the psychic and moral space individuals need in order to come to terms with the complex identifications all of us face in our relationships with our family, our sexuality, and our national and linguistic identities.

One way of trying to facilitate the protection of an adopted child’s imaginary domain is through open adoption, in which the biological mother or parents and the adoptive family know each other. However, open international adoption is very difficult; some of the countries that still allow international adoption either do not have records of the birth parents or have laws and practices that prevent access to the birth parents. There is also a deeper problem. Many of the countries that allow adoption are at times unable to control the privatization of adoption, with the result that some orphanages end up in the hands of mafias. This raises the specter of children who, if they have not been outright stolen, have in some way or another been coercively removed from their family of origin.

The argument that adoption is traumatic can deprive children from non-traditional families of a sense of belonging.

In 2009, Madonna was caught in a legal battle in which some members of the family the second child she adopted from Malawi claimed that they had not truly chosen to put their child up for adoption. In a country struggling with a weak or collapsed economy, it is often difficult to maintain the line between legal adoption and trafficking. It is not surprising, then, that many countries, as they attempt to constitute themselves as independent powers in the global economy, outlaw international adoption altogether, as a signal to the world that they want to take matters of intergenerational relationships into their own hands. For example, China, which used to be one of the most sought-after countries by the adoption agencies of the United States, has now drastically limited international adoption to the Global North. Indeed, one country after another has limited or shut down adoption to countries in the Global North over the last 10 years.

How, then, do we confront the reality that some countries from which children have been adopted are now ferociously opposed to international adoptions, for the reasons given above? And what does it mean that with some exceptions, international adoption is generally a one-way street from the Global South to the Global North?

Often those who adopt children from the Global South are hailed as saviors of children from countries that have fallen into hell, on the grounds that those children were unlikely to grow up to lead meaningful lives, or even to physically survive. Adopting such children can seem like a humanitarian gesture, which allows the adopting parents to pat themselves on the back for “saving a life.” Why is this humanitarian gesture problematic? After all, these parents are breaking out of the conception that an acceptable family involves members who look alike, are from the same culture, speak the same language, and so forth. Many parents have even insisted that their children have access to the culture and language of the country from which they were adopted. Such measures are of course extremely important if one takes seriously the literature on trauma and adoption that emphasizes that the break that occurs in a child’s life when she or he is adopted be at least open to a meaningful narration, so that the child can begin to understand the complexity of her or his life. The need for this kind of narration is basic to what I have called the imaginary domain, and if it is denied, the psychic life of the child can be rendered fragile.

Of course, such measures are to be applauded as attempts to protect the imaginary domain. But they cannot entirely escape the underlying narrative that children from the Global South are better off if they are removed from those countries to the more “developed” world of Europe and the United States.

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Read previous contributions to this series.

As an adoptive mother, I have had to think about my own responsibilities towards an adopted child from Paraguay, who, by all signs at the time, would not have survived if I had not adopted her. The way I think of it now is that my own action was what the literary theorist Gayatri Chakravorty Spivakhas called an “enabling violation.” I enabled my daughter’s life by adopting her, but in another sense it was a violation for my daughter, who was uprooted from her home, her language and her country of birth. I may have violated the people of Paraguay by participating in an adoption process that the vast majority of Paraguayans deeply disapproved of and ultimately sought to end. I have of course tried to make sure that my daughter always knew the story, not only of her adoption, but of what I could gather of her birth mother’s decision. But I will never feel at ease until my daughter and I visit her birth mother and hear it directly from her.

There is no easy way in which the adopted child’s imaginary domain can be facilitated, although dual citizenship seems to be a minimum guarantee to adopted children, so that they can return to their country of birth if they so desire. Ultimately, international adoption is profoundly implicated in relations of inequality that cannot be addressed on the basis of one family alone. Perhaps, then, if we at least recognize international adoption as an enabling violation, we can avoid the worst kinds of self-righteous humanitarianism, and find ourselves pointed towards a struggle for a more just world.

Emerson woman sold at birth hoping to find family

MONDAY, OCTOBER 17, 2011    LAST UPDATED: MONDAY OCTOBER 17, 2011, 4:04 PM

BY CHRIS HARRIS

STAFF WRITER

THE RECORD

Cyn Bird always suspected her family was hiding something, but it took a deathbed confession by her mother three years ago to confirm the shocking truth:

CARMINE GALASSO/STAFF PHOTOGRAPHER

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Cyn Bird of Emerson found out at age 46 that she was sold on the black market as a baby. She uses her art to help deal with the pain.

She had been bought on the black market as a baby for $2,500 cash. Her birth mother was a college student. And her parents traveled from Queens to Coral Gables, Fla., to make the transaction.
The Emerson artist and mother of two is part of a cluster of adults sprinkled throughout America who have recently learned from their aging parents or other family members that they are "Cole babies" — infants delivered by Coral Gables-based naturopathic physician Dr. Katherine Cole, who profited from falsifying birth certificates and selling babies to infertile couples up and down the Eastern Seaboard.
"For years, they told me I was their child, and I believed them," said Bird, who is still searching for her birth parents. "I wanted to believe them.

Granny Doc

* Dr. Katherine Cole was known throughout the Coral Gables, Fla., community as "Granny Doc" and operated an illegal abortion clinic out of a legal adoption center from the 1930s to the late 1960s.
* Pregnant girls would visit her clinic and Cole persuaded them to give their babies up for adoption.
* Cole falsified birth records of the children she sold to infertile couples, listing the adoptive parents on the form as the birth parents.
* Police records indicate that from 1943 to 1967, Cole was arrested five times for manslaughter, attempted abortion, unlawful possession of barbiturates and failure to file a birth certificate.
* She was cleared of all charges but one — attempted abortion — and was sentenced to less than a year behind bars.
* In the 1950s, Cole was questioned as part of a federal investigation into black-market baby adoptions, but that never led to any charges.
* Cole died in 1981.
* Her true crimes wouldn't become known until the early 1990s, as "Cole babies" reached adulthood and began asking the questions. A Miami Herald investigation exposed the truth about Cole's baby-brokering business.

"My father had already died, and my mother's memory was foggy; she was sick," Bird said. "She died four months later. … It was a shock — at 46 — to find out you came from somewhere else."
Bird said the entire family knew she was bought on the black market, and no one ever let it slip. Her mother told Bird "she was afraid every time there was a knock on the door, because she thought she was going to get busted."
Her search has turned up few leads. So far, she's only been able to locate a distant cousin through a DNA ancestry firm.
"There was no original birth certificate," Bird said. "My birth certificate is a 'falsified original.' Cole put down my adoptive patents as the birth parents."
Josette Marquess, a retired Florida adoption official, has guided dozens of Cole babies through mostly fruitless state searches, and has become the state's expert on Cole.
Marquess said most of the Cole babies she helped found out about their origins quite accidentally.
"There was a rift in the family, and somebody got mad with somebody else, and, in revenge, said, 'Oh by the way ... I have something to tell you.' "
Marquess said working with Cole babies was "heartbreaking, because I knew there was really nothing I could do to help them.
"In order to have a reunion, you really need a paper trail to follow and the particular nastiness of Dr. Cole was, she made sure there was no paper trail."

Operated a clinic

Cole — known throughout the Coral Gables community as "Granny Doc" — operated an illegal abortion clinic and a legal adoption center from the mid-1930s to the late 1960s. Young pregnant girls who "got in trouble" would visit her clinic, and Cole convinced them to give their babies up for adoption, Marquess said.
Marquess said the doctor owned a number of apartment buildings within a three-block radius of her clinic. Both the pregnant girls and the adopting couples would stay there until the delivery.
Cole would assess each infertile couple individually, charging anywhere from $25 to $10,000 for a baby.
"All you needed was a wedding ring and $5,000 and you were good to go," Marquess said. "She probably placed, at a minimum, 200 babies a year and she operated in Florida for more than 30 years — even with a little prison stint in there. That's thousands of people who will never know their true identity."
While it is typically hard for legally adopted people to track down their birth parents, Cole — who died in 1981 — left no factual records behind, making it almost impossible for the babies she sold to find the truth.
"There is nothing — no records," Bird said. "Cole orchestrated it as if my parents were living in an apartment in Florida and gave birth to a baby — me."
Bird said there was even a birth announcement placed in a local Florida paper, naming her adoptive father as her natural father. "Oddly, there's no mention of my mother in the announcement," Bird said.

Role of doctors

Bob Rooks, director of the Florida Adoption Information Center, which for free provides adoption information and referral services to adoptive parents, adult adoptees, birth relatives and pregnant women, said authorities didn't catch on to Cole for so long because doctors at the time always filled out birth certificates.
Florida doctors still fill out birth certificates. In New Jersey, parents fill out a form at the hospital that is eventually certified by a physician, according to state officials.
But doctors today don't handle adoptions, Rooks said.
"That ended in Florida in 2007. In Cole's day, physicians legally did adoptions, adding to the confusion."
Rooks said many Cole babies — and most adults who were placed through what he called black market adoptions — likely will never find their birth parents.
"The adoptive family was listed on the certificate," which were often written in red or green ink, "and the birth mother was not, so with that, there is no paper trail. These weren't legal adoptions, so these people are left out in the cold."
Rooks said the Florida Adoption Information Center — which fields more than 10,000 calls a year — has not been contacted by any of Cole's birth mothers, as far as he knows. Marquess has had no contact with any of them either.
"These children completely lost their identities, and now they're getting older and starting to show some symptoms," Rooks said, adding that he does get calls from Cole babies as well as children sold by other doctors around that same time. "They've lost their medical and social history."

Health history

Marquess said more than anything else, Cole babies want information. "They wanted a good health history, and I don't think Florida is unusual in that we historically did not do a very good job of gathering family medical history ... even though we had access to the birth mothers."
For Bird, she will never give up the search, even though she acknowledged, "I think there's a huge chance I will never know."
But she's hopeful for her children's sake. A recent medical scare made her even more determined to dig into the past. Bird underwent surgery to remove skin cancer from her hand.
"I don't think about the fact I was sold every day anymore, but once in a while, stuff will come up," she said. "I go to the doctors and they want family history, and I have none. I used to think I did, because I was lied to all my life."
Bird retreats to her art to help deal with the pain and the betrayal.
"I started this series [of paintings] pretty soon after I found out about it, and it's very cathartic for me," Bird said.
The paintings feature vibrant splashes of color, interwoven with words like "lies," "secrets" and "sin."
Bird keeps in touch with other Cole babies through a Facebook group and e-mail. She understands why her parents did what they did, but she still harbors some resentment toward them.
"Intellectually, I get it," Bird said. "They couldn't have children; they didn't qualify for the typical agency adoption, because they didn't have enough bedrooms. They didn't have enough money. I see why they did it. But I do get pissed off about it."
Bird is hoping that someone will read her story, visit her website, see her picture, and that something will trigger a memory or inspire someone to come forward. At this point, she said it is really only hope.
"I'm hoping someone will recognize my eyes or my smile," Bird said. "I just want to know who I am."
E-mail: harrisc@northjersey.com

The Trouble With International Adoption Is not Trafficking: It's the Global Orphan Crisis

Dr. Jane Aronson

Pediatrician and CEO, Worldwide Orphans Foundation

Posted: 9/20/11 10:06 AM ET

This blog is in response to a September 18 article in the New York Times, by John Leland, on the trafficking of babies in China.

Over the 22 years that I have been an adoption medicine specialist, there have been many historic moments where the legitimacy of the adoption of children from abroad has been questioned and revealed on TV and in print media. Countries have closed at these moments, leaving children stranded in orphanages, parents without their children and accusations of trafficking. Inter-country adoptions have gone from 23,000 in 2005 to about 11,000 in 2010 with fewer and fewer choices available to families looking to adopt from abroad.

A September 18 NY Times article by John Leland sensitively highlights recent trafficking of babies in China. The article includes interviews with American parents of adopted children from China, focusing on how it feels for a parent to think that their child might have been bought and sold. The complex issues about how to speak to one's child about such matters in the future are excruciating, but not impossible to handle. That said, most parents who adopt from abroad rarely know the real facts of that desperate moment when their child was abandoned or relinquished. We have hopefully learned not to glorify birth parents and to respect what we do know and what we don't know in an honest and loving way when we speak with our children. Those conversations change and become more sophisticated as children grow and develop.

Trafficking is rare in international adoption. It is not because of trafficking that international adoption has gone south. I don't dismiss the importance of trafficking and I hope that the Hague Convention on Inter-country Adoption in cooperation with each country will continue to work hard to prevent the violation of the rights of birth mothers and to protect the rights of children. That will never happen however, unless there is a financial and educational investment in the sending country's social welfare infrastructure.
Children are typically abandoned in a public place in China so that they can be found and protected, while in other countries like Ethiopia, they are relinquished to a local orphanage. It is safe to say that the cause for the desperate decision to not parent one's own child in countries all over the world, including the US, is poverty and the resultant isolation and depression that darkens the birth mother's thoughts. There is no hope and no one to talk to and no one to help sort out the possible solutions to the dilemma of shame, no education, no work skills, no dignity, and abject and extreme poverty. 
I ask myself a bigger and more philosophical question about the millions of orphans when I read articles like this. There is a Global Orphan Crisis. When I started out helping parents manage the health issues of children adopted from abroad, I knew very little about the social conditions that dominated the communities of developing countries. For over two decades I have traveled abroad on medical missions and learned about the despair and hopelessness in countries all over the world where there are no social workers or community workers to openly engage in discussions with women who are pregnant and poor. Economic strengthening is limited and women have little access to education and medical care. Why did we create such a marvelous bureaucracy to improve international adoption practices and not pour some of that money into the welfare of mothers in these countries? It seems immoral to me to accredit US adoption agencies and to not empower women from sending countries to make international adoption a well-thought out choice for a birth mother no matter what her economic status. We do this for all domestic adoptions in the US. If we educated women abroad and showed some respect for their process, we might find that some women would still opt for their children to be adopted...even changing some attitudes about domestic adoption in very poor nations.

I review pre-adoption referrals daily in my adoption practice. More and more of the social histories that I read, are about a dead mother or a dead father and 7 children perhaps ranging in age from 15 yrs old to 6 months of age. The one remaining parent may have AIDS and begins to relinquish the youngest children one by one to a local orphanage. The parent signs papers that state that they cannot afford to care for their child. The stories are pitiful and after years of reading them, I am heartbroken. It is these stories that have likely made adoptive parents reading them, realize that there is a moral moment in adoption from abroad. Any decent person who reads a referral that tells the story above, likely lies quietly in the dark of night while waiting for that baby, thinking about the unfairness in life. This is why adoption has gone the way of "boom and bust" resulting in lower numbers and fewer countries. Governments and the global community are not blind to the conflicting issues that arise from poverty, community disintegration, and increasing numbers of children without parental care, whether true orphans or not. It is not about trafficking.

To help orphans have a better life in their own countries, I created a foundation, Worldwide Orphans, 14 years ago. We started in institutions to enrich the lives of orphans and then we grew and realized that orphans were in the community. In our work with HIV-infected orphans and vulnerable children and their families we help to strengthen the local communities to prevent abandonment and relinquishment and also to re-unify families affected by HIV/AIDS.

It would be wonderful if we could address the Global Orphan Crisis now. There are millions of children who are born without pre-natal care, malnourished, low birth weight, and living in extreme poverty; they cannot all be adopted.

Let's set priorities and reach more children in their communities, provide social services for women, lessen abandonment, lessen relinquishment and trafficking will naturally be less of a threat. Let's strengthen the adoption opportunities so there is complete transparency and finally, let's also be community builders. Let's not be afraid to face all the issues honestly and let's not perpetuate the theory that trafficking is the cause of the demise and demonization of international adoption. Nothing is ever that simple.

Follow Dr. Jane Aronson on Twitter: www.twitter.com/wworphans

September 16, 2011

For Adoptive Parents, Questions Without Answers

By JOHN LELAND

IN almost any adoption, the new parents accept that their good fortune arises out of the hardship of the child’s first parents. The equation is usually tempered by the thought that the birth parents either are no longer alive or chose to give the child a better life than they could provide.

On Aug. 5, this newspaper published a front-page article from China that contained chilling news for many adoptive parents: government officials in Hunan Province, in southern China, had seized babies from their parents and sold them into what the article called “a lucrative black market in children.”

The news, the latest in a slow trickle of reports describing child abduction and trafficking in China, swept through the tight communities of families — many of them in the New York area — who have adopted children from China. For some, it raised a nightmarish question: What if my child had been taken forcibly from her parents?

And from that question, inevitably, tumble others: What can or should adoptive parents do? Try to find the birth parents? And if they could, what then?

Scott Mayer, who with his wife adopted a girl from southern China in 2007, said the article’s implications hit him head on. “I couldn’t really think straight,” Mr. Mayer said. His daughter, Keshi, is 5 years old — “I have to tell you, she’s brilliant,” he said proudly — and is a mainstay of his life as a husband and a father.

“What I felt,” he said, “was a wave of heat rush over me.”

Like many adoptive parents, Mr. Mayer can recount the emotionally exhausting process he and his wife went through to get their daughter, and can describe the warm home they have strived to provide. They had been assured that she, like thousands of other Chinese girls, was abandoned in secret by her birth parents, left in a public place with a note stating her date of birth.

But as he started to read about the Hunan cases, he said, doubts flooded in. How much did he — or any adoptive parent — really know about what happened on the other side of the world? Could Keshi have been taken by force, or bought by the orphanage in order to reap the thousands of dollars that American parents like him donate when they get their children?

In his home in Montclair, N.J., Mr. Mayer rushed upstairs to re-examine the adoption documents.

According to the news reports, the children were removed from their families when they were several months old, then taken to the orphanages. “The first thing I did was look in my files,” he said, speaking in deliberative, unsparing sentences. According to his paperwork, his daughter had been found on a specific date, as a newborn.

He paused to weigh the next thought.

“Now, could that have been faked?” he said. “Perhaps. I don’t know. But at least it didn’t say she was 3 months old when she was left at the orphanage.”

According to the State Department, 64,043 Chinese children were adopted in the United States between 1999 and 2010, far more than from any other country. Child abduction and trafficking have plagued other international adoption programs, notably in Vietnam and Romania, and some have shut down to stop the black market trade.

But many parents saw China as the cleanest of international adoption choices. Its population-control policy, which limited many families to one child, drove couples to abandon subsequent children or to give up daughters in hopes of bearing sons to inherit their property and take care of them in old age. China had what adoptive parents in America wanted: a supply of healthy children in need of families.

As Mr. Mayer reasoned, “If anything, the number of children needing an adoptive home was so huge that it outstripped the number of people who could ever come.”

This narrative was first challenged in 2005, when Chinese and foreign news media reported that government officials and employees of an orphanage in Hunan had sold at least 100 children to other orphanages, which provided them to foreign adoptive parents.

Mr. Mayer was not aware of this report or the few others that followed. Though he knew many other adoptive families, and was active in a group called Families With Children From China — Greater New York, no one had ever talked about abduction or baby-selling.

“I didn’t even think that existed in China,” he said.

Again he paused.

“This comes up and you say, holy cow, it’s even more complicated than you thought.”

“ADOPTION is bittersweet,” said Susan Soon-Keum Cox, vice president for public policy and external affairs at Holt International, a Christian adoption agency based in Eugene, Ore., with an extensive program in China. The process connects birth parents, child and adoptive parents in an unequal relationship in which each party has different needs and different leverage. It begins in loss.

Adoptive parents and adoption agencies have powerful incentives not to talk about trafficking or to question whether a child was given up voluntarily, especially given how difficult it is to know for certain. Such talk can unsettle the children or anger the Chinese government, which might limit the families’ future access to the country or add restrictions to future adoptions. And the possible answer is one that no parent wants to hear.

Most parents contacted for this article declined to comment or agreed to speak only on the condition of anonymity. Several said they never discussed trafficking, even with other adoptive parents. To a query from The New York Times posted on a Web forum for adoptive parents, one parent urged silence, writing, “The more we put China child trafficking out there, the more chances your child has to encounter a schoolmate saying, ‘Oh, were you stolen from your bio family?’ ”

Such reticence infuriates people like Karen Moline, a New York writer and a board member of the nonprofit advocacy group Parents for Ethical Adoption Reform, who adopted a boy from Vietnam 10 years ago. “If the government is utterly corrupt, and you have to take an orphanage a donation in hundred-dollar bills, why would you think the program was ethical?” she said. “Ask a typical Chinese adoptive parent that question, and they’ll say, my agency said so. My agency is ethical. People say, the paperwork says X; the paperwork is legitimate. But you have no idea where your money goes.

“Now you have to give $5,000 as an orphanage fee in China. Multiply that by how many thousand adoptions. Tens of millions of dollars have flowed out of this country to get kids, and you have no accounting for it.”

Agencies say that cases of child abduction are few compared with the number of abandoned Chinese babies who found good homes in America. The abductions reported in August were of 16 or more children taken from their parents between 1999 and 2006. According to the investigation, population-control officials threatened towering fines for couples who violated the one-child policy because they were too young to be married or already had a child, or because they had themselves adopted the child without proper paperwork. When the parents could not pay, the officials seized the children and sent them into the lucrative foreign adoption system.

“The incident when it happened was resolved quickly by the Chinese in a way that was drastic and made very clear that the Chinese would not tolerate trafficking,” said Ms. Cox, of Holt International. “I’m not saying there are not any other incidents, but people can be assured that the process in China is a good one.”

A 2010 State Department report said there were “no reliable estimates” of the number of children kidnapped for adoption in China, but cited Chinese news media reports that said the figure might be as high as 20,000 children a year, most of whom are adopted illegally within the country, especially boys.

But it is hard to know, said David Smolin, a professor at the Cumberland School of Law at Samford University in Birmingham, Ala., who has written extensively about international adoption and trafficking. Changes in China in the early 2000s — a rising standard of living, an easing of restrictions on adoption within the country, more sex-selective abortion — meant that fewer families abandoned healthy babies, Professor Smolin said.

“Orphanages had gotten used to getting money for international adoption,” he said, “and all of the sudden they didn’t have healthy baby girls unless they competed with traffickers for them.”

PROFESSOR SMOLIN has two daughters, whom he and his wife adopted from India as teenagers. Within six weeks the girls disclosed that they had been kidnapped from their birth parents. But when Professor Smolin and his wife tried to find the girls’ biological parents, he said, no one wanted to help.

When he started to speak publicly about his experience, he met other parents in the same situation — hundreds of them, he said. “They all said they felt abandoned by adoption agencies and by various governments,” he said. “There’s a sense that other people in the adoption community did not want to hear about these circumstances. People were told that it was not a good thing to talk about. So you’re left alone with these practical and moral dilemmas, and that is overwhelming.” In the end, it took more than six years for the couple to find their daughters’ birth parents, by which time the girls were young adults.

Susan Merkel, 48, who with her husband adopted their daughter, Maia, at 9 months old in August 2007, said that even within their own home, her husband did not like to talk about the possibility.

“My husband really feels like it’s something that we don’t know whether that’s the case and would rather not think about it,” she said at her home in Chesterfield, N.J.

But for Ms. Merkel, who is studying social work at Rutgers University, the uncertainty is haunting. Her daughter’s orphanage, in Hubei Province, which is immediately north of Hunan, is near an area known for strict enforcement of the one-child policy, and Ms. Merkel said she could not shake the possibility that a population-control official had seized her and turned her over to the orphanage.

Ms. Merkel was adopted as a child, and said that meeting her birth mother had helped her understand her past and herself. What, then, was her responsibility as a parent — to find Maia’s birth parents, who might make a valid claim for her return? How could Ms. Merkel, who got so much out of meeting her own birth mother, not want that for her child? “What I do know is that she’s my daughter and I love her,” she said. “We’re giving her the best family and life that we can. And if she has questions someday, we’ll do all we can to help her find the answers.”

Ms. Merkel said that she would support Maia’s meeting her birth parents if it was possible, but that she would not willingly return her to them, even if there was evidence that she had been taken.

“I would feel great empathy for that person,” she said. “I would completely understand the anger and the pain. But I would fight to keep my daughter. Not because she’s mine, but because for all purposes we’re the only family she’s ever known. How terrifying that would be for a child to be taken away from the only family she knows and the life that she knows. That’s not about doing what’s right for the child. That’s doing what’s right for the birth mother.”

BRIAN STUY, an adoptive father of three in Salt Lake City, runs a service called Research-China.org to help adoptive families learn about their children’s origins. When he has managed to contact birth parents, he said, most were content to learn that their children were alive, that they were healthy and in good homes. “Unfortunately, the reaction of most adoptive parents is to go into hiding,” Mr. Stuy said. “When they have suspicions, they don’t want to come forward.”

Many parents simply never have suspicions. Tony X. Tan, an associate professor of educational psychology at the University of South Florida whose research specialty is adoption, surveyed 342 adoptive parents of Chinese children last month. Two-thirds said they “never” suspected that their children might have been abducted, and one in nine said they thought about it “sometimes.” Several said the paperwork from the orphanages was inconsistent or suspicious.

One mother, who adopted two girls from different provinces, wrote, “My Guangxi daughter was adopted with a group of 11 other infants, all roughly the same age, and came home with an extremely detailed description of her first 11 months of life in her orphanage. Yet ‘her’ information was word-for-word the same as the info given the families of the other 11 children adopted at the same time — making it all too specific to be believable.”

Judy Larch, a Macy’s executive who lives in Pelham, N.Y., said she adopted two girls from China, in 2001 and 2007, because she had heard good things about the program, and because she could adopt as a single woman. Though she has read about trafficking, she said, “I’ve never had any doubts or concerns about their adoptions.” She said she had faith in the adoption agency, Holt International.

Such faith is small comfort to a woman named Ms. Chen, who said population-control officials in her hometown, Changle, in Fujian Province, took her daughter in 1999. Ms. Chen, who is in the United States illegally, applied for asylum as a dissident this year, but was denied. She declined to speak to The Times, but gave permission for a reporter to watch a videotaped interview conducted by a Christian group in Flushing, Queens, called All Girls Allowed, which works with women’s rights groups in China and maintains a database of photographs of missing children. Her story could not be corroborated.

In the interview, Ms. Chen said that her first child, born in 1997, was a girl, and that she was under great pressure from her in-laws to produce a son. She became pregnant soon afterward, but this child, too, was a girl. Ms. Chen was in violation of the one-child law, which in her area allowed parents to have a second child after six years. Officials came to her with a choice: give up the second child — then 5 months old — or undergo tubal ligation.

“I was holding my daughter and crying,” she said on the video. The official told her that if she gave up the child, in six years she could try again to have a son, she said. “I was afraid for my marriage,” she said. “Of course I didn’t want to give up the child. But I was afraid that without a boy my marriage wouldn’t last.”

She said, “I handed her over meekly.”

MR. MAYER, in Montclair, who also has an adopted son from Ethiopia, has accepted that he may never know the full truth about his daughter’s beginnings.

After absorbing the revelations about trafficking, he said, he took a step back. “O.K., what does this mean to my life today? And how does it change my life today?” he said he asked himself. “And today it changes absolutely nothing about my life with Keshi. If I want Keshi to be able to question and to come to terms with the issues of why she would have been put up for adoption in the way she was, she’s going to ask these questions. This is just another one of those questions to which I don’t have a concrete answer. That’s my role as a dad.”

In the future, families like his may have better answers. Parents or children may be able to search online databases of children whose birth parents say they were taken. For now, though, is it the parents’ duty to ask those questions? Or is it for children to decide, in time, how much they want to know?

“I can’t change the past or change whatever anybody has done in China,” Mr. Mayer said. “What’s most important to me is there are real significant issues for my daughter coming of age and understanding her birth story. And I’m committed to supporting her in that and making sure that it’s as honest and truthful and supportive as possible. And that’s a scary thing.”

Chinese Officials Seized and Sold Babies, Parents Say

Link to original article here. 

By SHARON LaFRANIERE

Published: August 4, 2011

LONGHUI COUNTY, China — Many parents and grandparents in this mountainous region of terraced rice and sweet potato fields have long known to grab their babies and find the nearest hiding place whenever family planning officials show up. Too many infants, they say, have been snatched by officials, never to be seen again.

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Xiong Chao at Play

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At least 16 children were seized in Longhui County.

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But Yuan Xinquan was caught by surprise one December morning in 2005. Then a new father at the age of 19, Mr. Yuan was holding his 52-day-old daughter at a bus stop when a half-dozen men sprang from a white government van and demanded his marriage certificate.

He did not have one. Both he and his daughter’s mother were below the legal age for marriage.

Nor did he have 6,000 renminbi, then about $745, to pay the fine he said they demanded if he wanted to keep his child. He was left with a plastic bag holding her baby clothes and some powdered formula.

“They are pirates,” he said last month in an interview at his home, a half-hour trek up a narrow mountain path between terraced rice paddies.

Nearly six years later, he said, he still hopes to relay a message to his daughter: “Please come home as soon as possible.”

Mr. Yuan’s daughter was among at least 16 children who were seized by family planning officials between 1999 and late 2006 in Longhui County, an impoverished rural area in Hunan, a southern Chinese province, parents, grandparents and other residents said in interviews last month.

The abduction of children is a continuing problem in China, where a lingering preference for boys coupled with strict controls on the number of births have helped create a lucrative black market in children. Just last week, the police announced that they had rescued 89 babies from child traffickers, and the deputy director of the Public Security Ministry assailed what he called the practice of “buying and selling children in this country.”

But parents in Longhui say that in their case, it was local government officials who treated babies as a source of revenue, routinely imposing fines of $1,000 or more — five times as much as an average local family’s yearly income. If parents could not pay the fines, the babies were illegally taken from their families and often put up for adoption by foreigners, another big source of revenue.

The practice in Longhui came to an end in 2006, parents said, only after an 8-month-old boy fell from the second-floor balcony of a local family planning office as officials tried to pluck him from his mother’s arms.

Despite a few news reports outside the Chinese mainland about government-sanctioned kidnappings in Longhui and other regions, China’s state-controlled media ignored or suppressed the news until this May, when Caixin, an intrepid Chinese magazine well known for unusually bold investigations, reported the abductions and prompted an official inquiry.

Zeng Dingbao, who leads the Inspection Bureau in Shaoyang, the city that administers Longhui County, has promised a diligent investigation. But signs point to a whitewash. In June, he told People’s Daily Online, the Web version of the Communist Party’s official newspaper, that the situation “really isn’t the way the media reported it to be, with infants being bought and sold.”

Rather than helping trace and recover seized children, parents say, the authorities are punishing those who speak out. Two of the most vocal fathers were detained for 15 days in Shaoyang on charges of soliciting prostitutes at a brothel. Released last month, the two men, Yang Libing, 47, and Zhou Yinghe, 34, said they had been entrapped.

Mr. Yang said he was constantly followed by government minders. Mr. Zhou said the village party secretary had warned him to stop talking to reporters about the abduction of his 3-month-old daughter in March 2003 or face more punishment. “They are like organized criminals,” Mr. Zhou said.

China’s family planning policies, while among the strictest in the world, ban the confiscation of children from parents who exceed birth quotas, and abuses on the scale of those in Shaoyang are far less common today than they once were. Even so, critics say the powers handed to local officials under national family planning regulations remain excessive and ripe for exploitation.

“The larger issue is that the one-child policy is so extreme that it emboldened local officials to act so inhumanely,” said Wang Feng, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution who directs the Brookings-Tsinghua Center for Public Policy in Beijing.

The scandal also has renewed questions about whether Americans and other foreigners have adopted Chinese children who were falsely depicted as abandoned or orphaned. At least one American adoption agency organized adoptions from the government-run Shaoyang orphanage.

Lillian Zhang, the director of China Adoption With Love, based in Boston, said by telephone last month that the agency had found adoptive parents in 2006 for six Shaoyang children — all girls, all renamed Shao, after the city. The Chinese authorities certified in each case that the child was eligible for adoption, she said, and her agency cannot now independently investigate their backgrounds without a specific request backed by evidence.

“I’m an adoption agency, not a policeman,” Ms. Zhang said.

The Shaoyang welfare agency’s orphanage is required to post a notice of each newly received child for 60 days in Hunan Daily, a newspaper delivered only to subscribers in Longhui County. Unclaimed children are renamed with the surname Shao and approved for adoption. Foreign parents who adopt must donate about $5,400 to the orphanage.

Reports that family planning officials stole children, beat parents, forcibly sterilized mothers and destroyed families’ homes sowed a quiet terror through parts of Longhui County in the first half of the past decade. The casualties of that terror remain suffused with heartbreak and rage years later.

Yang Libing, one of the two fathers accused of soliciting prostitutes, said he was a migrant worker in the southern city of Shenzhen when his firstborn, Yang Ling, was stolen from his parents’ home in May 2005 when she was 9 months old.

Family planning officials apparently spotted Yang Ling’s clothes hung to dry outside the family’s mud-brick home. Her grandmother tried to hide her in a pigsty, but the grandfather, Yang Qinzheng, a Communist Party member and a former soldier, bade her to come out.

“I don’t disobey,” he said last month. “I do what the officials say.”

Yang Ling’s parents had not registered their marriage. To keep the baby, the officials said, the elder Mr. Yang would have to pay nearly $1,000, on the spot. Otherwise, they said, he would have to sign away the girl with a false affidavit stating that he was not her biological grandfather.

“I was totally outraged,” he said, but “I did not have the courage to resist. They do not play by the rules.” He signed the document.

Yang Libing discovered the loss of his daughter during his monthly telephone call home from a pay phone on a Shenzhen street. “Is she behaving?” he asked cheerily. The answer, he said, made him physically sick.

After racing home, he said, he begged family planning officials to let him pay the fine. They said it was too late. When he protested, he said, a group of more than 10 men beat him. Afterward, the office director offered a compromise: although their daughter was gone forever, the Yangs would be allowed to conceive two more children.

“I can’t even describe my hatred of those family planning officials,” Mr. Yang said. “I hate them to my bones. I wonder if they are parents, too. Why don’t they treat us as humans?”

Asked whether he was still searching for his daughter, he replied: “Of course! This is not a chicken. This is not a dog. This is my child.”

Hu Shelian, 46, another anguished victim, gave birth to a second daughter in 1998. Even though family planning specialists said couples in her area were allowed a second child if the first was a girl, she said family planning officials broke her windows and took her television as punishment.

After she had a third daughter the following year, they levied a whopping fine of nearly $5,000. When she pleaded poverty, she said, four officials snatched her newborn from her arms, muscled her into a car and drove her to the county hospital for a forced tubal ligation. Her baby disappeared into the bowels of the Shaoyang orphanage.

Xiong Chao escaped that fate. Villagers say he was the last baby that officials tried to snatch, and one of the few returned home.

Now, six years later, his 63-year-old grandmother, Dai Yulin, patiently scrawls blue and white chalk numerals on her concrete wall hoping — in vain — that Chao will learn them.

“He has been to primary school for a whole year,” she said, “and he still cannot recognize one and two.”

Nearby is the tiny, dark room where, she said, she tried and failed in September 2006 to hide Chao from family planning officials. He was 8 months old, her son’s second child. Officials demanded nearly $1,000, then took him away when she could not pay.

His mother, Du Chunhua, rushed to the family planning office to protest.

There, as she struggled with two officials on the second-floor balcony, she said, the baby slipped from her grasp and fell more than 10 feet, to the pavement below.

Later, she said, as the baby lay in a coma in the hospital, his forehead permanently misshapen, officials offered a deal: they would forget about the fine as long as the family covered the medical bills for Chao.

Also, they said, the Xiongs could keep him.

Edy Yin, Shao Heng and Shi Da contributed research from Beijing.

A version of this article appeared in print on August 5, 2011, on page A1 of the New York edition with the headline: Officials in China Seized Infants for Black Market, Parents Say.

The Underground Illegal Abduction and Sale of Spanish Infants

I seriously can't even believe this article.

Spain Confronts Decades of Pain Over Lost Babies
By RAPHAEL MINDER
Published: July 6, 2011

SEVILLE, Spain — Prodded by grieving parents, Spanish judges are investigating hundreds of charges that infants were abducted and sold for adoption over a 40-year period. What may have begun as political retaliation for leftist families during the dictatorship of Gen. Francisco Franco appears to have mutated into a trafficking business in which doctors, nurses and even nuns colluded with criminal networks.

Dolores Díaz Cerpa said she was carrying twins in 1973, but the hospital said she delivered only a girl. Lawsuits have been filed to learn the truth.

The cases, which could eventually run into the thousands, are jolting a country still shaken by the spoken and unspoken terrors of Spain’s 1936-39 Civil War and Franco’s rule. Last week, 78-year-old Concepción Rodrigo Romero joined the rapidly growing ranks of Spanish parents who are turning to the courts to uncover the fates of their babies.

Mrs. Rodrigo Romero, a former seamstress, gave birth, prematurely, in 1971. A doctor in a Seville hospital told her that she had had a son, who was small but “fine and capable of getting a lot bigger,” she recalled in an interview.

The doctor never reappeared, and she never saw her baby again. Two days later, another doctor at the hospital told her husband that the baby had been sent to another hospital for further checks, but had died there.

The second hospital had taken care of the burial, the doctor said, and the body lay in Seville’s San Fernando cemetery, in an unmarked grave.

“Deep inside, I’ve always known that my son was stolen from me,” Mrs. Rodrigo Romero said.

Spain’s judiciary was forced into action after Anadir, an association formed to represent people searching for missing children or parents, filed its first complaints in late January. Attorney General Cándido Conde-Pumpido announced on June 18 that 849 cases were being examined, adding that 162 already could be classified as criminal proceedings because of evidence pointing to abductions.

The statute of limitations on most of the suspected crimes has expired, prompting lawyers to discuss whether a special statute can be adopted. In 2008, Baltasar Garzón, Spain’s most internationally renowned judge, extended an investigation into allegations of crimes during the Franco era to examine whether Franco had ordered thousands of babies taken from women who had supported his republican opponents in the civil war.

The cases of disappeared infants stretch from 1950 to 1990, continuing well after Franco’s death in 1975. It is not known whether government officials played any role.

Mr. Conde-Pumpido, who said it was impossible to estimate how many more cases would surface, also suggested for the first time that organized crime “networks” had been involved. He gave no details, saying only that he did not believe that “one single organization” had masterminded all the abductions.

Antonio Barroso, the president of Anadir, said he believed that over time Spain became a hub for gangs operating an international trade, with many newborns sold into adoption overseas.

The possibility of such an operation is one of many unanswered questions posed by the searing journey of long-silent parents and children in recent months.

Mr. Barroso, 42, founded Anadir last year, after being told by a friend that they were both adopted. He took DNA samples from the woman he had always known as his mother and confronted her after tests showed that his sample and hers were not a match. She admitted paying a nun for a baby and misleading her son about his birth for decades.

Mr. Barroso said he had since tracked down the nun, who had worked in a maternity ward. His own lawsuit — against the nun and other hospital staff members — has yet to be heard in court, and he is still searching for his real parents.

According to Anadir, a handful of adopted people have managed to find their parents, but so far most have preferred to remain anonymous. To help with legal matters, Anadir and other similar associations that have sprung up as the list of plaintiffs grows are trying to recruit lawyers willing to work on a pro bono basis.

Last month, the first cemetery exhumations took place in La Línea de la Concepción, after allegations that newborns had been buried there. Madrid’s regional attorney’s office has said that it would require medical staff members, including nuns who worked as nurses, to testify in court about the whereabouts of some children who were born during the 40-year period under investigation.

As in Mr. Barroso’s case, a few nuns have confessed to selling children, but without suggesting that they were part of a criminal network. The Roman Catholic Church has had no comment.

A Madrid company has built up a DNA data bank from about 700 people since January. Yet even with DNA testing, prosecutors face a struggle to search common graves for the remains of babies supposedly buried there. Medical records often prove to be incomplete or contradictory.

Flawed records are central to the complaint filed by Dolores Díaz Cerpa, who alleges that her newborn was abducted in 1973. Mrs. Díaz Cerpa had been told by a doctor that she was carrying twins. She gave birth to a daughter, but a nurse denied that she had carried another fetus.

Always suspecting a lie, and after hearing about other parents who were searching for stolen newborns, she asked the hospital for another copy of her daughter’s birth record. Instead, she received a record for a boy.

“The hospital suggested this was just an old administrative error, but nobody can convince me that I haven’t sadly been right for decades,” Mrs. Díaz Cerpa said.

Some couples, like Joaquín Sáez Naranjo and Manuela Sánchez Cintado of Seville, are pursuing multiple lawsuits. They lost two babies in suspicious circumstances, in 1972 and then in 1985.

In the 1985 case, Mrs. Sánchez Cintado said that doctors performed a sonogram, and that she was congratulated for carrying a boy. After giving birth, she was informed that the newborn had been sent to a special ward to deal with “a small problem.” Her husband was separately told that his baby daughter had died.

“I was going to have a boy and somebody switched him for a dead daughter,” a visibly shaken Mrs. Sánchez Cintado recalled. “This was as ridiculous a story as if the doctor had told me that I had broken my elbow and then started operating on my wrist.”

Like other parents, Mr. Sáez Naranjo said that he now deeply regretted having accepted a doctor’s advice that it would be best for him and his wife not to deal with the shock of seeing the dead baby’s body. Instead, he went to Seville’s San Fernando cemetery for the burial of “a bundle of cloth” in a common grave.

Last week, he was back at the cemetery, only to be told by staff members that the remains in that grave had been moved a decade ago to an unspecified location.

In separate interviews, some grieving parents said they allowed hospitals to handle the burials because their own insurance policies did not cover such costs. Others also said they were too naïve or uneducated to challenge medical workers, despite their suspicions.

During the Franco regime and in its immediate aftermath, “you simply didn’t challenge what an official told you,” said María Luisa Puro Rodríguez, a former tobacco factory worker who claims that her newborn was abducted in 1976 from a Malaga hospital. “We now thankfully live in a society where it is normal to question what we hear,” she said. “I’ve learned this bitter lesson and am now ready to fight all the way to find out what actually happened.”