The End of International Adoption? by Estye Fenton

Author:Estye Fenton [Fenton, Estye]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780813599700
Barnesnoble:
Publisher: Rutgers University Press
Published: 2019-06-28T00:00:00+00:00

Chapter 4

Murky Truths and Double-Binds

“I began to read a little more about how complicated it is and that it’s not such a cut-and-dry thing,” Danielle told me. After bringing her daughter home from China, she and her husband, Mark, had become very active in online discussion groups about international adoption, including a group just for parents who adopted from the same region of China as they had. Through these groups, they began to read more about irregularities, controversies, and scandals in international adoption programs around the world, including in the same orphanage where their daughter had lived. When I asked Danielle what she made of the stories she encountered, she responded, “There is no such thing as a real orphan, and we don’t really know much about these kids’ circumstances. We don’t have any guarantee that these children are legitimately and authentically available. It’s hard.”

Gail is a single mother of a daughter, Peyton, whom she adopted from Ethiopia as a young toddler, and, like Danielle, she began to follow the media coverage of international adoption much more closely after bringing Peyton to the United States. Gail explained to me that she had come to view international adoption, as an institution, much more critically than she had prior to adopting Peyton. Reflecting on that time, she said, “About the ethics of international adoption, I think I didn’t want to know. I wanted to be a mom. I wanted this to happen. I’m not proud of this. I just said, ‘OK, I accept this,’ and I went ahead and did it. Everybody was really celebrating international adoption at that point. There wasn’t a lot of encouragement to probe more deeply.”

Unlike Gail and Danielle, who went into their processes of international adoption with relatively little knowledge of their children’s birth countries—and relatively little international experience in general—Kate, who adopted her son Jonah from Ethiopia, had worked in Africa and in the United States as an immigration and human rights lawyer. Also unlike Gail and Danielle, Kate was one of the many mothers I interviewed who discovered that the circumstances of their own children’s adoptions were fraudulent. “We were told both parents were deceased,” she explained to me. “Mom bled out giving birth to him, dad died of malaria a few months before he was born. We have since learned, the summer we went back and met them, [that] none of it was true.”

In this chapter, I tell the stories of families who encountered and often vigilantly sought to uncover evidence of impropriety, corruption, and fraud while adopting their children. These stories illustrate how programmatic and political shifts in international adoption, alongside the gendered family arrangements of adoptive families, created a particular emotional and ethical double-bind for the mothers I interviewed. The stories in this chapter are full of the struggle, confusion, and pain that many international adoptive mothers felt as they reckoned with the social inequality, market dynamics, political battles, and ethical complexity that defined their experiences with international adoption. I tell these

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.