Making the Choice

If you think international adoption is hard or near impossible, just think of this: close to ten thousand children born outside of the United States are adopted each year by U.S. families. The annual number has been relatively stable for years, hovering between 7,500 and 9,800 adoptions (see table).

I predict that number will rise to over ten thousand in 1996, and while it won't skyrocket, international adoption will continue to grow — slowly — and become more common. It's not as difficult to do as it used to be; more countries now have the mechanism to place abandoned children with families that want them, and our increasingly diverse society is more receptive to children who are "different."

After all, the typical nuclear family just isn't so common anymore. (Think of all the "alternative" families that now populate network TV.) Many adopters these days are single, like me, and there are books and support groups just for us. Many are older — some in their fifties — as the mother- and fatherhood age ceiling rises (me, too; I'm over forty). Gay couples are forming families through adoption; and in some cases, couples on their "second-go-round" in marriage, who maybe missed out on children their first time out, are turning to adoption to create families.

The news media and technology have had a lot to do with the increasing openness of international adoption. The world is getting smaller. We learn about countries we never knew existed, and hear on the radio or TV about children from there who have lost their parents or about the overcrowded orphanages they live in. A story on National Public Radio in 1995 about a disabled little boy in a Russian orphanage led to a couple in Ohio adopting him. The new father, hearing the story while in his car, said he just "knew" he had to adopt the child. Could this have taken place even five years earlier? Probably not.

A Tradition ... a More Recent History

Adoption has a long tradition. Remember Moses? You might call that foster care, but yes, that was an adoption. In royal families where there were no male heirs, a nephew might be adopted in order to maintain the family name.

But the types of adoptions I'm writing about here — adoptions of children from overseas by U.S. families — basically goes back to the early 1950s, when a man in Oregon named Harry Holt sought to find homes for Korean war orphans. He eventually founded one of the first U.S. agencies to do international placements, and these days, agencies as well as facilitators (individuals or groups of people not licensed to act as formal agents) help match children needing homes with couples and single people wanting to form families. The children come from all over: Latin America and the Caribbean, India, the Philippines, many Asian countries, and since 1990, countries that once made up the former Soviet Union and other Eastern bloc nations. There are also limited opportunities to adopt from Africa.

Large-scale adoptions from China began around 1992 and spiraled upward as it became clear that there were many babies — mostly girls — who needed homes, and that the process was neither very difficult nor as expensive as other foreign adoptions, and completely legal. Furthermore, the Chinese government welcomed older parents and single adopters. What once seemed beyond reach for many aspiring parents was now available. Vibrant support networks grew in their wake.

Adoption has also become a big business. Go to any adoption conference for the first time, and you'll be surprised by the numbers of "advertisers"— agencies, facilitators, magazine publishers, insurance companies, greeting card vendors, and toy manufacturers — seeking to sell you their services. Talk to more experienced people in the field, and you'll learn that many newcomers are peddling services that they are not really equipped to provide. An experienced adoption expert I know bemoans the way one of her newer competitors "tries to tell people what they want to hear" to get them to sign on with her, rather than sketch out the realities of international adoption: how much it costs, what has to be done, the problems they may encounter — and the fact that children adopted internationally come from deprived backgrounds, and, although some are well cared for, others are hardly the sunny-faced, rosy-cheeked, chubby, and gurgly picture-book babies that parents imagine taking home. Not at first, anyway: the nurturing and love parents give is key to helping children get that way.

But the competition is tough. People seeking to adopt often do so after many years of not having children, and they don't want to wait. Many excellent professionals can help. But a sad reality is that some unscrupulous individuals or groups are giving adoption a bad name, making promises they can't keep, offering babies whose actual orphan status may be uncertain, and asking exorbitant sums of money to help families get them.

Technology and Changing Political Dynamics Make Adoption a Global Village

Fortunately, you can get information about the good, bad, and ugly agencies and services right at your fingertips — if you can type and know how to use a modem. One of the biggest changes in making international adoptions succeed is the wealth of information that is now available to adoption "consumers" as well as professionals. The Internet and the World Wide Web, fax technology and videotapes make it possible to transmit information and images in record time and enable people like you and me to obtain information that was once hard and expensive to track down.

This development has been a real boon. Adoption "chat groups" enable people to share information about their experiences and to highlight good agencies that do what they say and criticize those that don't. I think that over time, technology will also help balance out the wildly skewed costs of adoption that agencies charge. Agencies are having to become more competitive and accountable now, because we have ways of finding out who's charging less for better service, or who's making promises but not delivering. And we're learning that it's okay to ask the hard questions. If one agency doesn't satisfy us, we can find another that will help. Chapter 2 discusses the use of technology to get information and the questions you should ask when looking for an agency.

The new technology means that information about children — photo listings and videotapes — can get to prospective parents much faster. This is the most...