Letters to the Editor
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Adopt locally
Well, maybe that means some of these parents-to-be will reconsider the thousands of American children stuck in foster care, available for adoption.
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Adopt locally
Absolutely correct.
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And also maybe...
...the Chinese will back down on their revolting - on so many levels - "one child" policy that has led to this fiasco in the first place!
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fat and ugly?
the regulations exclude unhealthy people, and those with tendencies associated with bad parents (mental illness, lack or marital commitment, poor physical health). none of the regulations have anything to do with physical attractiveness beyond the primal instinct that unhealthy people are unattractive. it's basic common sense.
why is it that whever obesity is discussed here, it always digresses into 'thin and pretty' vs. 'fat and ugly'. why not look at it as healthy vs. unhealthy?
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Serious question
Why the quest for Chinese babies instead of, say, Haitian babies? Are the agencies more up-front about what's going on with the child? Is the paperwork easier? Are you guaranteed an infant?
I can understand not wanting to adopt through the foster care system in this country. Lots of those children are troubled and not everybody wants to sign on for that. Just because you can't have children on your own doesn't mean you have the bear the weight of the world on your shoulders because of it.
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The "ugly" part
"Facial deformities" is also included in the list of forbidden traits or qualities of prospective adoptive parents, so yes the fat and the ugly are off the list.
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Beyond just "fat"
There's been a lot of press over disallowing "fat" people from adopting. The Chinese haven't done that - they've only banned grossly, morbidly obese people from adopting. A BMI under 25 is considered healty; anything over 30 is obese. They have banned people with a BMI over 40.
To put it into concrete numbers, a mother that is 5' 6" tall should weigh under 154 pounds to be healty. This bans someone that height who weighs over 248 pounds - or almost 100 pounds overweight. Someone that large will likely not survive long enough to see their child graduate from high school, and will certainly be incapable of picking their child up, let alone playing with them.
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Read the source articles
To one person's point, yes the "ugly" are excluded under the regulation that anyone with a facial deformity is considered ineligible. To the other person, the source article points out that Chinese adoptions are popular because the Chinese orphanage/adoption system is thought to be well run and efficient and the children are better cared so there is a liklier possibility of having a healthy child.
So of the regulations I can get behind, like no newly weds or multiple divorces or already having 5 children. I'm good with people in stable relationship of 5+ years and if you already have 5 kids, people without any should go ahead of you. But the BMI restriction, facial deformities, taking anti-depressents, having a disability, etc are outrageous. How can having a facial deformity make you an unfit parent? Anti-depressants are taken for a multitude of reasons from things like pelvic pain disorders to IBS to season affective disorder to social anxiety. None of those conditions makes a person an unfit parent. Also if someone has battled and beaten cancer, I don't see why they shouldn't be eligible. I had a friend that had a cancerous skin patch removed 10+ years ago when he was 18, he's a perfectly fit person with a lifetime ahead of him.
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One Child Policy is Saving the Rest of the World
I don't agree with China's adoption policy at least in regards to the clear anti-gay agenda. However some of the other rules have there place. Potential parents ideally should be screened. Obviously you don't want a child molester adopting kids. Saying you don't want someone who is chronically depressed adopting is more controversial but has validity. People who suffer from chronic depression are less able to take care of themselves and therefore someone else. Is a hard fast rule the right way to go about it? I don't know, but there are reasons.
As for the one child rule - sure it's not what we could consider liberty, but at the heart of it's environmental regulation taken to an extreme. If we believe that personal freedoms (such as spewing as much as pollution into air as we want) must be curtailed for the betterment of the world, we sometimes have to agree to things that we don't want to.
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American entitlement is history
Americans need to get used to the idea - and this will be a big change for our narcissistic culture - that we're no longer in any position to dictate terms to China, or many other countries for that matter. The Chinese are in the process of completing a stunningly successful transition from a dysfunctional communist economy to one that is able to generate great wealth and, increasingly, provide a decent standard of living to its more than one billion citizens.
Reality check: China owns a huge percentage of U.S. national debt. If they sold only a fraction of their dollar assets, our currency would go into a downward spiral. Yes, one can argue that they're as dependent on us as we are on them, but this situation definitely produces a constraint on U.S. unilateralism, at least in East Asia.
The Chinese continue to display great intelligence with regard to world affairs. While we in the U.S. choose to spend our national treasure on idiotic misadventures like Iraq, the Chinese are busy investing in themselves. Unless changed, sooner or later our profligate financial ways, including our quest for empire, will come back to bite us in the form of devalued currency and lower standard of living.
What does all this have to do with adoption? Only that it's one small manifestation of how the Chinese don't care what we think - and don't have to. They'll set adoption policy to suit themselves and tell us to take a flying leap, regardless of how loudly and obnoxiously Americans bleat about their entitlement to a Chinese orphan. Those days are over.
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How many of your were considering adopting a Chinese kid?
I find it amusing but also mildly disturbing, that all of a sudden people are interested in the adoption policies of China... On the one hand, Americans just love to be on top of the news (myself included) to disperse their "clear channel" thoughts on the current issue. On the other hand, it's an opportunity to espouse views on an issue that probably don't even apply to you. (e.g. why do you care about china's adoption policies if you aren't even considering adoption from there?)
what if all of us who read this article were indeed interested in adopting a baby from china - and because of this article, vested that energy into rallying around change for that OR supporting orphanages there through international concern for chinese orphans (an NGO)... what if we actually put our silly vented ideas into action that went toward positive change? just a thought.