Letters to the Editor
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Early Intervention
My eye was caught by the reference in this article to early intervention programs, in which various service providers come to your house to assist your children. Gross listed several kinds of in home services, including occupational and physical therapy.
I write because my youngest son is the beneficiary of this program. The two therapists that come weekly to our house have been wonderful, and Early Intervention is a program that my state can be proud of. I'm sorry if Gross was frightened off by the prospect of her adopted daughter participating in therapy. The services are hugely beneficial, the therapists are wonderful, and they work out of a center that we visit regularly. In fact, we just celebrated a Christmas party at the therapy center and had a great time with the other families and kids.
Of course, he is my son, but I can tell you I would choose no other.
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Take your advantages where you can find them
When you have your own kid (I'm told), you get to experience the wonders of carrying and bearing your child. You know that when the kid is born, you'll be able to see some of you, your spouse, and/or your families in that kid (at least physically, possibly personality-wise).
When you adopt, you don't get any of that. But you do get to screen for challenging physical and emotional problems. Not everyone is ready to "rise to occasion" of raising a child with disabilities, even if its their "own," and you get to make that decision in advance.
It's a tradeoff. But you're not wrong for choosing what you did.
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Take it up with the Raleigh News and Observer
Everything I said came from their Sunday full page long piece. thanks.
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@Ancient Assyrian
I assure you that I neither subscribe to or read People Magazine. (I probably have glanced at a cover or two, while in a checkout line, but that's about it.)
You ask how I know about international adoption: I personally know over a dozen families (couples and singletons) who have adopted internationally. One was my best and oldest friend, who was single and 45 when she adopted from China. As such, I was at her side throughout the entire year long process, and as a friend I accompanied her to adoption meetings and later to adoptive children's gatherings, where I met probably over 100 adoptive parents.
I'm a curious person, and I tried to actively engage people in talking about their adoption experiences. This was years before Angelina Jolie or Madonna adopted, but I think those celebrities are the public face of adoption these days, which is why I reference them. They are both influential on other, less famous people and at the same time, they are reflecting an overall cultural trend towards people -- especially single or older women - wanting to adopt exotic children rather than (boring) locally available children, and rather than undergo the miseries of pregnancy. It's pretty obvious that Angelina Jolie, at age 30, is not and never was infertile. It's well known that when Madonna adopted a little boy from Africa (a child who had a father and was NOT an orphan), she had all the children in the orphanage line up and she was allowed to "pick" the cutest one.
I've had the chance to talk to many women (married and single) who have adopted, and it was personally very shocking to me to hear how often they became interested in adoption because they didn't want to be pregnant. Most of their rationale was not about health issues, but about weight gain and inconvenience related to their jobs.
As I have mentioned many times, I am not opposed to adoption, but I have concerns about racism. (There is an interesting piece in the Cary Tennis column today about just this issue.) Most American adoptive parents are bypassing the thousands of waiting children in foster care because they are African-American and choosing instead to adopt children from Asia or South America, and I can't see any reason beyond the fact that these children are lighter skinned. Apparently it is worth many tens of thousands of dollars to have a child with less melatonin in their skin. (Many adoptive parents of Chinese baby girls have told me that they believe their daughters will be of superior intelligence, and also have an "easy" passive personality -- racist stereotypes if I have ever heard any! Racism against black people is far from the only racism around.)
Most of the people who have adopted are Boomers or Gen-Xers -- they don't fear massive amounts of paperwork, they THIVE on it. These are the folks with 3 Master's Degrees (cuz they couldn't make up their minds what yuppie profession they wanted to work at, all while postponing having children until it was physically impossible). People like that find great satisfaction in filling out hundreds of pages of notarized documents (just like grad school!) and think of it as catharctic and also I have heard adoptive parents compare PAPERWORK to LABOR IN CHILDBIRTH, and feel a sense of great justification about having done it.
They also ADORE trips abroad and live for them. I have also heard first hand (and read in many books) people such as the Gross's here, rhapsodizing about the chance to travel to a really exotic, expensive place -- maybe somewhere they could not justify visiting just for a "trip", but in conjunction with an adoption, it all becomes excusable. (Of course, these are the same people who would never dream of driving through the "bad neighborhood" in their hometown, where undesirable black-skinned children waiting for adoption are being fostered.)
I suggest you read some of the writings of author Tama Jamowitz (Slaves of New York), who adopted a baby girl from China about ten years ago. She constantly calls her daughter "my adopted Chinese daughter" (shades of the characters in The Royal Tennenbaums!), and hired her a Chinese, non-English speaking nanny, so the little girl would grow up speaking fluent Chinese. Ms. Jamowitz is 100% vested in the "exoticness" of her daughter.
Read some stuff about evangelical Christians who do foreign adoptions. Believe me, they are all about "saving" little heathen children from their native religion by raising them as Pentecostals.
Some posters have mentioned changes in Guatemalan adoption law, and China has sharply clamped down as well. Some countries that allowed adoptions in the past have curtailed them. The reasons are that despite the huge influx of money to desperately poor 3rd world countries, adoption agencies in these countries have witnessed first hand the abuses in the system, and seen how many marginally suitable people are presenting themselves to adopt -- people over 50, singles, unmarried couples, gay couples, morbidly obese people (which is to say, people who are routinely rejected for adoption in their home countries) -- and are taking steps to curtail such adoptions.