The End of International Adoption?

An Unraveling Reproductive Market and the Politics of Healthy Babies

Estye Fenton

• Publisher: Rutgers University Press
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9780813599700
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Sociology
• Index: Social Sciences

Since 2004, the number of international adoptions in the United States has declined by more than seventy percent. In The End of International Adoption? Estye Fenton studies parents in the United States who adopted internationally in the past decade during this shift. She investigates the experiences of a cohort of adoptive mothers who were forced to negotiate their desire to be parents in the context of a growing societal awareness of international adoption as a flawed reproductive marketplace. Many parents, activists, and scholars have questioned whether the inequality inherent in international adoption renders the entire system suspect. In the face of such concerns, international adoption has not only become more difficult, but also more politically and ethically fraught. The mothers interviewed for this book found themselves navigating contemporary American family life in an unexpected way, caught between the double-bind of work-family life and a new paradigm of thinking about the method—international adoption—that they used to create those families.

Chapter 1

International Adoption in the Twenty-First Century

In 2004, the year that the number of international adoptions in the United States peaked, the Cincinnati Enquirer reported on two families, the Ingles and the Wallises, great friends who were about to move into custom-built homes on the same suburban street. The stay-at-home mothers had run a marathon together, and the fathers volunteered together at their church. Between them, they had twenty-two children, seven born to their parents and the other fifteen adopted through a combination of Ohio’s foster care system, private domestic adoption, and international adoptions from South Africa and Ethiopia. There were financial and logistical struggles, moments of chaos and exhaustion, but Heather Ingle, one of the mothers, told the reporter with confidence, “I feel like I’m doing exactly what I’m supposed to be doing” (Johnston 2004). Almost ten years later, a story about international adoption on Fox News flashed across gyms, waiting rooms, and living rooms everywhere, about a Missouri family that adopted a sibling group of five older children from Peru. Children played happily in a large manicured yard while a reporter interviewed their parents. The mother described being “called” to adoption because it was “in her heart” to help orphans in need. The father discussed the pride and purpose that he felt in both providing for and having fought for his children. As the adoptive mother explained, “We got told ‘no’ a lot of times, and by then we were already crazy about these kids, so it was a rough part of the story. . . . And you had to keep trusting that we were fighting for something that you knew was yours to fight for . . . doing what God asks even when it seems crazy is worth it” (Tenney 2013).

Media coverage of Hollywood celebrities adopting kids from overseas has complemented this overwhelmingly positive spin. In 2005, ABC News claimed that American interest in adopting children from Ethiopia doubled in response to Angelina Jolie’s adoption of her daughter Zahara (Good Morning America 2005). The Huffington Post called Jolie’s and Brad Pitt’s adoption of additional children a “race to keep their family more ethnically diverse than Madonna’s” (Matthews 2009). The phenomenon of celebrity adoptions is not new: in the late 1950s, jazz phenomenon Josephine Baker set out to adopt her own “Rainbow Tribe” and disrupt the ethnoracial order of the day. While New York Magazine claims that Baker started the trend of international celebrity adoption (Gaines 2009), neither Baker, nor Madonna, nor any other celebrity alone could have sparked the growth of international adoption in the late 1990s and early 2000s. Nonetheless, these celebrities have presided over the perceived triumph of international adoption as both a personal and a public good. Gail, a mother whom I interviewed for this project, recalled the triumphal mood in the first decade of the 2000s, when she began the process of adopting her daughter from Ethiopia, telling me, “Everybody was really celebrating international adoption at that point.”

Equally celebratory but more complicated stories have also emerged. Writing in Newsweek in February 2013, National Public Radio host Steve Inskeep, himself an adoptee, shares the story of adopting his second daughter from China. Like many of the parents I interviewed for this project, Inskeep and his wife were thanked both for “saving” their daughter and for doing “a noble thing” (Inskeep 2013). And like several of the parents I interviewed for this project, Inskeep and his wife were also asked directly (by the taxi driver bringing them from their daughter’s orphanage to their hotel) how much they paid for their new baby. Inskeep describes explaining to the taxi driver that, “according to Chinese documents,” their daughter had been abandoned in a hospital hallway, needing surgery for a “common and correctable” heart murmur. At the same time that Inskeep rejects the notion that he purchased his child, he also rejects the notion that his actions were “noble,” writing, “My younger daughter is one of my people. She is adopted like me. She is American like me, having arrived in this nation of immigrants. . . . We did not bring [her] home to save her or to change the world. We did it to add to our family, just as my parents did years ago. Our lives are richer for it.”

In the same year that Inskeep wrote about his daughter’s adoption, a CNN special investigation profiled a young woman named Tarikuwa Lemma. “When I was thirteen, I was sold,” she said. The news piece explains that she and two sisters were adopted by a U.S. couple who were told that the girls’ birth parents had died of AIDS. As Lemma explains, “The truth was that our mother had died as a result of complications during childbirth, and our father was alive and well” (Voigt 2013). CBS News also reported in 2010 on a separate set of three sisters, who alleged that their father had been paid by a U.S.-based adoption agency to place them for adoption in the United States (Keteyian 2010). In November 2017, CNN released an exclusive feature titled Kids for Sale, which was featured on their website, and was aired in prime time when Randi Kaye, the lead investigator, sat down to discuss widespread cases of financial corruption, fraud, and trafficking in international adoption programs across Africa with CNN anchor Anderson Cooper (for the landing page displaying all the features of the investigation, see Kaye and Drash 2017).

The last thirty years of international adoption have been characterized by rapid program expansions, followed by temporary freezes and, often, indefinite shutdowns in one sending nation after another. This cycle began early in the history of international adoption, shortly after the Korean War, but the pattern solidified after the Cold War era, starting with Romania after the fall of the former Soviet Union. While the 1990s and early 2000s were a time of multiple disruptions to established international adoption programs, the number of international adoption in the United States grew overall. However, since the number of international adoptions to the United States peaked at 22,991 in 2004, the last fifteen years have been characterized by a series of indefinite closures to international adoption programs in both major and more minor sending nations, despite some smaller temporary “booms” in Ethiopia, Uganda, Liberia, and Haiti. The 2017 fiscal year saw the lowest number of international adoptions in the United States since 1973: 4,714 children were adopted internationally in 2017, a 79 percent decline from the 2004 peak (Bureau of Consular Affairs 2018). Moreover, in countries where international adoption remains open, the profile of adoptable children has shifted substantially, bureaucratic processes are far longer and more involved than they were fifteen years ago, there is far more emphasis placed on adopting children with special needs, and children are generally older. The average age of children at adoption has increased dramatically, and fewer than one in twenty international adoptees are currently adopted before the age of two, compared to 40 percent in 2004 (Bureau of Consular Affairs 2016). Today there is no international adoption program in existence that offers parents the opportunity to adopt infants.

In this chapter, I review the historical changes that shaped international adoption in the first part of the twenty-first century as well as the media coverage surrounding those changes in order to lay out the context of the bureaucratic circumstances, political shifts, and ethical debates that have defined our evolving cultural conversation about international adoption. The story in this chapter is about how many in the news media, with the help of critical scholarship in sociology, anthropology, and social work (see, notably, Briggs 2012; Briggs and Marre 2009; Dorow 2006; Dubinsky 2010; Leinaweaver 2008), worked diligently to uncover cross-national patterns of fraud, financial corruption, and the high costs and negative optics of both orphanages and large-scale out-migrations of children. The reporting on international adoption that I outline in this chapter changed our cultural conversation about international adoption and consequently set the stage for the stories that I tell in the coming chapters. It also provides the best data we have about patterned irregularities and structural changes across a variety of international adoption programs. I suggest that the contours of these patterns and the polarized ways that the media portrays them reflect broader cultural contradictions surrounding family life, child welfare, and reproductive politics.

Early History

International adoption in the United States originated in the context of post–World War II America, but its foundations are rooted in a longer history of adoption as a social practice and the evolution of that social practice in the modern United States. Informal but widespread adoption practices dating back to colonial America allowed for both the care of unparented children and the accommodation of childless couples. Children were often raised by adults other than their biological parents, usually by family members but sometimes by strangers. Both the “putting out” and the “taking in” of children was possible because “the household, and not so much the conjugal unit, constituted the colonial family.” These arrangements depended on fluid, permeable boundaries, both between “family” and “community” as well as between “consanguine and nonconsanguine families” (Carp 2009; Marsh and Ronner 1996). As the norms and practices of colonial America gave way in the nineteenth century, the same social, economic, and political forces that led to more nuclear family arrangements consequently hardened the boundaries between kin and nonkin. Simultaneously, as the conception of childhood itself began to shift with urbanization and the growing industrial economy, adoption became more organized. Viviana Zelizer (1985) famously characterizes the changing nature of adoption as a shift from the “instrumental” placement of children in foster families and apprenticeships to the “emotional” adoption of children as one’s “own.” Indeed, the term adoption itself was not used to describe the forging of family ties until the second decade of the nineteenth century.

At the turn of the twentieth century, adoption also became far more bureaucratized alongside new forms of social policy and governmental oversight, as well as the emergence of the social work profession during the Progressive era (Carp 2009; Marsh and Ronner 1996; May 1997). The first formal adoption code in the United States was a Massachusetts law passed in 1851, far more concerned with inheritance than the emotional aspects of kinship per se. Indeed, the formalization of adoptions remained uneven until well into the twentieth century; despite the passage of adoption laws across the country, it was uncommon for Americans to use them until the structure of the newly minted Social Security system, beginning in the 1930s, created material incentives to do so (Herman 2008; also see Marsh and Ronner 1996). The Massachusetts law, which would become the model for adoption laws across the United States, nonetheless “reflected Americans’ new conceptions of childhood and parenthood by emphasizing the welfare of the child” (Carp 2009: 6). The demand for infant adoptions in the first decades of the twentieth century far outpaced the availability of adoptable children; Zelizer cites a 1937 headline in the New York Times that declares, “The Baby Market Is Booming” (1985: 192). The article, however, elaborates that the adopted child “needs protection as never before . . . [because] too many hands are snatching it.” Indeed, the history of adoption has long been intertwined with fears of baby snatching, baby selling, “bad” mothers, and “good” mothers being wronged. As Zelizer (1985) illustrates, stories about adoption have long been a staple of the press, which magnifies and distorts our cultural anxiety surrounding kinship and motherhood more generally. At the same time, money has been a part of adoption since the very beginning. In the modern (and postmodern) contexts, market dynamics and marketplace analogies are interwoven with the concern for child welfare that has characterized the formalization and bureaucratization of American adoptions throughout the twentieth century.

International Adoption as a National Project

As the United States emerged from the Second World War, Americans grew to see their role in the world, from rebuilding Europe to “fighting communism,” as generous and benevolent. The emergence of this worldview coincided with the ongoing assimilation of the children and grandchildren of European immigrants, thanks in no small measure to the postwar economic boom. It was in this economic, cultural, and diplomatic context that both the United States as a nation and Americans as individuals came to see the breaking down of (white) ethnic barriers and a role for themselves in the international adoption of children. It was the children fathered by American servicemen in Europe, Japan, and Korea who initially generated the most interest and pity; reports of the mistreatment of mixed-race children—particularly the children of African American service members—filled the pages of the American popular press (Herman 2008: 216). At the time, military families stationed in Europe were able to adopt local children through a military screening process, avoiding both U.S. and European national authorities, but the trend quickly spread to nonmilitary families. Initiated by an emergency directive by President Truman in 1945, international adoptions of “eligible children from war-torn countries” proceeded with relatively little regulation and oversight until 1962. In the context of postwar America, “citizens’ desires”1 for children in the context of the nuclear family and the era’s particular cult of domesticity coincided with contemporary views on America’s particular role in the modern, modernizing world (see also May 2008).

International adoption and transracial domestic adoption took on important symbolic value within the ideologies surrounding American kinship in the late 1950s and early 1960s as the first wave of Korean children joined American parents and as the first organized efforts to promote transracial domestic adoption materialized in the mid-to-late 1960s. The humanitarian motivations behind the first postwar international adoptions reanimated a “rhetoric of rescue and religious fervor” (Herman 2008: 217) that had characterized the placement of orphans throughout the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. This supported the “triumphal narrative” that has characterized international adoption as a statement of altruism, of America’s political-economic and moral superiority, and of cultural openness, inclusivity, and diversity both within individual families and within U.S. foreign policy. International and domestic transracial adoption has, in this sense, come to reflect “a longed-for symbol of national progress” toward a pluralistic, inclusive, and multicultural society (Herman 2008: 288). A triumphal narrative not only naturalizes international adoption as a way of forming kinship ties but also allows international adoption to proceed as a widespread and relatively uncontested practice precisely because it reinforces broader ideologies of American citizenship.

This triumphal ideology was clearly at work in one of the most notable child-relocation operations of the twentieth century: Operation Peter Pan, in which more than ten thousand child refugees from Cuba—called “political orphans” in the media at the time—were placed in foster care in the United States throughout the early 1960s. The Cuban Revolution, having ushered in a new phase of Cold War rhetoric, set the stage for the media reports that described “saving” these children from “Castro’s brainwashing” (Dubinsky 2010: 32). Publications by the U.S. Department of State, the Catholic Church, and other organizations described both the importance and the ease of these children’s adjustment to American cultural and political values.2 While Operation Peter Pan was framed as a fostering program and not, strictly speaking, as an international adoption program, it provides an instructive example of the triumphal narrative that underlies U.S. involvement in international adoption. Further, the rhetoric surrounding this program and the cycle of international adoption programs’ openings and closures illustrates the relationship between U.S. diplomacy and international adoption.

This is not only true from the perspective of the United States. International political and diplomatic bodies have long sought to regulate international adoption. The 1993 Hague Convention on Protection of Children and Co-operation in Respect of Intercountry Adoption called for the application of international standards to prevent fraud, corruption, and abuse within international adoption. The Hague convention emphasizes children’s rights to live in families, rather than institutions, seeking “to ensure that intercountry adoptions are made in the best interests of the child and with respect for his or her fundamental rights, and to prevent the abduction, the sale of, or traffic in children.” In its primary objectives, the Hague convention calls for the establishment of a centralized authority to handle international adoptions in both sending and receiving nations and for nations’ central authorities to cooperate fully and transparently with one another. The United States, an initial signatory, did not officially ratify the Hague convention until 2007.

In December 2012, Russian president Vladimir Putin signed a bill permanently banning Americans from adopting Russian children, claiming retaliation against a U.S. law that sanctioned Russian officials for accused human rights violations (Flintoff 2012; Lipman 2012; Voigt and Brown 2013). Masha Lipman, writing in the New Yorker, quotes one of the Russian lawmakers instrumental in the ban’s initiation, who was asked by a Russian reporter if she thought Russian orphans would be better off in Russian orphanages than in U.S. families. The lawmaker responded, “This is not the point. You’re asking a wrong question. . . . Normally economically developed countries don’t give up their children, not a single one of them. I am a Russian patriot” (Lipman 2012). But at that time, Russia was still “giving up” their children to Sweden, France, and Germany; the bill solely halted adoptions to the United States. When Putin held a press conference upon signing the adoption ban, a reporter asked him to comment on the notion that the ban was “excessive.” Putin, in a direct reference to the United States’ “humiliation” of Russia, responded, “Do you enjoy being humiliated? Are you a sadomasochist?” (Lipman 2012). The U.S. Department of State, as reported in the New York Times, “strongly criticized” the ban; as one State Department spokesman said, “We have repeatedly made clear, both in private and in public, our deep concerns about the bill passed by the Russian Parliament” (Herszenhorn and Eckholm 2012). Nobody in the U.S. State Department questioned the legitimacy of the abandonment of Russian children, nor were reports of a “gray market” at all operative in Russia’s decision to end adoptions with the United States. The Russian adoption ban provides a clear case of baldly diplomatic and nationalistic motivations, including the blatant suggestion that the best interests of children are far less important than nationalistic concerns.

Russia had also temporarily suspended international adoptions in 2007 when—along with multiple other countries, including China and the United States—they began to shift their practices toward compliance with the Hague convention. After 2007, the numbers of international adoptions from Russia and China—the two leading sending nations to the United States at that time—declined as adoptive families began to face longer processes and additional paperwork. These slowdowns, which ultimately became the norm for the international adoption program in China, were wholly bureaucratic in nature and driven by the organized implementation of new policies rather than by the kinds of scandals that rocked Guatemala, Vietnam, Cambodia, and other nations. At the time of these slowdowns, journalist and adoption advocate Adam Pertman was quoted in the New York Times, explaining, “What is happening in Russia is part of a fundamental restructuring of international adoption across several countries” (Clemetson 2007a).

In May 2007, China instituted new and far more stringent regulations governing the eligibility of foreign adoptive parents. The new rules initially prohibited single people and those over the age of fifty from adopting. In 2011, China revised the restrictions, allowing single women to adopt children with special needs if the women sign an affidavit stating that they are not homosexual. The 2007 regulations also bar adoptive parents with a body mass index of more than forty (about 230 lbs. for a 5′4″ woman or 275 lbs. for a 5′10″ man) and those who have taken antidepressants or other psychiatric drugs. There are additional regulations related to the length of a couple’s marriage, the marital history of the partners, and adoptive parents’ income and assets (Katz 2006; Voigt and Brown 2013). As reported by CNN, a Chinese government spokeswoman explained that “the new rules were necessary to protect ‘the best interests of children’ as foreign demand for children outstripped the supply of orphans. . . . The rules ensure adopters ‘are able to offer the Chinese children adopted the best possible environment to grow in’” (Voigt and Brown 2013). While there have been reports of baby-buying scandals in China that surfaced in the mainstream U.S. media (notably by Charlie Custer [2013], writing in the Atlantic), these reports ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Introduction
• Chapter 1. International Adoption in the Twenty-First Century
• Chapter 2. “We’re on the Market Again”
• Chapter 3. Parental Anxiety and Interwoven Decision-Making Surrounding Race, Health, and “Fitness”
• Chapter 4. Murky Truths and Double-Binds
• Conclusion: The Reproductive Politics of International Adoption
• Appendix A: Methods and Sample Characteristics
• Appendix B: Participant Biographies
• Acknowledgments
• Notes
• References
• Index
• About the Author