CBC adoption series: Is this news?

Hey there, time traveller!
This article was published 19/03/2009 (6290 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

I am writing about the CBC series Buying Babies that is airing this week. It is the story of a young woman who wanted to adopt a baby girl from Kazakhstan. As someone who did precisely this a year and a half ago, I have strong opinions about the way the story is being presented.

The title of this series, as so many people have passionately pointed out on CBC’s website, is inaccurate, misleading, and potentially damaging.

First, it is an accepted fact worldwide that the buying and selling of babies is unlawful and unethical. Manitoba, as a signatory to The Hague Adoption Convention, an international agreement to safeguard inter-country adoptions, has to adhere to the guidelines that the convention sets out, including those preventing the abduction, sale, or traffic in children.

It is, therefore, impossible to legally buy a baby.

Second, the title disguises the fact that the fees involved in international adoption are to cover legitimate costs. There are costs for the home study adoptive parents must all undergo. There are costs for the preparation of a dossier, the translating, authenticating and notarizing of documents. There are legal costs.

There are fees for sending those documents around the world by courier. There are fees for obtaining visas, citizenship papers, passports. Then there are the wages of the people who work on behalf of adoptive parents — teams of people in at least two countries who do everything from representing prospective parents in courts and government offices to the drivers and translators who accompany people during their in-country stay. There are travel and accommodation costs.

The use of the word “buying” in this context is like adding up all the costs associated with a wedding and coming up with a figure that represents the “price” of your spouse.

It’s possible that the CBC is using the word “buying” in a symbolic rather than literal way, in which case they are using a metaphor that reduces children to objects for purchase — things that one shops for and eventually owns. It is demeaning to adopted children, no matter where they come from.

The piece focuses exclusively on what one young Winnipeg woman wants: a baby.

International adoption, however, is not viewed in Kazakhstan as a means of fulfilling the hopes and dreams of potential parents. Rather, it is considered a necessary evil for those in the country who are concerned about the welfare of relinquished children.

In fact, this is the belief shared by most ethical facilitators working anywhere within the world of adoption: that every child deserves a family, and not the other way around.

The point of the piece, with its focus on the seemingly outrageous costs and lack of transparency in the process, seems to be that there exists some corruption. Is this news?

This is like doing a piece on someone who was robbed while on vacation in Mexico and concluding, with a grand flourish, that there are robbers in Mexico. I have no doubt that there are people involved in international adoption who are in it for their own personal gain and who care little about the prospective parents and the children involved.

What is perhaps more newsworthy is how those people can be avoided. Given that it is a process so easily infiltrated by people with criminal intentions, how is it that it ever works at all? How do people navigate a complex and chaotic system and emerge as happy families?

One key factor here is the online communities that exist on the Internet. Adoptive parents are incredibly generous about sharing their experiences and giving advice ranging from which agencies are reputable and good to where you’re most likely to find a working cash machine and good coffee in a particular city.

In an ideal world, there would be far less need for international adoption. There would be cures for diseases that wipe out whole swaths of the population in Africa. There would be a change in the economic conditions that lead to the abandonment of children in Eastern Europe. There would be the infrastructure to permit children to remain in their countries of birth, connected to their own culture and language and in touch with their extended families. We are not, however, at that point. We are not even at the point where it is easy to reach orphaned children.

In my case, I started investigating adoption as close to “home” as possible. My family is from Iran, but I soon learned adopting as a Canadian from Iran or neighbouring countries such as Afghanistan and Iraq is impossible. This is clearly not due to a lack of need.

Our goal should be to focus on how to make the process smoother rather than to highlight where it fails, in the hopes that we can reach the children who were born in the wrong place at the wrong time.

Jila Ghomeshi is an associate professor of linguistics at the University of Manitoba who adopted a baby girl from Kazakhstan in 2007.