I wasn't sure if I wanted to post this link about Ethiopian Adoptions. But, I've decided to do so. It is sad. It is disgusting what is going on. It has been a rough year for bad publicity on international adoptions. Each individual unscrupulous adoption blackens the name of every other healthy adoption. As I tossed around the idea of bringing to light yet another story on unhealthy international adoptions, I realized that it is a story that people should know and understand, especially people that are going into an adoption process. It is hard to really get a full picture of how the agency works on the other side of the world, but checking into it as much as you can is better than not checking at all.
I am thankful that CAFAC is our agency once again. I am thankful that even after hiring an investigator to contact Mikiyas' birth family, no lies about his adoption process were brought forward. [Age is a minor discrepancy when looking at all the possibilities of what could have been lied about, and we can't blame one person or another for the incorrect age. No one knows where that came from ... and really, he was the size of a 12 month old baby when we got him at age 32 months!]
On the flip side, I am also thankful that I can tell my son and his future siblings that we did not adopt him because it was the "thing" to do or because Angelina Jolie did it. And I find it disgusting that people, like us, who go into adoption with honest hearts and minds, end up getting abused by the agencies. Both the biological families and adoptive families are being hurt. I'll get off my soap box. I've become pretty much speechless now anyway.
Here is the story. I've put the written information from the website below. If you want to watch the half hour video, which I recommend, click here: Ethiopia - Fly Away Children and then click "Play Video".
Since Angelina Jolie adopted her daughter Zahara in 2005, the number of Americans adopting Ethiopian children has quadrupled.
A pop-media obsession with celebrities adopting children in Africa has resulted in a queue of adopting foreigners dealing with opportunistic adoption agents in operating in a regulatory vacuum. In Ethiopia - and beyond - its creating a heartbreaking mess.
International adoptions may seem like an ideal solution to the dreadful deprivation among the young in Ethiopia and the often impossible circumstances confronting parents trying to feed and raise their children.
The reality though, is far from ideal.
Some adopting parents suspect or discover the new child they’ve taken in is not an orphan as they’d been assured. The child may also have a litany of health problems that has been covered up by corrupt officials.
Also many ‘relinquishing’ Ethiopian parents or carers may have been duped into giving up their children through a heartless process called ‘harvesting’ and can’t hope to re-establish contact with them.
Ethiopia has 5 million orphans needing homes and the United States has millions of homes needing babies. Africa Correspondent Andrew Geoghegan and producer Mary Ann Jolley, discover it’s not a simple mathematical equation or zero sum game. There are virtually no government regulations or policing of the process. Many international adoption agencies flashing Christian credentials are taking advantage of the situation. Corruption, fraud and deception are rife.
Foreign Correspondent follows a Florida couple in their mid fifties as they travel to the Ethiopian capital, Addis Ababa, to pick up their three adopted children, aged three, four and six. It’s a gut wrenching moment when they meet the birth mother who has come to the orphanage to say a final goodbye to her children. This transaction appears above board but it’s all too common for Ethiopian parents to give up their children for international adoption after being coerced by adoption agencies.
Foreign Correspondent investigates the activities of one of the biggest American agencies operating in Ethiopia. In a remote village in the country’s south, the agency openly recruits children with parents. Each child offered for adoption is then filmed for a DVD catalogue which in turn is shipped out to potential adoptive parents.
A world away in California a mother of one - looking for a brother for her son - chooses from a CWA DVD catalogue. The agency’s sales pitch promised a healthy, abandoned child, but that could not have been further from the truth. Her story is tragic and disturbing and exposes the callousness of the profit oriented international adoption business
A group of grieving mothers who have given up their children for international adoption gather at an orphanage to tell their stories. All claim they were told by adoption agencies they would receive regular information about the whereabouts and wellbeing of their children, but have heard nothing.
It’s a thought-provoking edition of Foreign Correspondent and a must watch for anyone considering adopting a child from another country or who has celebrated the apparent social consciousness of Hollywood A-listers.
What I did find interesting in the story is learning that many agencies discourage staying in Ethiopia for more than a few days and that "ordinary Ethiopians" find adoption to be a sensitive issue. Through CAFAC, we are encouraged to stay for at least 10 days to embrace the culture, food and the people. We were not hidden from the public in a discreet location. We were embraced by the public, taken to touristy sites and loved by everyone we came into contact with. Although it has been over 2 years since Mikiyas came home, I haven't heard any negative stories from the many people in Canada that have picked up children over the last couple of years. And CAFAC actually discourages us from using the escort service.
I am thankful that CAFAC is our agency once again. I am thankful that even after hiring an investigator to contact Mikiyas' birth family, no lies about his adoption process were brought forward. [Age is a minor discrepancy when looking at all the possibilities of what could have been lied about, and we can't blame one person or another for the incorrect age. No one knows where that came from ... and really, he was the size of a 12 month old baby when we got him at age 32 months!]
On the flip side, I am also thankful that I can tell my son and his future siblings that we did not adopt him because it was the "thing" to do or because Angelina Jolie did it. And I find it disgusting that people, like us, who go into adoption with honest hearts and minds, end up getting abused by the agencies. Both the biological families and adoptive families are being hurt. I'll get off my soap box. I've become pretty much speechless now anyway.
Here is the story. I've put the written information from the website below. If you want to watch the half hour video, which I recommend, click here: Ethiopia - Fly Away Children and then click "Play Video".
Since Angelina Jolie adopted her daughter Zahara in 2005, the number of Americans adopting Ethiopian children has quadrupled.
A pop-media obsession with celebrities adopting children in Africa has resulted in a queue of adopting foreigners dealing with opportunistic adoption agents in operating in a regulatory vacuum. In Ethiopia - and beyond - its creating a heartbreaking mess.
International adoptions may seem like an ideal solution to the dreadful deprivation among the young in Ethiopia and the often impossible circumstances confronting parents trying to feed and raise their children.
The reality though, is far from ideal.
Some adopting parents suspect or discover the new child they’ve taken in is not an orphan as they’d been assured. The child may also have a litany of health problems that has been covered up by corrupt officials.
Also many ‘relinquishing’ Ethiopian parents or carers may have been duped into giving up their children through a heartless process called ‘harvesting’ and can’t hope to re-establish contact with them.
Ethiopia has 5 million orphans needing homes and the United States has millions of homes needing babies. Africa Correspondent Andrew Geoghegan and producer Mary Ann Jolley, discover it’s not a simple mathematical equation or zero sum game. There are virtually no government regulations or policing of the process. Many international adoption agencies flashing Christian credentials are taking advantage of the situation. Corruption, fraud and deception are rife.
Foreign Correspondent follows a Florida couple in their mid fifties as they travel to the Ethiopian capital, Addis Ababa, to pick up their three adopted children, aged three, four and six. It’s a gut wrenching moment when they meet the birth mother who has come to the orphanage to say a final goodbye to her children. This transaction appears above board but it’s all too common for Ethiopian parents to give up their children for international adoption after being coerced by adoption agencies.
Foreign Correspondent investigates the activities of one of the biggest American agencies operating in Ethiopia. In a remote village in the country’s south, the agency openly recruits children with parents. Each child offered for adoption is then filmed for a DVD catalogue which in turn is shipped out to potential adoptive parents.
A world away in California a mother of one - looking for a brother for her son - chooses from a CWA DVD catalogue. The agency’s sales pitch promised a healthy, abandoned child, but that could not have been further from the truth. Her story is tragic and disturbing and exposes the callousness of the profit oriented international adoption business
A group of grieving mothers who have given up their children for international adoption gather at an orphanage to tell their stories. All claim they were told by adoption agencies they would receive regular information about the whereabouts and wellbeing of their children, but have heard nothing.
It’s a thought-provoking edition of Foreign Correspondent and a must watch for anyone considering adopting a child from another country or who has celebrated the apparent social consciousness of Hollywood A-listers.
8 comments:
Remember how the media works: one bad story gets tons of attention over all the thousands of wonderful ones.
And also, I somehow doubt that people just "started adopting" children from Ethiopia - since it is focused on the US, I suspect that the difficulty of adopting American children caused some people to simply start considering foreign adoption who might not have without the publicity.
And it is a complicated issue boiled down into a few paragraphs: how many domestic adoptions do you hear about where the birth mother after the fact feels coerced. People remember things in a funny way, especially when highly emotionally charged parts of life are involved.
That said, it is annoying. I wanted to adopt since high school, and recently mentioned it again to my mother, and she said something like, "You and Madonna." Made me want to choke her, at least a little.
Also, after watching this, they state "High profile celebrity adoptions have caused the number of Americans seeking Ethiopian adoptions to quadruple" like this is a researched fact. Is it?
We're still talking about an infinitesimal number - maybe people are just seeing Ethiopian kids around and are going there instead of China or Central America. Maybe more people are open to adopting siblings. It isn't like there was a jump from a few thousand to fifty thousand. Maybe there are other reasons - are other countries more difficult to adopt from?
Even if you want a bad reason - maybe there are more, less scrupulous agencies opening up in Ethiopia, reaching different orphanages.
I hope people won't take this too seriously. It's like those baby cases where some birth family contests the adoption years later - they get all the attention and are hot stuff for the press...and by the time the reporters have moved on and forgotten, the damage has been done to thousands of children who might have been adopted without scare stories like that deterring people.
wasn't kids link canadian though??
Yes, the KidsLink one mentioned at the end of the program is the Canadian one, also known as Imagine, that recently went bankrupt.
Sherri. You've made me think, cry, question, get angry, and pray. The video is pretty powerful and convincing, but there are also a lot of holes in it- reminds me of a certain program put on by a certain Cdn station which I won't mention by name... If they are in fact harvesting children, that's got to stop. I'm glad our agency can't operate this way and that they deal with the orphanages, not the people in the villages... It makes me sick to think of this happening and it makes me sick to think of people believing this, seeing the children home with families and thinking that about each child. I could go on about this, but in the end, it brings me back to my knees, in hopes that as we are on the journey, things will be done "right"....
Ramona
Amen Ramona! Thanks for sharing your thoughts too.
I was a bit shook up from that article too. But since then I read a response from Michelle ~ the lady mentioned in the story ~ I'd be happy to share it with you if you are interested. She clarified what the media took completely out of context. She's an author, btw, and i have really enjoyed her book about adoption called "After the Dream Comes True."
Hi Karen
Yes, I'd like to read Michelle's response. That'd be great! Thanks.
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