"Adopting a child can cost a lot of money. So the Giorgiannis have organized several fundraising events to help bring them a child they always wanted.""Always" that is, after eight years of trying to have one of their own! And, they decided to go internationally because they believe they will get a "better cared for" child! You know, like a car that's been garaged. You can read it all here.
So they are selling adoption tee shirts and holding a yard sale to raise $50,000 to get the designer baby of their preference. But being the do-gooders they are, their goal is also to increase awareness of all the children that need adopting, including the ones they refuse to adopt here at home! Perhaps they can sell shirts that say "Do as we say, not as we do" ...or, simply "Baby Buyers!"
My reply to them, to those who might fall for this money-raising scheme and support this baby buying, and any others who might join the fray of those who fund-raise for adoption:
This couple is misinformed and disseminating miss-information. Adoption does not have to be costly at all. There are approx 120,000 children in US foster care that can be adopted for fees so minimal anyone could easily afford them. Yes, they are generally older and some have disabilities, but so too do children coming from overseas. Remember the boy sent back to Russia because his mother couldn't handle him? That's not uncommon. Children coming out of orphanages are "damaged", many have fetal alcohol syndrome, difficulty bonding, or other health issues and you take them as they come. Foster care children you can meet and take them as a foster child and see how they fit in your family. Also, many foster adoptions come with subsidies to cover their health or learning disabilities while International adoptions do not.
Additionally, the myth that you are "rescuing" 'unwanted" children "languishing" in orphanages is just that: a myth. An intentional distortion of statistics. 90% of children in orphanages worldwide have at least one parent and are not eligible for adoption because people in other parts of the world use these places for temporary care, for medical treatment or education they cannot otherwise afford but have no intention of letting their children be adopted as was the case with the two children Madonna adopted. There, as here, the only children languishing in orphanages are older or disabled children. You can read it clearly in the book The Brotherhood Of Joseph, how they turned their back on an orphanages full of "older' toddlers and children to get one fresh form the oven.
The tens of thousands of dollars Americans and Western Europeans spend to adopt actually feeds the corrupt world of child traffickers who steal, coerce, dupe or kidnap children from living, caring mothers to sell to orphanages with forged papers, claiming the child was abandoned. This corruption has been found and has stopped adoptions from China, Vietnam, Guatemala, Ethiopia and many other parts of the world. Such fees also keep nationals from adopting their own as they cannot compete. Taking children one at a time does nothing to ameliorate the poverty of their family, village or nation. It is far more humanitarian to spend that kind of money to dig a well, build a school or buy medicine than take a child from his culture and heritage, his family and kin and risk taking a child that might have been kidnapped as happened to the Monahans who have been ordered to return their adopted daughter to Guatemala (google it).
Fund raisers should be held to help the poor, in every part of the world, including the US. They should be held to help a mother to keep her child not used to help TAKE a child, exploiting the mother's crisis and commodifying her child. Poverty is the number one reasons for ALL adoptions worldwide, outweighing all other causes (such as abuse or neglect) combined. Taking from the poor and benefitting form their misery is not altruistic, it's man and women's inhumanity to mothers and children.
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Is infertility sad? Yes. But so is blindness or being an amputee but we don't go out and raise funds to buy limbs or eyes from the poor!
Am I without compassion for couples like this yearning to be parents? No, I am not. But they can foster or foster-adopt. They can be big bothers and big sisters. The can support children in need through programs like UNICEF, SOS for Children, Save the Children - charities that work on the ground with these impoverished families and knw that the real way to help is not to buy a child and support corrupt child traffickers but to help so many more.
Remember, no matter how ethical and reputable the agency you are dealing with in the US, they may not know the real origins of the child they are helping to procure from overseas. papers get forged. Any child can be stolen and claimed to have been abandoned. In countries that have ceased international adoptions, the number of alleged "abandoned" children dropped to almost zero and when adoptions resumed so too did the claims of abandonment!
Many people have adopted through so-called reputable agencies and discovered to their horror that the child they adopted had been stolen.
READ:
Orphaned or Stolen: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/schuster-institute-for-investigative-journalism/orphaned-or-stolen-the-us_b_825451.html
Duped by Indian adoption agency, US family cautions couples. http://economictimes.indiatimes.com/news/politics/nation/Duped-by-Indian-adoption-agency-US-family-cautions-couples/articleshow/5964751.cms
Read Julia Rollings story at: http://bittersweet-story.blogspot.com/
Read also: The Lie We Love by E.J.Graff http://www.rhrealitycheck.org/blog/2008/12/11/the-lie-we-love
The works of David Smolin on child trafficking: works.bepress.com/david_smolin/1/
Re China, read:
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/09/18/nyregion/chinas-adoption-scandal-sends-chills-through-families-in-united-states.html?pagewanted=1&_r=2
http://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/adoption-stories/200909/la-times-chinese-babies-stolen-foreign-adoption
http://www.mercatornet.com/family_edge/view/5824/
http://ouradopt.com/adoption-blog/jan-2009/juliafuller/was-baby-you-adopted-china-stolen-or-purchased
Re Ethiopia: http://familypreservation.blogspot.com/2010/05/must-see-video-news-report-about-child.html
http://www.ethicanet.org/ethiopia-to-cut-foreign-adoptions-by-up-to-90-percent
“Regrettably, in many cases, the emphasis has changed from the desire to provide a needy child with a home, to that of providing a needy parent with a child. As a result, a whole industry has grown, generating millions of dollars of revenues each year . . .” The Special Rapporteur, United Nations, Commission on Human Rights, 2003.
"Over the past 30 years, the number of families from wealthy countries wanting to adopt children from other countries has grown substantially. At the same time, lack of regulation and oversight, particularly in the countries of origin, coupled with the potential for financial gain, has spurred the growth of an industry around adoption, where profit, rather than the best interests of children, takes centre stage. Abuses include the sale and abduction of children, coercion of parents, and bribery." UNICEF's position on Inter-country adoption.
2 comments:
In fact, if you foster-adopt difficult to place children, you can often get subsidies for various special needs they might have, like medicaid to help with doctor bills, etc. There is nothing noble in adopting a child when it costs $50K. That's a designer baby, highly desirable, who will not want for a family. All these people are doing is asking strangers to "kick-start" their family and probably, their racism, if they aren't looking to adopt domestically.
I also wonder, if they have to raise funds to adopt the child, will they have the money to raise the child?
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