Adoption Ethics and Issues

January 31st, 2007
Dutch Television

(Link to Original Story)

This is the story of a 10 year old adopted girl named Eline, who finds her birth parents in China.

The transcription as done by Mirjam follows here.

This story is from 2007 - and the links to it may or may not be dead, you can try but I can’t read Dutch so… here’s the link http://www.uitzendinggemist.nl/

Navigate to “Spoorloos”, the interview is third along, the child’s name is Eline.

“Cllick orange button with “bekijk uitzending”(watch broadcast).First part is about Dutch couple adopting second cleft-affected son.Second part is about a Dutch agency (Wereldkinderen) that provides means for Chinese foster-parents who are willing to take up severely handicapped children. Third part: Eline. Starts at 0:27:35. Eline’s A-mother is/was a volunteer at Wereldkinderen (agency) who advertises for funds during the program. Same agency is afraid that more searches will bring hazard to future adoptions from China”.

Here is a translation ( thank you Mirjam ) of the interview:

http://www.uitzendinggemist.nl/index.php/aflevering?aflID=3906136

click orange button with “bekijk uitzending” (watch broadcast)

starts at 0:27:35

Background: in church

A church in Noord-Holland (province), a couple of weeks ago. We meet Eline.

Eline is an altar girl and searching for her Chinese parents. For a couple of years now she has been asking her Dutch parents about her roots. Eline was born in the surroundings of Chongqing.

Chongqing ~

Here she was abandoned shortly after her birth. The first months of her life she stayed with a Chinese foster family.

(Continued)

By ELLEN ULLMAN
Published: January 1, 2009

The New York TImes

(Original Story)

I AM not adopted; I have mysterious origins.

I have said that sentence many times in the course of my life as an adopted person. I like it so much I put it into the mouth of a character in the novel I’m writing. The character and I are both fond of the idea. We can think of ourselves as living in the dense pages of 19th-century fiction, where one’s origins — the exact mother and father — are not nearly as important as one’s “circumstances.”

(Continued)

You dont’ have to be adopted to know that prying into a family’s genetics is rude.

By Jeanne Marie Laskas

Sunday, February 27, 2005; Page W35
Washington Post

(Original Story)

One of the grandmothers, a gentle woman in her sixties, turns to me and says, “Are your girls real sisters?”

I look at her. We’re at a birthday party. It’s a large one, kids everywhere, pizza boxes half-empty, giant cake decorated with Ninja Turtles about to be cut. Noise level: elevated. My girls, who were both adopted as infants from China, are in this mix, the 3-year-old chasing the 5-year-old, who is tackling the boy she calls her boyfriend.

Now, this grandmother. She often shows up at the birthday parties. She’s been a part of this group since preschool, as have I. I’m taken aback that the question I so often get from strangers should come from someone I know.

(Continued)

(this is an early draft of an article which appeared in the New Palgrave Dictionary of Law and Economics)

by John Palmer / The University of Western Ontario

(Original Story)

The adoption of a child by non-biological parents is the transfer of a limited property right. To understand an economics-and-law analysis of adoption, one must first examine the nature of this property right. Then the conditions of exchange can be studied and assessed.The property right that is being exchanged is a parenthood right — the right to take on the rights and obligations that accompany parenting a child. These rights are limited by governments in many different ways. One may not buy and sell these rights, one may not readily dispose of one’s “property”, nor may one indiscriminately cause harm to the property. Also, one must provide food, clothing, shelter, and education for the property. These limitations have been imposed upon the owners of all such property in the class, whether the property right was acquired biologically or via exchange.

Changing Supply Conditions

Through the first half of the twentieth century, into the 1950s, the primary issue in adoption was finding acceptable homes for children, including adoptable infants born out of wedlock. Beginning in the 1960s, though, shortages of normal healthy infants emerged. This dramatic shift in the supply and demand conditions has been related to many concurrent shifts in relative prices, technology and tastes. Certainly one of the major determinants of the reduced supply of parenthood rights for adoptable infants has been the falling birth rates themselves, throughout the entire populations (and not just among unwed mothers) of industrialized countries. This decline in birth rates has been related to rises in the labour force participation rates of females and to lower-cost and more reliable birth control technologies (see Medoff 1993).

(Continued)

Ralitsa Vassileva / CNN

ADOPTION MOST FOUL: Like many children, Esther was abducted when she was only a few-months-old.

Guatemala: International adoptions are raising some serious concerns as a disturbing story has revealed its dark side. Each year, several thousand Americans adopt children from Guatemala. But not too long ago, the State Department started advising prospective parents to consider ‘other’ options.

Esther Sulamita is finally home and is nestled close to her mother. But like many children Esther was abducted when she was only a few months old - only to re-appear under a different name in Guatemala’s controversial foreign adoption system. (Continued)