I run a support group for adoptive parents, all of whom have adopted foreign born children. They had a strong collective response to the article by Kristof regarding the Reuter's expose of plight of "re-homed" children entitled "When Children Are Traded" 
http://www.nytimes.com/2013/11/21/opinion/kristof-when-children-are-traded.html?hp&rref=opinion

Concerns fell in three major categories. First, as parents working hard to attend to traumas their children experienced in orphanages and foster care abroad, they felt deep concern regarding agencies’ failure to prepare parents appropriately and provide follow-up services. Many families bring home children with an inadequate understanding of the developmental delays and behavioral problems that result from children spending the beginning of life in institutional settings and being separated from birth mothers and subsequent caregivers.

Second, the statistic that 10-25% of adoptions don't work out has no citation. This is a dramatic and somewhat dubious statistic, even more so because it is deeply disturbing and gives adoption very negative press. Are we to believe 1 in 10 or 1 in 4 adoptions "don't work out" not exclusively international adoptions of older children, just "adoptions" ? When the Times publishes data like this without giving sources it  it does adoptive families everywhere a disservice.

Third, tying the issue of foreign adoption to domestic policies such as food stamp programs, funding for education, etc misses the point entirely. While these are important issues, the questions that rehoming raises do not lie in this arena. Most immediately, it raises the issue of quickly finding a way to regulate and stop this child trafficking in our country. There are many actions that need to be taken to do this form legislative to better adoption education and preparation. The current Hague Convention rules, designed to stop baby trafficking in adoptions from abroad, need to be amended with an eye to getting children placed in homes as early as possible, thereby limiting early traumatic experience and attachment issues. Prospective adoptive parents need much more pre and post adoption support and education. Additionally business practices in adoption need to be reexamined and revamped. 

Happy national adoption month! As I read about various events honoring adoption this month and check out the many blogs on the subject I am struck by how much adoption has changed since my husband and I set out to adopt our first child in 1989.

It's now almost twenty-three years since we adopted my son and almost fifteen since we adopted my daughter.  As I reflect on all the change that has occurred since then it is mind-boggling. What has happened in the world of adoption is such a powerful reflection of these changes.

When my son was born in 1990 adoption was still mostly closed. I remember that California was beginning to have open adoption. There was no internet. Nobody had a website. There was no Google. There was not the huge access to the vast amount of information and opinions that we have today. There were no blogs!

Adoptive parents were given standard advice: Tell your children they are adopted. Tell them they can search for their birthmothers when they get older, preferably at age eighteen. Birth parents were mostly invisible. Adoptee grief was tucked away behind the wish that everyone would be happy and the assumption that all would have a better life created by the "solution" of adoption.

We are now rocking on the sea of anger at these presumptions. This is creating dramatic and lasting change. Change never comes without pain, just as adoption does not come without loss.

There are many common features to most adoptions: loss, grief, fantasies of lives not lived, anger at abandonment. These are all difficult feelings to deal with and overcome. It is easy to become stuck along the way and even easier to assume that, because there are many common experiences, there is one "correct" way to feel about them. This strain in the current narrative of adoption forecloses on the great variety of emotion and experience that all participants in the adoption have.

We need to make space for many voices, most especially the voices of change. Adoptees are working to open records and claim their full identities. Birthmothers are gaining a voice and power in the decision to place their children and maintain relationships with them. I would like to raise my voice for the changes that adoptive parents are experiencing as the world of adoption opens.

I notice that, as the voices of a hurt and anger in both adoptees and birthparents have taken their justifiable place on the stage of adoption, there has developed at the same time a tendency to disparage adoptive parents. While this is not always the case, it occurs often enough to be identified as a theme that deserves to be challenged. 

I remember my shock at seeing adoptive parents referred to in some places as "adopters." The adopter seems to be someone who only wanted to parent a child for their own selfish reasons, oblivious to the child's loss. As we challenge the narratives of the "chosen baby" who can only be grateful he or she was adopted and the insistence that adoption is "best solution" for the children it touches, I would caution that we not swing in the other direction and vilify the many parents who have adopted their children after suffering their own losses and have walked the heroes path to raise them.

I adopted my children in the last years before the changes that are now occurring, that is to say in closed adoptions. As the adoption world has opened I have been challenged to rethink what I was told over twenty years ago. In that process, my husband and I have helped both children search for and find their birth families with two dramatically different results. Again, no two situations are the same! In order to do this, I have had to soul search and let go in ways I never imagined years ago when we were given the advice I refer to above. Much to my surprise, it has opened my heart in ways I never imagined and brought into our lives a new extended family for one child that broadens our world and theirs. For my other child, questions were put to rest, but the birth family did not want connection and my child was challenged to grieve again. 

I think these two results of search and reunion serve as reminders to us all that no two situations in adoption are the same. Biological connection gives us different kinds of connections, not always positive ones. When it does it is amazing and when it does not, it can be very hard, but also freeing. As we ride the tide of change that is opening us all to each other it is so vital to hold in mind that extreme positions and assumptions about the meaning of our adoption experiences do not allow us the room to have our own individual stories and to learn and grow from them.

Link to video on adoption: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9nZDp64tFo0