Accounts of Chinese children being kidnapped, bartered and sold to orphanages have many adopters wondering about their children. Some may try to track down the birth parents -- but then what?

By Martha Groves

November 11, 2009 / latimes.com

When television producer Sibyl Gardner adopted a baby girl in China in 2003, the official story was that the infant had been abandoned on the steps of the salt works in the city of Guangchang, where a worker found the day-old child and took her to a social welfare institution.

But after reading with "utter horror" the latest revelations of child trafficking in China in the Los Angeles Times, Gardner found herself contemplating a trip to back to Jiangxi province to investigate how Zoë, now 7, came up for adoption.

"I don't think I could live with myself for the rest of my life thinking that my desire to have a child could have caused tragedy in someone else's family," Gardner said. "I'm going to need answers, and for my daughter's sake as well."

China has long been the most popular source for U.S. parents seeking to adopt from overseas. Since the early 1990s, more than 80,000 Chinese children have been adopted by parents from other countries, the United States leading the way.

In the last five years, U.S. parents have adopted nearly 31,000 children from China. The conventional wisdom has been that the children were abandoned because of China's restrictions on family size and the nation's traditional preference for boys, who serve as a form of social security for parents.

But adoptive parents have been unsettled by reports that many children have been seized through coercion, fraud or kidnapping, sometimes by government officials seeking to remove children from families that have exceeded population-planning limits or to reap a portion of the $3,000 that orphanages receive for each adopted child.

Some adoptive parents "looked the other way" when they heard reports about child trafficking in Hunan province years ago, said Jane Liedtke, founder of Our Chinese Daughters Foundation, a nonprofit organization that offers programs and tours for families with children from China. Now that trafficking cases have been documented not just in Hunan but also in Guizhou, Guangxi and other provinces, "people say, 'Oh, I didn't know. My agency didn't tell me. If I'd known, I wouldn't have adopted.' "

To that, Liedtke responds: "Oh, yes, you would have. You wanted a child."

Mark Brown said he and his wife, Nicki Genovese, felt sickened by the thought that their daughter might not have been found at the gates of a park and taken by police to an orphanage, as they had been told.

They had just returned to Los Angeles in 2005 after adopting a Chinese foundling in south-central Hunan province when they read the news reports about trafficking. Police had arrested 27 members of a ring that since 2002 had abducted or bought as many as 1,000 children in Guangdong province and sold them to orphanages in Hunan.

"It put everything into question," said Brown, whose family has since moved to New York. "Was she really found? Was she abducted or taken by family services? If she had been taken away from her parents, it is heart-wrenching.

"On one hand, it's horrifying and your stomach is churning. On the other hand, it brings to light something you're trying to block out -- that business there and life there is pretty wild."

As reports have continued to surface, some adoptive parents have become wracked by ethical, legal and moral questions.

"I was shocked but educated" by the most recent revelations, said Judith Marasco, who is on sabbatical in China with her 5-year-old adopted daughter. The fact that some people have been punished, she said, suggests that many more "are getting away with these abominable acts."

"No adoptive parent wants to entertain the thought that our child was the victim of this kind of child trafficking," Marasco said. "But think of the Chinese parents and how much worse this is for them."

China for many years was considered to have one of the world's most dependable international adoption programs.

"When I chose China, it seemed to be a very clean, very legal process, and that was a good deal of what appealed to me," said Peggy Scott, who adopted 16 years ago and is president of Families With Children From China-Northern California, a support group.

Some families on adoption-related e-mail groups have expressed fears that reports of child trafficking will taint all China adoptions, even though agencies and adoption experts say most of the adoptions in China are well regulated and legitimate.

"We shouldn't draw overly broad conclusions from any specific examples," said Adam Pertman, executive director of the Evan B. Donaldson Adoption Institute, a nonprofit group that works to improve adoption policies and practices. Still, he said, "one kid, one birth mother where it's done badly, unethically or for the wrong reasons is one too many."

A U.S. congressional commission that monitors human rights in China said in a 2005 report that "trafficking of women and children in China remains pervasive," with many infants and young children abducted for adoption and household services.

According to an estimate cited in the report, 250,000 women and children were sold in China during 2003.

China has cracked down on many family planning officials and orphanage workers found guilty of trafficking, with some violators sentenced to death or long prison terms, according to Chinese news agencies. Still, Liedtke said the United States has treated China differently from other sending countries. U.S. families, for instance, are not allowed to adopt from Cambodia, Vietnam and Guatemala because of evidence of trafficking or other corruption.

"As a country, we should come out and say the Chinese government has to demonstrate what it's doing to prevent" trafficking, she said. But she added that it would be tragic to close off adoptions from China because "there are still way too many children who need help."

The Canadian government opened an investigation in October after The Times documented numerous cases in which Chinese babies were confiscated from their parents by local government officials and sold for foreign adoption.

And BBC News reported recently that China had rescued 2,008 kidnapped children and had reunited some with their birth parents. The Chinese established a national DNA database this year to help trace missing children.

For Ellen and John Lawler of Echo Park, who traveled to China with Brown and Genovese, the initial trafficking reports came as a shock. They plan to return to Jiangsu province to search for their daughter Jemma's biological parents. They have an advantage: The orphanage director wrote a book with photographs of adoptive families so residents of Gaoyou could see that the children were being cared for.

"He wanted to lay the groundwork for the possibility of birth parents coming forward," Ellen Lawler said.

Meanwhile, with China adoptions now taking several years, the Lawlers are seeking to adopt a second child, this time from Ethiopia, where distressing reports of trafficking have also surfaced.

"I've discussed this with [our] agency, and I've been reassured," Ellen Lawler said. "But I could be accepting it because it's what I want to hear."

Although Gardner, a supervising producer for the "Saving Grace" TV series, doesn't expect to take Zoë back to China for at least a year, she is already considering the complicated logistics. She has an important clue that many parents don't have: photos of the foster mother in China who cared for the child until a couple of weeks before the adoption.

Gardner would probably hire a translator for the trip, since she speaks no Mandarin. She would invite other parents who traveled to China in 2003 with her and her former husband, Gary Stetler, to join forces and make the journey together.

More daunting, she acknowledged, is how an adoptive mother in the United States could "make amends for such a tragic thing," if she learned that her daughter had been bartered.

"I don't have an answer for that," she said. But she is certain of this: "I would want that family to know Zoë and her to know them."

A fight to change adoption law 
 

A group of expats in Seoul are driving a movement to create a major shift in how the country deals with adoptions. With Democratic Party Representative Choi Young-hee, the coalition presented its bill to revise the current Special Act Relating to Adoption Promotion and Procedure law at a National Assembly public hearing on Nov. 10. [Photo by Marc Champod]

Leveraging the help of a group of lawyers and a Korean unwed mothers' organization, a group of expats in Seoul are driving a movement to create a major shift in how the country deals with adoptions.
With the support of Democratic Party Representative Choi Young-hee, this coalition presented its bill to revise the current Special Act Relating to Adoption Promotion and Procedure law at a National Assembly public hearing on Nov. 10.
The coalition has been working together for over a year to draw up a proposal for a new adoption law. Involved are three adoption-related groups - Truth and Reconciliation for the Adoptee Community of Korea (TRACK), Adoptee Solidarity Korea, KoRoot - an unwed mothers group, Miss Mama Mia, and the Gonggam Public Interest Lawyers Group.
What initially began last year as a request to the Anti-corruption and Civil Rights Commission for a probe into cases of allegedly inaccurate or falsified adoption records has expanded into a movement that could change the course of Korea's adoption program.
So Ra Mi, the Gonggam lawyers' group representative, said that while the probe failed to "correct the wrongdoings of the past," she wanted to "help change the present and future" of Korean adoption. 
 

 
Korea has a long history of international adoption. According to the Ministry of Health, Welfare, and Family Affairs, since 1958 over 160,000 children have been sent abroad for adoption. Other estimates put the figure closer to 200,000, due to the many unrecorded adoptions performed in the years before 1958. Inter-country adoption began in Korea during the 1950s after the Korean War, initiated as an effort to help children orphaned by the war and children born to Korean mothers and U.N. coalition fathers.
The adoption program, however, quickly became what critics now say has been a substitute for any real government-level social welfare programs for children.
Adoption rates steadily grew throughout the 1980s, long after war orphans ceased needing homes. It wasn't until the 1988 Olympics in Korea that adoption rates fell, due to a wave of international media dubbing Korea a "baby exporting nation." This stigmatized reputation still holds today, as does Korea's inter-country adoption program that last year sent more than 1,000 children overseas.
Now those who were adopted abroad have returned to change the very program that sent them away.
Although Korea ranks as the fifth-largest "sending" country of international adoption - behind China, Guatemala, Russia, and Ethiopia - it has never ratified the Hague Convention on Inter-country Adoption, nor does it meet the international standards of the U.N. Convention of the Rights of the Child.
The government has been maneuvering in what seems like steps address the issue. In recent years, task forces were created to research and propose revisions to adoption laws. But critics point out that these government task forces didn't originally include any adoptee organizations or single mothers groups, the groups that would be intimately affected by such changes.
TRACK president Jane Jeong Trenka believes that these groups are a valuable voice in the discussion. "It is significant that our bill has been written by a coalition of concerned Korean citizens and diasporic Koreans, international adoptees, and single Korean mothers who will reap absolutely no economic, professional, or social benefit from continuing the adoption system as it has been practiced in the past. Instead, we look forward to meeting international standards of human rights and justice," said Trenka.
Focus on families, unwed mothers
One of the biggest differences in the new bill that the coalition hopes to make into law is taking the focus away from promoting adoption. Instead, more emphasis would be placed on the preservation and support of original families.
According to Ministry of Health, Welfare, and Family Affairs statistics on adoption, 90 percent of children who are adopted, both internationally and domestically, are children of single mothers. This is indicative of the strong social stigma that unwed mothers face, as well as the lack of financial support from the government should they choose to keep their children.
Currently, single mothers who apply for government assistance can receive only 50,000 won per month ($43), based on whether or not they meet low-income stipulations. During the open floor portion of this week's public hearing, a member from the unwed mothers group Miss Mama Mia questioned the seemingly preferential treatment for adoptive families over single mothers. She raised the point that families who adopt domestically within Korea are able to receive 100,000 won per month in government assistance, with no low-income stipulations, versus the 50,000 won that is provided to unwed mothers.
The discrepancy points to a clear case of institutionalized discrimination against unwed mothers, says the group.
The central government's concern over the plummeting birth rate, and its policies on adoption and social spending for women and children, seems contradictory. Because Korea's birth rate is the lowest of all Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development countries, the government has taken great strides to promote an increase in the birth rate; there are government incentives for families with multiple children, supporting childcare, and education subsidies.
Skeptics say it seems counterproductive, then, that the government is doing little to keep children already here, born to single mothers, in the country. When interviewed about her reasons for spearheading the adoptee coalition's bill, Rep. Choi told Expat Living that more needs to be done to support unwed mothers.
"The government is urging people to have children, but on the other hand, isn't supporting the children of unwed mothers ... it shouldn't just be about encouraging more babies but to also raise well the babies already born ... the most important thing is these babies are not just the children of single mothers, but they are all of our children," she said.
There is a general consensus that giving more adequate support to single mothers would go a long way in both stemming the country's low birth rate and creating a more ethical environment in adoption procedures.
Park, Min-ji, a representative from Miss Mama Mia, spoke during the hearing and gave examples of policies in other advanced countries, such as France, Sweden, Germany and the United States, that have increased the birthrate and helped single mothers keep their children. "In reality, unwed mothers are forced to choose adoption, for lack of another option. Therefore, I think there should be policy measures created to support single mothers," she said.
Her thoughts were echoed by Yang Jung-ja, director of the Korea Family Legal Service Center. Yang spoke above France's success in increasing their birthrate though government support for single mothers or unmarried couples. "In the past, France had the lowest birthrate in the world, but now it has the highest rate in Europe ... 52 percent of its children are born out-of-wedlock but they still get government support."
Miss Mama Mia representative Park also indicated a need for government-sponsored counseling for single mothers during and after their pregnancies. "Adoption agencies pressure you to give up your child ... they don't offer counseling on how to raise your child ... I believe that the goal is to get the mother to give up the baby.
"(Adoption) agencies should not be the first and only ones to provide counseling; there should be a neutral government agency," Park said.
These cases bring up obvious red flags over the questionable ties between unwed mothers' homes and adoption agencies. All four of the major adoption agencies in Korea operate their own unwed mothers' homes, a practice critics have labeled "baby farming."
Park said she was pressured to relinquish her son for adoption within six hours of giving birth. She later retracted her decision to relinquish and had to go through great measures to get her son back. Other mothers like her, she recounted, were forced to pay fees to the agencies for each day that the child stayed in their facilities in order to get their children back.
Park says it's not right that agencies ask mothers to make a decision about adoption so soon after giving birth. "This is not a time when a mother is able to make an informed decision."
In Korea, there are currently no regulations on the timeline of a mother's consent to adoption. The coalition's revisions would include a stipulation that consent from a mother is not valid until 30 days after the birth of the child, giving the mother ample time to get counseling about parenting resources and to understand the all of the implications of such a weighty decision. It also would include an extension on the time period that mothers are able to retract their decision.
Bringing the time period to 30 days would bring Korea up to international standards.
Ethical adoption procedures
International adoption standards aside, there is also a lack of clear national regulations, which can create questions of ethics in adoption agencies' procedures. Adoption agencies here run essentially as private organizations with little to no interference from the government. It is a troubling fact, given that their line of work deals with the welfare of the country's most vulnerable citizens - children.
According to the new bill, agencies would be required to keep accurate records during the entire adoption process. Some of the most common complaints of returning adoptees include a lack of access to adoption records and discrepancies between the adoption records that they are given and the records that are kept at agencies. In the past, these discrepancies have occurred due to a lack of administrative standards or intentional falsification. In her speech, Trenka gave a list of eight types of these abuses, documented by TRACK in real-life cases.
One of these, for example, is a falsified "orphan hojuk." According to the adoption laws of many of the countries where children are sent, the child must be an orphan to be adopted. In order to create the illusion that the child was in fact an orphan - even in cases where children did have families and may have even appeared on their family hojuk (registry) - agencies created "orphan hojuks" to indicate that the child had no family, which is a falsification of a legal document. Trenka says her own case shows multiple examples of these abuses by adoption agencies.
Trenka states that while adoptions may look legal on paper, falsification of records to facilitate adoptions is what prof. David Smolin, an academic expert on international adoption, calls, "child laundering," where children are obtained or sent under false pretenses, but processed to have "legal" adoption papers.
When adoptees come searching for their personal information, these fragmented or inaccurate records make it nearly impossible to track down biological family; the current rate of success is a mere 2.7 percent. Adoption agencies often use the privacy rights of the parent as a reason why information may not be disclosed, but unethical practices in the past may be another motivation to keep adoptees in the dark. The new adoption law proposed by the coalition would require the agencies to surrender all information, excluding any identifying personal information of the parent. In order to enforce the accuracy of adoption records and access to them, the new adoption law proposal stipulates that a central authority should be run by the government. This central authority would house all adoption records, give assistance to adoptees in birth-family searches, and be a watchdog of adoption agencies.
Other parts of the proposal include lowering the age that a child can give their consent to an adoption from 15 to 13 years of age, granting adoptees the right to keep their Korean citizenship, parenting education for prospective adoptive parents to prevent disrupted adoptions, and mandatory birth registration regulations to prevent child trafficking and secret domestic adoptions.
Currently Korea has no law regarding birth registration, so 97 percent of domestic adoption is done in secret, with adoptive parents listing the child as their biological child.
In an interview, Eun Sung-ho, the director of the Family Support Division in the Ministry of Health, Welfare, and Family Affairs emphasized the government's commitment to revamping the country's adoption laws, stating continued talks and plans for another public hearing on the subject by the end of this year. He said it was a priority for his department to promote a bill that makes the adoption procedures more transparent and fair, while preventing cases of disrupted adoptions. "We have to make it a priority to raise Korean children in Korea."
Rep. Choi said that she anticipates some opposition to the bill, which could hit the floor of the National Assembly next year, from proponents of international adoption, such as adoption agencies and prospective adoptive parents, and from those who think that making birth registration mandatory will discourage domestic adoption.
This is Rep. Choi's first time working with a foreign community group, but said that she appreciates when foreign groups want to work to make positive changes in Korean society. She encourages foreign groups who are compelled to activism. "If there is a problem that can affect the relationship between Korea and other countries, it's important to work together to make changes ... not everything can be changed by laws, but when we change laws, we began to change society."
ASK representative Kim Stoker said it's important that expats speak up. "As a foreigner, people might wonder why I'd be interested in changing legislation in Korea. Well, I am a foreigner ... (and) even though I don't hold Korean citizenship, I have lived in this country for more than 10 years. Once I heard that the Special Adoption Law in Korea was going to be revised ... I knew that we as a community living here in Korea had to be involved. Our voices needed to be heard."
For more information, visit the groups' websites: www.adoptionjustice.com or www.adopteesolidarity.org
For non-Koreans who are interested in other forms of social activism, the Seoul Global Center offers free legal counsel Monday, Wednesday, and Friday from 2-5 p.m. You can also visit the website http://global.seoul.go.kr or call the hotline at 02-1688-0120.
(shannon.sgc@gmail.com)
By Shannon Heit

The Observer (Kampala)
Uganda: Adoption is Now the Rage in Uganda
Moses Talemwa
11 November 2009

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Dictator's wife defiant over forced adoptions
Margot Honecker, a Communist-era minister now living in exile in Chile, left a cruel legacy of separated families
By Tony Paterson
Tuesday, 10 November 2009

Margot Honecker, wife of the former East German leader Erich Honecker, was People's Education Minister. 'We lived good lives in our GDR,' she says
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More than 2,000 Germans are still searching for family members lost as a result of the forced adoption policies instigated by Margot Honecker. The widow of Erich Honecker, the East German dictator who ordered the building of the Berlin Wall, lives in exile in South America on a German state pension. And 20 years after the collapse of the Iron Curtain she remains unrepentant. In a rare interview recently the 82-year-old insisted that people "lived good lives" under the regime headed by her husband.
The families torn apart by Mrs Honecker's children's policy would not agree. Under the policy, the children of dissidents and East Germans who attempted to flee to the West were forcibly and permanently separated from their parents. Many were placed in foster homes or state adoption institutions, or with the families of childless Communist party activists.
Many affected children and parents never saw each other again, but a search pool has been set up and is attempting to bring families back together. It has identified more than 2,000 individuals still suffering a family loss thanks to Mrs Honecker's legacy.
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Search the news archive for more stories
Eva Siebernherz, director of the programme, told The Independent: "This was one of the gravest human rights abuses perpetrated by East Germany's Communist regime. The state simply took away people's children. Parents and the children themselves are still suffering from the consequences 20 years after the fall of the Wall," she added.
Petra Hoffman lost two children to the "Youth Welfare" department. In 1971, as a 17-year-old government canteen worker, she had her first child, Mandy. The baby's father was a dissident, so Petra was forced to give up the child for adoption. "I tried to fight them but I was young. And all that happened was that they put me in jail as an enemy of the state," she told Bild newspaper. The judge at her trial called her "a rat gnawing away at the magnificent pillars of Socialism". A son she bore in 1974 was also taken from her and adopted without her consent. "They came to the door at night, pushed me aside, and stole him from his bed," she said. Petra and Mandy were reunited last month. She has still not traced her son.
Mrs Honecker was East Germany's People's Education Minister and was even more hardline about Communism than her husband. As well as forced adoptions, she introduced military and weapons training in schools. She fled to Chile in 1993 after the government in Santiago decided to reciprocate the sanctuary provided to its members by East Germany when they had fled the Pinochet regime. Her husband, in power between 1971 and 1989, joined her the same year, but died of cancer in 1994. He had initially fled to the Soviet Union, but was extradited back to Germany and tried for treason. His wife was investigated for her role in the child adoptions scandal, but never stood trial.
"I have had enough of the persecution that is inflicted on former citizens of the German Democratic Republic [GDR]," Mrs Honecker said in the interview. "In today's Germany ... there is hardly a television talk show, film or news programme that does not defame the GDR. But they haven't succeeded. Fifty per cent of East Germans say we are worse off under capitalism. We lived good lives in our GDR. You can say what you like, but the facts can't be ignored; more and more people are reminding themselves nowadays of what they had in the GDR. We can be sure that things are going to get worse in Germany, not for industry but for the working classes. But socialism will return – even in Germany."
At her home in Santiago, Mrs Honecker, once mocked for her blue rinsed hair, lives a life shielded from the press and rarely gives interviews. She is still celebrated however by left-wing South American activists. Last year she was lauded as a "Heroine of Socialism" in Nicaragua and decorated by President Daniel Ortega for her contributions to the cause of Revolutionary Socialism. She raised a clenched fist to show her appreciation.

Buckner encourages families to adopt children from around the world

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Posted: 10 November, 2009

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Jim and Linda Kimberly are in the process of adopting a brother and sister through Buckner foster-to-adopt services in Texas.

International (MNN) ? November is National Adoption Month. Throughout the month, Buckner International is raising awareness for the large amount of children who need families, not just in the U.S. but globally.

In the U.S., Buckner is focusing much of their efforts in Texas.

"Buckner Foster Care and Adoption provides Texas families with a number of ways to ‘be a family' to a child in need, including foster care, foster-to-adopt, adoption of Texas Waiting Children and domestic infants," according to Buckner's Web site.

In the states, the need is great as Child Protective Services (CPS) investigated 165,010 allegations of abuse and neglect in 2008 alone. From these children, 14,295 were removed from their biological families; 70,589 were confirmed victims of abuse or neglect; 213 died from abuse and 43,697 were placed in foster care.

Buckner's foster-to-adopt services are meeting a great need. In fact, because of this program, Jim and Linda Kimberly of Carthage, Texas, are now in the process of adopting siblings, Ethan, 6, and Alisa, 4. The siblings came from a family where alcohol, drugs and violence were common.

Buckner partners with Dillon International to provide homes for children across the globe in China, Korea, Haiti, India and Hong Kong. Buckner also helps children in Ethiopia, Russia, Honduras and Guatemala.

Specifically, in Guatemala, at the Buckner Baby Home, children ranging in age from infancy to 10-years-old are waiting for families.

Although international adoptions in Guatemala are closed, the children in the baby home in Guatemala are being placed in country with Guatemalan foster and adoptive families.

The home was designed as a temporary place to provide care for the children until they are adopted. Buckner is now placing a high priority on finding families for them in country and working with the appropriate government officials to help foster care and in-country adoption succeed. 

However, the older children of the house continue to wait for someone to take them home and make them part of a family.

Please pray for these children and others across the globe as they are in desperate need of a loving family. Also, when children are placed in loving homes through Buckner, they get the chance to hear about Christ' love and how He died for them--some of them for the first time.

To learn more about Buckner's foster care and adoption, visit beafamily.org. 

L'institutrice homosexuelle peut adopter

Par Alexandra GUILLET, le 10 novembre 2009 à 09h37, mis à jour le le 10 novembre 2009 à 15:49

Le tribunal administratif de Besançon a donné son feu vert mardi à Emmanuelle B. pour adopter un enfant en annulant les décisions du Conseil général du Jura qui lui refusait l'agrément.

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