How far are you willing to go for a child?
When everything else had been tried and failed, my wife said: Why don't we adopt? This was the beginning of a complicated process full of bureaucratic hurdles and years of waiting that continues to this day. The desire for a child became a never-ending story.
By Jochen-Martin Gutsch • 12.04.2024, 13:00 • from DER SPIEGEL 16/2024
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At one point I thought, now the time has come. That was about a year ago, on January 26, 2023, to be exact. In my inbox was an email from Ms. Barth, an employee of the adoption agency Parent-Child Bridge. I went over to my wife's study and said: "We have news from Thailand!" She asked: "Good news?"
Hard to say.
Ms Barth wrote: "Thailand has given us some information on the current situation. Do you have a quiet moment in the next few days for a phone call?"
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It was just two succinct lines, but they seemed like a sensation to us. We had never heard anything from Thailand. In January 2020, our adoption application was sent to Bangkok. A thick folder full of reports and documents about our financial situation, the size of our apartment, our stable marriage, and an album with personal photos. Since then, everything had been quiet. For three years, during which a virus swept around the world, a war broke out in Europe, and Argentina became soccer world champions. Not a peep came from Thailand. It was as if a black hole had swallowed our application.
And now, out of nowhere, they wanted to give us “information on the current status.”
"What does this mean?" my wife asked. "Maybe it's finally starting," I said. "We're going to be parents." "Oh, God," my wife said.
Why does it take five years to adopt a child?
For a whole day I imagined a life with an adopted child. All the good things and the hard things. In my mind I was already clearing out my study, which would now become the children's room. Until the phone rang and Mrs. Barth said that unfortunately an adopted child would not be possible for the time being. Instead, information had come from Thailand that we would have to be patient a little longer.
“What do you mean by patience?” I asked.
»Two more years to wait. At least.«
"But we've been waiting three years! Why does it take five years to adopt a child?"
Mrs. Barth said that we should definitely look at the special needs list again. According to the Thai adoption authority, this could shorten the waiting time. "You have applied for a healthy child. If you are now prepared to accept certain restrictions..."
I wasn't really listening anymore. I did the math. In two years I would be 53 years old. More like a grandfather than a father. When Mrs. Barth hung up, in the long silence after the phone call, I thought: That's it, it's over. No child. I can live with that. I live with it now.
But then - days, weeks later - hope rises again, quiet as poison, and a voice whispers: You've already put so much time, effort and money into it. Now you just say: That's it, it's over? So close to the goal? And then we'll do what we've always done.
Wait
At the very beginning, we waited for a pregnancy. Like many others. When it became clear that it would be difficult to conceive naturally, we tried every means of reproductive medicine . At the time, I thought: I hope our child never asks how and where it was "done." What should we answer? "Well, first, mom was pumped full of hormones so that she would grow lots of beautiful eggs. Then they were removed from her in the operating room, you know. While dad sat next door in a room with porn videos and tried to ejaculate into a cup on command. Then mom's eggs were fertilized with dad's sperm and put back into mom's uterus. But we really love you very much, even if your conception process was really crap."
We were briefly happy twice. My wife suffered two miscarriages.
I am sitting in tears in the waiting room of a doctor's office while my wife's dead embryo is being scraped out. When everything has been tried and failed, my wife says: "Why don't we adopt a child?" It is a thought that she has had since she was young. Perhaps because she herself is a kind of adopted child. When my wife is seven years old, her mother, a Brazilian, dies of cancer. Her Brazilian great-aunt comes from São Paulo to Hanover to help raise my wife and her brother, two little half-orphans. The great-aunt does not speak a word of German; from one day to the next she gives up her life in Brazil and sits in cold Germany as a surrogate mother to two children who are not hers. The great-aunt is now 97 years old, she often spends the summers with us in Berlin, and my wife loves her more than almost anyone else. I always think of this story when I have doubts about whether it is really possible: to be a real family , even if you are not biologically a mother, father or child.
Childlessness often seems to be the unspeakable. Like Lord Voldemort in Harry Potter.
We are already too old for adoption in Germany. There is no legal limit, but it is better not to be older than 40. We initially thought about a foster child, but decided to adopt abroad and waited again: this time for adoption eligibility. The review by the youth welfare office took almost a year. When we finally had adoption eligibility, we submitted the adoption application in Thailand in January 2020. Since then we have been waiting for a child suggestion. If I add everything up, all this time, then we have been waiting for 13 years to become parents. It sounds crazy. I can hardly believe it myself. But at some point waiting becomes normal. Like background noise that is always there but rarely bothers you. Today the noise is sometimes so far away, so quiet, that I am almost irritated when friends ask me: "How is your adoption going?"
We told it, from the beginning. To everyone who asked, and also to many who didn't ask because they didn't dare. We didn't want the anxiety that sometimes threatened to set in when children or pregnancies were discussed over dinner. Or the pitying looks or whispers: Do you know something? Childlessness often seems to be the "unspeakable."
Like Lord Voldemort in “Harry Potter.”
It's actually quite simple: Get it out there, ask, talk about it, give a hug, encouragement. Just like with all the other shit that happens in life. It's strange: almost every intimate thing is made public these days with astonishing ease. People post their relationship status, their cancer, the death of their mother, menopausal symptoms or photos of their half-naked girlfriend on Facebook. But they're afraid of the question: "Why don't you have any children?"
I have never asked this question to others either.
The list
The special needs list that Mrs Barth spoke of is an A4 sheet in English with illnesses, disabilities and possible problems that the adopted child will bring with him. A few days after the phone call, my wife and I sit at the kitchen table and go through the list. It starts at the top with "imperforate anus", which means something like: deformed or missing anus. And ends with "low birth weight". Low birth weight. You can also decide to have a child with clubfoot, epilepsy, hearing loss, Down syndrome or cerebral palsy.
The list contains 36 items. "What is cerebral palsy?" I ask my wife. We look it up on Google. We are not doctors, we know nothing about cerebral palsy or living with epilepsy. But we are still supposed to put a cross on a piece of paper. Yes/No. As if it were about eye color or shoe size.
Do we dare to raise a deaf child? A child born of rape? But every tick on the list could shorten our waiting time. That's the deal. It seems to me - I hope this doesn't sound cruel - like one of those bargains in the supermarket: yesterday's bread and damaged fruit: 30 percent off today!
These are the circumstances and questions that biological parents are never confronted with.
I don't want to be ticked off the list. And I feel bad about it, as if my character is not well qualified for adoption. But I'm like (almost) everyone else who wants a child. I still remember how nervous my friends were during every pregnancy, before every ultrasound. Everything was examined just to rule out the possibility of disabilities. They all wanted a healthy child. Is that any different than not ticking off the list?
Adopting a child from Thailand means that it will be the child of a prostitute. Or a drug addict. Or a woman so poor that she could not feed her child. Or perhaps all of the above. None of this corresponds to the radiant image of a child that is often cultivated in Berlin-Prenzlauer Berg, where we live.
A few years ago, a colleague who had applied for a foster child with his wife told me how they suddenly got a call from the youth welfare office. They had a newborn, but the mother was a drug addict. Do you want the child? The colleague frantically called several doctors, discussed it with his wife, and then they decided to keep the child, who had to go into drug rehabilitation immediately after the birth. I admired my colleague a lot. But would I have done the same? Would I have had the courage?
Illustration: Isabel Seliger / DER SPIEGEL
These are the circumstances and questions that biological parents are never confronted with. They don't get a phone call and then find themselves holding a drug-addicted newborn in their arms. They don't sit in front of a list and, like bureaucrats, choose the disabilities and illnesses they are prepared to tolerate in a child they don't even know, from a foreign country, and whose parents they will become in two, three or five years. So: maybe.
We make two crosses. At point 15: "Thalassemia". Anemia. And at point 33: "older child". We increase the child's age. We once started with three to five years, now we're changing it to five to seven. We're getting older and older, our child is getting older and older, a logical development, I think. My wife says: "If we keep increasing the age, then the child will probably be an adult when we have it."
Madonna vs. Mrs. Hoffmann
An international adoption is bureaucratic and time-consuming. And the longer it takes, the more surprised the questions sound. "Is this still an issue for you?" friends ask. "After all, you are getting older."
At the beginning there is curiosity and lots of offers to become godfather or godmother. At some point the curiosity turns into caring incomprehension. "Why don't you try another country?" the friends ask. "It will probably go faster there. What about Brazil? Or Africa? Madonna has adopted four children from Africa. From that country, what's it called again?" "Malawi," I say.
The friends mean well, of course. And Madonna is not really to blame either. It is just that Madonna – together with Angelina Jolie , who adopted children from Cambodia, Vietnam, and Ethiopia – shaped the popular image of international adoption that many today believe to be reality. The distorted image of rich white people taking children through dubious means. According to this, you simply get on a plane and travel to a very poor country, of which God knows there are enough in the world. There you walk into an orphanage, maybe you bring a few presents or a donation cheque for a sum of money that is crazy in this poor country, but a joke to us. Then you just have to decide how many children you want to take with you. They all look cute.
But that's not how it works. Not with celebrities and certainly not with me. Luckily, I guess we have to say. There are six adoption agencies in Germany that are allowed to handle adoptions from abroad. These six agencies together cover around 20 countries. We would have liked to adopt a child from Brazil, but there is no adoption agency in Germany that has Brazil in its program. This is mainly because Brazil has no interest in giving children to Germany. No country wants to be known for giving away its children. Ethiopia, the country from which Angelina Jolie adopted a girl in 2005, later suspended adoptions by foreigners.
Of course, all available countries also have conditions for adoption. You almost always have to be a heterosexual couple. You usually have to be married. Some countries require that you have been married for five years when you apply. But you shouldn't be too old either. Sometimes 45 is the upper age limit. For comparison: Madonna was 58 when she adopted her last two children. If you want to adopt a child from Peru or Indonesia, one parent must have Peruvian or Indonesian citizenship. Other countries mainly give away older or disabled children. Finally, the waiting period and bureaucracy of a country must also be taken into account.
So the choice was quickly narrowed down. That's how we came to Thailand. A beautiful, warm country that we knew from our holidays. Basically: a bit of Brazil, only in Asia. The bureaucracy seemed manageable, as did the waiting time. Two to three years, so they said.
If we were French, we are told, we could have applied for adoption in several countries at the same time. Under German law, this is not possible. Here, you have to put all your eggs in one basket.
Do we really still want this? A child?
But first you are tested. Anyone can father a child. But not everyone can adopt a child. A fact that I am only surprised about after we spend months sitting in Ms Hoffmann's office, Senate Department for Youth, Berlin, for the aptitude test. Over fruit tea and biscuits, everything is examined: our relationship, family history, attitude to adoption, personal characteristics such as resilience, ability to deal with conflict and empathy. Ms Hoffmann takes notes, our quirks, our messed up childhood patterns and our gross income are added to her files, and at the end I think: Ms Hoffmann now knows more about me than my mother.
One day, Mrs. Hoffmann visited us at home to see whether our living situation - four rooms and 100 square meters - was sufficient for two adults and a child. She praised the view from our balcony and then asked: "Why do you actually want a child?"
Well, why? Most people just have a child without giving a reason. The facts are explanation enough. At most they ask themselves how many children they have. Sometimes I visit friends and they complain about their stressful life as parents, but soon they have another child and say that they wanted it so much. There is obviously no logical explanation for the desire to have children. Perhaps instinct plays a role, perhaps it is hormones, perhaps the simple fact that you don't know any other way. The best explanation I heard for wanting children was from a friend who said: "I actually just wanted to be pregnant."
I can't answer the question of why any more conclusively than many others. But the difference is that I get asked the question every now and then. As if I must have a particularly well-founded or very strong desire to have children. After all this time. As someone who wants to adopt a child from the other side of the world.
But my desire to have children doesn't grow with every year of waiting. Rather, it becomes smaller, more abstract. I have to do something to keep it alive despite all the setbacks. Others work on their relationships or their careers. My wife and I are also working on our desire to have children. And every now and then we ask ourselves doubtfully: Do we really still want this? A child?
Illustration: Isabel Seliger / DER SPIEGEL
In the summer of 2018, we saw Mrs. Hoffmann for the last time. She wished us luck, we are now state-certified adopters. But that is not enough. For the adoption application in Thailand, further certificates and documents must be obtained. Incomplete extract: proof of income, police clearance certificate, psychological report, marriage certificate, proof of employment, report from the medical officer.
We create a photo album that shows us in different situations: in the apartment, in the garden in Brandenburg, on our street in Berlin, with our cat, in the mountains, on the beach. The photo album is important for the "matching", we are told. The chosen child should be able to see what his parents look like and where they live. All the certificates and documents have to be certified by the court or notary and translated into Thai. Then finally, after a few more months, the adoption application is sent. I have no memory of that day. But today I sometimes imagine all of our laboriously obtained, translated, certified papers from 2019 lying somewhere in an office in Bangkok, most of which will no longer be of any use in 2024.
Trauma
What if there were training courses that all parents had to attend during pregnancy? In these training courses, they would be shown all the things that could go wrong with their child. Maybe it will be aggressive, or intellectually limited, or unable to form bonds, or depressed, or anorexic, or steal or despise its parents. Anything is possible. Be prepared!
As prospective adoptive parents, you attend such training courses. You are expected to provide proof of further training.
We attended the workshop on "attachment disorders". The workshop on "trauma and trauma-educational parenting behaviour". We looked at "findings from brain research for everyday parenting of children with special developmental needs". I now know that the "ratio between praise and criticism" for a healthy relationship with a child should be 4:1 (how you count that in everyday life, I don't know). Once we stood in a room with other workshop participants, all of us connected with wool threads that were supposed to symbolise the brain waves between the thalamus, cerebral cortex and amygdala in a child's head. We looked like a knitting class at the adult education centre that had gotten out of control.
On the train ride from a workshop, I read the following sentence in the training material: "Adoptive parents are not just parents, but must also take on other (professional) roles (educator, therapist) depending on the child's ego state and special needs."
Apparently we were expected to be super parents. Super-mom and super-dad who can do everything, who are also therapists, social workers and psychologists. But I'm just a journalist and completely average in other ways too.
You are tested, trained and prepared for the worst.
When we were close to withdrawing our adoption application a few times, it was usually after one of those training courses that always dealt with trauma, disorders, and aggression. We looked into the future of our parents as if it were a dark hole. Depressed, I asked a lecturer: "Are there actually any positive aspects to living with an adopted child?"
Don't get me wrong: the training is very useful. It is designed to prepare you for a special kind of parenthood. But I don't always need a horror scenario. I also need a bit of anticipation, like "normal" parents. Otherwise I won't be able to do it. In the adoption process, you are tested, trained and prepared for the worst. You are just rarely encouraged.
Every year we receive an invitation from our adoption agency to the "family reunion" in Heidelberg. But we never go. Adoptive parents come to the family reunion with their children. But we are not adoptive parents, we are people on hold, and I always had the fear that you would stand at this reunion and look at happy parents while you yourself would become more and more unhappy.
We are just a couple who wants to adopt a child.
It wasn't until summer 2023 that we found the courage to go to the family reunion for the first time. It was a warm day in July and the courtyard of a Heidelberg school was full of children from Thailand and Taiwan. In between were the German parents. There was lemonade, homemade cakes, Vienna sausages and the first thing I noticed was the normality. There were no traumas running around the courtyard, but children who wanted more lemonade and sausages and were hanging on the climbing frame like monkeys.
We talk to some of the parents and it's nice not to have to explain anything. We're just a couple who want to adopt a child. The most normal thing in the world. A father introduces us to his nine-year-old daughter, who came from Thailand a year and a half ago and speaks German without an accent. I look at her as if it's a miracle. When I tell him about our doubts, the father, whom I've never met before, immediately gives me his cell phone number and says I can call him any time if I need advice or encouragement. Day and night. "Hang in there," he says. "It's worth it."
I don't know what to say. His willingness to help is too much for me, I have a lump in my throat. I never called him. But his number is still in my cell phone. Filed under: Adoptive father/emergency.
Maybe it sounds strange, but adoption is terribly abstract for a long time. There is no pregnancy, no birth, there are only exams, training, waiting for day X. But as I stand among all the adopted children and adoptive parents that afternoon, I have the feeling for the first time again: It can really happen. It is all real. And at some point we are standing here too, family celebration, child by the hand. I can hardly describe how encouraging that is.
Zeitgeist
In search of an answer as to why our adoption is not progressing, I drive back to Heidelberg. In an industrial park, next to a car paint shop, there is a plain, low-rise building. This is where the adoption agency Parent-Child Bridge is located. A small association, five employees, a few volunteers, no state funding. They live off donations, placement fees, course fees. Most foreign adoptions in Germany are handled by associations like this one. It is not a business run by glittering international placement agencies. It is more like social work by people who see adoption as a good deed. The Parent-Child Bridge website states: "Anyone who takes in another child opens themselves to the world and the world opens themselves to them." That is the spirit.
The head of the parent-child bridge is Berit Haas, a lively, optimistic woman, 66 years old, who I liked immediately when I first sat in her office. Her optimism is also admirable because Haas has had to deliver bad news a lot recently. Today she says: "Unfortunately, Thailand is sometimes difficult at the moment."
"If things continue like this, we will have to close at some point"
Berit Haas, head of the adoption agency "Parent-Child Bridge"
But actually it's difficult everywhere. "We've just received news from the Czech Republic: applications are being stopped," says Haas. "There are problems with Poland, nothing is happening in Russia because of the war. And for Bulgaria we have a waiting period of six years plus."
Haas has adopted four children herself. At the end of the 1990s, she founded an association to advise adoptive parents, which later became the Parent-Child Bridge. In 1999, Haas carried out the first international adoption, a child from Poland. Those were different times, she says. "We used to place 20 to 40 children a year. Today, it's maybe 7." The number of adoption applicants is also decreasing, says Haas, and with it the number of adoption agencies. There used to be eleven in Germany, but there are now six left. "If things continue like this, we'll have to close at some point," says Haas.
Illustration: Isabel Seliger / DER SPIEGEL
According to the Federal Statistical Office, a total of 121 children came to Germany in connection with an adoption in 2022. The share of these international adoptions in all adoptions was only three percent. Ten years earlier, the share was three times as high.
I ask: “What has changed over the years?”
"Almost everything," says Haas. "In the 1990s, people sometimes went out to adopt children on their own. I remember one couple travelling to different countries, the father bringing a four-year-old and the mother a toddler. They brought the four-year-old back because they only wanted one child. Fortunately, something like that is unthinkable today."
The Hague Convention on Adoption has been in force in Germany since 2002. International adoption is more strictly regulated and children are better protected. At the same time, waiting times have become longer and the children are older. First, an adoption opportunity must be sought in the home country. This often means that years pass and the children spend in the orphanage. "In the beginning, we had small children for adoption, from the age of one," says Haas. "Of course, that was good for integration. Today, they are on average between three and five years old. Our oldest child, a boy from Thailand, was eleven."
Sometimes I look at surrogacy offers, the internet is full of them.
Over the years, the adoption alternatives have become more and more diverse. Fertility clinics are now everywhere, artificial insemination is sometimes paid for by health insurance, for egg donation, which is not legal in Germany, you can fly to Spain, and with social freezing a woman can freeze her young eggs until she wants to become pregnant. And if the wish to have children is still unfulfilled, people in Eastern Europe ask.
"We have already received advertising from Ukraine," says Haas. "We are supposed to send the adoption applicants that we reject for age or other reasons to them. For surrogacy." Surrogacy is prohibited in Germany. But the world is big.
Sometimes I look at surrogacy offers, the internet is full of them. There are special Christmas offers or the "Comfort Guarantee Package" in Cyprus with "30% discount for delivery in Georgia or Moldova." I only need to click and the wait would soon be over. But I can't do that. Not because I fundamentally condemn surrogacy morally. But because I feel like I have to draw the line somewhere. How far are you willing to go for a child?
When I was a child, my mother stuck a newspaper clipping to the wall in the bathroom of our dacha. It was about starving children in Africa. Whenever I sat on the toilet, I automatically looked at the lines that were meant to make me realize what a good, carefree life I was leading. As a child of the Wall in East Berlin.
It sounds strange today, but in the 1980s it was the spirit of the times. At school we collected money for Cuban and Vietnamese children, at church for "Bread for the World", our pastor had adopted two children, on Western television there were fundraising galas for the SOS Children's Villages, Bob Geldof organised "Live Aid" in London's Wembley Stadium, and USA for Africa sang: "We are the world, we are the children". Saving children was everywhere.
Illustration: Isabel Seliger / DER SPIEGEL
Perhaps this zeitgeist has subconsciously seeped into me and still makes me believe today that it makes more sense to adopt a child from a home in Thailand than to pay a woman in Eastern Europe to work as a breeding machine for me. But there are moments when I feel like an idiot with this attitude.
For example, when I ask Berit Haas about our application. "Why is it taking so long?" Haas shrugs her shoulders. "Unfortunately, we don't have any new information." The fluctuation in the authority in Bangkok is extremely high. There are always new contacts. "Three employees have already worked on your file, but they've all left today. We just had a request pending for a roots search for an adopted child. No response from the authority, nothing. And suddenly an email came - that was a year later."
They don't know anything either. They're waiting here just like I am waiting. For news from Bangkok, where inquiries and applications seem to be falling by the wayside.