The Last Babylift

Personal History

The Last Babylift

Adopting a child in Haiti.

by John Seabrook May 10, 2010

We had never thought of ourselves as Rose’s saviors. We wanted a child, and Rose needed a family: it seemed like a fair trade.

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Audio: Adopting a child after the earthquake.

In the aftermath of the earthquake in Haiti on January 12th, many Americans inquired about adopting Haitian orphans, estimated to number three hundred and eighty thousand before the quake and as many as a million afterward. International adoption agencies, adoption advocacy groups, and government Web sites were overwhelmed by calls and e-mails. “I would love to take about twenty or more kids in my home,” someone wrote on the U.S. State Department Web site. “I have plenty of room.” Queen Latifah, appearing on the “Today” show, said, “I want to just go and get some of them babies. If you got the hookup, please get me a couple of Haitian kids.” Susan Soonkeum Cox, who runs Holt International Children’s Services, one of the largest international adoption agencies, said recently, “You’d say to these people, ‘Well, it’s not that easy. Imagine a big earthquake strikes California. Would we want people from Mexico saying, “Oh, you can’t care for your children—we’d better take them off your hands”?’ But it’s hard for people to accept that.”

The desire to adopt needy children from other parts of the world, especially during times of crisis, is not an exclusively American impulse, but it draws together several threads in our national character. It combines an evangelical zeal to save the lost, a humanitarian spirit, and the love of a sensible idea: by bringing childless families together with orphans, international adoption solves two problems with a single stroke. The earthquake spurred these impulses, and in its aftermath they showed themselves in different ways, some legal and some possibly illegal, like the Baptist church group from Idaho who tried to take thirty-three orphans into the Dominican Republic.

On January 12th, my wife, Lisa, our eleven-year-old son, Harry, and I were about two and a half years into the process of trying to adopt a child from Haiti. Fifteen-month-old Rose Mirlande had been referred to us by Holt International, our adoption agency, in April, 2009. She was one of twenty-five children living at Fontana Village, an orphanage run by Holt, about forty miles north of Port-au-Prince. Lisa had gone there to meet her in October, 2009. We had a room ready for her, and were beginning to sort through our son’s old baby books. We hadn’t bought anything, though, because we thought that would jinx our chances.

Helpless, despairing, we received no news until the next morning, when we learned from Holt that all the children living at Fontana Village were safe, as were the caregivers and the other staff members. But our dossier, containing the documents that formed our paper umbilical cord to Rose, was in the National Archives in Port-au-Prince, and that building had partially collapsed, crushing any hope we had of ever getting her to the States.

The practice of adoption goes back at least as far as Moses, who, the Bible says, was adopted by the daughter of the Pharaoh of Egypt. In ancient Greece and Rome, adoption was commonly used, in the absence of male heirs, to transfer property rights to protégés. International adoption, however, is a more recent development. In the United States, it grew out of orphan-rescue missions in the wake of military conflicts, beginning with the airlift of German and Japanese orphans at the end of the Second World War. Similar rescues followed the Korean War, in 1953, the Bay of Pigs debacle, in 1961, and the Vietnam War, in 1975. These “babylifts” were, in part, political, fuelled by a new superpower’s desire both to demonstrate its good will to the rest of the world and to rescue children from Communism, but the press covered them uncritically, as humanitarian mercy missions.

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International adoption became widely available to ordinary Americans through the efforts of Harry and Bertha Holt, prosperous evangelical Christians from Creswell, Oregon. In a memoir, “The Seed from the East,” Bertha Holt describes a night in 1954, when she and her husband drove fifteen miles to Eugene to hear a travelling minister named Bob Pierce. Pierce showed a documentary called “Other Sheep,” about the unhappy fate of Amerasian children in South Korea, most of them sired by American servicemen and left behind at the end of the war. After the film, he asked the audience, “Is there one person in Eugene who will volunteer to help me?” The Holts couldn’t get that question out of their minds. They decided to adopt eight of the children. Harry flew to Korea to arrange the paperwork in May, 1955, and brought the children back in October. Images of Holt getting out of the plane, surrounded by babies, were published in newspapers and magazines across the country. (Life ran a feature showing the Holt clan at home on the farm in Creswell in its 1955 Christmas issue.) Soon, the Holts were receiving hundreds of letters from other families who wanted to adopt Korean children by proxy. Harry Holt made repeated trips to South Korea, bringing back planeloads of orphans for American families.

David Kim, a young Korean who assisted Holt on some of the early flights, and later became the executive director of Holt International, describes in his book “Who Will Answer . . .” the scene at the airport—the families waiting at the end of the gangway as he and Holt brought children out of the plane and called out the names of the adoptive parents. Something unprecedented in the history of human kinship was occurring—parents were meeting children for the first time who were at once strangers and family—and no one was sure what to expect. Kim was astounded to see women running forward when their names were called, crying, “My baby! My baby!” He wrote, “Each time a child was handed over to his or her new parents, everyone watching clapped and shouted for joy.”

Child-welfare professionals were contemptuous of the Holts. At the time, adoption was overseen by social workers trained in the science of “matching” children with families, which was done on the basis of ethnicity, religion, social and educational background, and appearance, in the hope of creating replicas of biological families. The Holts had only love, good intentions, and a higher calling to guide them. Their radical notion—that love could transcend any cultural barrier—was ridiculed within the adoption profession, but it resonated with many Americans, including Pearl Buck, the winner of the 1938 Nobel Prize in Literature, who had adopted seven children, two of whom were biracial. Although Buck disliked the Holts’ religious views, she defended the couple against the child-welfare establishment, arguing that the science of matching was just a form of entrenched racism and class bias, based on ideas left over from the early-twentieth-century eugenics movement. “The real barrier to adoption of mixed-blood children was not that no one wanted them,” she wrote, “but that adoption practice demanded child and adoptive parents to match.”

Korea was the first of the “sending” nations (a term borrowed from global import-export economics), followed by Vietnam. In April, 1975, in the final days of the Vietnam War, President Gerald Ford announced that some two thousand Vietnamese “orphans” would be brought to the U.S. for adoption, in a series of flights that became known in the press as Operation Babylift. In the 2002 documentary “Daughter from Danang,” an American social worker can be seen trying to persuade Vietnamese mothers to hand over their children, saying, “It’s better for everyone.” Some Vietnamese parents later travelled to the U.S., tracked down the families who had adopted their children, and demanded them back.

In the nineteen-eighties, Americans began obtaining children from Latin America, and, after the fall of the Berlin Wall, in 1989, from Romania, Ukraine, and Russia. China began dispatching orphans to the U.S. in the nineteen-nineties and by 2000 was sending five thousand children a year, more than any other nation. Next, Guatemala emerged as a major supplier of adoptive children—four thousand children came to the U.S. in 2006. Some African countries, which had long lacked the legal infrastructure to engage in international adoption, began to do so; Ethiopia, in particular, became a popular option for adoptive families, thanks in part to the child that Angelina Jolie and Brad Pitt adopted in 2005. In raw numbers, the U.S. is the largest of the receiving countries (although Spain and Norway adopt more children per capita). In 2004, the peak year of international adoptions, 22,884 adopted children from more than ninety nations came to the United States.

By the time we decided to adopt, in the spring of 2007, the seed from the East had sprouted a multibillion-dollar industry. There are roughly three thousand international adoption agencies in the U.S., as well as countless adoption lawyers and facilitators through whom one can arrange an independent adoption. The children are, in most cases, no longer casualties of war but “social orphans,” whose parents have abandoned or relinquished them, usually because of poverty, or, in the case of China, because of its one-child-per-family policy.

Over the years, both a legal and an underground economy have sprung up around international adoption. The dividing line between an ethical adoption and a baby-buying scam generally falls on the issue of whether the birth mother has been coerced into giving up her child. It’s one thing to pay a licensed adoption agency to pursue your adoption within legal channels; it’s another thing to pay a poor woman for her baby. But this distinction has proved difficult to maintain. A nation opens its borders; adoptions proliferate; corruption creeps in; there is a scandal; the borders close. This happened recently in Guatemala, which effectively closed its borders in 2008. (DNA evidence later showed that in one case an adopted child had been kidnapped from the birth mother.) Baby buying has also suspended adoptions from Romania, Bulgaria, and Cambodia. Even Vietnam, long a mainstay in international adoption, closed in 2008, amid allegations of corruption.

In recent years, many families have embarked on international adoptions not for humanitarian or religious reasons but out of a more utilitarian calculus of supply and demand. Since the seventies, the supply of healthy infants available through domestic adoption has contracted sharply. Birth control, legal abortion, assisted reproduction, and the fading stigma of single motherhood have drastically reduced the number of infants given up for adoption in the U.S. In 1970, a hundred and seventy-five thousand newborns were adopted; by 2002, that number had dropped to under seven thousand. Most of the fifty thousand domestic U.S. adoptions each year are of older children in foster care.

In the era of “open adoption,” which has prevailed in domestic adoptions since the nineteen-eighties, the birth mothers, rather than social workers, decide who should adopt their children. Adoptive parents create profiles, with pictures, personal statements, and winning tidbits about themselves. If, like us, you’re older (we were both pushing fifty when we entered the process), or if you are single or a gay couple, you worry that your profile might not stack up well against all the younger, more conventional families on the Internet sites. In international adoption, the agencies generally choose who gets which children, and that relieves the adoptive families of the burden of selling themselves. Also, domestic birth mothers often change their minds about giving up their children. That doesn’t happen as much in international adoptions.

For all these reasons, we decided that international adoption made the most sense for us. Adopting from Haiti wasn’t a practical decision: we knew it was going to take twice as long to get a child from Haiti as from, say, Ethiopia; Haiti’s highly bureaucratic legal system (a legacy of its French colonial history), its undeveloped infrastructure (some government officials still work on typewriters), and its recurring political and natural crises all slowed things down. But Haiti was the only sending nation with which we had a personal connection. Early in our marriage, we had spent time in Haiti, when Lisa was working in an orphanage that Jean-Bertrand Aristide had founded. We were tied to its culture, as part of a community of people who love Haiti. And we also wanted to help.

We thought about the identity issues a black child with white parents might face growing up in the U.S., and decided that, whatever they might be, it was better to grow up in a family than in an orphanage. We wrestled with the moral issues of adopting from a poor country. We weren’t going to pay a lawyer who would pay a facilitator who would get us a child. We weren’t going to bribe anybody. We chose to use Holt International because, in more than fifty years in the field, it has built a reputation for ethical conduct. It long ago shed its founders’ evangelical orientation. Adoptive families no longer have to be “saved persons,” or even Christians. Some Jewish friends of ours had adopted a four-year-old girl from India through Holt, and they strongly recommended the agency.

Over the course of nine months, we assembled all the information required by U.S. law and by the Haitian government. A social worker came to interview all three of us, separately and together, and to inspect the premises, and wrote up her findings in a “home study.” Lisa and I were tested for AIDS, t.b., gonorrhea, and syphilis, and had complete physicals and psychological evaluations. We were fingerprinted, once by New York State and once by the feds, and the F.B.I. ran background checks. We produced financial records, solicited recommendations from our friends about our competence as parents (when we were trying to have our first child, using a variety of reproductive technologies that ended with a successful IVF procedure, in 1998, no one questioned our competence as parents), and had everything translated into French. We sent Holt this information at the end of 2008, and then we waited for a “referral.”

On April 15, 2009, Mike Noah, the director of Holt’s Haiti program, called me in New York. Lisa and Harry were visiting Lisa’s brother and his children in Singapore during the Easter break. Noah said that a six-month-old baby girl had recently “come into care” at Holt’s Fontana Village orphanage. The child’s mother, who was thirty-four, had relinquished her in front of a judge, in January, 2009. She had five other children, no income, and no education, although she had learned to write her name, and she had signed the papers with it. The child’s father was no longer living with the family. When asked by the judge why she was giving up her child, the woman responded that she couldn’t feed her, and couldn’t bear to hear her cry from hunger. She added that she wanted a better life for her daughter.

“What’s her name?” I asked.

“Rose,” Noah said.

I froze. Rosalie was Lisa’s mother’s name, and that was what we had been planning to call the girl we never had. I knew, gazing at the photograph Noah e-mailed after we hung up, that I was looking at our daughter. Lisa felt the same way: it was fate.

When Lisa got back, we officially accepted Holt’s referral. Then our dossier went to the appropriate Haitian authorities, to be verified and approved. This investigation would take place in the Institut du Bien-Être Social et de Recherches (I.B.E.S.R.), a two-story concrete structure up the hill from the National Palace in Port-au-Prince. Our file would also spend time in the National Archives, the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, and the Ministry of Justice. And, because we already had a child, the President of Haiti, René Préval, had to sign our adoption papers personally. At the end of the process, which could take up to three years, we would go to Haiti for an extended stay, meet Rose’s mother—an important step for us, because we would be absolutely certain that this was what she wanted—and finally bring the little girl home with us, as a U.S. citizen and a legal member of our family. Until then, Rose’s mother could change her mind.

In the meantime, Rose would remain in Holt’s orphanage, which looked in pictures to be in a pretty spot, on a hill above the sea, with a view of the mountains toward the northeast. We pored over the periodic updates that Mike Noah sent and fussed over the details that were made available about her development: she was walking by twelve months; she had a worrisome cough; she liked to laugh. In October, 2009, when Lisa went to meet Rose for the first time, she wrote, “Rose is adorable. I met her right around sunset and we watched the sun setting over the island of Gonâve and I pointed at it and said ‘sunset’ and she pointed at it too and looked at me and then played with the buttons on my shirt. . . . She was very zen and happy enough to be in my lap, but would crane her neck to look at me once in a while to see just what was up.”

She also sent photographs of the orphanage and told me about the caregivers, or “mommas,” as they were called—most of them youngish Haitian women with families of their own. I was planning to visit the orphanage in the spring of 2010. I feared that the waiting would be even worse after I had met Rose.

When the quake hit, Rose would have been just waking up from her nap. The older children were playing outside. The ground shook violently, and some of the adults saw huge rockslides on the mountains, as if the mountains themselves were moving. No one was hurt, no buildings were damaged, and the children “took it in stride,” we learned from Holt the following day, but some of the caregivers had lost members of their own families, in Port-au-Prince. One of the Holt staff members who was visiting the orphanage at the time of the quake wrote on her blog the next night, “As I am typing this we hear loud cries. . . . One of the care providers just found out two of her family members died last night. . . . It just breaks my heart.”

We had decided to adopt internationally just as the boom was ending. The gross inequities at the heart of the enterprise had become harder to justify. (The average annual income of the sending nations, if you exclude Korea, is less than four thousand dollars, and the average income in the receiving nations is about thirty thousand.) Critics have argued that the practice denies children the chance to grow up in their own cultures. Interracial adoptions, which in the sixties were considered socially progressive, came to be viewed as transgressive, because they stripped the child of his or her racial identity. Questions have also been raised about the preparedness of some adoptive parents in the United States, on the one hand, and the mental health of some of the children, on the other. Last month, all Russian adoptions by Americans were suspended as a result of a spectacularly bad parenting decision made by an adoptive mother from Tennessee, Torry Ann Hansen, who put the seven-year-old boy she had adopted from Russia on an airplane and sent him back alone, claiming that he was unmanageable. Far from being a humanitarian gesture, international adoption has come to be seen by some as the supreme act of exploitation.

The Hague Convention on Intercountry Adoption, agreed upon in 1993, has created much stricter rules. The convention was the result of a series of meetings, over several years, between representatives of both sending and receiving nations, that sought to create a single set of standards with which all signatory nations would be obliged to comply. One goal was to eliminate corruption in the adoption industry and prevent the trafficking of children. Another was to create a system that insured the best interests of the children and of their birth families.

But views on what constitutes the best interests of the child differ. The Hague Convention requires countries to try to place their orphans domestically first, with relatives or through local adoptions. The new rules stop short of preferring institutional care to adoption, but that is often what they amount to, in practical terms. Many developing countries lack adequate foster-care facilities for homeless children. Although the Hague Convention is intended to protect orphans, in some cases it ends up harming children, by condemning them to years in abusive institutions.

Prominent children’s aid organizations, such as UNICEF (the U.N.’s child-welfare arm), Save the Children, and the International Social Service, emphasize improving social conditions within sending countries, rather than facilitating international adoption. As a result, some advocates of international adoption have come to see these organizations as opponents. Senator Mary Landrieu, of Louisiana, recently threatened to cut off UNICEF’s funding unless it changes its position on adoption. Susan Bissell, the director of Child Protection at UNICEF, told me, “We are not against international adoption. We are against exploitation, against the sale of babies, and against forced relinquishment.” She added, “We need to step up programs in these countries, so that families can bring up their own children, which everyone agrees is the best option.” The difficult issue is what constitutes “forced relinquishment.” Is a mother who cannot afford to feed her child forced into relinquishment by poverty? If so, aren’t all international adoptions of social orphans morally indefensible?

Since its peak of close to twenty-three thousand adoptions, in 2004, the international adoption rate has plummeted by almost half in the U.S., to 12,753 in 2009. In 2010, the number is likely to be fewer than ten thousand, and by 2013 below seven thousand. In addition to the closing of several prominent sending nations, like Guatemala and Vietnam, others have cut back. In 2009, China sent less than half the number of children to the U.S. than it sent in 2004, and has introduced a welter of new restrictions on who may adopt (including the weight of the adoptive parents); the average wait time for a child from China can now be six years.

“International adoption should be an option for some orphans, but, sadly, those options seem to be going away,” Dr. Jane Aronson, the founder of the Worldwide Orphans Foundation, said recently. This isn’t because the number of orphans is declining: according to UNICEF, there are a hundred and sixty-three million, worldwide. Nor is it because of any compelling data showing that international adoption doesn’t work. Most studies have found that adopted children, even when they’re from different countries and races, do just as well in life as biological children, provided that they are adopted early enough, while children who spend years in orphanages have much less chance of normal development. International adoption is dwindling because no one can agree on what constitutes an ethical adoption. As Karen Dubinsky, a professor of history at Queens University in Ontario, who is the adoptive mother of a Guatemalan child, and the author of “Babies Without Borders,” put it to me, “Adoption, of whatever sort, works better in miniature than on the big screen. In the abstract it is hideous, but individually it can sometimes—even often—make sense.”

In the days after January 12th, we agonized about what we should do. Before the earthquake, we had never thought of ourselves as Rose’s saviors. We wanted a child, and Rose needed a family: it seemed like a fair trade. But after the earthquake, circumstances changed, and, like it or not, our adoption became a rescue mission.

ABC reported the story of Matt and Amanda Poulter, an Iowa couple who were in the process of adopting from Haiti. With ABC’s help, they had managed to get to the orphanage in Port-au-Prince where their child was living and bring her back to the States, along with four other children in the process of adoption. ABC had heartwarming scenes of the Poulters embracing their child, but I was furious at the Poulters, because I thought they had made the slim chance that Haiti would expedite our adoption even slimmer.

Then, on Monday, six days after the quake, Janet Napolitano, the Secretary of the Department of Homeland Security, announced that all confirmed Haitian orphans who were in the process of being adopted at the time of the quake would be granted “humanitarian parole,” meaning that they could enter the U.S. without passports. Hillary Clinton later mentioned adoptive families in a press briefing, and Michele Bond, a Deputy Assistant Secretary of State who helped work out the plan, told me afterward that the idea to do something came from “a very high level.” Was there a precedent for such an action? “Not in my experience,” Bond said. “It’s not in the playbook,” Joanna Ruppel, a senior Homeland Security official who also worked on the plan, told me. When I cited Operation Babylift, Bond said that the crucial difference was that this operation applied only to adoptions already in progress.

Under the government’s plan, the adoptive parents would be the children’s legal guardians in the U.S. until the adoption process was completed. Cases were being divided into two categories. Category One consisted of roughly a hundred and fifty children that had made it through the Haitian system and were waiting for final clearance from the United States. The families of Category Two children had applications that were being verified by the I.B.E.S.R. The Haitian government still had to agree to the deal, but the fact that a Cabinet officer had announced support for what was, after all, a pretty narrow constituency—the nine hundred or so American families who were in the process of adopting from Haiti—was testament to the emotional power that saving orphans still commands. Whitney Reitz, a Citizenship and Immigration Services official who helped put together the plan, even gave out her cell-phone number and encouraged people to call with questions.* Although our dossier was buried in the rubble of the National Archives, the fact that we had accepted Holt’s referral, and that Lisa had visited Rose and had pictures to prove it, appeared to put us strongly in the running for Category Two.

In a conference call between adoptive parents and U.S. officials, one woman said, sobbing, that she had informally adopted a child and had been thinking of starting the legal process, but hadn’t got around to it. Michele Bond asked the woman whether she had any legal document tying her to this child. “No,” the woman said, her voice cracking.

It seemed unlikely that the Haitian government would go along with Napolitano’s plan. In recent years, international adoption has been suspended at times of national disaster, as happened, for instance, after the Southeast Asian tsunami in 2004.

The day after Napolitano’s announcement, Governor Edward Rendell, of Pennsylvania, arrived in Haiti, loaded a plane with fifty-three children from the damaged BRESMA orphanage, in Port-au-Prince (leaving a fifty-fourth behind by accident, in a bus on the tarmac), and, against the objections of the Haitian government, departed, after a standoff on the runway. Twelve of the children weren’t actually in the process of being adopted; they are now in a children’s home outside Pittsburgh, and could be sent back. The media covered Rendell’s wildcat action in generally heroic terms, much as it covered the rescue missions of old. But my wife and I were horrified, thinking that Rendell had killed the government’s humanitarian parole plan. And to take the orphans so abruptly, without giving them any time to prepare, did not seem like it was in the children’s best interests. I felt sick. I couldn’t eat that night.

Just as we had feared, the following day the Haitian government announced that, from now on, all adoptions would have to be signed by the Prime Minister, Jean-Max Bellerive.

Nevertheless, families in the process of adopting Haitian children started turning up at the U.S. Embassy in Port-au-Prince. Embassy staff accommodated the adoptive parents, getting them mattresses to sleep on in the immigration hall and feeding them ready-to-eat meals in heated foil packets. Embassy staff were sleeping on mattresses on the other side of the numbered windows through which they conducted business. Donald Moore, the consul-general, had lost his house and most of his belongings. Paul Mayer, who temporarily replaced Moore in the second week after the earthquake, told me that “these people were coming in because some of the orphanages were damaged, and we weren’t going to turn them away.”

On Friday, January 29th, after ten days of tense negotiations with the State Department, Bellerive approved the first large group of adoptive families. A hundred and twenty-one children left that evening on military transport. Presumably, additional groups would soon be approved, unless something went wrong and the plan fell apart. That same day, we learned that Rose was confirmed as a Category Two. Mike Noah and two of his colleagues from Holt were already in Haiti. I decided to go down and see if I could help. Lisa and Harry would stay in New York until Rose’s case was resolved. If she got out, we would all meet in Florida. Late Friday night, I got a ride on a Miami Air charter flight into Port-au-Prince, which was bringing relief supplies gathered by the Notre Dame d’Haiti Church, in Miami. The plane was a 737, and almost all its hundred and seventy-two seats were empty, except for those occupied by a small group of volunteers from the church.

I stayed in the Coconut Villa, a hotel in Delmas, a section of the city that had not been badly damaged. The next morning, after breakfast, I spoke to an American doctor from Atlanta, Don Leslie, who was helping to get replacement limbs to people who had had emergency amputation surgeries. I told him I was meeting my daughter for the first time later that day, and that I was strangely nervous.

“Of course you’re nervous!” he exclaimed. “You’re an expectant papa!”

Mike Noah and his colleague from Holt, Lisa Vertulfo, picked me up at the hotel. We drove to the airport to meet Tom DeFilipo, the longtime president of the Joint Council on International Children’s Services, an advocacy group for international adoption. The U.S. military had control of the airport, and the soldiers told us we couldn’t go past the checkpoint at the gate, so DeFilipo came out to meet us. He was on his way back to Washington, having made a tour of orphanages, hospitals, and tent camps. How likely was it that the newly orphaned would be adopted? “It might not happen for years,” DeFilipo said. He added that UNICEF was trying to prevent any of the children in the tent camps from being moved into orphanages, where they would be treated better, because of concerns that they might be adopted improperly. UNICEF says that it was following the policy of the Haitian government, and that the tent camps were, in fact, safer than orphanages.

“I understand the need to guard against child trafficking, especially during a national disaster,” DeFilipo said. But in Haiti, he went on, a culturally accepted form of child trafficking already exists. Some poor parents sell the children to affluent Haitians as indentured servants, or restaveks—from rester avec. Some are treated decently, but many are abused. He added, “By not allowing adoptions, are you increasing the chance that a kid will end up as a restavek?”

Next, we drove to the U.S. Embassy. I met a Haitian-American in his thirties who was among the clump of people outside the entrance. He had come down from New York City to take charge of his two nieces, who were standing nearby—pretty girls, aged eight and ten, whose hair was beautifully braided. The house had fallen on their father, killing him, and their mother had been missing since the earthquake. The girls had been sleeping in the yard beside their father’s lifeless arm, which protruded from the rubble.

“I want to see about adopting them myself,” their uncle said.

Noah explained that even interfamily adoptions require a home study, and that was going to take a while. “I don’t got a while,” the man said.

We went to the immigration hall. Occasionally, someone would appear at one of the numbered windows, then leave. The Holt staffers tried to game which windows to watch. At one point, a crowd formed around the TV in the corner of the room, which was showing CNN. The Idaho Baptists—the group of five men and five women from the New Life Children’s Refuge who had come to Haiti on a self-described “Haitian Orphan Rescue Mission”—had been arrested the day before for trying to cross the border into the Dominican Republic with thirty-three children, and the news was just breaking.

“Oh, no,” Vertulfo said, staring at the screen and shaking her head. There were groans all around the room.

By the afternoon, it seemed clear that there wasn’t going to be another list coming from the Prime Minister that day, and we left and drove through the city on our way to the orphanage. On some streets, heavy equipment was beginning to clear away the rubble; others were still blocked. Where were they going to put all the debris? We found out on the road north out of town. High walls of smashed concrete lined both sides of Route 1, dumped there by the trucks. Other trucks were working in the hills, burying bodies, we were told, in mass graves. It was a gloomy processional to my introduction to Rose. At the back of my mind was a thought I didn’t even want to articulate—that we were benefitting from this tragedy.

We arrived at Fontana Village, and one of the staff members slid open a heavy iron gate to admit the car. The village was designed and built by Peter Fontana, a retired professor of physics at Oregon State University; Holt took over its management in 2004. The children were living in five white bungalows, with six or eight kids and three caregivers in each. There were large shady palms and banana trees, a cistern for collecting rainwater, and an office where the administrative staff worked.

The children were scattered around the yard between the buildings. Renaud, who was going to Oregon, was kicking a soccer ball with Jezer, who was bound for Virginia (the names have been changed). The younger girls were playing together on one of the porches. Noah walked with me toward Rose’s quarters. Her caregiver, Mimose, carried Rose out of the bungalow and put her down, and I knelt in front of her and held out my arms. Rose had on a white T-shirt and white pants with frilly bell-bottoms, and she was carrying a toy car. She looked at me, then put the car up to her ear like a phone. I held out a blue bunny rabbit I had brought for her. To my relief, she walked up and took it, and then she let me pick her up and hold her for a minute or so, before she started squirming and I put her back down. The older girls took charge of her and inspected the blue rabbit while Rose made another call on her car.

The Holt staff was trying to prepare everyone for the possibility that twenty-one of the twenty-five children in the orphanage might be leaving very soon, and would be living far apart; one girl was going to Alaska. Under normal circumstances, one or two children leave at a time, but now the orphanage was emptying, except for four kids who hadn’t yet been referred. To fill the vacant spaces, Holt was planning to take in children orphaned or abandoned as a result of the earthquake, who were in overcrowded hospitals and other orphanages in Haiti, and to work with local authorities to try to trace their families, place them with relatives, or process them for adoption, should that become possible again.

Most of the children were between three and six; there was also a twelve-year-old girl, Jeanel, and a fifteen-year-old, Ayida. The young ones were very excited, especially the boys, but the older girls appeared sombre and apprehensive. They all practiced walking together holding a long piece of rope, with the little ones in the middle and Jeanel and Ayida on the ends, which was how we were planning to get across the chaotic street outside the Embassy and the tarmac at the airport. Staff members measured each child’s foot so that their new parents would know what size shoe to buy.

On Monday morning, we were back at the Embassy, hoping there would be another list. We were joined by Mansour Masse, a Haitian with a master’s degree in social work from Boston University, who runs the orphanage for Holt—a big, cheerful man with a booming laugh. A group of forty children from an orphanage on the north coast, together with ten adoptive parents, had been in the immigration hall all weekend. Two of the adults with the group were sick, sacked out on mattresses on the floor with high fevers. But all were in good spirits, giddy with the possibility that they were going to get their children. The Embassy staff walked through the crowd, dispensing ready-to-eat packets of beef stew. At one point, Donald Moore, the consul-general, came out, in a pink shirt. He said that he was hoping for another list from the Prime Minister’s office that day.

At around three o’clock, a consular officer called Noah to Window 3 and told him that fourteen of the twenty-one children from the orphanage were on the list. The other seven were still pending. Noah studied the piece of paper for ten excruciating seconds, then looked at me and said, “Congratulations. Rose is on it.” Our group would be flown to Florida the following night, on military transport. With shaking hands, I texted the news to Lisa, and told her to come to Miami the next day.

We returned to Fontana Village to prepare. Lisa Vertulfo and I would go on the first flight with the fourteen children who had been cleared, and Noah would wait and come with the other seven. Masse gave instructions to the caregivers about which children were leaving in the morning. Ayida, the fifteen-year-old, was on the list, but Jeanel, the twelve-year-old, was not. Ayida was particularly upset at the prospect of leaving so soon and burst into tears.

By the following morning, however, Ayida had composed herself and was assisting with the little ones, as the caregivers bathed and dressed them in their nicest clothes, doing the youngest girls’ hair in braids decorated with traditional white ribbons. Rose was still in her bath. She smiled up at me when I looked in, and splashed a little. Like several of the children, she had a herniated belly button, a result of being malnourished as an infant. She seemed happy; she had no idea what was about to happen. Mimose, on the other hand, who had raised her for the past year, looked stricken. Awkwardly, I tried to thank her for taking such good care of Rose; she nodded shyly and went back to bathing her.

When all the children were dressed, everyone assembled in the outdoor meeting area, for group pictures. The mommas sat in chairs with the children on their laps, trying to smile; the older children stood around them, and the support staff on both sides. Masse announced that we were going to have a party. He and Noah passed out Cheetos and juice boxes, which the children shared with one another as the staff sang Haitian songs. The caregivers sang a particularly mournful hymn about redemption that made both Vertulfo and me cry.

Then it was time to go. Masse called each child’s name, and one by one they walked to the waiting cars, carrying their few belongings in small backpacks that Noah had brought from the States. I picked up Rose. Mimose was sitting under a banana tree outside one of the bungalows. As I walked back toward her, she saw me coming and quickly blocked her face with her hand so that I wouldn’t see her tears. A moment later, she lifted her face, dry-eyed and smiling again. She gave Rose a big kiss and whispered something into her ear, and I said, “Nous reviendrons.” Holding Rose under the arms so that she faced forward, I carried her out through the sliding iron gate to the waiting S.U.V.

The stories that people tell about international adoption have changed. The rescue narratives, like the Holts’ story, gave way to kidnap narratives, as some of the children brought over in the seventies grew up and told their own stories. These aren’t about saving children from terrible circumstances but about the reunion of the child with the birth mother and the rediscovery of the adoptee’s lost culture. Some of these works are bittersweet, like “Lucky Girl,” by Mei-Ling Hopgood, who was adopted from Taiwan in 1974 and returned to meet her birth family in the late nineties, and some are just bitter, like “The Language of Blood,” by Jane Jeong Trenka, who was adopted from South Korea in the early seventies and who repatriated as an adult. In “Daughter from Danang,” Gail Dolgin and Vincente Franco’s powerful film about the reunion of Heidi Bub, a young American woman, with the Vietnamese mother who gave her up during Operation Babylift, Heidi ends up wishing she’d never gone back to Vietnam. But in every case the birth mother is the emotional core of the narrative.

Reading some of these unhappy accounts by adopted children was acutely painful. When we first decided to adopt an orphan from Haiti, I hadn’t dwelled much on the fact that the child might have living parents, who would always be her parents, no matter how completely we might fill that role. Although the records aren’t sealed in most international adoptions, the process is far less open than it is in domestic adoption, in which the adoptive parents are sometimes present for the delivery of the child, and birth mothers may have visitation rights. In international adoption, a buffer of distance, language, culture, and class exists between the adoptive parents and the birth parents, and, to be honest, that was one of the things I liked about it. But I was thinking primarily about my own interests. When Rose grew up, she might have vastly different interests, and perhaps she, too, would come to blame us for adopting her.

No one told Rose’s mother that we were leaving. There was no time for Holt to inform her, or any of the other birth parents, what was happening, and, of course, we couldn’t meet her, as we had planned. We could only assume that she was O.K., because she lived far away from the epicenter, in the north, near Cap Haitien. This was what she had said she wanted—a better life for her Rose—and that was what we were committed to providing. And who were we to gainsay her decision to relinquish her child? One can argue that no decision made in the straits of crushing poverty can ever be truly free, but shouldn’t a woman, regardless of her circumstances, have the right to choose what she thinks is best for herself and her family?

In the S.U.V., with my new daughter under my care for the first time, these musings became terribly real. The invisible bond between a mother and a child seemed to be tearing as the car hurtled away from the orphanage. Rose was on my lap. The rabbit had disappeared. I spoke to her in French, but she didn’t seem to understand, and I hadn’t learned any Haitian Creole yet (that was one of the things I had been planning to do during the three-year wait). Next to me was Ayida, who held another toddler, Fredeline. Ayida was wearing a short-sleeved orange blouse, a gold-colored necklace, and a denim skirt. Her hair was in long tight braids. She looked like an American teen-ager, but the prospect of becoming one apparently terrified her.

Ayida’s adoptive family lived in New Jersey, and I asked her, in French, if she knew what part. She smiled but didn’t answer. Vertulfo called the name of the town from the front seat, and I opened Google Maps on my iPhone to look it up. It took a while, because Rose kept grabbing the phone. She had figured out from watching me that touching the screen made things happen.

The town was not far from the ocean. “Near the sea!” I said. “That’s good, right?”

Ayida turned her head to the window.

At the Embassy gate, a marine asked to see our passports, and then we got the kids out of the cars, and, holding on to the rope, they crossed the road and went into the outer courtyard. After twenty minutes, we were admitted to the inner courtyard, where off-duty marines and aid workers were trying to sleep on cots in the sun. We had been expecting to wait at the Embassy until a plane became available that evening, but the consular officer who met us said we were leaving now. She had her own list, and only eleven of the fourteen children were on it. Noah insisted that there had to be fourteen. “Well, I got eleven,” she said. A Homeland Security officer said, “Gotta go, people. Plane is leaving.” Vertulfo bundled the approved kids in a van, and I got in with Rose. As we drove away, I could see Noah continuing to argue with the consular officer, the other three children clustered around him.

The customs officer in the front seat spoke tersely into his lapel-mounted radio: “We’re on our way to the airport with a load of orphans.”

At the airport, we waited for several hours. Noah arrived with the children who had been stopped at the Embassy; their paperwork had been found. We waited some more, and some of the children had to get out and pee on the tarmac. Finally, the van rolled onto the runway and pulled up behind a C-5 military transport plane.

The C-5 hasn’t changed much since the Vietnam War. There’s no interior cladding, vapor comes out of ducts in the ceiling, and the only windows are too high to see out of. For young children who had never been on an airplane before, the C-5 seemed like a fearful prospect. We led them up the ramp at the back of the plane, and they climbed into the canvas seats. In old footage of the Vietnamese babylift, you can see children sitting in the same kind of airplane, in the same red mesh seats. This felt like a babylift, too, and, if it’s the last one, it will serve as a bookend to a remarkable experiment in human kinship, flaws and all.

The ramp closed with a loud screeching sound, encasing us in semi-darkness. The children stuck together, calming one another, except for Lucsenda, a seven-year-old, who clung to my leg fiercely. Rose fell asleep on my lap. I dozed off, too. Waking up, I felt as though I’d crossed over into a different destiny.

The plane landed in Miami three hours later, and the ramp at the back opened and let the purple evening light into the hold. Ayida picked up Fredeline, and I picked up Rose and took Lucsenda’s hand, and we walked down the ramp together. A bus took us to the terminal, where Red Cross workers were waiting with blankets and bottled water. Rose was ready for a diaper change. “I’ll take her,” one of the elderly volunteers said, with eager, outstretched arms.

The children spent the night in a safe house near the airport that had been set up to process their paperwork. Parents weren’t allowed. I went to the Marriott, where Lisa and Harry had checked in earlier that day, and we spent our final night together as a family of three. By noon the next day, there were four of us. ?

*Correction, May 13, 2010: Whitney Reitz is not a State Department official, as originally stated.

ILLUSTRATION: YVETTA FEDOROVA

Read more: http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2010/05/10/100510fa_fact_seabrook#ixzz0oC6aZtGr