Adoption: yes or no?

Publication date: 30 September 2019

Is it good or bad to adopt a child? And should intercountry adoption continue or not? Special professor Femmie Juffer and emeritus professor by special appointment René Hoksbergen, both specialized in adoption, discuss these issues. But they don't agree.

Update

On Monday 8 February 2021, Minister Sander Dekker will announce that the adoption of children from abroad will be suspended. He decides this following a report on the system of so-called intercountry adoption in the Netherlands. It is up to the next cabinet to take a position on the future of intercountry adoption. Read more about this decision here .

In the series ' I'm not from Sri Lanka ', we follow Dinja Pannebakker, a young woman of 32 who was adopted from Sri Lanka. She herself feels completely Dutch and has no need for connection with her native soil.

Pannebakker is one of more than 3,400 Sri Lankan children who have been adopted by Dutch parents since the 1970s. In 2018, adoption from Sri Lanka was definitively stopped. Adoption from a dozen other countries, or 'intercountry adoption', still exists, although the number of adoptees is decreasing every year. In 2018, a total of 156 children were brought to the Netherlands from abroad. Most of them come from China (28), Hungary (24) or the United States (23). Within the Netherlands, 21 children were adopted last year and placed with other Dutch families.

Femmie Juffer, professor by special appointment of adoption

With crooked eyes

Within the media, Pannebakker's story seems to be an exception: you often hear about adoptees who protest about their adoption or who are diligently looking for their biological parents. This ties in with the way in which people have come to think about adoption: where adoptive parents used to be seen as do-gooders, you can now be looked at with skewed eyes when you bring a child to the Netherlands. Is adoption good for such a child? And does that not perpetuate abuses?

To find out more about the good and bad sides of adoption, we had a separate conversation with Femmie Juffer and René Hoksbergen, professor by special appointment and professor emeritus by special appointment, respectively, who specialize in adoption. Although they are both well educated in their profession, they differ on many points. This makes it difficult to draw unambiguous conclusions about adoption.

René Hoksbergen, emeritus professor of adoption

Is there something wrong with non-seekers?

Whether there is something 'wrong' with Pannebakker, because she does not go looking for her biological parents, is a question for many people around her. Juffer does not think it is at all strange that Pannebakker does not want to start a search. "Research by pedagogue Wendy Tieman shows that adoptees aged around thirty can be divided into three groups: one third of the adoptees goes in search of their biological parents, one third is interested in his background, but does not go looking and one third has no need for more information about his origins, so Pannebakker fits well with the latter group and is certainly no exception.

"I think that the 'Spoorloos' program partly ensures that the average Dutch person thinks that every adoptee wants to look for his biological family, while that is not the case. Incidentally, the fact that she is not interested in her origin does not mean that she will never be interested in that. There are also people who are only involved with it later, for example when they have children of their own."

Hoksbergen also sees people like Pannebakker more often. He only believes that it does not happen often, in contrast to Juffer and the research she cites. "You can't measure how many adoptees are looking for their background until they're dead," Hoksbergen says. "Then, in my estimation, there will be many more, about 90 to 95 percent."

He does not want to say that it is not healthy not to search, but according to Hoksbergen it is a form of denial. "At the moment Pannebakker denies psychologically that she has been adopted. Literally that is simply not possible, because she looks different. But she does not feel adopted.

"I don't know if that is healthy, because when you accept your identity, the reality belongs to your biological parents. This does not affect the relationship you have with your adoptive parents. On the contrary: if you have a healthy relationship with your past, then it does the present good too. I say that from experience, clinical experience. Yes, I've seen hundreds of adoptees."

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Dinja Pannebakker

Good luck in the new land

Hoksbergen knows that there are intercountry adoptees who feel satisfied and happy in their new country. But that doesn't mean much to him. “Adopted people struggle with their otherness and that influences them to a great extent in their lives. I don't come across anything else. The negative stories, in my opinion, are too numerous to claim that adoption makes no difference to happiness in life.

"For example, I regularly see adopted boys who struggle with their height. On average, they are smaller than Dutch women. And women simply want a man who is at least as tall as themselves, or slightly taller. That is a biological fact. every study shows that adoptees have more psychological problems."

From research it did Damsel among 1200 adult adoptees in the Netherlands, revealed that they felt on average as happy as the average American. Ninety percent were also positive about the fact that they had been adopted. Juffer concludes from this that adoptees can experience the same happiness in life as non-adopted ones. "In this research, we deliberately sought participants from the Interlandelijk Adoptees Foundation and United Adoptees International, who are often critical of adoption. We wanted all voices to be heard."

"Happy can only be the end point of how adoptees feel. They may have had to think a lot and talk to people before they achieve that feeling. We know, for example, that colored adopted children around the age of six or seven often say that they want to be white. So it's really not all that easy. But for me the bottom line is : kids have to be in a family."

Juffer believes that children are best placed in a family, following numerous studies that point to the poor conditions in children's homes. "It is bad for all aspects of development to grow up in a children's home. The IQ, physical growth and attachment of the children suffer."

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An adoptive parent with her child in 1989

Stop adoption immediately

Now the question is: is intercountry adoption a good way to help these children? Both Hoksbergen and Juffer believe that the first thing to look at is the placement of the child with the biological family and then the adoption within the country itself. But they disagree on what to do if both these options are not there.

In 2016, the Council for Criminal Justice and Youth Protection (RSJ), in collaboration with Hoksbergen, submitted an advice to the Minister of Security and Justice. In this, the RSJ recommends shifting the focus from intercountry adoption to support in the development and expansion of the youth protection system in the country of origin. The Council also advised to immediately stop adoptions from China, the US and EU countries – the countries from which the most children still came in 2018.

Hoksbergen is still behind this. "We should stop adopting children at all from countries that could provide materially well for them, such as China, the US and European countries. Zero. Let those countries take care of their own children, come on. no children from the Netherlands to India, wouldn't we find that very strange?

"I think that if we continue to adopt, nothing will change in that country itself. You don't know that in advance, but it's just logic. When adoption is no longer there, you can no longer easily throw away children."

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Orphans in Cambodia

Abuses?

Abuses during adoption are an important reason for Hoksbergen why he does not support most intercountry adoptions. "In the seventies we thought naively about adoption, everything seemed like a dream come true. But we found out that a lot was wrong. Not all adopted children were pathetic and the nature of the pity was sometimes deceit. The background of a child was often unknown or deliberately made different from what it said. Money also played an important role. Not with all children, but with too many."

According to Juffer, no research has yet been published about how often these abuses occur, so we can't make any statements about it yet. "You shouldn't get ahead of things and jump to conclusions too quickly. People quickly think that there are a lot of them, because the media almost only tell stories about adoptees who feel disadvantaged. In a way that makes sense, because people who are satisfied about their adoption, like Pannebakker, have less drive to tell their story and if they want to say something, it is not picked up by the media.

"For example, when we published the satisfaction survey among 1200 adoptees in a press release, we didn't get any response from the media. Even though that was quite a large study. Suppose the results had been more negative, then I know how it had gone."

Bizarre turnaround

Juffer, and several other researchers, have criticized the RSJ's advice. The minister also explained in a letter why he will not (fully) follow the RSJ's advice. "The allegation was that adoption would have an attractive effect. But my colleague Rien van IJzendoorn has shown that the number of adopted children is very small compared to the population of children in the orphanages. The numbers of children that are adopted are a few tens or hundreds of the millions who are in orphanages, so how can adoption boost supply, that's a bizarre twist of thinking.

"As far as I'm concerned, adoption can also go hand in hand with improving child protection in the country itself. And that also happens in many countries, with both adoption and child protection being set up. No research has been done whether it is better is for childcare development in a country when it stops intercountry adoption, but I don't see why that would work any better."

In the series I'm not from Sri Lanka we follow Dinja Pannebakker, who investigates the importance of knowing where you come from. Watch this four-part documentary series here .

Countries: Sri Lanka, Cambodia, Netherlands