February 26: Notes on the Way Home
There is no modern equivalent to what has happened to perhaps more than a million* baby girls in China and to what is continuing at such an astonishing rate today. However, while there have now been well over 30,000 abandoned Chinese children adopted into the United States alone since the mid-1990s, there has been, as Kay Johnson’s valuable work has pointed out, surprisingly little hard data published about child abandonment in China or about China’s social welfare system.
| * Researcher Kay Johnson estimated in the late 1990s that the number of children (generally baby girls) annually abandoned in China had climbed into the hundreds of thousands. Government statistics showed about 50,000 brought into orphanages each year; Johnson cited officials who estimated that number was likely to be only about 20 percent of those abandoned. Actual numbers are still unavailable. These high rates of abandonment can be traced at least as far back as the early 1990s. Today the number of children brought into orphanages has begun to decline. |
It’s probably healthy then to question some of the basic assumptions we have about these things. Is abandonment only a rural problem? Take a walk off the main street in almost any small city in China and you’ll likely find living conditions as difficult as those in the surrounding countryside where there seems to be less pressure to strictly adhere to population controls. While good work has been done in the past decade by China's Ministry of Civil Affairs, the China Center for Adoption Affairs (CCAA), and many private groups, how much has orphanage care really improved overall? Given that child abandonment has practices that are so standard such as leaving those red birth date notes, might it be possible to identify a standard set of conditions that lead to abandonment so that these conditions could be more closely addressed? Given the tragic scope of China's abandonment problem, why is domestic adoption in China so often decribed as too cumbersome or too expensive or too often less valued by orphanages than foreign adoption.
We simply don’t have much to go on.
That’s too bad because through my journey to the Hengdong SWI I have come to more fully understand that there is so much more to Chinese foreign adoption than children needing homes and families wanting children. I know that am blessed to be an adoptive parent, but I also wish with all my heart for the day when there would no longer be foreign adoptions in China because children there would no longer be abandoned. It is my greatest hope, even if that day seems such a long way off.
Meanwhile, please support Chinese foreign adoption and look for ways to support positive change in China's domestic adoption system. Support established public and private efforts to help the Chinese improve orphanage and foster care, especially for infants.
I spent a couple more days in Hunan following my visit to the Hengdong SWI, mostly focused on returning safely. But all in all, I have come to treasure every minute that I've ever spent in China and I carry with me many special moments from those last days as well. On my final day in Changsha, I found it difficult to say goodbye to my friends.
While it will be good to be home, to be camped out once again in our daughters' room, I know that our family will somehow return to China again eventually, since despite its immense challenges it is equally such a wondrous and powerfully compelling place. This and the fact that our kids are each irrefutably Chinese.
It's just that they're ours in a very special way that comes with all they've been through and two unforgettable promises, each made between sniffles in a far away land, that everything will be okay from now on.
