“Would you rather have grown up in an orphanage?”

“Would you rather have grown up in an orphanage?”
“So, growing up in an orphanage would of been a better life for you??”
“How about kids languishing in an overcrowded orphanage?”
etc.

To all of you who ask me the questions above:

You don’t want to hear my answer.
You’re assuming there’s only one answer to the questions, and that I’ll say no.
It’s equivalent of saying, “shut up, stop whining, your life coud have been worse.”
You want everyone to say “It’s better to be adopted to have grown up in an orphanage.

STOP  using my experiences as an “orphan” in an awful overcrowded orphanage to try to silence me or to promote or defend adoption.

Your question ignores my family, it doesn’t ask me if I would have preferred to be raised by my own family. It doesn’t give the families the option to raise their children. Just like the adoption industry didn’t give me the option of staying with my family.

“Kids-languishing-in-an-overcrowded orphanage” + “Better-being adopted-than-living-in -an-institution” are statements used by adoption agencies, adopters while creating more orphans. It’s used by adoption lobbyists when a country stops or wants to stop international adoptions due to child traffickings to pressure the country to continue exporting their children.  It’s being used now in the petition launched by adoption lobbyists.

 

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Because of adoption…

Think first

While in the USA adoption profiteers and adoption-advocacy groups have filed a petition to save international adoptions…

Adoption.com, an American company that profits from adoptions,  and adoption-advocacy groups have filed a petition requesting pres. Donald Trump investigate the causes behind the decline in international adoptions.

One of the biggest concerns of the company seems to be the continuous decline in international adoptions. The CEO of Adoption.com, which he founded 20 years ago, said if that trend continues international adoption could completely end within four years.

The adoption profiteers say, “Every child needs a loving, permanent family, whether that child is in a foster home in the U.S. or in an orphanage in another country” and “Adoption prevents child trafficking.”  The CEO of Adoption.com sees the number of international orphans as too large to ignore and cites statistics of orphans who commit suicide or a crime, become homeless and of the girls who age out of orphanages and are forced into prostitution.

 

 in other parts of the world,…

orphanage tourism is a big business;

Orphanages recruit kids to get foreign donations. “The children are being commodified and placed in orphanages for the sole purpose of bringing in donations and other donated goods. The children have families, they’re exploiting vulnerable children, vulnerable people, vulnerable guardians.” Click on the image above to view CNN video.

Networks of traffickers are suspected of recruiting and deceiving children into orphanages to gain money from abroad, the Haitian state research authority believes. Indeed, Lumos found evidence of parents believing their children would receive a better education in orphanages, orphanage directors paid “child finders” to recruit children to the orphanages, and in some cases families were paid $75 to give their child away. “Many parents are deceived into giving up their children, purely so that unscrupulous individuals can make a profit,” said Lumos’ CEO. Click on the image above to read more.

Lumos is an organization that  rescues children from orphanages and reunite them with their families.

Lumos is an organization that rescue children from orphanages and reunite them with their families. They change education, health and social care systems so they can all be protected and protected.

Other people and organizations help vulnerable children escape poverty and be cared for within their families or communities. Tara Winkler is one of them. In her conference at TED (click on the image below to watch the video of the conference), she speaks out against the spread of orphanages in developing countries, caused by the good intentions of foreign donors, and of harm that comes to children when they are separated from family and left to grow up in institutions.

Tara is the Managing Director of the Cambodian Children’s Trust (CCT) which she established with Jedtha Pon in 2007 in order to rescue fourteen children from a corrupt and abusive orphanage. She has led CCT through a number of significant organisational changes, including the closure of the initial CCT orphanage in favour of a family-based care model to empower Cambodian families to escape poverty, assist institutionalised children return to families, and help orphanages transform to a family-based care model. Her first book, ‘How (NOT) to Start an Orphanage – by a woman who did’ was published in April 2016.

“How (not) to start and orphanage… by a woman who did” by Tara Winkler

 

in Nigeria (April 2018), the authorities shut down 2 illegal orphanages and a baby factory 

In Nigeria, 162 children were rescued from a baby factory.

 

Pregnant women sometimes end up in the baby factories after they have been promised health care, but after delivery their babies are simply taken away from them. In other cases, women are raped and conceived. The babies and children are then sold for adoption, used for child labor, smuggled to Europe for prostitution or ritual murder. In 2013, seventeen pregnant teenagers and eleven babies were rescued from a home in the southeastern state of Imo. The girls declared to be raped by one man. Click on the image above to read more.

The first reported case of baby factory was published by the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization in 2006. Several more baby factories claiming to be orphanages were revealed over the years by police raids.

In 2014, the proliferation of baby factories and child trafficking in Nigeria has led Denmark  to ban adoptions from Nigeria after raid on baby factory. In 2016, Denmark also banned adoptions from Ethiopia after a series of inspection at adoption facilities in the country. Early this year, Ethiopia banned adoption of children by foreigners. Ethiopian MP said orphans and other vulnerable children should be cared should be care by local system, in order to protect them from abuse abroad. Ethiopia is not the first country that stopped adoptions by foreigners. Country after country has closed due to corruptions, and when a country is closed  adoption agencies simply moves to another country where the stories repeat.  (Read the article, The Lie We Love and watch the documentary, Search a Child, Pay Cash).

Child trafficking through international adoption continues despite regulations

Think first before signing their petition.

Those who need kids to stay in orphanages the most are the adoption agencies and prospective adopters. The adoption industry needs the orphan industry to supply the demand. And prospective adopters need the orphan industry to get what they want (babies). The demand of adopters is for healthy babies or young healthy children.   International adoption creates more new baby ‘orphans’ and adoptable ‘paper orphans‘.  It seldom saves the existing real orphans who are older or disabled than  requested by adopters.

While in the USA, people are signing the petition launched by adoption profiteers and adoption-advocacy groups  to save international adoptions,

In their own country,…

American born babies, mostly African American babies, are sent for adoption to Canada and Europe

Canadian parents pay less to adopt African American babies

America’s unseen export: children, most of them black

“But that organization is mired in controversy, because of the fees it charges its Canadian clients. According to its information package, the costs attached to adopt a white baby can be as much as US $44,000. Biracial? A bit cheaper. But for black babies? Even less. On average, no more than $35,000 US — a discount of close to $15,000 US.”

“Just as the U.S. looks to China and other countries, Canadians look to the United States,” says Jane Turner of Adopt Illinois, a private adoption agency. Adopt Illinois is one of 26 agencies in the U.S. accredited by the State Department to handle adoptions involving an American-born child and foreign parents.

Adoption of US-born children by non-US citizens approved in France, Italy, and the Netherlands.

This statistic shows the number of outgoing (emigrating) adoptions processed in the United States in 2016, by receiving country. In 2016, total  89 American children were adopted by families living in Canada or Europe; 39 of them were adopted to Canada.

children are advertised on Internet for re-adoption (legalized rehoming of adopted children);

With WIAA (Wasatch International Adoption agency), you can adopt children and give them back for re-adoption if you’re not satisfied or you can adopt children second hand

Adopted children are advertised on their Facebook page, Second Chance Adoptions

“this is a child you could adopt with much less cost and much less time”, says an ad.

“Available. This kid is being relisted…was adopted from Africa 5 years ago”

“…was recently adopted (March 2018) internationally from an Asian country”

 in an annual event called Meet The Kids, companies and associations use highly marketing methods to place children;

catalog of children abandoned by their adoptive families

children parade to find parents

Images above from a French documentary, Enfants jetables (Disposable children), about rehoming of children in the USA.

children on Internet to find parents

images above: photolisting of children to find parents

children are rehomed through Internet, given to strangers their adopters have never met;

watch the youtube video child exchange or click on the image above to read the detailed written report.

some unwanted children are kicked out from their adoptive homes and end up homeless;

 

 

children are abused or murdered in their adoptive homes

Hana Williams, adopted from Ethiopia, was murdered by her adoptive parents in 2011.

 

Sherin Mathews, 3 years old adopted from India, was murdered by her adoptive father in 2017.

adoptees are 4 times more likely to commit suicide than non-adoptees;

 

adult adoptees are not given automatic citizenship and face deportation or are deported back to their birth country

Adopted at 8 from S. Korea into an American family, Phillip Clay was deported 29 years later, in 2012. He ended his life on May 21, 2017 by jumping from the 14th floor of an apartment building.

 

Adopted at 9 months old from Vietnam, Denise discovered she wasn’t as US citizen when she sought her birth certificate to apply to become a Philadelphia police officer in the mid 1990s.

“We call on Congress to uphold the promise to adoptees by fixing the legal loophole and passing the Adoptee Citizenship Act of 2018 allowing citizenship for all adoptees of US citizen parents.”  Adoptee Rights Campaign.

Fix first before demanding to bring in more children!

 

The first time I heard of adoption

When I was kid ( a non-adopted kid in Korea), after I entered first grade, we became so poor that we once searched in the garbage dump for foods and we gleaned  radish and cabbage left in the fields after the harvest.

My sister was friend with the daughter of a rich family in our neighborhood. They lived in a house of more than one room, they owned a TV, and a piano and they had a beautiful rose garden in front of their living room. Everything they owned was unusual at that time. Compared to a family in the Western country, they weren’t rich, but they were the richest in the world to my knowledge as a child. She always wore wore beautiful clothes (while other children had only one set of clothes to go to school and one set for home). My sister would draw her new clothes for my paper doll. I thought she was lucky until the day I heard she was adopted. I didn’t know what adopted meant, so my sister said her parents were not her real parents. I then had assumed that her real parents were dead, and although she didn’t look unhappy I thought it was terrible. The sad revelation made me appreciate my life and my family. I tried to imagine my life without dad but couldn’t imagine. It was too horrible. I didn’t want to live with another family for all the clothes in the world, nor even for all foods in the world.

That’s how much my family meant to me.

Ironically I got adopted three years later into a rich country where there were clothes and foods in profusion, while my father was still alive. When you take a child from the poor and give him/her to the rich in exchange of money, what’s left to the poor? Nothing.

My father had nothing else after losing me, but the “birth” parents don’t matter for people who promote adoption.

I just need to comment to a comment

Someone to the post Almost Aborted wrote, “Be a round Korean, learn Korean and serve in the Korean Army.”

Korea sent me to a white community  where there were no Asians.
A community where I was mocked, bullied and threatened for my slant eyes.
I was called “The Chinese” or “La Chinoise” if not “la sale Chinoise (the dirty Chinese)” by everyone around me, even by the few black people.
Korea sold me  to white people who taught me that to be an Asian was a shameful thing, that to be Asian = to be a geisha.

Koreans sent me to a foreign land where there were no Koreans around me.
As I mentioned in the post “Almost Aborted”,  Koreans crossed off the date of bearer’s return on my visa to ensure I wouldn’t go back to Korea for a long time.
I completely lost my language within two years of my arrival on this land for having nobody to talk to.
The loss of mother language was traumatic.

To be told to to be around Koreans, to learn Korean  and to serve in the Korean army sounds sardonic to me.