Adoption

Adoption documentary "Stuck" on NF

Anyone want to discuss? Just happened upon it and have started o watch it. Focus on int'l.

DS born 8/2010 - preliminary stages of SN int'l adoption - fur mama to 2 shelter dogs;  cloth diapering, babywearing, EBFing mama

Re: Adoption documentary "Stuck" on NF

  • What's NF?

    I went looking and I think she meant Netflix.

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  • Ah, thank you.
  • I don't think I can at this point in our adoption. Too many disappointments; too painful.
  • I had not seen or heard of it before your post, but I watched it this morning.  It was interesting to me, but extremely sad.  We are not pursuing IA (we are foster to adopt).  It breaks my heart that so many children languish for so long when families here are fighting so hard for them.
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  • I really enjoyed it.  I though several of the points in the movie not only have to do with international adoption but domestic adoption and "greed" in general.  I thought it was very well done and of course there is always two sides to the story I don't think enough people realize why international adoption can be so risky and that Hauge isn't as great as we expected it to be.  
    Brenda & Phillip married 10/10/09 

    After 6 years of failed cycles, we were blessed with our little man through adoption. 
    B born 1/3/2012. Adoption finalized 12/27/12

    Back  on the IF crazy train...
    Sept 2013 - IVF #1 -  BFP, EDD 6/4/14, born 6/8/14
    Everyone welcome

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  • I just watched it. It was more even-keeled than I suspected, and I think the producers really did a good job at showing that there isn't just one type of problem causing the delays in international adoption. But the movie was less than an hour and a half, and so they could just touch on topics without really explaining them or their views on why each part contributed to the delays. I agree with a lot of what was said, disagree with a few points, and feel it may be a bit misleading to people who aren't involved in the adoption world because it glosses over a lot and these issues are very complex.

    First, I believe that baby selling and unethical adoptions have been the way of the world for centuries, and that it is only within the last 20 years or so that there has been a movement to make adoptions more ethical.  This has happened hand-in-hand with the movement to make the focus the children's well-being, both while they are in care and after.  Most reputable, ethical adoption authorities are now focused on *finding families for children* and not the other way around; this may seem like a small distinction, but it greatly determines how they operate in terms of who they are "working for" and motivated "to please."

    To that end, I believe the Hague is a great outline/starting place.  As this is all a relatively new movement, there will always be difficulties in finding the most efficacious way of doing things.  Difficulties with the Hague are that it requires quite a bit of proof surrounding the background of the child and their relinquishment.  As the movie did a good job of pointing out, this is particularly difficult when you are dealing with countries plagued by poverty, famine, unstable governments, and other situations that render what Americans consider basic civil services unimaginable.  Add to that the fact that each country has different cultures that frame how they view relinquishment, adoption, single parenthood, etc., and you run into all sorts of obstacles that the writers of the treaty may not have foreseen.  Still, I think they did a pretty good job, for a first try.  They built in a lot of work-arounds to make it possible to adopt children abandoned without a trace of their biological families...but those work-arounds take time.  Which is one of the reasons it is highly unlikely to adopt a child under the age of 18 months from a Hague Country.

    Another thing about Hague is that there are a lot of countries that follow the guidelines, or have substantially similar rules, but don't have or want to spend the money to put it into legislation.  As a result, implementing Hague alone is not enough to know if a country has ethical practices. There are lots of places that are very ethical in their adoption practices, but haven't codified it and may have possibly eliminated some of the red tape that way.

    With regard to the Haiti storyline, a lot was left unsaid.  Haiti is not a cosignatory to the Hague Convention, so their process is very different, and I believe unethical.  Before the earthquake, the process looked something like this:  parents receive referrals of their children at the very beginning of the process, after which, it can take them two to four years to complete their process.  During that time, the parents are expected to pay for their children's care (and I believe to pay for their time in care up until that point, too), but only a fraction of what they are asked to pay actually goes to the children.  The adoption authorities then sit on the case files as long as they can, so they can continue to get as much money from as many waiting parents as possible, for as long as possible.  I know parents who literally went to Haiti and searched through offices to find their files so that their process could move on; more than once, their files were in a completely different office/building/part of the process than where they were told it was, and if they hadn't flown down there, no one may ever have found them and directed them to the right place.  All the while, their children were losing weight from undernourishment and untreated, but completely manageable illnesses.  It took that family over three years to bring their two children home.

    Then the earthquake hit.  There was chaos, and families were separated.  The UN was there to help, and UNICEF became terrified that children whose parents were still alive but not yet found would be adopted.  Enter the group that tried to smuggle a handful of children into the DR, and their fears hit fever pitch.  They called for all adoptions out of Haiti to be immediately halted.  It sounds good on paper, but there were lots of families that had already completed all the requirements for their adoptions and were already legal, but they weren't able to bring their children home.  One of the posters on AFB was friends with one of these families.  They pleaded to their US Senator, who, if I have my story accurate, somehow commissioned a military plane, and they flew down with Marines in the middle of the night to virtually smuggle their children (and those of a few other families in similar circumstances) out of the country.

    Which brings me to why I developed a hatred towards the UNICEF (and later the UN).  Contrary to what they said in the film, they are anti-international adoption.  Even in the film, I think you can see that their denials aren't really convincing.  They basically openly admitted to allowing their representatives throughout the world implement anti-adoption policies.  They are not alone in their thinking--there are several African organizations that also think it's better for children to languish in their own nations rather than thrive in others and lose their culture--and the imposition of this philosophy by external forces on the people and authorities of countries who cannot support their orphans is creating a serious slow-down in the processing of adoptions.

    I am sad my boys will lose a lot of their cultural Heritage.  I am sad that M will never really believe us when we tell him he is native Peruvian and his mother most likely spoke Aymarain.  I am sad that they long for the food and music and only have limited access to those things here.  But do I think it would be better for them to have aged-out of the system in Peru, only to become social outcasts hanging on to the lowest rung of society in Peru?  Hell, no!  Such thinking is irresponsible, and the prerogative of people privileged enough never to have had to face those life prospects.

    Hmm, I know there was more to which I wanted to respond, but there's a start.  If I think of anything more, I'll be sure to add it.

    Oh, and just as a side note, we adopted from Peru because we knew that the orphanages were very child-developmentally centered and the process was as ethical as you could get (even if they did have some requirements that were unnecessary and infuriating).  It was important to us that no one could ever call our adoption into scrutiny in the future as possibly being unethical or illegal.  Knowing that there are cases children who were adopted as infants who were facing deportation as teens because their adoptions were ruled illegal made us seek out only those programs that we felt followed the best practices and could never be called into question.  Now, we are in a situation we could never have expected, in which the school district is calling into question the validity of M's birth certificate, and we are banking everything we've got on the stringency and transparency of that process.  Isn't it amazing how life comes full circle?
  • Captain, our efforts to adopt have been frustrated by those very African organizations, and I think I would be very hard-pressed to believe any member of them grew up as an orphan and aged out of an orphanage in their countries. I'll bet most of them grew up with bodyguards and drivers and lived behind high gates. I have to work hard to not hate them, which is terrible! But I know of so many families with children who have died in orphanages of treatable causes while their paperwork was sat on and delayed and "lost" (or lost, fine). How do you reconcile the facts without being absolutely furious? I don't know yet.
  • I'm so sorry to hear that, @MrsMuenich .  I think it's really only time that makes it not hurt so much.

    As for letting it go, I wish fewer people just rolled with the punches.  I'm to blame of this, too.  Once most families are through the process, they rightfully focus on their new family members.  Unfortunately, the side effect of this is that we fail to continue the fight against anti-adoption policies and it's left to those in the process to carry on.  Families in the process, however, often have too much at stake to feel like they can really and fully fight the fight, and very few are left to push for these kids.
  • astroMomastroMom member
    edited January 2014
    I had not heard that about Haiti before.  I was seriously shaking from crying when I saw the little baby being so small and told she only got 2 bottles a day.  I just cannot pretend to understand that in light of what you are saying about them purposely trying to keep them in that system longer.  DS1 was bio & nursed by me, and he definitely ate frequently at that age.  So heartbreaking.

    Right now we are working with a country that isn't Hague officially but has many of the same guidelines in place.  SW says she is a very blunt person and can actually highly recommend our agency, so I hope for the best.  SW even said she has told people before that they are working with a bad agency!  She rocks;  I think being post-official-retirement and now working for herself emboldens her, and I am all for brutal honesty in this process.

    DS born 8/2010 - preliminary stages of SN int'l adoption - fur mama to 2 shelter dogs;  cloth diapering, babywearing, EBFing mama

  • I have about a million thoughts on this post, but I'll try to keep it brief.

    We had hoped to be in the process of our second adoption (IA this time) through Colombia.  Unfortunately, for the time being they've closed their program.  We loved their program because it was so thorough and the children were SO well cared for.  Honestly, their DCFS program is better then ours (at least in my home state) in many, many ways.

    Watching this documentary, was symbolic to me of every form of adoption (DIA, Foster to Adopt, and IA).  In all of these avenues there are good solid people trying to make it an ethical, legitimate process.  And there are people who aren't so good, out for money and out for pride.  

    I believe Hague was a great place to start.  But it's not the end all.  It's not something that can simply be rolled out in every single situation (IE: it's not an out of the box fit).  There are countries that don't have the infrastructure (technology, record keeping systems, etc) to fully implement it the way it was drafted by countries that DO have these systems and didn't give second thought to how it would roll out in a country that didn't.  The system is very broken, and we have VERY corrupt people in place that are blocking progress from being made for very political reasons (Hello, Russia?)  

    I stopped donating to UNICEF after watching that video.  It broke my heart, as from a domestic stance seeing how UNICEF has worked in local communities, they've been great.  But I refuse to donate to an organization who is a non for profit and thus not suppose to have political standing, take political stances and this absurd.

    I am heart broken for these children who are being malnourished, and even dying when they have families waiting for them who could get them the care and love they deserve. 

    However, I do NOT subscribe to the ideal that ALL of these children are better off in America then in their own countries.  There are some large movements in super churches that believe in the idea of bringing all these orphans to Christian homes and kids are brought into homes not ready for them and I hear (or read on blogger sites) to many times "well, at least their here".  Some of these foster homes and orphanages are giving GREAT care to these kids, and they may not have iPads, or PS3/4's, but they are fed, loved, and given all they need to thrive.

    That being said, obviously it's a very broken, messy situation.  I don't know that it can or will be perfect.  The documentary did at least open my eyes to UNICEF and their grotesque practices as well as some individuals in the State Department that prompted me to write many a letter to my congressman/senators about their job performance and need for further investigation into their job duties.

    All that for- yes, I watched it.  Yes, it broke my heart.  And yes, I think the system is just...broken.  
  • I agree, completely, that children should never be placed in a home where the sole desire is to evangelize. Adopting an older child, specifically, means that the family will face some difficult times. Often, people who adopt with the idea of bringing another soul to Christ, are not properly prepared for what they will face, and that's when problems can arise. Lately I've read way too many stories of adoptions that have failed or dissolved because the families were not prepared or otherwise able to handle the very typical difficulties which of income with adopting an older child.

    that being said, I do believe that children do much better in an environment in which they can feel the love of a family. A family that they will never outgrow, a family that will be with them for their lifetime. Foster home situations are the best one can hope for for institutionalized children, but they are no substitute for family. Even in cases where the child grows up and moves out but can still rely on the foster family and friends, the bonds are not the same as those better developed when the child can have a true familial relationship.

    I see it in my own sons of all the time. Every time they get to a place what I think they're completely comfortable in our home and in our family, old demons rise to rock the boat. it's an ongoing process that follows them through life, an ongoing process thateven having a strong bond for the family can only help to manage, an ongoing process that no one should have to live with alone.

    in most countries child ages out of the foster care for adoption system, they become social outcasts. They are relegated to the lowest jobs society has to offer. They often haven't had the education, access to medical care, and/or therapies they need to be able to succeed in the workplace or other societal endeavors beyond the most basic forms participation. their lives are destined from the start never to be a full as the live a fully enfranchised members of the society. for that reason, I believe it is better for a child to be adopted than to age out of the system, but that doesn't mean the child needs to enter a Christian home, an American home, or any other specific type of home. It doesn't mean they need to leave the country of their birth. What it does mean is that they need to be a fully loved, equal member of a family that pursued adoption because they wanted to add a child to the family and was properly prepared for all the added complications adoption can bring.
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