It’s a sad reflection that, even today, now the Wild West days of adoption are said to be behind us, that babies are still being trafficked on the open market under the banner of ‘Adoption’. Even now, it’s almost impossible to say whether a baby is a true orphan or not, particularly in the developing world, where the cost of a life drastically drops and measures aren’t in place to protect the most vulnerable. Wherever there’s a buck to be made -and in adoption there are Billions- the rules are easily bent or circumvented.
If someone arrives in an orphanage with a baby or lost-looking young child, who is to say where that baby has come from, or what *actually happened to their parents? The baby can be stolen and sold, transported just 50-100miles from home and they’re as good as lost. Any story can be made up. New papers drawn up.
The baby can’t tell you they have a loving mother, father, family desperately looking for them. They just look sad, shocked and bewildered, unable to articulate their actual circumstances. The paperwork will guess their age and they’ll be placed in the shopwindow for prospective parents desperate to create a family of their own.
This is the story for countless babies across China and the Far East, India, Africa, with the West clamouring for babies they can no longer source so easily in their own back yard.
The whole conversation about adoption, made louder during NAM National Adoption Month is entirely about and from the prospective families, their needs, over and above the voices of those that have actually lived the experience. It’s about babies for people who for whatever reason can’t have one. Not the wishes, the needs of the baby. Those are entirely taken as read, assumed to be solved by money and the promise of a middleclass upbringing.
Even now, it can be illegal for adult adoptees to obtain their own original birth certificates. In a sane, so-called free society, how is that ever right?
