Facts: Kidnapping Is Always a Crime and Adoption Desperately Needs Reform

For more about Guatemalan adoption, and both its beauty and controversial underbelly, please check out my book, “Between Light and Shadow: A Guatemalan Girl’s Journey through Adoption” (http://www.nebraskapress.unl.edu/product/Between-L...,674763.aspx):

In Between Light and Shadow veteran journalist Jacob Wheeler puts a human face on the Guatemalan adoption industry, which has exploited, embraced, and sincerely sought to improve the lives of the Central American nation’s poorest children. Fourteen-year-old Ellie, abandoned at age seven and adopted by a middle-class family from Michigan, is at the center of this story. Wheeler re-creates the painful circumstances of Ellie’s abandonment, her adoption and Americanization, her search for her birth mother, and her joyous and haunting return to Guatemala, where she finds her teenage brothers—unleashing a bond that transcends language and national borders.

Following Ellie’s journey, Wheeler peels back the layers of an adoption economy that some view as an unscrupulous baby-selling industry that manipulates impoverished indigenous Guatemalan women, and others herald as the only chance for poor children to have a better life. Through Ellie, Wheeler allows us to see what all this means in personal and practical terms—and to understand how well-intentioned and sometimes humanitarian first-world wealth can collide with the extreme poverty, despair, misogyny, racism, and violent history of Guatemala.

Clarification of my earlier comment; I wasn't kidnapped and I didn't intend to suggest a parallel in that regard. My musings simply arose from my attempt to imagine myself in the place of the child. From that point of view, the legal issues are less relevant than the emotional ones.

"What is family, and who gets to define it?" That was one of several questions raised by a speaker at my church this morning, and it is probably the defining question of my life.

This news story haunts me. But my emotional response to it surprises me. I am an adoptive parent, and I know first hand how powerful (and mother-bearish) the emotions of an adoptive mother can be. I am also a reunited adult adoptee, and though I have a strong bond with by biological family, I'm also connected to my adoptive family by threads of love and shared experience, and I'm grateful that I've never had to choose one family over the other. But when I really check in with myself, on an emotional level, and ask myself the question of where that child belongs, surprisingly, there is no ambivalence. I believe the child belongs with the biological family.

Really? My entire life is defined by adoption, and that's what I come up with!? Is the biological bond really that strong?

I grew up in a very loving adoptive family, yet throughout my childhood I fantasized about escaping from it. I would fall asleep at night thinking over my plans to run away. These plans were very vague; I thought little of how I would survive or what I would do after I set off ... but I knew which direction I would head in. It wasn't until many years later, as an adult, that the significance of that direction struck me. I was planning to head toward the hospital in which I was born, the place where the separation from my biological mother occurred. It was a fantasy of return.

If I had been removed from my adoptive family at age six and returned to my biological mother, would that have been traumatic for me? I honestly don't know. I know that separation from my biological mother was traumatic, but would the trauma go both ways? On an intellectual level, I'm telling myself yes; surely it would. But that's not what I feel in my body when I try to imagine the hypothetical situation of myself at age six returning to my birth mother, leaving "the only family I'd ever known." It seems that such an imagining should strike a note of terror in me, but it doesn't. The dominant emotion is relief. After that comes sadness and grief, morning the loss of the adoptive family. But that's not the same as trauma.

But this is obviously all speculation, from the point of view of an adult, not an actual child. The hard reality of the child in the news story is likely very different from the psychological reality of my childhood "return fantasy." In the real world, it's hard to imagine a situation involving a post-adoption return as anything but tragic. Such situation should not occur, and would not occur if better safeguards were in place to prevent such adoptions in the first place. I completely agree with Jenna that adoption reform should be a top priority.

Rebecca Hawkes

www.rebeccahawkes.com

Mothers should be supported to keep their children, I think that is healthy. If, in a case where , such as cancer, car accident etc. there is no option, that is another matter. Our family had an experience where a friend of our child was taken into custody by DYFS. But we were not sure if the whole situation was in fact honest or convoluted..a ploy by the school counselor and the DYFS. To our knowledge the kids life not only did not benefit..he and his brother supplied more children with questionable situations who would also be DYFS 'customers'. Gross and horrific..yes!?

I agree with you.

I just met a grown woman living in the US from Belize who told me her own adoption story. I'll have to write about it, it was very sad and heartrenching. And it was along these lines.

I know I'm not a mother by adoption. I did have a moment in our lives when I embraced the possibility of adopting instead. But I couldn't imagine having a child that I knew had come to me in such a way! How I could live with myself, I have no idea. Perhaps it's because I lost a baby and had braced myself for the thought that I couldn't have a child to call my own and couldn't imagine someone taking away the two precious darlings I do have now biologically.

I'd hunt someone down and kill them if they took my children. No really, I would.

And the idea that somehow a life in America is better than a life in another country, being an immigrant, I find HIGHLY offensive. Especially when divorce rates and obesity are so high in our country and people talk about how children are molested and abused and our foster care system here STINKS beyond compare.

How can that be better? Than a family who had their child STOLEN from them?! Who loved that child? Who wanted that pregnancy? Who could have been like myself, on my knees asking God to please please let me become a mother.

The same people who think the child would be best with the adoptive parents. I ask, "Would it be the same if the child was kidnapped from an American family and taken to another country for adoption?" Nobody would say that was ok. Why is it different that the child is in the US?

So sad...

in the end its all for the child. no matter who is hurt by it the child is old enough to choose who they feel safe with. so many children suffer in this world...where is the respect for the children...adults are so darn selfish.

The adoption laws in this country desperately need overhauling. My parents had foster children when I was a teen and the courts will often return children regardless of whether the birth parents are fit (even if they abandon a child many times). This situation is terrible all around, but the most important thing has to be the health of the child. This little girl is leaving the only family she's ever known and it will be a huge adjustment. I am sure her adoptive parents simply didn't want to ever have to part from her, even knowing they were in the wrong, because the attachment you develop is so strong. I hope that they won't be cut off from her completely, because I think that would actually be worse for her heart.

Society has long been told that leaving a child with the adoptive parents has been in the "best interests of the child" without any real foundation to support that statement. As a mother, I have to question that kind of thinking. A child's best interests are always and should always be skewed to the biological/natural family. Not because the adoptive parents are bad people, but because a child raised in an adoptive family unnecessarily ends up a mental health mess. Research of over 50 years backs that up. In the US, social services uses the argument "best interests of the child" to validate removal of children from their homes.... a great number of these removals (over 60%) are not for real cause, but assumptions. An even greater number of the children are so traumatized by the changes that they never fully recover.

When is best interests going to be real? When people stop assuming that because they have the money, they have the power... and they know best.

This is scary and horrible all around!! As an adoptive mother, and having my own biological child, I cannot imagine the pain...for any of them...if one of my kids were kidnapped I wouldn't sleep until I found them! God bless this child, and these families!! Yes, this sucks! And yes to reform, reform, reform! You are absolutely right, this should NOT be happening in 2011....ever! This will likely scare the hell out of anyone who has adopted internationally....and should make those going forward question - everything!!! Hoping your post will help those in process and push them to be more alert and ask the hard questions. Thanks for sharing and shedding the light on a very emotional & personal process!

Rita Brennan Freay

http://ritabrennanfreay.com