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It's hardly a souvenir. There are travels - off you go, and when you come back, it's more than just a vase or a scarf you've brought back...your family is a little bigger.
Adoptive mom Stephanie posts about why they went to China when they adopted their first:
When you adopt a Child from China, the adoption takes place in China. You begin your new lives together in the child's homeland. The visit also allows us to purchase trinkets from our child's country, gifts to give over the years. When we adopted our first daughter, Katy, we bought her a jade pendant to give to her on her 16th birthday and a beautiful pearl bracelet to wear on her wedding day. We also have several less expensive gifts tucked away in our attic, saving them for appropriate times. --Journey to Lindsey
Mac wrote about her family's departure from China with their new daughter:
China is Cali's birth country, and Guangdong is her birth province. We spent two weeks here experiencing the culture and way of life. China will always have a place in our hearts and should always have a place in Cali's heart. --Crazy about Cali
And at Journey to Emma Clare, an adoptive mom writes about her hopes for her kids when they're able to take them to see their countriy of origin:
Sure, I can understand that some adoptive parents go to China not because they want to travel there, but because they want to adopt a child from China. But how can you take in a child from a country and not want to visit that country and a least have a small understanding of the culture? You do your child harm in being so ignorant & intolerant yourself.--Journey to Emma Claire
Adoption tourism has detractors, of course:
his is a new form of tourism. Visit us! We have teeming wildlife, colourful natives and unspoiled vistas. Further, in your guest suites you will find our complimentary fruit basket, bottle of champagne, box of assorted chocolates, complimentary tickets allowing you to enter the lottery to buy the African country of your choice, your personal slave and of, course, an adoptable infant guaranteed to be cute, black, lovable and incapable of speech and thus at your complete mercy. --Diary of a Mad Kenyan Woman
And from an adoption case worker:
I've always been slightly suspicious of international adoptions. The power relations involved in "adoption tourism" (for lack of a better term. I may have just made that up.) are astounding; the colonial relations that make it so that some nations have so many children to export, while other nations can so easily take those children away. And how much thought is put into taking children away from their homes, their families, their cultures and languages?--A Womb of Her Own
It has long been acknowledged that American adopters will go to foreign countries to adopt in order to avoid "messy" interactions with the parents of the children they covet. Here in the US, it is hard to avoid the mother of the adopted child due to open adoption, reunions and now, contested adoptions. It has also long been observed that there is an arrogance in the American adopter that assumes our material wealth and (sometimes questionable) national values make us a superior environment to their own country for any child, regardless of their families, cultures and beliefs. I have heard enough from a few adult Asian and other foreign adoptees to know that they are not the most "grateful" group on the planet. If anything, many of them feel robbed of both their original families AND their native cultures. This need to be seen as "saviors" by the American adopter is becoming downright pathological and, as I said before, extremely arrogant.--Motherhood Deleted
But there's something of a response to that point of view here:
Anti-international adoption activists like to muddy the waters between adoption and child-trafficking. Although there are unscrupulous individuals who are happy to benefit from the profit of baby selling, that is not the same as legal international adoption. These activists like to argue that children should not lose their heritage, religion or culture, but in all the orphanages I have visited I have yet to see a country’s “heritage, religion or culture†– an orphanage is no one’s culture!
The most interesting voices to me in this debate were from kids who were adopted from other cultures.This is the other side of adoption tourism - when kids adopted from other cultures
