Years ago, in
a European city, a young adopted woman confronted a
political dissident from Korea with the words: “You
are a leader of a country that sold its own
children, that continues to sell its children. Are
you not ashamed?” At a press conference this
October, the same man, Kim Dae Jung, tearfully
apologized as president of his country to the
hundreds of thousands of infants and children
divested of their identities and exported around the
world in order to spare their communities the
“shame” of their existence. Now, a president agreed
to take upon himself another type of shame — that
of a nation for treating its children in such a
manner. With slaughter in the Balkans, politicians
facing morals charges in Kuala Lumpur and Washington
and his own country under the brutal discipline of
IMF trusteeship, the world barely noticed this
president’s apologia. In distant North America,
only two radio programs even bothered picking up the
story. Yet I am convinced that some day this event
will be seen as a milestone of sorts for the cause
of adoptee human rights.
Activists may
remember 1998 as the time when public entities
around the world first took responsibility for
injustices committed in the name of adoption and
acknowledged that those separated by adoption have
an entitlement to social justice. In Argentina,
Admiral Emilio Eduardo Maserra was arrested for
ordering the adoption and identity deprivation of
the children of his political enemies. In
Australia, a parliamentary commission was convened
in New South Wales to investigate abuses alleged to
have been committed by agencies over four decades of
closed adoption, and to recommend measures of
redress for those affected.
Once
unquestioned and, in large measure, unquestionable,
lawyers, social workers and bureaucrats find
themselves squirming under subpoena on the witness
stand, the hostile questions now directed at them
instead of by them. Guatemala and Romania moved to
properly regulate the often under-monitored and
undocumented flow of infant babies from their
countries to the developed world. In Canada,
Premier Lucien Bouchard apologized on behalf of
Quebec for the plight of the Duplessis Orphans,
whose records were falsified and who were subjected
to years of abuse in state and church-supported
orphanages.
In Ireland,
the apex court of that country refused to
acknowledge the right of birthmothers to perpetual
privacy and ordered their parliament to draft
legislation resolving issues relating to the
informational rights of adoptees, a process which is
still underway. In London, the U.K. government
expressed regret for 160,000 “child migrants,” many
relinquished under coercion, sent from Britain to
destinations around the Commonwealth for adoption
through 1967, and set aside public funds to
facilitate the identification and reunification of
those involved.
Just this
month, Korea’s National Assembly, acting on the
country’s official apology in October, tabled
legislation to offer the right of abode and other
measures to the benefit of a generation lost to
adoption. And, as we all know, in the U.S., voters
in Oregon took the first step toward reconciliation
by passing historic legislation allowing adoptees
access to their original birth certificates for the
first time in nearly half a century.
These
victories are of limited and ambivalent scope.
Maserra may yet be freed by a military court.Some
Australian states still have contact vetoes,
although, to their credit, these are subject to
sunset provisions and languish on the books
unenforced. Canadian reform legislation in several
provinces seems stuck in committee, thanks to
unrelated filibustering and legislative gridlock,
and, to a fault, they all contemplate compromise
provisions. In Ireland, compromise in the form of
disclosure vetoes seems to be the byword. Quebec has
yet to introduce measures to compensate victims for
the horrors of the Duplessis institutions. The U.K.
avoided a full and unconditional apology for its
child migration program (in diplomatic doublespeak
an expression of regret falls just short of saying
sorry).Korea, an OECD country, is still exporting
the odd undocumented and unidentified baby
And, in the
U.S., the National Council for Adoption (NCFA) – the
major force opposing truth and openness in adoption
– continues its tactic of obstruction and
dis-information, litigating against reform
legislation in Oregon and Tennessee and fighting a
rear-guard action in the nation’s media. Meanwhile,
fly-by-night facilitators continue to peddle their
wares from the third world to the infertile rich,
with few or no precautions for full disclosure,
assuring yet another generation of identity-deprived
adoptees. The desperation of their trade is seen in
occasional wire service dispatches relating, with
digital precision, stories about mercenaries
employed to compel relinquishments in the Russian
Federation and gun-battles between the Indonesian
navy and baby smugglers in the Straits of Malacca.
Closer to home
for many, the American government has now officially
given up on collecting statistics on domestic
adoptions, and cross-border imports continue to
increase at a decade-long cumulative average growth
rate of nearly 10% per year. Many of these take
place without any precautions to ensure that the
informational, civil and political rights of
adoptees will be protected. And to add insult to
injury, the U.S., which receives over two-thirds of
cross-border infant adoptees each year, has still
failed to ratify a single international instrument
protecting the rights of the adopted, with
opposition to treaties like the Convention on the
Rights of the Child championed by many of the same
people and organizations who also lead the fight
against adoption reform.
Those opposed to change around the world seem to
have two emotions in common – fear and shame, the
traditional engines of reaction. The fear side of
the equation includes, quite predictably: parents
who are fearful of losing perpetually infantilized
children; adoption agencies, lawyers and
facilitators who, having forgotten they operate in
the public interest, are fearful of what lies they
might have told in years past or of losing their
inventory in years forward; and bureaucrats and
politicians fearful of dredging up old secrets now
conveniently cached in locked file drawers, or of
losing the benefit of future patronage.
On the shame
side, we are told, birthparents live in shame of
their indiscretions or of the violence committed
against them, adoptive parents live in shame of
their infertility, adoptees are creatures of shame
and must live to gratefully serve in order to atone
for the sins of others. And we are also told that
all of these people live in fear of being confronted
with their shame, and hence all the king’s horses
and all the king’s men must protect everyone from
their fear of everyone else by crushing underfoot
just a few civil and political rights. And of
course, the only way we can ascertain the truth of
these claims is from the mouths of the fear-mongers
themselves.
Meanwhile, the
baby sellers, their legal counselors, certain
government and orphanage officials and professional
searchers continue to operate, often in an
atmosphere of relative unaccountability and
regulatory forbearance, capitalizing on markets made
possible, in large measure, by this fear and shame.
This cycle remains intact and, in large measure,
unchallenged. Dis-mantling these impediments to
change, through advocacy, education, bureaucratic
trans-parency, reconciliation, reform and, where
necessary, judicial retribution, will be the next
challenge. 1998 only laid some rather tenuous
groundwork.
Nonetheless, I
believe this past year will be seen as the point
where adoptees got their first glimpse of something
which might sustain optimism in the years to come.
It was the year when a sizable piece of the world
recognized that adoptees have rights, even if only
observed in the breach — that to know one’s
identity, to grow up and become independent adults
in the eyes of the law, to expect accountability
from those who placed them, to have their cultural
and ethnic roots respected, to not have secret and
often doctored files maintained on them, and to have
the legally-protected expectation of being told the
truth about their own lives, are all basic human
rights.
It was the
year when, for the first time, a sizable minority of
interests acknowledged that adoptees too should
benefit from equal protection and non-
discrimination under the rule of law and that they
should be allowed to live free from the shame and
fear of others. Thanks to the efforts of adoptees
and their allies around the world, this minority now
understands that only those who have abused the
rights of others need experience shame, and only
those who have not yet owned up to the policy
mistakes of the past and present need feel fear. In
these respects, adoptees have in 1998 grabbed for
themselves the gift of hope.
Albert S. Wei
is an adoptee. He presently resides in
Southeast Asia, where he works in the securities
industry.