Why Reopen Cambodian Adoptions?

There has been chatter again about reopening Cambodia. Having watched from the sidelines during its glory years and while it was closing and listening to friends who adopted there discover everything they were told about their child’s “orphan” status was a lie, I am always concerned when I hear about the country reopening.

Adoption advocates claim better controls are now in place. Oh, really? Considering it was just as dirty as Ethiopia is now I find that hard to believe.

The following is an excerpt from a recent Riverkids mailing,

“Then I remember the three babies in Cambodia I met on my last trip in September. They were just over a month old, three healthy lovely babies in clean clothes, cuddled and cooed over by their mothers while we talked, clearly loved and cared for. I talked with their young mothers, street sex workers. We’d helped them with pre-natal care and now we hoped to help them train and find safe jobs to support their families. Each of the women were already back on the streets working. They had worked almost up to the day of delivery – their clients didn’t care. And the women needed to buy food for their families, no matter how much it hurt. At the end of our discussion, I asked if they’d ever thought of selling their babies. And despite all the time I’ve spent in Cambodia, despite being the adoptive mother of four children who were trafficked, I was still shocked at their answers. Yes, two of them said. And yes, they’d sold a baby before. One of them, cradling her little girl and looking at her with the tender gaze of a new parent, said that she would have to sell her soon. She had debts, a sick mother and her toddler to support on her own. Her husband had run off, and the trafficker who had bought her infant son when she was desperate a year before, had heard of her new daughter and offering even more. Now she had to choose between watching her son and mother go hungry or saying goodbye to her baby – again.The other woman had given birth in a hospital, complicated with severe blood loss. Afterwards, the doctor demanded a delivery fee and her husband went to beg and borrow the US$35 they managed to bargain him down to. While he was away, the doctor threatened her until she agreed to sell her newborn to him. She said, staring at the wall, her voice a whisper, that she knew the doctor had sold her child to a rich local family, but when she tried to find him, the family moved. Heartbroken, she had given up hope of finding him – but this new baby, she said, she would never sell.”

Hmmm, does that sound like a system where international adoption agencies can possibly run a clean program? Countries like Cambodia have a very long way to go before they can ethically offer international adoption as one option for truly orphaned children. Without excellent government controls in place if reopened it is likely to turn into a child harvesting, child selling free for all once again. Once open, turning off the spigot takes time and resources. During that time many relationships are broken and lives permanently damaged in the process. Is that really what people want?

Instead, why don’t we support programs that help mothers parent their children and when that fails support programs that find and train foster and adoptive families IN Cambodia? If the answer is that foreign families don’t want to do that then we must conclude they are only interested in reopening Cambodia so they can adopt children for themselves. Not so child-centered is it?

**If you are interested in helping children and families in Cambodia, please consider supporting organizations like Riverkids.

REFORM Puzzle Piece