“In very cynical terms, an American told me: “But don’t you understand, buddy, that this is the last reservoir of Caucasian children in the world ?”

Dear Carol,

Last year, I decided make an appointment with your agency to read my adoption file. I arrived on the day of the appointment, and everybody seemed surprised to see me. When I explained why I was there, they called you, Carol, because you didn’t show up. That evening, you wrote in an e-mail that you were “sorry” you “forgot” my appointment. Your colleague Amelia took care of it. Amelia was nice, she was young, she had never worked with my birth country. Amelia didn’t explain how adoptions work for the adopters, for the children. Or for your beautiful agency. Like I was supposed to know. She read out loud the few documents that she saw in my file. She made a copy of those I wanted to take with me. There’s one paper I didn’t ask for, and I wish I had.

Amelia was unable to tell me what a “judicial abandonment” was. She was unable to tell me how the living conditions were at the orphanage, how long I stayed, why I ended up there in the first place. Amelia decided to read me the social investigation your agency did on my adoptive parents, probably because she felt sorry for me. But she also pointed out that my adoptive father was “tolerant and open-minded, he liked meditating, it’s written right here”. From my previous life, there was nothing. “You should ask your adoptive parents”, she said. “At the time, we weren’t as thorough when we were filing the papers”. How many children’s lives were affected by filing methods that weren’t as “thorough” as they are now? When I left, I was bitter, frustrated and angry. I thought: “Those people are responsible for the process that changed my life forever, and they know nothing”.

 

This year, I contacted you again, Carol, to ask you how to get in touch with the intermediary who brought the children from Romania to France. I had clear memories of him, since he went on vacations with my family in France for several years. You gave me two e-mail addresses, and you sent me the link of an association of Romanian adoptees. They could help me find potential brothers or sisters, you said. I thought your beautiful agency helped adoptees “find their roots”. Wasn’t it a “central theme” for adoption agencies? You “invest[ed] more and more on […] the quest for one’s origins” and “your competence in this particular regard [was] well-known”… right? I even found an article about this with beautiful, colorful graphs in one of your magazines. The adoptees association you introduced me to later told me you called them to enquire on the searching process in my birth country, because you had no idea how to proceed yourself. The only thing your beautiful agency did, was to give me a copy of my file -which is the bare minimum-. In some cases, you gave adoptees a file that had nothing or close to nothing in it, or with pictures of another child. And as we saw last year (not you, since you didn’t show up), the psychologist who was supposed to give me “support” simply read out loud papers that I was able to read myself, gave a compliment about my adoptive father without knowing him and told me “sorry, there’s nothing more we can tell you.”

Thank you for introducing me to the Romanian adoptees’ association, though, because their website truly is a gem. You should go check it out. I selected a few sections for you[1]. “Since the 1980s, the number of people from rich countries who want to adopt a child has been ten times higher than the number of children adoptable in poor countries.” “Between 1990 and 2000: over 30 000 Romanian children are adopted abroad.”

 

“The “casa de copii” (literally “children’s homes”) were State institutions were day-care, housing, food and medical care were offered to children whose mothers or parents weren’t financially and/or psychologically capable of doing so, for the amount of time necessary for the parents to get better and take them back.” Interesting. Did you know that a “casa de copii” (the institution I went through) wasn’t an orphanage? “The “Romanian orphans” weren’t all orphans, far from it! It might have been convenient to think so, but 97% of children had a mother who was very much alive and whose identity was known, and some children also had a father. More than 50% of mothers came to see their children. Some on a regular basis, others, less @frequently, and others only on religious holidays.””

In 1993, the Romanian government passe[d] a law according to which a child who ha[d]n’t been visited by his or her parents for six months [could] be declared “abandoned” by the court and thus, become adoptable. Mothers usually didn’t have any means of transportation, and the trick was to move the child to an orphanage which was over 50 km away (30 miles), and there you had it.” This is the law that was used in my case. I was curious about this law from 1993, so I looked it up. I found out that in order to regulate the adoption chaos after the fall of the communist regime, a law demanded that adopters work with an agency authorized to process adoptions by the French, as well as the Romanian authorities[2]. In 1993, the US Congress was discussing Romania’s right to get the Most Favored Nation Clause (a trade agreement). “The US had made improvement of the situation of the Romanian children a condition for this trade agreement, and it was in that context that Romania adopted the so-called “abandonment law”. […] In 1991, an incredible number of intercountry adoptions took place, estimates were more than 10,000. Many children were not adopted from orphanages, but directly bought from poor families. In 1991, a new law was adopted limiting intercountry adoptions to children in children’s homes and orphanages. But the children’s homes’ directors would not give those children, because they were not legally adoptable, more often, the children’s parents would be known and visit their children. As a result of this limitation adoptions dropped enormously in 1992. And thus, under the disguise of wanting to improve the living condition of institutionalized and disabled children, the US congress pushed for an abandonment law, a law that rendered children adoptable.”[3] These two laws,” Law 11/1990 and Law 47/1993 on child abandonment set up the legal framework for the emergence of a Romanian international adoption market after 1994. These two laws create[d] the offer – children legally declared as abandoned and prepared for adoption. In order to have an operating market, the demand need[ed] to be created and the prices established.”[4]

When a child was abandoned, which was not as systematic as you would like me to believe, under which circumstances did the parents give their consent? When you’re living in extreme poverty, when you’re fragile, isolated, when you’re facing social and familial pressures that are sometimes overwhelming, can you really make an informed decision ? When everybody wants you to believe that the only way to make sure your child survives, is to give him or her away forever, can you really make an informed decision? When nobody tells you that you’ll never see your child again, when you are asked to sign a paper you can’t even read, when nobody tells you how new laws might affect you and your child, when nobody, not even the authorities of your own country, offers you any support, even temporarily, can you make an informed decision? When you’ve just given birth to a baby and you have no idea how you’ll make it until tomorrow, can you make an informed decision?

In 2007, Roelie Post described how Holt, an American agency -you work with them for the adoptions of children born in South Korea-, was mandated by Unicef Romania to help prevent abandonments. Here is how those charming people were pressuring young mothers from poor backgrounds to give up their baby: “We discuss with the mother the possibility to consent to adoption right after birth. We wait for the obligatory 45 days to pass and then she signs. We wait another 30 days, during which she may change her mind, and then, the adoption file goes to the DCP [Department of Child Protection]”.[5] What a lovely way to prevent abandonments, indeed. If the tactics used in poor countries to get children for adoption were used in richer countries, people would be outraged. We would all be denouncing the violation of basic human rights, of children’s rights, of women’s rights. When you know that the vast majority of children used to be sent for adoption for economic reasons, it makes you wonder, Carol. With just a little bit of help, how many parents would have been able to keep their children? It was only in 2009, that poverty was no longer deemed a legitimate reason to remove a child from his/her family.[6] For how many decades was this the one and only reason that was used to do precisely that? I’m one of those children who were told: “Your parents were too poor to raise you, that’s why you were adopted.”

I read your nice magazine, Carol, the one from your website. I noticed you wrote an article about the search for one’s origins. I was excited to read what you had to say on the subject. It turns out you actually have a very short experience working on that side of adoptions, and up to now, you have mostly been helping adopters. But there was one section I found particularly appalling.  “What do they want? What are they looking for? They allow themselves, in our offices, which is a symbolic place, to go back to being the little boy or girl they once were and who was left on the side of the road.” Is this what you see in front of you, Carol? Children? People who are still the age they were when they “went through” your agency? You think I came all the way to Paris to “allow myself to be the little girl who was left on the side of the road”?

Your problem, Carol, and the problem of all those people who want us to believe that adoption is a fairy tale (adopters, psychologists, “adoption specialists”, or even the old uncle you meet at your best friend’s wedding), is that you refuse to see that the people most affected by adoption are no longer children, and that they have the intellectual capacities to demand explanations, to question the processes, the practices, and the whole system. You also refuse to see that we are absolutely legitimate in doing so, because in order to become someone else’s child (for international adoptions), we have to lose our natural family (parents, brothers, sisters, and the whole extended family), we have to lose our country, our language, our culture, our religion, and most of all, to lose our identity. Since we were the object of the transaction at the time (a passive object, which didn’t, at any moment, agree to any of it), we understand better than anyone else how it feels, to lose all those things, and how it feels, to be adopted. So you can keep your sympathy.

This year, your beautiful agency made headlines because adoptees from another country, very far from mine, accused you of having deceived their natural families in order to get them adopted in France. “It’s not us, we know nothing”, you claimed. How could an agency who seems to never know anything get the French authorities’ blessing to bring children from all over the world into the country for over 40 years? This encouraged me to keep digging. Remember there’s a paper I forgot to ask for last year? Big mistake, but I had no idea what kind of people I was dealing with at the time.

You were hard to reach, Carol, I had to wait over two months for you to get my file. You scheduled a phone appointment. When I asked you if you thought it was normal that my file had so little information about the Romanian part of the process, you came up with pretty shitty excuses. “You know, we don’t know in what conditions the files were created in the birth countries.” “Maybe the birth countries didn’t ask the parents anything”, “maybe nobody asked anything when the child was left at the orphanage,” “maybe they weren’t very thorough”. There it is again, Carol, your motto: “it’s not us, we not nothing.” With a new little addition: “It’s the birth countries’ fault.”If you didn’t know, if you weren’t really sure, why did you process adoptions from Romania? The European Union asked Romania to halt adoptions long enough to create a child protection system because of all the past malpractices… And you think this happened because the adoption system in Romania wasn’t fraudulent? You think, Carol, that Romania was referred to as a “baby bazaar”[7] or an “ex-supermarket for adoptions”[8] for no reason? Theodora Bertzi, former director of the Romania Committee for Adoptions, used this term to refer to adoptions in Romania, adding: “Children were sent abroad like packages. There was a lot of money involved. They were white and healthy, and adoptions were processed very quickly. Children had become objects used to address adults’ emotional needs.[9]” According to Yves Denechères, a French professor of contemporary history, and Béatrice Scutaru, “Between January 1990 and July 1991, […] orphanages open[ed] their door but the number of adoptable children prove[d] insufficient in front of the exploding demand in rich countries. Many candidates to adoption “tr[ied] their luck in Romania”. “Thus, the rules of a post-war paucity market set in: everything was
for sale and everything could be bought” (Trillat, 1993, p.20).[10]

The report addressed in March 2002 to Romanian Prime Minister Adrian Năstase when the moratorium on adoptions was decided (quoted previously), clearly states that adoptions up to that date were a market. The words « adoption market » are used 6 times in this report.[11] And you’re going to tell me, Carol, that your beautiful agency had no idea? Well, one thing is sure, you guys kept shopping there for over ten years. Back to the phone call. I asked you how come your agency didn’t know more about the adoptions you processed in Romania. You were feeling helpless, you told me. “Try to understand”. “The intermediary isn’t answering”. If he was the only one who knew what was going on, isn’t it a bit concerning? “The people working on Romania at the time are dead, or are old ladies now.” And “If I knew more, I’d tell you, but I can’t, try to understand how helpless I feel”. You weren’t transported into another country, you weren’t told “those people are now to be called “mom” and “dad”, you didn’t have to re-learn your native language to understand what a bunch of undecipherable papers are saying, you didn’t have to look up laws about family, child protection and abandonment to figure out what happened to you, and yet, from your comfortable little office, you were telling me to understand how helpless you felt. I don’t claim to be a psychologist, but weren’t you reversing roles there?

You then asked me in an irritated voice what I wanted to talk about exactly: my abandonment? I know you’re really attached to the concept of “abandonment”, because it gives a legal basis and a moral justification to the removal of children from their birth countries, and to the irrevocable legal and emotional severing of the family ties with their natural parents (in the case of closed adoptions, which are the majority in France). Your beautiful agency makes a living thanks to abandonments, after all. The word “abandonment” itself is placing the entire responsibility for what happened on the natural mothers, who aren’t there to defend themselves. Like they had a choice. That way, their children don’t want to look for them later, because they think they were “abandoned” by a mother who didn’t love them and didn’t want them in her life. But we don’t know that. There’s no way to prove it. It just happens to be really convenient to justify adoptions. If we were a bit more honest, we’d talk about “separation”, because there were one or several separations, chosen, or not. There weren’t actually that many truly abandoned children. When there was an abandonment, coercion, manipulation, lies, blackmail and other appalling tactics were often used to get the desired commodity: a child, as young as possible. I’ve already told you all this. Adoption agencies that held office directly in maternities[12], nurses that refused to let the young mother leave with her child or to give her her child back after birth, children who were declared dead right after birth to be then exported for adoption[13], directors of orphanages – or rather, children’s homes- who refused to let the families see their children[14] (who were placed there, not abandoned), social services that moved children to prevent their families from seeing them, and the authorities which kept orphanages open and filled with children specifically for international adoption were all realities, Carol. In an article published in the Irish Times in 2002, Serban Mihailescu, the Romanian minister for children, said: “the effect of foreign adoptions was « extremely negative » and encouraged officials to keep the institutions full of children. « The number of children in institutions increased because more and more foreigners wanted to adopt Romanian children and more and more of the personnel in the institutions worked as dealers and they pushed the children for the inter-country adoption. It’s like a business, a $100 million business”.[15]

Blaming Romania only would be too easy. Without such a high demand, there wouldn’t have been such a high artificially-created offer of “orphans” to “rescue”. The pressure faced by Romanian authorities from the biggest importing countries (the US, France, Spain, Italy, Israel) was huge, and the lobbying response to any attempt at regulating adoptions was ferocious. In 2002, after the moratorium on international adoptions was decided, adoption agencies from those countries still accepted files from potential adopters and requests were still being sent to the Romanian Committee for Adoptions, hoping they’d be forced to grant them. When negotiations for Romania’s integration into NATO started, “US officials […] warned the Romanian government that a continuing ban could jeopardize acceptance of Romania for NATO membership.”[16] You know what I call that? Adoption blackmail.

You see, Carol, during the almost three months that you asked me to wait in order get my file back, I educated myself on adoptions from Romania in the 1990s. And I only have more questions now. I want to know how the six months without a visit from the family of a child were counted. Who counted the days? Was there a register? Was there a written trace of those visits? Did somebody sign a paper to prove the visit had taken place? Was the visitors’ identity controlled? Where are those papers, Carol? I want clear explanations on that “abandonment”, because right now, I have nothing that proves it. And you’ll understand I don’t really trust you or your agency, given how much you had and still have to gain from all those so-called abandonments.

A few weeks later, after another useless phone call, another e-mail, you ended up agreeing to send me the papers I didn’t get the first time. By e-mail. Finally. Welcome to the 21^st century. I found more inconsistencies, that once again, you couldn’t explain. “It’s not us, we don’t know.” I get it. In the meantime, I kept working on the file sent to me by the French authorities (which contains papers you claimed you didn’t have) and I realized there were abandonment papers from the court of my birth region. I managed to read my natural parents’ address at the time. I found a few dates. Maybe these details aren’t true, or maybe I’m not interpreting them accurately. But they were right there from the beginning, in a document that neither your agency nor my parents ever bothered to decipher and have translated. Because, the truth is, you didn’t care. What mattered to your beautiful agency, and to my parents, was to get a child, to erase his/her identity, to bury his/her past. And they lived happily ever after, with the poor, abandoned orphan that they saved from a life of misery.

You see, Carol, nobody told me that having to deal with you would be the most challenging and nerve-racking part of the whole process. Imagine what it’s like for people who don’t have enough support, time, energy, or mental space, to do all this. I can’t help but think that you and your agency are treating adoptees that way on purpose, because if it was easier, maybe more people would start asking questions. In your agency’s magazine, you write that you have a “symbolically important role as the intermediary between the original and adoptive families, as the guardian of the adoptee’s pre-adoptive and adoptive histories.” This sums up beautifully all the lies your agency has been writing about its “help” in adoptees’ search for their roots. You are, indeed, the intermediary. But the original family isn’t even named. It’s erased, made invisible, as if it had never existed. You claim you know nothing, which either proves that you were incompetent, that you were looking the other way, or that you didn’t bother to check what was going on, and in every case, it’s extremely alarming. You don’t investigate on the pre-adoption history before the adoption, and certainly not afterwards, once the adoptee is an adult. You make promises that you can’t and won’t keep to give legitimacy to your actions and polish your reputation as an agency that is respectful of laws as well as people. What I learnt from this experience is that you respect everyone but those you claim to be saving.

 

 

Clara

 

[1] http://orphelinsderoumanie.org/ladoption-en-roumanie-dans-le-contexte-international-des-annees-1980-1990/

[2] Law on adoptions 11/1990 modified July 8th, 1991.

[3] Roelie Post, Romania For Export Only: the untold story of the Romanian “orphans”, p. 66

[4] RE-ORGANISING THE INTERNATIONAL ADOPTION AND CHILD PROTECTION SYSTEM
MARCH 2002, IGIAA (INDEPENDENT GROUP FOR INTERNATIONAL ADOPTION ANALYSIS)

[5] Roelie Post, Romania For Export Only: the untold story of the Romanian “orphans”,  p. 200

[6] “The directives on alternative child protection measures, which were approved by the UN in 2009, forbid to place a child in care simply because his/her parents are poor. It is preferable to offer appropriate support to the family instead.” Intervention by Nigel Cantwell, during an MAI conference, 16th October 2018

[7] New York Times article from March, 24^th 1991, by Kathleen Hunt:

https://www.nytimes.com/1991/03/24/magazine/the-romanian-baby-bazaar.html

« One young gynecologist in a major hospital in Bucharest says he was approached by three separate lawyers to keep them informed of any babies abandoned at birth. « They offered me $100 for every baby I could produce, and $200 if I presented it already with the mother’s consent to put it up for adoption. »”

[8] Le Monde article from October 20th, 2006, by Mirel Bran: https://www.lemonde.fr/a-la-une/article/2006/10/20/roumanie-ex-supermarche-de-l-adoption_825807_3208.html

[9] Le Monde article from October 20th, 2006, by Mirel Bran: https://www.lemonde.fr/a-la-une/article/2006/10/20/roumanie-ex-supermarche-de-l-adoption_825807_3208.html  « La Roumanie était devenue le supermarché des adoptions, s’insurge Theodora Bertzi. Les enfants étaient envoyés comme des colis à l’étranger avec beaucoup d’argent à la clé. Ils étaient blancs et en bonne santé et l’adoption allait très vite. L’enfant était devenu un objet destiné à satisfaire les besoins émotionnels des adultes.

[10] International adoption of Romanian children and Romania’s admission to the European Union
(1990-2007), Yves DENECHERE, Béatrice SCUTARU, EASTERN JOURNAL OF EUROPEAN STUDIES Volume 1, Issue 1, June 2010

[11] RE-ORGANISING THE INTERNATIONAL ADOPTION AND CHILD PROTECTION SYSTEM
MARCH 2002, IGIAA (INDEPENDENT GROUP FOR INTERNATIONAL ADOPTION ANALYSIS)

[12] Roelie Post, Romania For Export Only: the untold story of the Romanian “orphans”, p. 200 « After the maternity tour, Unicef Romania guided Mariela to Holt, one of the biggest US adoption agencies, which held office in the maternity clinic”.

[13] « Over the course of a year, at the hospital in Ploiesti, nurses and doctors had told 23 mothers whose babies had been born prematurely that their babies had died, when in fact, they were put in incubators, well-fed and exported six months later”.  Emma Nicholson, MEP and rapporteur spécial for the European Parliament (1999-2004) http://orphelinsderoumanie.org/ladoption-en-roumanie-dans-le-contexte-international-des-annees-1980-1990/

[14] Roelie Post, Romania For Export Only: the untold story of the Romanian “orphans”, p. 130.

[15] ” Cashing in on the “baby rescue », article from the Irish Times published on 24 may 2002

[16] Article from the Irish Times from 2002.