Chinese adoptions may be ended

Shelley Page, CanWest News Service; Ottawa Citizen
Published: Saturday, December 22, 2007

The Chinese government's "matching room" is both mythic and mystical in the lives of adopting families.

It is the secretive chamber where the yearnings of would-be moms and dads from around the world are filed in neat dossiers stacked high, awaiting scrutiny from the bureaucrats who pair parents with orphans.

Each couple's folder is filled with sorrow, longing, hope and information so personal they might not share it with their closest friends: fingerprints, police checks, details about whether they were spanked as a child, whether they plan to spank their child; confessions about depression or marital strife or credit card debt; and, in many cases, revelations about health problems, fertility treatments and multiple miscarriages.

Even weight -- the obese need no longer apply -- is now relevant when adopting from China.

When a file reaches the top of the pile, a "matcher" contemplates the intimate details of a couple's life before pairing them with a waiting orphan. Modern-day lore has it that Chinese officials match would-be parents with exactly the right baby, so somehow hotheads with a competitive streak can end up with one kind-hearted yet volatile drama queen and an intense bookworm gymnast, as was the case when we adopted two daughters from China.

Earlier this year, I was allowed a rare visit to the matching room with a Canadian charity for which I volunteer. While there, I met the man who, in September 1999 matched our file with the quiet and watchful six-month-old infant with rose-petal lips who would grow into our gymnast. He, of course, didn't remember my daughter's file, but we posed for a scrapbook photo anyway. I was all emotion, he was all business.

I also watched a "matcher" as she peered at the photographs of two Canadians -- a solemn-looking, would-be mother and father, both white -- on one half of her computer screen. On the other half, the heart-shaped face of an eight-month-old baby. With a few clicks of a mouse, it was official. Whether by fate or chance or simply bureaucracy, these three were now one.

That couple was lucky, if, as some adoption officials suggest, the end of Chinese adoption is near, a red sun slipping below the horizon.

The number of couples hoping for a baby now so dramatically exceeds the available abandoned infants that it could take at least three years, if not more, to adopt. Officials for the China Centre of Adoption Affairs said there were an almost insurmountable 25,000 files -- including 600 Canadians -- waiting to be matched with Chinese orphans.

With each passing week, China matches fewer babies to foreign couples. Some months only 400 referrals are sent out worldwide -- compared to 1,000 just a year before. And it seems likely it could take five years or longer to match waiting couples with infants. Growing wait times are reflected in the operations of the world's adoption agencies, some of which no longer accept files from people wishing to adopt from China.

Many desperate couples are wondering where all the babies went. While families like mine, with our two daughters from China, could soon be reminders of a time when China's population control policies and traditional preference for boys led to the abandonment of thousands of baby girls, many of whom ended up in the farthest corners of the world. And if China is no longer a viable option for would-be adoptive parents, it means one more avenue for the childless has turned into a dead end. Those at the bottom of the huge pile at the China Centre of Adoption Affairs will still be waiting.

"China is definitely at a juncture," says adoptive parent and researcher Brian Stuy, who runs the Utah-based ResearchChina.org, which gathers and scrutinizes hard-to-get information about China's adoption program. "I'm not optimistic regarding the future of China's program."

Stuy predicts by the end of 2008, China will have to stop the adoption of healthy children.

It's impossible to see the piles of dossiers in the matching room and not feel angst for the parenting hopes stuck there like embryos that won't implant.

For years, my husband and I have hosted childless couples in our living room to share information about adoption. They meet our daughters and turn the pages of our photo albums, while we answer their anxious questions.

They tell us how they went through months, more often years, of unsuccessful attempts to give birth to a child, all the while holding in their hearts the idea of adopting a little Chinese girl.

Some of these couples went on to adopt, others have files caught in China. Nurseries feature empty cribs at the ready, or else have been turned back into offices or guest bedrooms. All are struggling to understand what is happening in China.

Chat groups are rife with waiting parents who speculate the Chinese are warehousing infants who remain out of reach of the adoption process, perhaps because China doesn't want the world to see babies leaving en masse prior to next year's Olympics.

Others blame the slowdown on the Hunan baby smuggling scandal of 2005, when news reports exposed the trafficking and sale of infants to several orphanages, that then made them available to foreign families. China stopped processing new infants in Hunan province from January through mid-April 2006 -- right around the time the slowdown began. Still others -- and this is the Chinese government's position -- say there are simply fewer babies abandoned in China. It may be because more Chinese families are keeping their girls or that domestic adoption in that country is increasing.

If it's because more families are keeping their girls, this becomes a bittersweet story: Good news for China's baby girls, heartbreaking for western parents struggling to form a family and facing increasingly limited options at home and around the world.

Those of us who have adopted from China -- or anywhere on this planet -- have always known our happiness is at the expense of someone else's loss; that Chinese government population control policies, combined with a traditional preference for boys, have wrecked families and destroyed lives in that county, while we end up the beneficiaries.

The notorious one-child policy that began in 1979 was the brainchild of Chinese leader Deng Xiaoping and is still in force to some degree. Deng believed curbing population growth could create prosperity.

The result was the worst boy-to-girl ratio in the world, with an estimated two million girls erased from the population each year. First, the infants were drowned, suffocated or abandoned in fields and, later, aborted as ultrasound technology became more available. Orphanages filled up as baby girls were left on doorsteps, in markets, on roadsides. In 1991, China reformed its adoption laws and opened its orphanages to the world, offering these infants up for adoption.

That these girls were welcomed whole-heartedly by thousands of would-be parents should not be a surprise. As Martha Maslen -- executive director of Children's Bridge International Adoption Consultants, Canada's largest adoption agency -- says, "the stars aligned exactly with what the majority of parents want." Unlike biological couples the world over, the majority of whom want a boy, more than 85 per cent of adoptive parents want a girl, says Maslen.

During that first year, only one Chinese baby went to a family using the fledgling Children's Bridge adoption agency, 61 babies went to Americans. In 2006, about 13,000Chinese children, mostly infants, left that country for North America or Europe.

Now people hoping to form a family through international adoption must alter their expectations. "They can no longer expect to get a healthy, Chinese baby girl. They will have to adjust their expectations on gender, age, health and race," says Maslen.

"The doors are slamming for adoptive parents. I hear them slamming. There are only so many

Quoted from The Leader-Post (Regina)