Still, she is my baby girl. And still, it is simply impossible to love
her more than I do – even on the days I don’t necessarily enjoy being around
her. As an adoptive parent I am thankful
every single day for the selfless sacrifice that a birth mother makes to hand her
child to a stranger in the hope that the baby will have the life that she
dreams for her, the life that for a number of reasons she can’t provide. For the last few years I have been saying
this gratitude out loud. I think it is
in the hope that if I say it often enough and loud enough it will actually be
true. It probably is…I have to believe
it is. The alternative is just too
horrible.
My daughter is a Mayan Indian from
Guatemala. After a successful domestic
adoption and two failed ones I decided to adopt internationally. I researched my options and selected Guatemala. At the time they were the only country that
utilized foster homes instead of orphanages.
I knew that if a baby was able to emotionally bond they would be more
likely to be able to transfer that bond.
That was important to me. I
wanted to do everything I could to avoid reactive attachment and all of the
other scary things that they tell you about when adopting. But what I later learned was far more terrifying
than any attachment issues. In 2012 I
read an article that stated that Guatemala's adoption system had been the most
corrupt in the world for over a decade. News organizations reported in detail,
repeatedly, that the country's babies were systematically being bought,
coerced, or even kidnapped away from families that wanted to raise them. I used a
legitimate adoption agency, I read the social worker’s report on the birth
mother, and I still have contact with the foster mother. How could this be true? It couldn’t be true for my Lidia…could it?
I wish I knew then what I know
now. And I wish that I could “unknow”
that in
every human endeavor, there is a chance for abuse. For every legitimate agency and every mother
in Guatemala who desperately wants a better life for their baby, there are also nefarious practices
and families are deceived or coerced into giving their children up for
adoption. Traffickers target the most
vulnerable – children, those living in poverty, refugees and migrants – because
they are often desperate. In Guatemala around 60 percent of children
live in poverty. Criminals know that parents who are poor will have less
resources and money to search for their missing children. In a related story, just this month the
news reported that a 12 year old
boy was trafficked to England to harvest his organs.
It is important to know that trafficking
exists. It is important to know that
there are those who are willing to hurt even babies and children for a
profit. It is even more important to do
something. Not sure what? The U.S. Department of State has 20
suggestions to get you started on your path to helping end modern day
slavery: http://www.state.gov/j/tip/id/help/ If those
suggestions don’t work for you then give the Michigan Human Trafficking Task
Force a call and ask what you can do.
But do something. Because I have
to believe that the only thing worse than imagining that your child was taken
from a mother who wanted to raise her is actually being that mother.
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