Does U.S. Law Treat Adopted Chinese Babies Like Stolen Cars?

I don’t know the law in particular with regards to adoption, but I know that adopted children have been taken from their adoptive families for many reasons. Here in the U.S., if a woman decides to put her child up for adoption, she also has to clear it with the biological father, if he is still around. If the adoption went forward without the knowledge of that father, he could step in (even years after the fact) and claim his parental rights.

@Joyce Lau,
I’d like to know how you came up with 99%. I’d also like to know how you can term “good faith” the act of going to a developing country and buying a child because that is what the parents are doing – a child knowing that the family (usually in dire straits) gets monetary recourse. Don’t make angels ought of one party to the transaction while reducing the other to a convenience or a stereotype, in this case the popular “corrupt officials”. If you adopt a baby from corrupt officials, and you turn a blind eye to the process up to getting the kid, is that so ethical?

Countries involved in international adoption have been very, very reluctant to undue what is considered a legal adoption, even in cases where the child was kidnapped from its birth parents. A recent case between India and the Netherlands is a typical case. In this case, a kidnapped Indian child was adopted by a couple in the Netherlands. The birth family sued to regain custody, but the governments would not force the adoptive family to provide DNA evidence, so the situation remains in limbo (http://www.againstchildtrafficking.org). Under current practice it seems the kids almost always remain with the adoptive families, who have little legal reason to provide visitation, etc. to the birth family.
Identifying the adoptive families of these Chinese children would not be difficult, but it would require the cooperation of the Chinese government to open the adoption files. The adoptive family of Yang Li Bing’s daughter has already been identified, but the rest are unknown.

“They presume that the children have either a) lost both their parents to death or b) have been given up willingly”
Define “willingly.”
A non-democratic government doesn’t equal “willingly” if the parents will be jailed or lose their home if they’ve gone over the one-child quota.
A non-democratic government that also cannot/refuses to give parents the medical treatment their child needs to survive also doesn’t equal “willingly.”
I think adoptive parents and agencies have a completely different idea of “willingly” than ‘birth’ parents or adoptees.

Anon — Adopting a child takes an enormous amount of care and time — not to mention raising, educating and supporting a child for 20+ years. People do it out of a combination of charity and wanting a child to love. They don’t profit from it in any monetary way.
If you can’t tell the difference between families adopting an orphan into their home and “traders” working in illegal child trafficking, you’ve got a pretty weak grasp on this issue.
The only people profiting from this are the Chinese traffickers and corrupt officials. Why blame the families — on both sides — who have been scammed?
Several of my friends have adopted both from Western countries and China (and, in one case, HK). They were all incredibly responsible — in fact, 2 couples volunteered at orphanages as part of the process. How would they know if they’ve been lied or cheated to? It’s not that they were “turning a blind eye” or “not doing due diligence.” They would be appalled to learn that their children were kidnapped or snatched.
The assumption — when you go through all the paperwork, checks, waiting and legal hassle — is that these are not trafficked children — that they have either lost parents were abandonned, and that you are helping them.
I’m sure you can find the odd unfortunate case somewhere. But most Americans adopting in China make an effort to fly to China, and visit the orphanages and meet the caretakers. But you can’t ask an infant if he/she has been trafficked or not.
There was a drop-off in Eastern European adoptions for a while because parents had ethical concerns. China was considered a relatively safer, more regulated place to adopt — until this happened. The sad thing is that, if China’s reputation is more damaged, the ones who will suffer will be the many, many (mostly female) orphans currently in state care.
Why is it that the most heartless comments always come from people hiding behind anonymity?
I feel terrible for both the adopted and natural parents. I feel even worst for the kids. But I have zero sympathy for a Chinese political system that allows for the sale of innocents.
PS. Clearly the 99% was hyperbole.

TRA — I agree with you.
In a broad sense, there’s no real “free will” when it comes to family planning in China. The one-child policy helped reduce hunger, but it left huge social and ethical problems.
There are all the problems you cite — the lack of medical care and proper papers for “unofficial kids” — plus aborted female fetuses, abandoned baby girls, skewed gender ratios, child trafficking, forced sterilizations and cadres forcing late-term abortions. I saw an Al Jazeeera TV report on Xiamen state workers kicking an 8-month-pregnant lady in the stomach, which is illegal. It’s one sad mess.
What I meant was that most adopted families would presume — and are told — that the children are orphans. That the parents are dead or gave up that child for adoption.
You’re right that “willing” is a tricky word in this case. If a couple abandons a female or disabled child because they are unfairly held to only one child — and prefer a healthy boy — is that “willing”?
The bigger point is that most adopted families would presume that they are taking kids who would otherwise spend their childhoods in orphanages — not that they are stealing kids away from loving families who have been victim to a kidnapping and are looking to get their children back.

(1) Absent a compelling reason, reversing an adoption is difficult in general, though one would need to check the relevant laws with a specialist practitioner.
(2) Theft of a child by illegal means would possibly qualify as a compelling reason in some jurisdictions, though the focus is the best interests of the child.
(3) There’s plenty of debate on the scale of offenses, there are instances where reversals have occurred as a result of illegal practices, and there’s an impressive conference note by Elizabeth Bartholet of Harvard Law’s child advocacy project, http://www.law.harvard.edu/faculty/bartholet/InternationalAdoption_A_Way_Forward.pdf

@JoyceLau
Forgive me if I posted too blunt an opinion, and that said, I don’t find anything heartless in my comments. There were no names in the OP, your post, or mine. Have I besmirched the name of adoptive parents everywhere? Though I’m not sure what weight it lends my opinion, my name is James.
As another commenter mentioned, anyone with internet access can do their “due diligence” and find out just how messy international adoptions can be and often are, once a lot of the various factors are considered.
As a teenager my family and friends helped take care of another friend, a boy adopted from Korea and pretty much abandoned by his parents when the task of rearing a teenager became too burdensome. This despite their being legally obligated to care for him as a minor. When I say take care of, I mean he was often without shelter and had no money, or food to eat. This was in a big American city with some pretty mean streets.
Now, despite this being a boy I was good friends with and so taking the matter personally, I certainly wouldn’t make his parents the rule for adoptive parents; I can say they aren’t the only poor adoptive parents I can think of, nor are they in the majority.
In your post, you are discussing two different things: the adoption process, and the raising of children. You wrote:
“An adopted child who has adjusted to a new family, life, language and home in America would go through some trauma being tossed back and forth in a trans-national custody battle. Meanwhile, your car doesn’t care where he’s parked!”
I never suggested that kids be uprooted after having been raised in the U.S, did I? In my previous post I (at least intended to) address the original adoption process itself, not kids being taken from loving homes after years of warmth and care.
This statement:
“If you can’t tell the difference between families adopting an orphan into their home and “traders” working in illegal child trafficking, you’ve got a pretty weak grasp on this issue.”
I think that if you think that there is always such a clear line between adoptions and traders, you are being willfully naive. Again, you paint it in such clear cut and broad terms: families warmly welcoming unloved kids into their homes and the cold-hearted Chinese officials who are involved in illegal child trafficking are miles apart… I just don’t see it as being that black and white.
I really, really doubt that anyone adopting from China doesn’t know about the one child rule, and that parents who run afoul of this rule might not have been “unable” to take care of their child as much as they were too poor to do so. Again, this doesn’t mean that all adoptive parents are callous and predatory. But there are a lot of people profiting handsomely from adoptions, not just corrupt Chinese officials. Also, if Chinese officials didn’t see something in it for themselves, what might be the result then?
On the first page of the google search for “Chinese adoption corruption”:
It is the “illegal” (really just undocumented) children whose parents can not afford to pay the fine or do not have the resources to have their child informally adopted that end up in China’s Social Welfare Institutes (SWIs) aka orphanages. Additionally, for families willing to buck the no-adopting tradition, adopted children are counted as part of the families child quota. If a family adopts a child, that is the one child they are permitted to have. It doesn’t take much research to see that the children in China’s SWIs are there because of governmental policies and poverty.
http://american-family.org/2006/03/02/china-adoption-ethics-part-one/
“In the beginning, I think, adoption from China was a very good thing because there were so many abandoned girls. But then it became a supply-and-demand-driven market and a lot of people at the local level were making too much money,” said Ina Hut, who last month resigned as the head of the Netherlands’ largest adoption agency out of concern about baby trafficking.”
…“When we adopted in 2006, we were fed the same stories, that there were millions of unwanted girls in China, that they would be left on the street to die if we didn’t help,” said Cathy Wagner, an adoptive mother from Nova Scotia, Canada. “I love my daughter, but if I had any idea my money would cause her to be taken away from another mother who loved her, I never would have adopted.”
http://kadnexus.wordpress.com/2009/11/13/470/
What I am saying is, it’s a really, really messy situation at all stages. Raising a well-adjusted child is commendable, but before that there is the whole adoption process, the fact that it’s usually the wealthy adopting “excess” children under what are obviously sometimes murky (to be generous) circumstances. You simply cannot expect to go to a developing country with a ton of cash and not expect to impact people there in some occasionally very serious and unfortunate ways. The traders take the babies and give them to who, other poor rural folk?”
More from Google:
“The Lie We Love”: exposing the world orphan myth, Foreign Policy, November/December 2008.
The story of abandoned or orphaned infants and toddlers in developing countries who need to be whisked away to adoring moms and dads in faraway lands is, unfortunately, largely fiction. So writes E.J. Graff, associate director and senior researcher at the Schuster Institute in her award-winning investigative article “The Lie We Love,” published in Foreign Policy’s Nov./Dec. 2008 issue. The article exposes the myth of a world orphan crisis—and reveals that the disproportionately large amounts of Western money offered in poor or corrupt countries can too often induce unscrupulous middlemen to buy, coerce, defraud, or kidnap children away from families that would have raised them to adulthood.
The article has received four prestigious journalism awards: the Society of Professional Journalists’ 2008 Sigma Chi Delta Award in Journalism for the Best in Magazine Investigative Reporting; 2008 James Aronson Award for Social Justice Journalism, the 2009 Clarion Award for Best Magazine Feature Article; and the 2009 Casey Medals for Meritorious Journalism honorable mention for Magazine Reporting.
“The Lie We Love”: exposing the world orphan myth, Foreign Policy, November/December 2008.
http://www.brandeis.edu/investigate/gender/adoption/index.html
I don’t stand against adoption at all. What I really would like to see is a much more regulated and ethical approach, and not just a lot of demonizing of “them” and lionizing of “us”. Furthermore, the information about this is out there and readily available to all.

What nobody has mentioned is how there are victims on both sides of this issue. The parents in China and the parents in the United States. Our job as compassionate people is to try to balance those as best we can.

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Guest — Of course not all adopted parents are saints. (Though I think most orphanage workers and volunteers are pretty saintly). And of course not all mainland officials are corrupt. There are no absolutes.
I was referring to the article above, which sites specific cases of selling children in a corrupt Chinese system, complete with fake papers and wronged parties on all sides — the birth parents, the adoptive parents and, most of all, the kids.
And if blame is going to go anywhere, it should be targeted where the rot begins.
Maybe some adoptive parents should do some more due diligence, but my limited experience through friends is that they generally do and that most people adopt in good faith.
I was also reacting to a comment about that adoptive parents “buy” their children, which I think is an awful way of seeing adoption in general.
In any case, please don’t put words into my mouth. I never said that all orphanage workers steal and sell children. That would be crazy.
PS. Just curious. Where do you do volunteer work?