If adoption can so often be reduced to supply and demand, these are the circumstances from which a ’supply’ of children come from.

Nothing is done to alleviate the ongoing suffering of these womyn, as that would mean money spent on development or health care, or other basic needs. Instead the pathetic conditions that force womyn to outright sell their children are encouraged to continue, as to do otherwise would cut the ongoing supply of adoptable infants.

It’s rare to find a story like this covering the desperate circumstances of these womyn and the origins of children bought in the adoption market.

Also keep in mind that while some of the children were born in Mexico and brought to the United States, at least one was born in the US and is thus a U.S. citizen. Thus this child, upon adoption, would be considered a “domestic” adoption, not international. This smuggling of pregnant womyn into the U.S., leading to the child being placed for adoption continues to be something to keep an eye on as we may see more of such as the number of international ’sending countries’ continues to decrease or grow stricter under Hague implementation.

Mothers who allegedly sold babies endured difficult lives

The Brownsville Herald, 6/21/08

Patricia Perez Quiroz:

A 21-year-old product of Rio Bravo’s cramped western colonias, Patricia Perez Quiroz simply left home one day – eight months pregnant – and came back several weeks later without a child.

“She told us the baby died,” Erika said in Spanish. “Then, she said (the baby) was with the father, and then, (that the baby) was sick in the hospital.”

Mexican authorities have since identified Patricia as one of nine Rio Bravo women who admitted to selling their newborns to a man accused of working as an international baby broker.

Investigators believe Amado Torres Vega, 64, of Harlingen, purchased children like hers for $2,500 to $3,000 a piece and then brought them to adoptive couples in the United States for a fee.

Claudia Pantoja Ramirez:

Pantoja has since told state prosecutors Torres smuggled her into the United States to have her child, but upon giving birth she asked him if she could back out of their deal. A day later, she woke up to find her baby gone and $3,000 from Torres, she said.

Alma Yadira Alva Gutierrez:

Across town, Alma Yadira Alva Gutierrez’s smart concrete home in Rio Bravo’s new Hacienda Las Brisas subdivision stands a world away from the poor, cramped neighborhood of Pantoja and the Perezes.

But her situation was no less dire. The mother of an 8-year-old girl with leukemia, Alva, 30, told authorities she sold three children to Torres to finance her sick daughter’s medical care.

What can ‘consent’ possibly mean when womyn feel they are forced into selling their children? In Claudia’s case, it’s apparent, her own feelings in the matter meant nothing.

Torres, of course, falls back on an all too familiar theme in adoption in a sick attempt at justifying his actions:

“These women were irresponsible,” he said. “I did what I could to give their children a better life.”

I.E. ‘these mothers were “bad”, “unworthy of their children”, “they didn’t deserve to keep them”, it’ll be better this way’ the usual crass ‘ends justify the means’. The false assumption underlying such is that poor womyn or those in dire financial need do not deserve to keep their own children, or that only the wealthy make good parents as they alone can provide the so called “better lives” to children. Thus the poor become expendable, for anything other than ‘womb services’; produce the kids for resale, not for keeping.

The promise of the so called ‘better life’ is used constantly to justify whatever it takes to redistribute children from desperate circumstances, often relating to dire poverty, into the hands of those who will pay top dollar for a kid, any kid, so long as they can call it their own.

But even if he’s right, his alleged actions violate Mexican law. Despite his public denials of wrongdoing, police say he has confessed in private to illegally purchasing children.

He remains in a Tamaulipas jail pending trial on child trafficking charges. If convicted, he could face up to 12 years in prison.

A maximum of a mere 12 years for the buying and selling of babies.

The womyn, as if they had not already endured enough, are now also facing charges:

State prosecutors have also filed cases against six mothers including Pantoja and continue to pursue charges against others. It remains unclear how many of the women Torres worked with are in custody, said Licensiado Oralia Mancha Barrera, a Tamaulipas assistant state attorney

Note that this includes Claudia Pantoja Ramirez, the womyn whose baby was taken after she changed her mind and refused to go through with it.

These womyn did what they did in a desperate attempt to survive or to ensure their family’s survival.

It’s a side of adoption rarely openly discussed.

There is no word on where their children are today, assumedly in the hands of adoptive parents here in the U.S., and likely to remain that way. They could have been represented to their adopters as any one of a number of different nationalities.

But that “better life” meme?

But no matter the hardship these children may have endured had they stayed with their birth mothers, Patricia Perez Quiroz’s mother-in-law, Socorro Treviño, can’t fathom a childhood lived any other way.

“A better life?” she said in Spanish while surveying the dilapidated house around her. “If that was the case we would have given everyone here up for adoption.

“What better life is there (for a child) than with the mother?”

If that so called “better life” were the only consideration entire villages across the world, children and adults alike, should go up for “adoption”. As is, the babies are exported to wealthy (by global standards) Americans, and their countries of origin and relatives are left to rot. Or produce more children for export.

No one’s coming along to “adopt” them.

The bottom line continues to be adoption is no answer to global poverty.

“I got mine”-ism of adopters comes at a global and deeply personal cost to those left in the circumstances that produced the child originally.

Global development is an opposite to adoption. It is rooted in genuine empathy with other people the world over. Adoption, on the other hand, is all to often about ‘resource extraction’ plain and simple.

Because at the end of the day, the Americans apparently still have the kids. If anything, they are likely blissfully unaware of the circumstances that led to them gaining ‘their child’. Never mind those pesky little ‘costs’ to those in their countries of origin; the childrens’ mothers for example.

Empathy? Yeah, not so much. There are some things adopters would simply rather not know.

Guatemala annulls 15 adoption cases

What I found most concerning was this-

The babies whose cases have been annulled will be put in foster homes until a judge locates their parents. If their parents aren’t found, they will be put up for adoption again.

in light of this

The irregularities were serious enough that the attorney general filed criminal complaints against lawyers, doctors, social workers and birth mothers involved in the 15 cases, Meng said.

Great ’solution’, eh?

Adoption from Vietnam has of course had a long and troubled history, this latest step is only one of many in an ongoing saga.

US adoptions from Vietnam had previously been stopped between 2003 and 2006 due to evidence of unethical conduct. Adoptions resumed in 2006 under a under a 2005 bilateral document (the “Memorandum of Agreement” click link for PDF) seeking to ensure adoption was practiced ethically. The Agreement is set to expire Sept 1, 2008. Clearly, conditions did not improve, leading to the latest measures towards curtailing US adoptions from Vietnam.

Sadly, once adoptions reopened, far from a tentative approach with the history of abuses in mind, instead a ‘gold rush’ mentality, wherein getting what kids could be gotten while the doors were still open kicked in. Damn the abuses, full steam ahead. Thus creating the largest boom in Vietnam to US adoptions to date as potential adoptive couples try to get in under the wire.

Now as the evidence piles up showing that kids were obtained through all manner of underhanded and illegal means, PAPs (prospective adoptive parents) are anguishing that “their child” is going to be one of the many children behind the closed doors, and thus are screaming politically and clutching desperately the photographs their agencies provided them, as happens in each and every country wherein Americans strip mine pregnant womyn for their children only to have to doors closed on their efforts.

Quoting the AP story:

Vietnam has failed to police its adoption system, allowing corruption, fraud and baby-selling to flourish, the U.S. Embassy says in a new report obtained by The Associated Press.

…

The nine-page document describes brokers scouring villages for babies, hospitals selling infants whose mothers cannot pay their bills, and a grandmother giving away her grandchild — without telling the child’s mother.

…

The U.S. Embassy report is based on a review of hundreds of adoptions since they resumed in Vietnam in 2006.

…

…others have been flooding the system with cash to get babies for American parents, who pay up to $25,000 for an adoption.

With 42 U.S. adoption agencies licensed in Vietnam, the competition for babies is intense.

Some agencies have been paying orphanage directors $10,000 per referral, the report says, and some have taken orphanage directors on shopping sprees and junkets to the United States in return for a steady flow of babies.

“Adoption service providers have reported that cash and in-kind donations have been diverted by orphanage officials and used to finance personal property, private cars, jewelry, and in one case, a commercial real estate development,” the report says.

Aloisi gave the AP a list of 10 particularly egregious cases, including the grandmother who gave away her grandchild.

The mother, working in another province for several weeks, had left the baby with her mother-in-law. She returned to discover the baby had been given up for adoption. Eventually, she got the baby back after U.S. officials uncovered the ruse during investigations as part of the U.S, visa approval process.

In another case, a baby was allegedly taken by hospital officials and turned over for adoption because the mother couldn’t afford to pay her $750 hospital bill.

Hospital officials had inflated the bill, claiming the child had serious health problems. U.S. Embassy officials say they discovered the child was healthy. Again, the child was returned to its birth mother.

The report also says some orphanages have pressured birth mothers to give up their babies in return for about $450 — nearly a year’s salary for many.

…

U.S. Embassy officials began raising questions last year, after their routine investigations turned up widespread inconsistencies in adoption paperwork.

They also noticed a suspicious surge in the number of babies listed as abandoned on adoption papers. That makes it impossible to confirm the infants were genuine orphans, or that their parents had knowingly put them up for adoption, as required by U.S. law.

In adoptions before 2003, 20 percent were abandoned babies. Since they resumed under tighter rules, that has risen to 85 percent, the embassy report says.

U.S. officials believe paperwork problems and reports of abandoned infants have risen in part because corrupt adoption workers are trying to cover up baby-selling.

The AP piece is based on the US Embassy in Hanoi’s summary; Adopted Children Immigrant Visa Unit, Summary of Irregularities in Adoptions from Vietnam and the warning just issued- Warning Concerning Adoptions in Vietnam (dated April.) I would advise readers to take a few moments to read through these documents, they catalog a litany of unethical child procurement and outright selling.

The section in the summary, “Financial links between ASPs and Orphanages” for example, lays out the SYSTEM by which numbers of children available for adoption are generated. (ASPs, by the way, refer to Adoption Service Providers, not snakes. Or at least, not necessarily snakes.)

This paragraph in particular stood out to me:

According to DIA, orphanages are required to refer one child for foreign adoption for every x dollars donated by the ASP. Thus, if the ASP funds a $10,000 project and the per-child donation is set at $1000 per child, then the orphanage would be required to refer 10 children for intercountry adoption to the ASP. Should the orphanage not have 10 children who are qualified for intercountry adoption, then, according to DIA, the orphanage director is required to find the additional children to complete his side of the agreement. Two orphanage directors have confirmed to consular officers that they are feeling pressure to find more children for their orphanage to “compensate” ASPs for their donations.

The coercion is bedrock to parts of the SYSTEM.

In the Unlicensed Facilities portion we find all too familiar conditions:

In five provinces, the Embassy has discovered unlicensed, unregulated facilities that provide free room and board to pregnant women in return for their commitment to relinquish their children upon birth. None of these facilities openly advertises its services. Women learn of the facilities existence solely by word of mouth. While the facilities are open and the women are free to come and go as they please, they incur a debt for each night that they stay that they have to pay if they do not relinquish their child. Recent Vietnamese media reports of such facilities have revealed that women often live in squalor and in many cases are forced to labor during their stay. In several of these facilities, there is a policy that the birth mother cannot see her child after delivery, in order to prevent bonding. Women in these facilities report receiving up to 6 million Vietnam Dong as payment for their children. While the source of funding for these facilities is unclear, they appear to have close connections with nearby orphanages.

When the Embassy visited these facilities, we saw up to 20 women living in a single home. These women reported that orphanage officials came to the house in order to have them sign paperwork relinquishing their children. The women would then receive the promised payments. Often, the child is then taken to a nearby hospital or orphanage where a second set of paperwork is produced stating that the child was deserted. This is the paperwork that is submitted to the DIA and to the Embassy to support the claim that the child is an orphan.

The demand the pregnant womyn repay a maternity camp here in the States has often been made illegal, yet when done abroad/outsourced, PAPs don’t blink an eye. Far from refusing to deal with agencies that promote this kind of extortion, PAPs line up around the block to get a hold of any kids made available by such systems of coercion.

Lest anyone for one moment assume it’s merely the ASPs/agencies who do the dirty work, the section “Reports of Corruption in Adoption System” makes PAP direct involvment clear:

In addition, statements from adopting parents and ASP employees show that many ASPs ask adopting parents to pay cash donations to orphanage directors and staff. These payments are illegal according to the Vietnamese Ministry of Justice, but the Ministry acknowledges that they are widespread and that they are a key factor in the irregularities seen in the adoption system in Vietnam. Further, ASPs have reported that cash and in-kind donations have been diverted by orphanage officials and used to finance personal property, private cars, jewelry and, in one case, a commercial real estate development.

Yup, gained through illicit means or no, there are still plenty of PAPs and agencies who still want these kids; stolen, bought, or otherwise illegally gained, it appears to make no difference to the brokers and purchasers. All maintain personal deniability; OTHERS may do it, but not us, not me, not MY baby, when time after time, such assertions clearly cannot be proven.

By way of a partial round up of responses to the article and the Embassy documents from various blogs (as usual a link here does not by any stretch imply any form of Baby Love Child’s personal endorsement) here’s some further reading;

Ethnically Incorrect Daughter has a series of recent coverage, among her ongoing writings on Vietnamese adoption:

Vietnamese babies ’stolen for adoption in the West’

Warning concerning adoptions in Vietnam

US alleges baby-selling in Vietnam

Vietnamese Adoptions- DNA requirement

Parents for Ethical Adoption Reform:

UPDATE: Call to Action Vietnam- USCIS Warning

Voices for Vietnam Adoption Integrity

Summary of Irregularities in Adoptions in Vietnam

AP Exclusive: US alleges baby-selling in Vietnam

DNA Testing Update

Still Waiting for an Official Announcement

The Leaked DNA memo

Fleas Biting has:

US Embassy in Vietnam: Summary of Irregularities in Adoptions in Vietnam