Adoptee Rights in 1998
by Albert S. Wei
weialber@best.com Introduction from our Editor
I am delighted that Mr. Wei has consented to this reprint of his thoughtful article. Our view of adoption issues tends to be very insular as we consider their impact on us, without giving much thought to the global picture. I hope the article that follows is as meaningful for you as it is for me. Mr. Wei has provided several of the link references, and others are my own.
About the author: Albert S. Wei is an adoptee, presently residing in England. He is an investment banker and his academic background is in international public policy.
Years ago, in a European city, a young adopted woman confronted a political dissident from Korea with the words: "You are a leader of a country that sold its own children, that continues to sell its children. Are you not ashamed?" At a
press conference this October, the same man, Kim Dae Jung, tearfully apologised as president of his country to the 150,000 infants and children divested of their identities and exported around the world in order to spare their communities the "shame" of their existence. Now, a president agreed to take upon himself another type of shame — that of a nation for treating its children in such a manner. With slaughter in Kosovo, politicians facing morals charges in Kuala Lumpur and Washington and his own country under the brutal discipline of IMF trusteeship, the world barely noticed this president's apologia. In distant North America, only two radio programmes even bothered picking up the story. Yet I am convinced that some day this event will be seen a milestone of sorts for the cause of adoptee human rights.
1998 may be remembered by activists as the time when publics around the world first took responsibility for injustices committed in the name of adoption and acknowledged that those separated by adoption have an entitlement to social justice. In Argentina, Admiral Emilio Eduardo Maserra was arrested for ordering the adoption and identity deprivation of the children of his political enemies. In Australia, a
parliamentary commission was convened in New South Wales to investigate abuses alleged to have been committed by agencies over four decades of closed adoption, and to recommend measures of redress for those affected. Once unquestioned lawyers, social workers and bureaucrats are squirming on the witness stand, the hostile questions now directed at them instead of by them. Guatemala and Romania moved to properly regulate the often under-monitored and undocumented, flow of infant babies from their countries to the developed world. In Canada, Premier Lucien Bouchard apologised on behalf of Quebec for the plight of the
Duplessis Orphans, whose records were falsified and who were subjected to years of abuse in state and church-supported orphanages. In Ireland, the apex court of that country refused to acknowledge the right of birthmothers to perpetual privacy and ordered their parliament to draft legislation resolving issues relating to the informational rights of adoptees, a process which is still underway. In London, the U.K. government expressed regret for 160,000 "child migrants," many relinquished under coercion, sent from Britain to destinations around the Commonwealth for adoption through 1967, and set aside public funds to facilitate the identification and reunification of those involved. Just this month, Korea's National Assembly, acting on the country's official apology in October, tabled legislation to offer the right of abode and other measures to the benefit of its 150,000 persons lost to adoption. And, as we all know, in the U.S., voters in Oregon took the first step toward reconciliation by passing historic
legislation allowing adoptees access to their original birth certificates for the first time in nearly half a century.
These victories are of limited and ambivalent scope. Maserra may yet be freed by a military court. Some Australian states still have contact vetoes, although, to their credit, these are subject to sunset provisions and languish on the books unenforced. Canadian reform legislation in several provinces seems stuck in committee, thanks to unrelated filibustering and legislative gridlock, and, to a fault, they all contemplate compromise provisions. In Ireland, compromise in the form of disclosure vetoes seems to be the byword. The U.K. avoided a full and unconditional apology for the horror of its child migration programme (in diplomatic doublespeak an expression of regret falls just short of saying sorry). Korea, an OECD country, is still exporting the odd undocumented and unidentified baby. And, in the U.S., the
NCFA continues its tactic of obstruction, litigating against reform legislation in Oregon and Tennessee. Meanwhile, fly-by-night facilitators continue to peddle their wares from the third world to the infertile rich, with few or no precautions for full disclosure, assuring yet another generation of the identity-deprived. The American government has now officially
given up on collecting statistics on domestic adoptions, and cross-border imports, possibly 50% of all stranger adoptions, continue to increase at a decade-long cumulative average growth rate of nearly 10% per year. Many of these take place without any precautions to ensure that the informational, civil and political rights of adoptees will be protected. The U.S. has still failed to ratify a single international instrument protecting the rights of the adopted.
Those opposed to change around the world seem to have two emotions in common — fear and shame, the traditional engines of reaction. The fear side of the equation includes, quite predictably, parents fearful of losing perpetually infantilised children, adoption agencies, lawyers and facilitators who, having forgotten they operate in the public interest, fearful of what lies they might have told in years past or of losing their inventory in years forward, bureaucrats and politicians fearful of dredging up old secrets, now conveniently cached in locked file drawers, or of losing the benefit of future patronage. On the shame side, we are told, birthparents live in shame of their indiscretions or of the violence committed against them, adoptive parents live in shame of their infertility, adoptees are creatures of shame and must live to gratefully serve in order to atone for the sins of others. And we are also told that all of these people live in fear of being confronted with their shame, and hence all the king's horses and all the king's men must protect everyone from their fear of everyone else by trodding underfoot just a few civil and political rights. And of course, the only way we can ascertain the truth of these claims is from the mouths of the fear-mongers themselves. Meanwhile, the baby sellers, their legal counselors, certain government and orphanage officials and professional searchers continue to operate, often in an atmosphere of relative un-accountability and benign regulatory forbearance, capitalising on markets made possible, in large measure, by this fear and shame. This cycle remains intact and, in large measure, unchallenged. Dismantling these impediments to change, through advocacy, education, bureaucratic transparency, reconciliation, reform and, where necessary, legal retribution, will be the next challenge. 1998 only laid some rather tenuous groundwork.
Nonetheless, I believe this past year will be seen as the point where adoptees got their first glimpse of something which might sustain optimism in the years to come. It was the year when a sizable piece of the world recognised that adoptees have rights, even if only observed in the breach — that to know one's identity, to grow up and become independent adults in the eyes of the law, to expect accountability from those who placed them, to have their cultural and ethnic roots respected, to not have secret and often doctored files maintained on them, and to have the legally-protected expectation of being told the truth about their own lives, are all basic human rights. It was the year when, for the first time, a sizable minority of interests acknowledged that adoptees too should benefit from equal protection and non-discrimination under the rule of law and that they should be allowed to live free from the shame and fear of others. Thanks to the efforts of adoptees and their allies around the world, this minority now understands that only those who have abused the rights of others need experience shame, and only those who have not yet owned up to the policy mistakes of the past and present need feel fear. In these respects, adoptees have in 1998 grabbed for themselves the gift of hope.
Copyright 1998, Albert S. Wei
reprinted by permission of the author © Albert S. Wei
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