Adoption

I've been watching A Baby Story lately since it's on during the kids' naptime (it still freaks me out when I write that word, kids, as in plural). In case you don't know, it's a show on TLC where they follow a couple for a couple of weeks before and after they have a baby and record the emotions, complications, etc. of birth. This week they were following couples who adopted. I saw 4 episodes - two were adopted from Korea, one from China, and one from Kazakhstan.

So I understand the plethora of orphans from China and Kazakhstan, but Korea? Growing up, most adopted kids I knew were from Korea. I never questioned it. I always assumed that Asian kids on TV with white last names were Korean, just because. It makes sense that immediately following the Korean war there would be a lot of orphans, but why in the 70s and 80s? Hmm. I decided to look into it.

Strangely enough, I yahoo searched "History of Adoption from Korea" and got an exact match. Here's the deal. After the Korean war, some random farmer from Oregon went to Korea and came back with 8 "Amerasian" children. He got some publicity for it and increased awareness of the need, then started an adoption agency. Pearl S. Buck somehow got involved and created her own agency that adopted exclusively from Korea (one of the episodes of A Baby Story went through the Pearl Buck agency). So pretty much it was the first well-established movement for international adoption in America.

A couple of years ago, some friends started looking into adopting from Korea. It's a really complicated and difficult process, often taking 3 years to go through. It's crazy - they want your age, income, even body mass index to be in a specific range in order to adopt. That was weird to me, especially since I knew so many adopted Koreans. According to the article I read, though, it said that a bunch of adopted Koreans returned to Korea for the '88 Olympics. Then there was all this publicity about Korea's biggest export being babies, which (of course) shamed the country into restricting adoption overseas. They're limiting the number more and more each year and hope to eliminate it completely by 2015. Except in 1998, when IMF hit hard, they temporarily halted the restrictions due to the impoverishment of so many families, who apparently had to give up their babies. Sad!

Anyway, that was just some interesting info I read. It makes sense. And I guess one reason people choose to continue to adopt from Korea is that these agencies have been around the longest and are well-reputed, even though there are probably kids in a whole lot more countries in need of being adopted.

Are you still reading this? So anyway, I thought it was funny how the Koreans would hand over the babies. Like, the caregivers were obviously very attached to the babies, but they'd awkardly smile and literally just hand them over to the adoptive parents. The parents, on the other hand, are all prepared to be super sensitive to the babies' needs and stuff. They all seemed kinda shocked when they got the babies.

In one case, the baby actually came to America with a caregiver (along with 5 other adoptees, which I thought was interesting - get them all over at the same time) instead of the parents coming to Korea to pick them up. The lady had the baby in a Korean Bjorn. She waved at the new parents, told the baby "umma, appa, oppa" (mom, dad, brother), shook the baby's hand (she was, like, 5 months old), waved again and left all teary-eyed. The parents were like, uh... okay. The show shows an update a few weeks later, and the baby was doing great. She was smiling a lot and having a good old time, so that was sweet. They decided to keep her Korean name as her middle name, which is sort of nice. This was the Pearl Buck one. A few weeks previous to getting their baby, the parents had met with a bunch of other adoptive parents and kids at the agency where they had a little Korean party. One woman humbly made bulgogi, and a few dressed their kids in hanboks. A fobby Korean teenager was there to teach them about dol, the first birthday. It was sweet.

I know I've been a little emotional since Matthew was born (making up for my complete stoicism during my pregnancy), but I've cried during each of these episodes. I actually DVR-ed today's since I was out. I don't normally cry during these shows (except for one episode where this woman had a boy, then a girl, then a miscarriage, then her baby died at 25 weeks for no particular reason, then she lost another baby due to infection from an amniocentesis and actually had to give birth to it at 30 weeks or something, then she got pregnant with twins, then she lost one twin, then actually had the other), but these adoptive stories made me bawl.

My hat goes off to those adoptive parents out there. What a grueling process it is. It almost doesn't seem fair that every idiot can have their own baby, but deserving unselfish people have to put so much effort and wait so long to adopt a baby that really really needs parents. And they really do love them so much. Come to think of it, all but one of the families on the show already had biological kids of their own, and they really seemed to treat the adopted kid the same as their own. I don't know if I could do that, honestly. I had a student who was adopted, along with his younger sister. His parents had biological children as well, the oldest and youngest of the 4. The mom TOTALLY treated them differently. It was rather sad.

I don't have a conclusion to this entry. I'm not saying I'm ready to adopt. I'm not saying I'd never do it. I feel enlightened, though, and I have a lot of respect for adoptive parents now.