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Recently in Salon Mothers Who Think

Column
Prisoners of a crappy war
I don't regret protesting Vietnam, but "Return With Honor" has humbled me before the heroism of our military.
By Anne Lamott
[07/08/99]

Playing from behind
The trials and tribulations of being a female sportswriter were highlighted by last week's Samantha Stevenson-Julius Erving story.
By Steve Kettmann
[07/07/99]

And many more ...
Kids' birthday parties are out of hand. Whatever happened to cake, ice cream and pin the tail on the donkey?
By Janet Mazur
[07/06/99]

Bare, naked ladies
There's not much room to commune with your own nudity, or anyone else's, in a swimming-pool locker room full of wary onlookers.
By Jennifer New
[07/02/99]

Column
Optimistic complaints
Of course, mothers think -- and every once in a while they even complain.
By Sallie Tisdale
[07/01/99]

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These infants and toddlers weren't abused. They weren't ill-fed -- their diet was simple, though not meager. They weren't wet or soiled or poorly clothed. No, these kids were just plain lonely. Staffers were too busy to do much more than attend to the children's most basic daily needs. So babies stood in their cribs with arms outstretched, begging to be held. Or they rocked on their knees endlessly, looking for love and unable to find it.

With this the central image of my Russian adoption, is it any surprise that I feel fiercely toward any threat to deny these children homes and loving parents? Yet a threat to these and many other adoptable children is exactly what is on the horizon, in the form of an easily overlooked provision in Senate Bill 682, which is the enabling legislation for the widely applauded Hague Convention on Inter-country Adoption. The bill is jointly sponsored by senators Jesse Helms, R-N.C., and Mary Landrieu, D-La., both adoptive parents who have been passionate advocates on adoption issues. Hearings for S.B. 682 are expected later this summer; ratification could take two to three years. Despite its generally good intentions and drawn-out approval process, S.B. 682 carries with it an electric charge. This legislation, if passed, could severely curtail most international adoptions by unmarried persons.

The Hague Convention, an international treaty, has been heavily supported as a protective measure for adoptive children and parents. Ten years in process and already ratified by 32 countries, it aims to set worldwide standards for inter-country adoptions. The convention's primary requirement is that each member country add to its current adoption overseers a "central authority" to accredit adoption providers and mandate accounting procedures. Controls such as those the Hague imposes would help curb the money-gouging "facilitators" and bribery endemic to inter-country adoptions, particularly in Latin America and Eastern Europe. (I have in mind the $11,000 cash I handed over to a facilitator in Russia, and the order I was expressly given not to ask where the money was going.)

Even more important, the treaty could put a real dent in the tragic, sordid business of baby trafficking, evidenced recently by the baby-smuggling ring that federal prosecutors have charged brought Mexican infants to New York. It might also curtail incidents of impoverished women worldwide -- this is a big problem in Russia -- selling their newborns to the highest Western bidders. Corruption of this sort gives "sending" countries the jitters and slows, rather than hastens, the pace of adoptions and of the numbers of orphans released to Westerners.

The Hague is undoubtedly a great leap forward for international adoptions, but now here's the problem: While S.B. 682 carries with it numerous important controls, a provision in the bill specifies that children adopted out of the United States be placed only with "a married man and woman." This wouldn't be such a blow if it affected only the 300 or so American-born children adopted by Canadians and Western Europeans each year. But recent diplomatic sensitivities with China and Russia have reminded Americans of our history of fragile relations with these countries, and the fear, among adoption organizations and advocates, is of reciprocity. In short, if the United States limits adoptions to married, heterosexual couples, it's reasonable for us to expect the Russians -- who gave us 4,491 children last year -- and the Chinese -- who gave us 4,206 of the total 15,774 inter-country adoptions by Americans in 1998 -- to do the same in return.

Next page | Single parents might lose any chance to adopt -- and many children could be without homes