Take a look at Reflections on the End of 32 Years of Chinese International Adoption From a 30 Year Old Chinese Adoptee, by Grace Newton, the writer of the highly regarded Red Thread Broken blog. Grace is a Ph.D. student and a co-author of the groundbreaking Adoptee Consciousness Model.
In her blog post, Grace reflects on China’s history around international adoption as well as her own. She cites other Chinese adoptees, including Grace Gerloff‘s interview with Minnesota Public Radio. Overall, Newton reflects on the far-ranging ramifications of China’s decision, in terms of adoptees locating their birth families, adoptees who had hoped to adopt from China, the random nature of adoption, and more.
Here’s one excerpt:
“A question that I have grappled with throughout my participation at adoptee conferences and spaces is more than just recognizing and responding to the inherent traumas in adoption, how do we instill pride in a community that wants to become extinct? What does joy and what does liberation look like for such a community? Of course, this doesn’t describe every adoptee’s perspective, but as stated by Hannah Johns, a Chinese adoptee and social worker in New York, “the blunt reality is that there will be fewer families in existence like mine. And none will likely be created the way mine was ever again.” The news of China ending their international adoption program creates a sense of finality to the idea that we, Chinese adoptees, will go extinct. As families that are created through international adoption become rarer, they should absolutely be accepted and de-stigmatized as a less legitimate type of family; however I don’t believe that adoption should be normalized in the ways it has been again.”
Newton is also quoted in a New Yorker article, The End of Adoptions From China.
The article is written by Barbara Demick, a Los Angeles Times China bureau chief and author of Daughters of the Bamboo Grove: From China to America, a True Story of Abduction, Adoption, and Separated Twins.
Demick writes in The New Yorker about the complex history of adoption in China, noting “the legacy of the one-child policy will be long-lasting. Demographers believe that it will be difficult for China to boost its birth rate, in part because there are now too few women of childbearing age, the result of more than thirty-five years of abandonments and abortions. But the Chinese government is trying. Some localities have recently announced subsidies of up to four thousand dollars for families having a second or third child. Women have been given incentives like water bottles and rice cookers to attend pro-family lectures. The same government officers who once terrorized families are now tasked with promoting more births.”
As others in the adoption community have said, the range of responses to China’s decision needs to be discerned and honored. Adoptees are not a monolith, and nor are birth parents or adoptive parents. One certainty is, though, that international adoption is changing dramatically around the globe. Both so-called “sending” and “receiving” countries are no doubt watching the developments and responses closely, especially as allegations of role of money, commodification, and fraud continue to emerge.
