Well said.

My adoption agency director posted this on Facebook today:

International Adoption Editorial
Barbara Adde
February 19, 2009


I entered the world of parenthood much later than most.

At the age of 42, in a stark, unfamiliar orphanage in a small, poor town, not even a dot on the huge mass of land on a map of Russia, I had the great joy of handing a dark-eyed infant girl I had just met to my husband and introduced our daughter.

By the time she came home with us 3 months later, she had gone from stranger to dearly beloved daughter. By the time she was 2, she could repeat with me that Mommy and Daddy would always keep her "happy and healthy, safe and warm."

Julia, and 4 years later, our son Benjamin, have become the light of our lives. They are as different as the 2 continents they were born on -- Julia from Asia and Benjamin, with his blond hair and pale grey eyes, from just over the border Russia shares with Europe.

Julia at 7 reminds me of a cat -- feline grace, mysterious deep thoughts hidden behind sleepy eyes, only to open with a sunny smile. At 4, Ben is a happy-go-lucky puppy, bouncing everywhere, stopping only to eat (often) and get a pat on the head.

Somewhere along the way between Russia and now, they stopped being adopted and became a part of me. They are clearly etched into my chromosomes -- each on their own, of course -- their internal continental divide.

And so it is with great pain that I read stories of children stolen from their birth parents to be sold to Americans, so desperate to become parents, supposedly, that they will look away from what is happening.

Perhaps this is true in some places, and it absolutely needs to be stopped, but these stories are affecting the lives of the hundreds of thousands of true orphans who will lose their one chance to know a family, because the fear that is being created by these stories is all but stopping international adoption.

Has anyone writing these articles stopped to look in the many, many orphanages that exist around the world, looked in the eyes of the children whose childhoods are passing them by? These aren't someone's living warehouses, storage for future sales. These are children whose parents, for whatever reason -- poverty usually, illness, personal crises we don't know -- have handed their children to the State to raise. And the orphanage women who struggle to do their best to keep these children fed, clothed and housed with the limited resources available to them.

Some of the children in these Russian orphanages are visited by parents and extended family; these lucky ones are identified as not available for adoption. The majority are never visited. These children exist -- or as one orphanage director told us -- "they do not live, they survive" -- until the day they are released to the street, with no home, no family, no hope. No past to give them roots, no future to look forward to.

Julia and Ben were among these children. It scares me how close we came to missing them. In fact, any one of these children could have been the one assigned to us by the Russian Ministry of Education. So each one is in some way mine also. And I had to leave them behind, with no mother to hold and comfort them, as I hold and comfort Julia and Ben. It is impossible to forget the children I met there and the multitudes each represents.

We can't leave them behind because of misinformation and politics. Those children who are truly without parents and family deserve their chance for a happy childhood too. Being born in the right place and time should not be a prerequisite for knowing a parent's love.

I don't know why my daughter and son had to be born to other parents on the other side of the planet -- I don't really think there is an answer. I don't know if there an answer to the pain I can only imagine those parents must still feel from a decision they felt they had to make -- or the pain my children will one day learn when they truly understand what they lost very early in their lives.

But I do know that the four of us are a family, bonded for life by much more than the pieces of paper that transferred their lives to our care.

I hope that the many waiting children reach the arms of the parents who can keep them happy and healthy, safe and warm.