So Madonna has adopted a one-year-old boy from Malawi. Or has she? There have been denials from her people but it’s not so unbelievable, is it? After all, she wouldn’t be the first. She has been thinking about it for months, apparently, and in July, her father-in-law let slip that Madonna and her husband, Guy Ritchie, had started the process. The pop star was in the southern African country this week visiting orphanages. It had been reported that 12 children were “selected,” from which she would choose a little brother for her children Lourdes, nine, and Rocco, six. “She asked us to identify boys only, which we have done after visiting four orphanages,” a government spokeswoman, Adrina Michiela, is reported to have said.
By now, developing countries must be used to celebrities swooping in to choose children like pick ’n’ mix candy. It’s the “rainbow” (her word) approach to families that the actress Angelina Jolie advocates. “It’s a very special thing,” she has said. “There’s something about traveling somewhere and finding your family.”
She adopted her son, Maddox, four, from Cambodia and her daughter, Zahara, 18 months, from Ethiopia (Jolie and Brad Pitt also have a biological daughter, Shiloh). Jolie has talked about adopting again, from another country. “We don’t know which country,” she told CNN. “But we’re looking at different countries. It’s going to be the balance of what would be the best for Mad and for Z right now. It’s, you know, another boy, another girl, which country, which race would fit best with the kids?”
PHOTO: AP
Celebrities adopting children is nothing new. Joan Crawford raised four adopted children and Mia Farrow started adopting children from developing countries in the 1970s. Of her 14 children, 10 were adopted, some from poverty-stricken countries including Korea and Vietnam (notoriously, her former partner Woody Allen later married her adopted daughter Soon-Yi).
Other celebrities have also adopted from abroad. Meg Ryan adopted her daughter Daisy from China and Ewan McGregor and his wife Eve, who have two children of their own, have adopted a four-year-old Mongolian girl.
While adopting from abroad can be commendable (although some experts warn of displacement and identity issues down the line), you can’t help feeling that picking up a malnourished but photogenic child is sometimes more about a celebrity’s image (not to mention that they need not suffer stretchmarks or caesarean scars). Even Jessica Simpson, a pop star whose only involvement so far in international issues seems to have been beaming her MTV reality show Newlyweds to a global audience, is thinking of adopting from abroad. “I think Angelina Jolie has done amazing things, and the international adoption rate since her has skyrocketed,” she told one US television program.
PHOTO: NY TIMES NEWS SERVICE
Should this attitude be a cause for unease? Of course, there are children in developing countries who need help but wouldn’t it be better if celebrities gave most of their vast fortunes away to help orphans and refugee children in their country of origin, rather than “rescuing” a child and transporting it to Beverly Hills? There are also many children in the US and in the UK who are waiting to be adopted. Some celebrities have chosen domestic adoptions (Calista Flockhart, Tom Cruise and Nicole Kidman, Sharon Stone and Michelle Pfeiffer have all adopted children in America) so what would stop Madonna, who is based mainly here in the UK, choosing to adopt a British child?
“The attention given to celebrities adopting from abroad distorts the fact that intercountry adoption is quite rare,” says David Holmes, chief executive of the British Association for Adoption and Fostering. “Thousands of children across the UK are adopted from our care system every year and as many as 4,000 more are waiting for permanent and loving homes at any one time. Yet we hear more about the 300 children adopted from other countries, usually as babies. We want to remind people that children here — particularly those over four — often wait far too long to find an adoptive family. Some never do.”
So why adopt from abroad? “People have different reasons,” says a spokesperson for Oasis, a support group run by families who have adopted from abroad. “The most obvious reason is that children who are waiting to be adopted in the UK will be older [the average age is four], and will have been through different circumstances, in and out of the care system and may have emotional or behavioral difficulties, which could be difficult for a first-time parent to take on.
“In the UK, it is sometimes considered best for the child to retain contact with their birth parents and some people might not want the influence of another adult in their family. That might sound awful but that’s the bottom line. Other people have connections with that part of the world. It is a different way of creating a family that is just as valid. It isn’t a fashion thing and the rigors of the process mean that those who just have a vague idea of saving a child won’t last the distance, which is right. My advice to them is go and get a puppy.”
If it looks easy for celebrities to adopt from abroad, it is — because most of them adopt through the US. In the UK, prospective parents have to have a home study (in-depth interviews about literally every aspect of your life) by a social worker, which can take up to nine months. Then you have to wait months before you are approved, then the paperwork is sent to the country you wish to adopt from. The whole process usually takes a minimum of two years, often longer, and can cost up to ?15,000 (US$28,000).
In the US, home studies take around two weeks, and in many states unregulated adoption agencies are used (it amounts to babies being “bought” quickly and easily). There are fears that illegal overseas adoptions are fuelling a baby-trafficking trade in the poorest countries. In 2004, Lauryn Galindo was sentenced to 18 months in prison for money laundering and visa fraud. Her agency, Seattle International Adoptions Inc, was charging American residents US$10,000 to arrange adoptions of Cambodian children. Without the adoptive parents’ knowledge, poverty-stricken women in Cambodia were being paid little more than US$100 to give their babies away.
Adoptions from Cambodia are currently suspended. Romania, too, has banned international adoptions amid allegations of corruption, even though there are now thousands of children languishing in badly run institutions.
The majority of the 300 children adopted from abroad into the UK come from China, where the one-child policy is in force and many children — 95 percent of them girls — are abandoned. In the past 10 years, more than 60,000 children left China, the vast majority for the US, but around 1,000 have come to the UK.
In China, a whole adoption industry has sprung up, from tour operators running trips to orphanages, to hotels catering for foreigners who, after many months of paperwork, go to collect their child (and “donations” of around US$3,000 are often made to orphanages).
But even though the Chinese adoption system is usually well regulated, there have been reports of babies being snatched and sold to orphanages. Last year, adoption authorities temporarily stopped adoptions in the Hunan Province in southern China after a baby-trafficking ring was exposed (10 people were convicted).
Of course it is understandable that anyone who visits a country where poverty is rife would want to take a child out of that, but it’s not as simple as saving someone; people sometimes underestimate the trauma some children can suffer if they are taken out of their country. Chris Atkins, a social worker for the adoption support service After Adoption, was adopted from Hong Kong in the 1960s by a white couple. “I have worked with adult transnational adoptees who have suffered breakdowns, have problems with relationships and have huge issues with their identity,” she says. “There is the feeling of displacement, the constant challenge to fit in somewhere and it lasts a lifetime. I grew up with a fear of rejection and I still don’t feel entirely comfortable in British society but nor do I feel comfortable in Chinese society. I love my parents dearly and on the one hand I’m glad I had the opportunities I’ve had. But I would rather have stayed in Hong Kong.”
So what will the effect on all these celebrity adopted children be? Joan Crawford adopted her four children, ostensibly for the good publicity, but her relationship with them was so bad she disinherited two and the remaining two only got tiny slices of her fortune. Surely, like children who stay with their birth parents, some adopted children will have problems, others won’t. In an interview earlier this year, Mia Farrow said of her daughter’s relationship with Allen: “She was on the streets in Korea when she was captured and brought to the state orphanage. And in a way I can see from her perspective — a very limited perspective — that she’s improved her situation.”
Maybe the biggest problem these kids will face isn’t the fact of their adoption — it is being the children of celebrity parents.
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