Having a baby is an awesome responsibility. Adopting one is in some ways even greater. It means taking in for ever a person about whom you know little or nothing; it means choosing a child without having any real understanding about the choice you are making, knowing nothing of its family.
It is true that some aspects of the choice are obvious; if you go abroad you can select for sex, beauty, race and country of origin. But there is something distasteful about that kind of designer baby shopping. In any case it has nothing to do with the real nature of the child — its inherited qualities of character, intelligence or the damage it may have suffered. That cannot be chosen (or traded) because it cannot even be guessed at.
Last week it was reported that Madonna had adopted a one-year-old boy from Malawi. For a long time the media have been saying that she wants a third child but at 48 is having difficulty conceiving. That may or may not be true but Malawi government officials reportedly said on Wednesday that Madonna had flown to southern Africa by private jet to “locate a suitable candidate” and inspected a shortlist of 12 tiny orphan boys.
She had at first wanted a girl but changed her mind two weeks ago. Changing one’s mind in such serious circumstances might sound a little frivolous but so, allegedly, she did. The chosen baby would have to spend the next 18 months in Malawi while checks were made on Madonna and her family, before he could finally be adopted. Meanwhile he would be looked after by a network for vulnerable children that Madonna has set up in Malawi.
The next day, however, a spokesman for Madonna denied all this. So the story is shrouded in mystery, but if Madonna were indeed to adopt a Third World child, she would not be the first superstar to do so. Angelina Jolie, Meg Ryan and Mia Farrow have. So, too, have countless well-off western women who have gone to Latin America, the Far East and Africa, as well as to the poorer parts of Europe.
One could say that international baby shopping is fashionable. Indeed the demand is so great that in some places it has turned into a racket. Last week The Sunday Times reported on illegal baby traffic in Bulgaria, where some mothers are forced to sell their babies to dealers to pay debts, and others are cruelly tricked into handing them over for ever. Until two years ago baby trafficking was not a crime in Bulgaria. In Romania, where there are countless orphans in need of a home, the government stopped international adoptions in 2001 after allegations of trafficking.
On the one hand it’s hard to avoid being suspicious of rich white celebrities who publicise their adoption of little black or brown babies — demonstrating as they smile for the cameras their charming maternal longings, their compassion for the poor and their impeccable non-racist credentials. They make adoption seem easy and glamorous when it is neither; it is hard, demanding and risky for all concerned.
But perhaps such cynicism is misplaced. Perhaps what these women are doing will encourage the rich world to spare a thought for lost and abandoned children in poor countries. Perhaps, too, the fear of money changing hands in the process of adoption is exaggerated. Human rights activists are outraged and of course it is wrong to buy or sell a person; traffickers interested only in money are beneath contempt.
All the same I sometimes think it might be better not to be too squeamish. After all, if there is one thing worse than an imperfect home in a rich country, it is no home in a poor country. The child who finds a happy home in Europe or America would care nothing at all that her adoptive parents in some sense paid for her.
A relation of mine in America recently adopted two tiny girls from a respectable orphanage in one of the poorest cities in India. I don’t know what she and her husband paid, but someone described it as “expensive”, as well it might be. The prospective parents had to be vetted by the charity concerned over many months, there was endless form filling to pay for and I think the charity expected a standard contribution to help to look after the other less lucky orphans.
Having been abandoned as babies by their destitute mother, these two little girls were spared a life of desperate poverty and are now growing up happily in America. Perhaps that is what their birth mother hoped. Yet at the time a member of their new family said he disapproved of adopting babies in this way because he believed it would encourage trafficking.
He was both right and wrong. Where there is demand there will be dealing, and some of it will be dirty dealing. But surely the answer is not to ignore the demand and prohibit all dealing, but to stop the dirty dealing that springs up around it. Just because villains get involved, that’s no reason to deny unwanted children the chance to be wanted. The human rights activists in the West, in their horror at trafficking, have by the law of unintended consequences done considerable harm.
Romania is a case in point. Thousands of western families were anxious to adopt orphaned and abandoned children in Romania, especially when the media exposed the terrible conditions in orphanages there. But because a black market grew up around adoption, the Romanian government was obliged by pressure from the European Union to stop foreign adoptions altogether in 2001.
I can’t think of anything sadder than the story of several teenage orphans who were approved for adoption by western families before 2001, but who were kept in Romania by the ban. This unlucky timing meant that instead of a reasonable home in Italy, France or America, they were sexually abused and beaten for many years in their orphanage. They found out only recently that they had at one time had a chance to escape which was then taken away, as reported in this newspaper last month; one can barely imagine their reaction.
Adoption is a good but hard thing; nobody should be either sentimental or squeamish about it. And it should have nothing to do with celebrity or publicity.
Minette Marrin