Sunday October 22, 2006
When celebrities buy a child
So Madonna adopted a baby boy from Malawi. One part of me says “Good for her.” And maybe good for him, although Madonna\’s history makes me a little sceptical about the kind of life 13-month-old David Banda may experience.
Certainly, he will get better health care and better education than he would at home. Malawi is one of the poorest countries in the world. Because of HIV/AIDS, it has one million orphans – one in every twelve people.
But another part of me is angry. Angry that children have become a commodity auctioned to the highest bidders. Angry that celebrities can use fame and finances to jump to the head of the line. Angry that governments bend or break their own rules, if it seems expedient.
And angry that children who desperately need love and affection, food and education, waste away in orphanages or gutters, while bureaucrats process applications at a rate that makes glaciers look speedy.
Long slow process
I admit that I have a bias here. In March 2005 our daughter Sharon adopted an Ethiopian baby girl, named Katherine.
At the time, Katherine was ten months old. But she had the development of an infant half that age. She could not hold a bottle or play with a toy. She could not roll over. She pulled back her hands and feet from touch.
Yet she fared better than most Ethiopian orphans. She had been transferred from an institution with cribs racked like sardines in a can to a foster home where she got at least a few hours a day of individual attention.
Today, Katherine is gloriously normal. (Her doting grandparents, of course, think she\’s exceptional.) Physically and intellectually, she is fully up to Canadian standards.
It took 18 months for Sharon\’s application for Ethiopian adoption to wend its weary way through provincial and international adoption agencies, Canadian immigration, and various Ethiopian ministries.
The process is equally slow for other countries. The Courier\’s City Editor Tom Wilson and his wife took over a year adopting from China; CHBC reporter Mohini Singh spent more than four years adopting from India. It was, says Singh, “totally exhausting, emotionally.”
But Madonna can do it in two weeks?
Bending the rules
Malawi normally requires prospective parents to become residents, living there for at least a year. Madonna arrived October 4. David Banda was flown to London October 16.
Madonna herself insists that she did everything legally: "We have gone about the adoption procedure according to the law like anyone else who adopts a child.”
She claims that she and film director husband Guy Ritchie had begun the adoption process "many months prior to our trip to Malawi."
Even that would be miraculously fast. Her own publicist didn\’t know about it. On October 11, Liz Rosenberg told Reuters: "She is not in the process of adopting a child…”
Even before the adoption hit headlines, sources in Malawi reported that Madonna had requested a line-up of 12 children from which to choose. It does not sound to me like a standard adoption process. An agency representative chose a child for Sharon six months in advance. All subsequent paperwork dealt with that specific child.
Is it purely coincidence that Madonna has poured money into her adoptee\’s homeland? She pledged $3 million to support orphans in Malawi, and another $1 million for a documentary about the plight of children there.
That feels perilously close to buying a child.
Exploiting the helpless
The Hague Convention on International Adoptions prohibits the sale of children. For good reason. It would be all too easy for unscrupulous persons to adopt children from poverty-stricken regions and then exploit them as household help, sex slaves, or even organ donors.
That\’s why social agencies here in Canada check the adopting parent\’s capabilities thoroughly before and after international adoptions.
Prospective parents customarily pay a fee – typically $7000-10,000 – to cover support services and facilities. No money, no child. But none of it fattens any individual\’s pockets. In theory, at least.
Except that it doesn\’t always work that cleanly. One couple went to the Ukraine and found that authorities had substituted a different child. Some $30,000 later, they gave up in disgust and came home. Another couple went to India, and found their child held for an additional $8,000 ransom.
Doesn\’t that sound like selling children to you?
The news media also revealed that David Banda wasn\’t an orphan at all. His mother died a week after he was born. His father, Yohane Banda, had placed David in an orphanage for better care.
Banda, who can barely read or write, had only days to digest a nine-page document before appearing in court to sign away his son forever. He told Angella Johnson of the Daily Mail that he felt powerless to stop the process.
Will the media monitor to see if the father suddenly profits from relinquishing his son?
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I don\’t fault Madonna herself here – unless someone can prove that she did pay bribes to speed up her adoption. A visit to almost any African orphanage would melt even Scrooge\’s heart.
In 2004, we were in a Canadian group that visited an orphanage in Tanzania. If regulations had permitted, most of us would have taken a child home. They are adorable.
Madonna is just the latest celebrity – others include Mia Farrow, Angelina Jolie, and Meg Ryan – to adopt children from desperately poor countries.
Jonathan Pearce, director of Adoption U.K., said celebrity adoptions draw attention to the need for adoption — but they could give the impression adopting a child was a simple process. It creates “a perception that you can just go out there and purchase a child," he said.
The present complicated process needs to be streamlined, certainly. But it also needs to be followed, to prevent abuses. Celebrities should be as subject to those safeguards as anyone else.
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Copyright © 2006 by Jim Taylor. Non-profit use in congregations and study groups permitted; all other rights reserved.
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