HW 42 - Pregnancy & birth culminating project

Choice 1: Organize a personal experience around this topic and write a narrative of your experience

What if i was adopted? This is a question i ask myself frequently, but because i wasn't i don't know what'd i do for sure. I'd most likely try to find my real parents, but be grateful for having parents that took care of me as if they were my own. Adoption itself is one thing, but an overseas adoption is another topic. For this project, i decided to compare and contrast answers to three essential questions through an interview of my friend's father and three other sources.

The first question is: why an overseas adoption? My friend was adopted from Columbia, and when i asked his dad this question he told me that there were two reasons: 1. Because him and his wife had a lawyer contract in columbia, and 2. Because he (the dad) is Puerto Rican and he thought that adopting a child from South America would give the child a sense of cultural identity. In the article The Benefits of International Adoption, the author states: "most parents choose international adoption only after being repeatedly stymied by U.S. adoption protocols—from birth parents that change their minds at the last minute, to stringent and sometimes arbitrary requirements on the part of domestic adoption agencies". Not including the recent fact that celebrities have influenced Americans to adopt internationally, it makes sense that based on my research, the reason for overseas adoptions are 1. Cultural diversity 2. Connections and 3. Adoption agencies in U.S can be more difficult.

The second question i sought to answer was: How difficult is the process of adopting a child overseas? My friend's dad told me that the process was ultimately an agony and that the adoption in Columbia was the easy part, but once back in the U.S it took him and his wife years to get their new son's citizenship. The article: Unwrapping Red Tape to Find the Gift of Family, tells the story of Rebecca Compton and Jeremy Meyer who were trying to adopt a child in Kazakhstan but dealt with complications with the adoption agency after a recent controversy over a previous overseas adoption. The process of the adoption seriously stressed the mother especially: "On many nights in recent months, she has retreated to her hotel room and not known whether to scream or cry or bang her head against the wall in frustration. She said she once dreamed that she was hugging Noah, but then he disappeared, though she could still feel his touch. Then she located him nearby, 'looking up at me with his dark searching eyes,' she recalled, but he vanished again." Based on my research, i can come to the conclusion that the process of adopting a child overseas is not only difficult, but can be mentally stressful and can drive the adoptees to the brink of insanity

The third and final question i tried to answer was: Do children that were adopted overseas try to learn more about their origin later in life? My friend's dad told me that his son hasn't ever tried to find out more about his biological family. "As far as my son is concerned, he's American" he told me, "anything he knows about his cultural heritage is from me". In the article Adopted From Korea and in Search of Identity the author discusses a trend in children that were adopted from Korea in to the U.S (in the past fifty to sixty years) in that most Koreans didn't consider themselves to be Korean until later in their lives. According to a study put out at around the time the article was published, based on the first generation of Koreans that were adopted to the U.S: "as adults, nearly 61 percent said they had traveled to Korea both to learn more about the culture and to find their birth parents." Not only is it tough for these Korean adoptees to accept their cultural heritage once they seek it, but some even face disapproval from the families that adopted them: " 'A lot of adoptees have problems talking about these issues with their adoptive families,' she said. 'They take it as some kind of rejection of them when we’re just trying to figure out who we are.' " Based on this research i can come to the conclusion that most children that were adopted overseas seek cultural identity when adults (or just at a later point in life), but it is not an easy process to say the least.

In conclusion, adopting a child internationally is a huge process . Through my research, i have learned why people do it, how difficult the process is and if the children that were adopted seek any cultural identity. Although adopting internationally is difficult, in the end most children are happy to live with their adopted families and should be as long as their parents took good care of them (as most do).