Our Adoption Journey Post #3: Why China?

We've already discussed why we chose international adoption, but why did we choose China? There are a few reasons why we picked China over other countries such as Russia and Ethiopia. These reasons include: the established adoption process in China, a higher level of prenatal health in China, and China's rich history and culture.

The adoption process is China is fairly standardized and relatively transparent. By this we mean that you know how the process is generally going to work and what to expect from beginning to end. An important aspect of this is that when you get a referral you can be certain that the information provided to you by the orphanage on the child although limited is fairly accurate. They're not going to mislead you. This is not true in all countries. The recent incident involving a Tennessee mother and adopted Russian boy highlights this issue.

To briefly summarize this incident; this mother adopted a 7 year boy from Russia who turned out to have severe psychological issues that the orphanage did not fully disclose. This mother deciding that she couldn't parent this child response was to send the child back to Russia on a plane by himself. First, let us say the mother was absolutely wrong in doing this and should be criminally charged. It is understandable that she could not parent this child, but to do what she did was cruel, selfish, and irresponsible. There were other options she could have chosen that she didn't even bother to explore. That being said, this illustrates some of the risks with adopting from Russia. It is true that Russian orphanages are not always honest in the information they disclose about the children in their care. There is also a fair amount of "donations" that one must pay to adopt a child from Russia. Often a family does not know the amount or number of these "donations" until they get to Russia. In contrast, for China you know ahead of time that you will have to make one donation to the orphanage and how much it is expected to be for.

Another reason we chose China is because of the high level of prenatal care in China. Since most birth mothers do not plan to give up their children until after they have them (that's a whole different topic) they take good care of themselves. There are few problems with drug and alcohol abuse. In contrast, in countries such as Russia there is a high level of prenatal alcohol syndrome among other health problems.

Another aspect of China that's always intrigued us is its rich history and culture. From Chinese New Year to the ancient Chinese dynasties to the Moon Festival, China is a very fascinating country. It has a long storied history and many unique cultural events and related effects. We look forward to sharing all this with our future daughter.

We realize in this post we do highlight alot of problems Russian adoption. We do this not to scare people or criticize families who have adopted from Russia (except the one mentioned earlier) but to highlight why we did not choose Russia for ourselves. We often get asked why we did not pick Russia and often they are really asking why didn't you adopt from a country where the child is going to look like you. For us it does not matter that our future daughter will not share our physical characteristics. Actually, it might even be a good thing. Every family has to make the choices that are best for them and China is best for us.


Now for the update.

As of 4/13/2010 here's our "non special needs" wait statistics:

Referred through: 4/17/2006
Current wait: 48 months
Projected referral date: 4/13/2013
Projected months remaining to referral: 36

In the Review Room!

Based on recent portal updates on the CCAA website they have now reviewed dossiers logged in through April 2009. Since our dossier was logged in May 2009, this means that they are reviewing ours as we write this. This is the step in the process where CCAA reviews all of our paperwork and approves, rejects, or asks questions concerning our dossier. While getting approved through the review room does not get us any closer to a referral it is an important step in the overall process. So far, we have not been informed of any questions they might have so cross your fingers! In this situation no news is good news. Once they announce that dossiers have been reviewed through the end of May 2009 (or later) we'll know that we're through!



On another note, The Washington Post recently published an interesting article on special needs adoption from China. This is something we can very much relate to and if you're interested you can click here.



Finally, we'll save the wait update for our next post but I wanted to mention that Congress did extend the Adoption Tax Credit (see our last post) for another year. It was included in the recent health care legislation. It doesn't go as far as making the credit permament as we would have liked to see but does keep it going for the time being. Rest assured, next year when it's up for renewal again we'll have another post on the issue.

Nothing new on the wait, will update the stats with the next post.