Rescue or Kidnapping?

The Toronto subway underlined the timeliness of this book for me: I looked up from reading it one afternoon to encounter two toddlers appraising one another across the aisle. The blue-eyed blond child braced herself for comfort against an Asian woman, almost certainly her nanny, probably from the Philippines. The Asian child kept one hand reassuringly twisted in the clothing of the woman with her—a tall redhead, almost certainly her adoptive mother.

There are enough questions and themes in that tableau for dozens of books. Babies without Borders: Adoption and Migration across the Americas attempts to address some of them. Its author, Karen Dubinsky, wants to give due consideration to the two models that international and interracial adop- tion can be moulded to fit: kidnap or rescue. She wants her readers at least to think about the fact that we welcome babies from developing world countries—but often not their parents. She tries to trace the shifting line that separates children-as-people from children-as-commodity. (And in a world where adoptive parents will pay so much for them, it gets harder all the time to recognize that line.) Since her focus is the Americas, she wants us to remember that the North is often responsible for the conflicts and poverty that make so many babies from the South available for adoption.

In Canada—an importer of children—atten- tion generally focuses on the individual child, the individual family, in a mode (or, to use Dubinsky’s favourite word, trope) that replaces politics with sentiment. The book is an analysis, mostly in political terms, of systems that she sums up thus: “mod- ern adoption is premised on inequality.” Dubinsky relies on the tools and theories one would expect from a professor in the departments of both history and global development at Queen’s University. She is deeply concerned about neo- colonialism and exploitive globalism. She is on the alert for western cultural arrogance. She starts from the approved academic premise that our takes on childhood and motherhood are ideas, intellectual constructs.

The book is likely to attract more attention than most academic studies, however, because events bring the issue of transnational adoption into the news so regularly these days. There is, most obvi- ously, the current Angelina-sparked fad for celebri- ties to adopt African babies. There is the arrest of ten American Baptists in January as they tried to transport 33 Haitian “orphans” across the border for adoption; all of the alleged orphans have now been reunited with their families. Fraudulent adop- tion agencies are a staple of television’s investigative news programs.

Moreover, Dubinsky’s academic disciplines are not the only factors that shape her interpretations. She is also the adoptive parent of a Guatemalan child. Indeed, she took custody of the boy at about the time that a Guatemalan mob lynched a Japanese tourist and a local bus driver in the belief that they were abducting children to harvest their organs.

Babies without Borders focuses on three pivotal historical initiatives: Operation Peter Pan, which brought 14,000 children from Cuba to the United States after Fidel Castro’s revolution, the interracial adoptions of Afro-Canadian and First Nations chil- dren in this country from the 1950s on and the wave of adoptions from Guatemala since the 1990s. Note that Dubinsky would probably have focused on Guatemala even without her personal involvement. It is currently the country with the world’s highest per capita adoption rate. The child welfare organi- zation Casa Alianza has compared Guatemala to a “child supermarket” or a “baby factory for rich countries.”

What links these three different waves of adop- tions is that central ques- tion of kidnap or rescue. For Americans and the middle class Cubans who dispatched their children to the United States five decades ago, Operation Peter Pan was clearly a rescue mission. Cuba’s young would be saved from godless commu- nism, from the destruction of family values and—in a myth of great strength at the time—quite possibly from being turned into tinned meat in Russia. Ironically, this effort to keep them in families, rather than in institutions, landed some of them in orphanages and camps not so very different from the facilities their parents dreaded. Decades later, some of those birth parents are filled with regret over what they now see as a tragic error. Some of their children now side with the revolution. And some Cubans of both generations still think the Peter Pan parents made the right choice.

Rescue was also the original framing for the adoption of aboriginal children in Canada: Good families would rescue these poor children from neglect, from violence, from vice. That form of adoption is fairly broadly viewed as kidnapping (and a disaster) now, not just by the communities that lost their children but also by Canada’s govern- ments and the general public.

Much of this history—except for the adoptions of aboriginal children—will be at best only vaguely familiar to the general reader. Operation Peter Pan, for instance, was initially cloaked in secrecy, as befits a campaign backed by the CIA, and had almost no impact in this country. (Its memory was revived, however, in some of the coverage of the Elian Gonzalez affair ten years ago—the boy who was eventually returned to his father in Cuba, after a lively propaganda war on both sides.) Many Canadians will probably also have no memory of the Open Door Society, a Montreal-based group that encouraged white families to adopt black or mixed-race children.

The book is a useful corrective to any linger- ing Canadian smugness about our own tolerance and blamelessness—always relative to the United States, of course. One disturbing feature Dubinsky’s research underlines is the different treatment of birth mothers from different communities. Social workers exerted enormous and unremitting pressure on white single mothers in this country to give up their babies, who were easy to place in adoptive homes. (This theme was reinforced by a documentary, “40 Year Secret,” that aired in January on CBC’s The Passionate Eye. Its most poignant scenes brought together women who had given up children in the 1960s to share their memories of maternity homes determined to instill shame and compliance.) The white mothers were told that giv- ing up their babies was the decent, unselfish choice. But the same welfare system urged the mothers of aboriginal and mixed-race children to keep their babies, who had less hope of finding other homes.

Dubinsky documents the removal of children for transparently flimsy reasons from First Nations families that could have raised them: several generations living in a single home, for example. There is no question, as government inquiries have established, that welfare authorities were overly zealous in removing aboriginal children and that many of the adopting families were unprepared to deal with children whose histories often included abuse and a succession of foster homes.

Nonetheless, I do feel that Dubinsky’s politi- cal biases sometimes make her unjust in this section. She singles out former prime minister Jean Chrétien, who adopted a boy from an Inuvik orphanage in 1970. (Chrétien was the minister for Indian Affairs at the time.) Dubinsky repeats a fairly damning quotation from Chrétien: “Nobody told us there was a big problem to take Indians, that their record was not good.” But journalists from that period will remember that Chrétien was a con- sistently loyal father to the boy, whether the initial adoption was right or wrong. It ill befits this writer, an adoptive mother herself, to focus on one family that seems, on the evidence of pretty close media scrutiny, to have done the best it could.

It is easy to accept Dubinsky’s argument that the central issue was not and should not be the loss of identity of individual children; it should be the poverty, exploitation and racism that made removing children from their communities seem a better option than leaving them with their parents. However, she omits completely a factor that seems to me to merit more attention than it generally receives in discussions about aboriginal children: fetal alcohol syndrome. The rate of adoption break- down for First Nations children is exceptionally high for a host of reasons—from a host family’s rac- ism to the child’s abuse by any number of players, including the child welfare system—but surely this is one of those factors.

Through no fault of Dubinsky’s, there is crucial information missing here, missing because no one has followed up on the children systematically and it may now be impossible to do so. So we may never know the outcome for most of the children of colour welcomed (more or less) into white families under the auspices of the Open Door Society. It is unlikely researchers will be able to track down and survey all 14,000 of the Peter Pan children scattered across the United States. We will probably never hear much from aboriginal children who met the original aims of their adoptive parents and inte- grated into the mainstream Canadian culture and economy. (Still, I find it interesting that only 8 percent of adult-adopted aboriginal children surveyed by researchers believe their adoptions were “illegal or improper.”)

Dubinsky does deserve credit for tackling our own relatively new concept of adoption, which is foreign to many cultures. In much of the world, the extended family takes in orphans or children whose parents cannot raise them, permanently or tem- porarily. (The West used to do the same thing: two of Jane Austen’s novels feature children who were “adopted by more affluent relatives, as was one of her own brothers.”) When children move in with non-relatives in many countries, they do so as ser- vants, not new family members. It is easy for west- erners to be shocked by this callous exploitation of child labour, at least until they remember that Britain’s Home Children scheme sent free labour to Canada’s farms and homes well into the 20th century. Dubinsky’s thesis does not require her to remind her readers of that fact—that even our national fictional icon, Anne Shirley herself, was supposed to be a boy to help the Cuthberts on the farm at Green Gables, not an adopted daughter.

Dubinsky’s definition of transnational adop- tion means she identifies the first documented panic about missing children as appearing after the French Revolution. For a historian, dependent on hard proof, that makes sense. But in fact we can identify much earlier instances of the same panic— and with good cause. The fairy tale of the Pied Piper of Hamelin, for instance, is sometimes traced to a forgotten plague or serial killer, but surely has its roots in the catastrophic Children’s Crusade of the 13th century, which really did sweep thousands of children from their homes. Epidemics of miss- ing children precede the modern version of the nation—and our current definitions of adoption.

In her introduction, Dubinsky sets out an ambi- tious plan for redefining our ideas of children and childhood. In particular, she wants to draw atten- tion to our hegemonic definition of childhood as a period of innocence, vulnerability and depen- dency. She suggests that such a vision is too sim- plistic and that children in conditions of extreme deprivation and suffering learn to take care of one another. Nonetheless, she clearly felt compelled to lift at least one child—her adopted son—into the embrace of adult protection and western comfort.

In the current furor over celebrity transnational adoptions—what we might well call the African- baby-as-fashion-statement—people seem to have forgotten that Angelina and Madonna did not start the trend. (One fascinating fact I learned from this book is that Ireland ended its mass exportation of largely illegitimate children to the United States after the actress Jane Russell adopted one in 1951.) The Joan of Arc for transnational adoption, at least in the United States, would be Mia Farrow, who has adopted eleven children from around the world. Of those children, at least one has claimed that she was treated as a servant and neglected in favour of Farrow’s four biological children. Of course that one—Soon-Yi Previn—eventually escaped from her mother’s home into the arms of her mother’s long-time lover, to become the most famous trans- national adoptee in the world. No one could call her a total success story. But you have to ask yourself: where would Woody Allen’s wife be today if she had been left on the streets in South Korea?

I do not fault Dubinsky for finding no answers to this conflict between the personal and the political. I can remember, as a very young and exceptionally unmaternal young woman, meeting a couple in the mid 1970s who had managed with great difficulty to adopt an African child, the daughter of a prostitute. At that time, I wondered if they would not have been wiser and kinder simply to offer the prostitute enough money to let her raise the child herself.

But in the intervening years I have met dozens of adopted children and the parents who brought them from their home countries. Perhaps some of them were taken from their original families by force or guile; as Dubinsky notes, we will never be able to know which ones. But many of the children had been placed in orphanages where they were suffering at the very least from extreme emotional neglect. Yes, some of them had mothers who might have wanted to keep them— although in some cases they had unquestionably been abandoned. Yes, they have been deprived of their own culture and some have had great difficulty struggling to meet the demands of their highly educated, ambitious parents. Some of the parents should probably never have been allowed to raise any child, adopted or not.

But overall, it still has to be said that that a female baby has a better shot at a good life in a Canadian family than in a Chinese orphanage. This is one issue where the personal is going to continue to trump the political, as long as some countries are rich and others are poor. The best we can do for now is to work with the material that Dubinsky provides, to ensure that the babies who come here have not been snatched from unwilling parents or sold like tourist souvenirs.