Company’s Gone, Let’s Get Down to Business

It’s the first time in 9 days I’ve been able to sit down and get caught up with email and blogging … and boy has it been a crazy 9 days in AdoptionLand. I’ve got so much buzzing around in my head and I don’t know what to write here and what to write over at VVAI …

Let’s just all go right to the topic on everyone’s minds: The NOIDS. First, raise your hand if you were surprised to hear about them. Is your hand up? WHY? This should not have come as a surprise to anyone with access to the internet and certainly not to anyone who has read my soapbox rants or taken five minutes to check out VVAI. Well, okay, if you were surprised it took this long for a NOID to be issued, I’ll accept that.

I don’t mean to make light of a very serious and tragic situation… honestly the reality is that agency is not the only agency to be under scrutiny since the reopening, just these three cases happened to have enough tangible evidence for the Embassy to be able to issue a NOID. And a NOID does not mean those babies won’t eventually receive visas and come to the United States. It just means that now those families have the burdern of proving that their adoptions meet the basic Orphan Definition requirements. Or at least, we’d like to think that is what will happen.

The reality is, those three families will likely go home and (if they haven’t already) start calling their elected officials and demanding that something be done immediately to force the embassy to approve their visas. And they’ll probably also get lawyers to look for a way to overturn the NOID.  

It’s also possible that the agency involved will decide it isn’t worth the headache to deal with these NOIDS and instead they will find new “paper ready” babies for these families and try to convince them to accept a new referral.

About the least likely thing to happen is the very thing I wish would happen: that someone actually tracks down the babies birth families and gets detailed information on how and why each baby was relinquished in the first place. The embassy could do this, or the agency could, or even the adoptive families could hire someone to do it for them. But will they? The embassy will probably try. And probably they will be stonewalled at every turn. And what if someone was able to track down birth family and relinquishment information? What are the chances that the people involved would tell the truth? And how would we know it was the truth and not a good story? Honestly, it could be that these babies were relinquished for legitimate reasons, but now that their cases have gotten caught in this mess, any legitimate reason will be seen as suspect. And the number of stories I’ve heard of facilitators/orphange directors “brokering” babies in the last few months gives good reason for those suspicions.

In the end, whether by political pressure or legal maneuvering or whatever, it’s likely those NOIDS will be overturned or withdrawn and the families will return to Vietnam to bring their babies home.  And the agency will loudly state that they have “never had a case denied” which will be technically true and assuage most of their clients’ fears and doubts. And things in the Vietnam adoption world will go back to business as usual.

The whole thing is a mess, plain and simple. And as MotherMotherOcean blogged, this is a loss for all of us. And while part of me stands back in righteous indignation, I know what these families are going through to some extent because I was nearly there myself, once upon a time. A couple families adopting from the same orphanage where R~ lived in Cambodia received NOIDS. And we certainly were put through the ringer waiting for our daughter’s case to be investigated as part of the INS shutdown “pipeline”. And not once during that time did I think “we should track down R~’s birthfamily and get their side of things.” All I could think about was getting my baby girl home. In many ways, it was the same situation in Cambodia, “abandoned” babies with sketchy paperwork that the embassy thought was suspect but couldn’t really prove was fraudulant.

But Vietnam 2007 is not Cambodia 2001. We didn’t know then what adopting families know now. In Cambodia the corruption was so deep and complicated that it was impossible to know who was corrupt and who was flinging mud to cover up their own corruption. Not so today in Vietnam. Today in Vietnam it is possible to complete a good ethical adoption. It is possible to know beyond a shadow of a doubt that your child needed to be adopted internationally because there truly was no other good option for him/her. But you won’t get that assurance if your highest priority is how fast you can get a referral or how young a baby you can bring home. You won’t have that assurance if you blindly pick an agency and accept whatever they tell you, no questions asked. You might get that fast referral of that tiny baby, and you might even complete your adoption without a hitch. But that won’t mean your child was reliquished in an ethical manner or that your adoption process followed all the rules and laws. And while hundreds of adoptions will go through in that way, every now and again, a few will have so many red flags that the embassy won’t be able to ignore their concerns. The NOIDS will go out, and everyone will lose.