Sorry I have been MIA, I have a number of balls in the air at the moment and the blog got dropped temporarily. Things are settling down a bit, so I hope to get back to posting pretty often. The following isn’t particularly tightly written, but cut me a little slack today, eh?
I wanted to get back to this before I moved on to something else. In a comment on the So You Think You Want to Search post, Lori asks:
re “Once a pregnancy is established (i.e. past the point where an abortion is a viable option) MOST Chinese families keep their children, even if they are born with visible disabilities, female, a second/third/later child. ”
Do you know of anywhere (maybe with Google translate) that this kind of number can be found? How about broken down by province, or urban vs rural, or living subsistence level vs relatively well to do? I know that in some areas the family planning policies are not closely enforced but I thought poverty alone often made this kind of choice impossible for many families.
I think it is easy for us to go along with the propaganda that Chinese babies are available for international adoption because their families CAN NOT keep them because of the One Child Policy or because of the child’s special needs. While it is sometimes true, it is certainly not a rule.
MOST Chinese families — the VAST MAJORITY of Chinese families –keep their children once they are born. Even if they have special needs or even if they are a second or third child.
You don’t need google translate to find this information. Just google “Birth Defects China.” Each year in China, there are 200,000 – 300,000 infants born with VISIBLE special needs. There are about another Million born with other non-visible congenital abnormalities born each year (see that same link). This article puts the rate of birth defects at about 170 out of every 10,000 births. I would assume that is probably just the legally recorded births too, if I had to guess. Numbers are increasing significantly because of pollution, not to mention poor nutrition (folic acid deficiencies, etc.) and other factors.
If there are a MILLION babies in China born each year with disabilities, there is no way the majority of them are being abandoned. There is no way the majority of the 200,000 born with visible special needs are being abandoned either. China does less than 8,000 international adoptions a year with less than half being special needs (I can’t find the stats right now, but SNs haven’t become the majority yet, have they?). If they had 200,000 abandoned special needs babies, they certainly would do a hell of a lot more than that.
Even for those children who are nonspecial needs, we just don’t know why they were abandoned. Certainly there are some notable circumstances where families are absolutely not able to keep their children (cases of birth planning officials confiscating them, etc.), but we are lying to ourselves if we choose to believe most Chinese birth families do not have some kind of choice in the matter.
MOST Chinese families do not abandon their children in these circumstances. Most of them find a way to pay the fine, ignore the fine or place their child with relatives or maybe even create a rudimentary adoption plan in which they find another family to raise their child.
The Chinese adoption community wants to believe the fairy tale: We want to believe that our children have parents who love them but were kept down by the Man. We want to tell our children that it is the government’s fault and not the choice of their parents.
The facts aren’t in yet. We don’t know that. Children who are available for adoption from China are available for many of the same reasons children are available for adoption in the US: Poverty, single motherhood, social stigma, family pressure, and most likely coercion.
It is easy to forget this as we sit in the US watching a seeing and hearing so much about abandoned Chinese children. But if we take a minute and think about the population of China (1.5 Billion?! 265 MILLION of whom are 14 or under) and the relatively small number of children in orphanages, you can’t really believe that abandonments are common.
So true. I think so many people lose sight of the sheer number of people living in China and how that relates to how many children are available–or are perceived to be. Think of how many children here have an adoption plan made, those stats are not readily discussed.
UNICEF estimates that there are 17 million orphans in China aged 0-17. That is one million orphans per year of age. Of course not all of these children are special needs, and not all of them are abandoned as babies. Yet, this is a huge number. We probably cannot look at the number of IA special needs adoptions and see that as representative of the underlying population of children turned over to institutions for deformities or health issues. Also, there is a population of children relinquished to the state facilities but not formally freed for adoption which are not in the orphan statistics. Anecdotally, it is very rare to see a child with special needs in China, even in the villages. I would love to believe that Chinese people’s views on special needs children were changing dramatically, but this is not yet well documented in the data.
Yes, but the Unicef stats can be misleading. Unicef’s definition of an orphan is a child who has lost one or both parents (among other things). It doesn’t mean children who have no family (or even no parent) or no home.
Poking around, this report seems to have some very interesting data on Chinese orphans: A census by the Chinese government (and who can say how reliable or unreliable that is?) counts 573,000 orphans nationally, but goes on to state that in 2005 there were only 78,000 children living in state run welfare homes (and we know there are a number of private orphanages in addition to that). It also states that 86% of all chinese orphans are in rural areas and most of those are in Anhui, Hunan, Henan and Jiangxi provinces.
Just because it is rare to see children with special needs in China doesn’t mean they aren’t living with their families. This report from Right to Play states that many Chinese children with disabilities are confined to their homes due to stigma and that they also lack educational opportunities, but lack of visibility does not equal abandonment.
I still stand by the statement that most families do not abandon their children (disabled or not). Chinese families are families like those in the rest of the world. MOST keep their children. Most raise their children. I think it is irresponsible to tell our children otherwise.
A Chinese friend told me that typically folks who carry a second child to term in urban areas are forced to pay a fine equivalent to the cost of a laptop. I would imagine it’s a steep price for many but not completely out of reach for a lot of folks.
I agree with you in believing that most Chinese families keep their children, but child abandonment is a problem all over the world. Last year when Nebraska enacted a poorly worded “safe haven” law 35 children were dropped off at state funded hospitals. Nebraska, the last state to implement a safe-haven law, modified it to cover only infants up to 30 days old. These laws (in all 50 states) are enacted in response to the phenomenon of infant abandonment here in the U.S. If you look around on Stuy’s website you can find some numbers that make it look like orphanage submissions for the first half of 2008 were 3971. How does that compare with child abandonment rates in the U.S.? Are there reasons to believe that child abandonment rates in China may be higher or lower than in the U.S.?
That child trafficking has played a part in international adoption from China is pretty well established at this point, but to what extent is still pretty hard to tell. I think the practice of female infant abandonment in China has been pretty well established. It may be a fairy-tale to believe that no child adopted internationally from China came into the program through human-trafficking, but I think it is just as fantastic to believe that most of them did.
hi Amber, thank you for addressing this.
Just to explain a bit more about what I was thinking… there is a lot of poverty in China. And based on my limited experiences in China, the face of urban poverty is very different from rural poverty – in terms of family support, in terms of how desperately poor and malnourished people can be, in terms probably of how medical care is or isn’t available to those with money or not. ad infinitum more I am sure. But maybe I am being convinced by the same things which did not convince you.
So what I am guessing is that rates of and reasons for abandonment are very different in more well-off vs. poorer areas, and also urban vs rural. I think there are probably some specific demographic groups which have more choice in terms of paying fines, getting hukou, etc but I do believe that there will be a group of people who do not have much choice (or who do not perceive themselves to have very much choice)about those things just from poverty, separate from the family planning laws.
I was not able to find any stats on abandonment in different demographics but if you can point me to some resources I would be glad to see them. Maybe after the holidays when I have a bit more time I can try myself in Chinese with google translate.
I don’t think your point was that all these “abandonments” are actually trafficking… I think the recent sensational reports actually conflated the family orphanage donation with a price paid allegedly by the “finders” and I continue to believe that there is probably very little trafficking in China. At least, as yet I have not seen evidence that convinced me otherwise.
As far as “wanting to believe the [adoptees] all have parents who love them” – I don’t believe that and I have been careful to tell my daughter that we don’t know _anything_. (By the way I had an interesting conversation on this subject with Mei-Ling, who did not agree with me at all.)
I suggest for any American or Canadian who really wants to understand the Chinese mentality of abandoning their babies to look no futher than those Chinese couples in the U.S. or Canada who would send their babies back to China after they were born. It is not uncommon to see Chinese couples (Mainland Chinese) in the U.S. and Canada who would send their kids to live with grandparents in China for several years shortly after their birth. These parents seem to be so detached emotionally from their own flesh and blood. Maybe it’s not hard to imagine poor people in China abandoning their babies when educated Mainland couples in the U.S. and Canada would do that to their own children. Survival and better opportunities for life seem to overshadow the well-being of children with some Chinese.
Baby Ruth, don’t you think there is quite a difference between sending a child to Grandma and Grandpa to raise and abandoning a child to an orphanage? I live in a neighborhood full of aforementioned Grandmas and Grandpas, and it would be hard to find more doting, more attached primary caretakers. It’s part of Chinese culture for that to be the case, and the same parents who send their own children back to Grandma and Grandpa to take care of are planning one day to care for their own grandchildren.
Your analysis goes too far in the other direction. In fact, millions of baby girls are “missing” (aborted or killed at birth) and millions were abandoned by their family because of fear and becuase of their cultural preference for a boy (particularly in rural areas) — although this is changing now. This was a direct result of the Chinese government’s misguided campaign to control population (a very, very real problem for China). Different regions had quotas and often a permit was required to get pregnant. Population control enforcers were celebrated for keeping birth stats very, very low in their designated area. There are a number of good books written about this.
Families abandoned baby girls. There is no doubt about this. I agree with you that the media helped devlop a larger myth about abandoned baby girls and that at a certain point a kind of baby mill began to take root. {International adoption now created cash incentives — thus the revelations about baby stealing and children being moved into the adoption pipeline through coerhsion in certain areas – against fmaily wihes, this is aboslutely true)> It is also true that many, many (if not lost) families kept their daughetrs or special needs children.
Eevn if abandonments are not “common” the sheer number of people means even a relatively low rate produces several million “orphans”. Your analysis does not take into account the special circumstances of the Chinese government’s campaign to limit birth. Were abandonments by coercion? Yes! Bu the popluation restrictions and cultural preferences for boys.
Suzanne,
You are taking this one post out of context, probably because you didn’t bother to read the original post and the comment that led to this post where I mention abortion and specifically say I am talking about babies AFTER they are born. Nor have you been a regular reader of my blog and seen the ongoing conversations about these issues.
Of course One Child Policy-related abandonments are by coersion. Of course there are more girls abandoned than boys. Who doesn’t think that?
I am also curious about where you are getting the “millions” statistics? You are making a lot of sweeping generalizations there without any reliable numbers to back it up.