Adoption news

I wonder (see post below) how welcome I will be in China when my wife and I travel there next year to pick up the baby girl we’re adopting?

Last night marked another significant step forward in a process that started many months ago: our dossier of information was sent to the Chinese Embassy in Washington, D.C., from whence it will be returned to us so that we can forward it to our adoption agency, who will then send it to the Chinese government. As you can see, there are still several steps to go before the Chinese government considers us as adoptive parents for a Chinese child, but this marks the first time that all of our paperwork has been together in one place.

What happens after the paperwork goes to China? As things currently stand, we’ll wait around nine months while the Chinese government matches us with a child and sends the the child’s details (consisting of a photograph and a brief medical and developmental history) to our adoption agency, Wide Horizons for Children. About two months later we’ll travel to Beijing, do two days’ sightseeing, and then travel to whichever province our daughter has been living in before traveling to Guang Zhou to make her a US citizen. That puts us in China around March or April next year.

Since our daughter is likely to be between nine and twelve months old when we meet her, it’s possible that she has only just been born or is in her third trimester as a fetus! It’s a little odd, as I think I’ve mentioned before, to have started adopting a child before she was even conceived.

Adopting from China is very different from adopting domestically. In the US a couple who plan to adopt will be interviewed by the woman who plans to put her child up for adoption, and they may well be present at the birth and take the child into their family that day. Children adopted from China, on the other hand, are generally abandoned by their mothers. The government then spends six months looking for the birth family before putting the child into the adoption process. That’s why the children are so much older at the time of adoption, and why we won’t know until two months before meeting our daughter who she is.

I’ll say something later about why so many Chinese women abandon their children. It’s a sad story.

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