[Adoption Statement of Robin Bell] Page: 4 of 6

                                
According to these news reports, family planning officials seized over-quota children
and took them to the SWI for international adoption. Interestingly, these seizures
started one year after the SWI received approval from the Chinese government agency
that issues certification to participate in the international adoption program. They also
seemed to target poor people, who couldn't pay the over-quota fines imposed for
violating the One Child policy. Zhenyuan wasn't the only SWI that got caught doing this.
A group of poor farmers in Shaoyang, Hunan Province were complaining about the very
same thing. News stories I read in the Los Angeles Times and in Caixin, a Chinese
investigative news site, indicated that the children were born in similar years and
therefore adopted during the peak years of international adoption from China.
A graph of yearly adoptions from China to the U.S. that I found on the website
johnstonsarchive.net says it all. The line for adoptions from China to the U.S. goes up
and up and up until about 2005-2006 and then plummets. This graph never made
sense to me. If abandonments are random events, it stands to reason that they would
be stable over time, or, at best, a wavy horizontal line, not shooting up and then
down. If one looks at U.S. adoptions from Korea, for instance, one sees a fairly
horizontal line.
I also never bought any of the reasons some adoptive parents gave to explain the
number of adoptions from China first skyrocketing and then plummeting, such as the
Chinese economy affecting the number of abandonments, the Olympics and China
tightening the requirements for international adoption. The only thing that made sense
to me is that over the years, since China started international adoption in the 1990's,
SWIs became increasingly creative in getting children in their custody. All the SWIs
"wanted a piece of the action" for financial gain since international families are required
to make a cash contribution to Chinese orphanages of $5,000 ($3,000 a few years ago)
when they adopt. When news reports finally revealed the Hunan trafficking scandal in
2005, the whole thing imploded and adoptions dropped precipitously, especially of
healthy girls.
In the end, I do believe I was told one big lie. Yes, there are probably some
abandonments but I believe many of our daughters wound up in the SWI for other
reasons. I believe that some SWIs provided financial incentives to their employees and
others to get children in their custody. I believe that some children internationally
adopted were trafficked from one province to another and between SWIs within a
province. I believe that family planning seizures and coercions put birth families in
impossible situations, forcing parents to choose between keeping their children or
paying heavy fines. I believe China's household registration system keeps birth parents
in the grip of their local governments. Without the household registration card known as
the hukou, no child can get health care or an education, a fact that forces birth parents
to relinquish so-called over-quota children born outside the One Child policy. So what is
one's moral responsibility, in general, if she believes fraud was possibly involved in her
child's adoption or that her child may have been coerced from her or his birth parents?
My answer is this: If my child had been lost or kidnapped or coerced from me by my