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Which children don’t deserve a family?
While shopping alone at Wal-Mart the other day, the clerk was busy ringing up my items and chatting away. She saw my three big boxes of diapers and asked me if I did foster care. I replied, “No, we have four who are still in diapers at home. We recently adopted six children from China.” To which she replied, “Oh….well, I guess they need families too.” and then there was nothing else said. Just silence. Chatty Kathy just stopped talking. Not even the customary “Thank you for shopping here.” or “Have a nice day!” Nothing!
This is not the first time I have heard these kind of comments. I have even blogged about the interesting questions we have been asked since adopting. (Read here) Even more recently when I was shopping with the five littles, I was asked if I got them in the Made in China clearance aisle. I know most of the time people make comments because they think they are being humorous, they truly are curious or they don’t know what to say so they say the first thing that pops into their head. But the outright indignation over us adopting internationally instead of choosing “one of our own” truly bothers me especially when it is said in front of my children.
We chose China for a lot of reasons. The first being that was where we felt God was leading us. Now if you don’t believe in God, I understand that would be a hard comment to understand, but it is my truth. Yes, I know there are children in need in the United States. At any given time there are more than 250,000 children waiting to be adopted. With that being said, in 2002 the statistics from the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services state there were approximately 18.5 million women who considered adoption. (Figures) It seems that number of children could be easily adopted so people with a heart for adoption is not the problem.
So what is? Fear of the unknown? Lack of money? Lack of information? Not knowing where to proceed? Believing that if you don’t step forward someone else will? Only wanting to adopt a healthy newborn? What is the issue with people and not adopting? Why do 18.5 million women think about adopting, only 2.6 million women take concrete steps towards adoption, and then only 614,000 proceed with adoption? From 18.5 million to 614,000 is a large number of women. I wish I had the answer to that, but what I do know is that I don’t take these things lightly. Once your eyes have been opened to the need for parents to step up both domestically and internationally, it’s hard to stay quiet.
I pray someday that there is no reason to even discuss international adoption. I pray that families will be healed. I hope that when parents die there are other family members or friends of the family or church members that step up and take these children in. I pray that countries will be better equipped to help parents who have children with birth defects. I pray there will be no more birth defects. I pray that there would be funding available for surgeries for all those children who are born to parents who can’t afford to get their child surgery.
There are many, many things that could happen to lower the number of orphans in the world. There are many wonderful programs in place that you can support, but even then there are many, many children who will never, ever know the love of a family, through no fault of their own. Amy Eldridge from Love Without Boundaries recently wrote a blog about international adoption. (Read Blog Here) In this blog she talks about how Americans adopted 2% of the children in institutions in China in 2011. Only 2%. I know that there are more domestic adoptions in China, I know there are other countries adopting from China, but that still leaves a huge percentage of children who will never know the love of family.
Because that is true, I will continue to advocate for these children. I will continue to support groups such as New Hope Foundation and Show Hope and Love Without Boundaries. I will do this because these groups helped Lainey, Eli, Maisey and Jasmine. I will do this because I’ve seen the difference made by these organizations and I have first hand knowledge of what it means for a child to be starving for food and love. The world is not perfect and we have to make the best decisions we can based on the information we have. But to say a child doesn’t deserve family because he/she wasn’t born here is a sad statement. To believe that any child doesn’t deserve the love of family is something I can’t even comprehend.
Look at this picture and tell me which child doesn’t deserve the love of a family?
I believe they all deserve the love of a family. I also believe we should take care of our own. The Bible states we are all children of God. There are no distinctions there. Every child needs the love of a family.
