I willingly, joyfully adopted my sons from Paraguay. I would never do it again

Last week, a report from The Associated Press in collaboration with Frontline stated that untold numbers of South Korean children had been stolen from their families, trafficked into international adoption through widespread fraud.

The stewardship of internationally adopted children has long been a subject of concern and rumor. Earlier this month, China abruptly stopped their international adoption program, and other countries have recently done the same. From Romania to Vietnam to Chile, rumors of stolen children adopted by unsuspecting American and European parents have endured. Now they are being proven true.

In 1995, after years of miscarriages, including the loss of twins, the advice from my doctors, therapists and everyone I talked to was to adopt, and I welcomed the idea. I was in my mid-thirties — “old” by adoption standards — and I knew I wanted any child I raised to have a sibling. I decided to adopt two children at once.

I received pictures of two babies. With them were documents showing blurry, black-and-white copies of government ID photos of their birth mothers, along with the papers that relinquished the rights to their children.

My sons and I lived a life of closeness, love and all the frustration of a mother single-parenting two boys: video games, smelly rooms, homework, the magically emptying refrigerator, bedtime stories and birthday parties.

Both boys had learning disabilities, something that occurs more than twice as often with adopted kids as with children raised by their birth families. One of my sons struggled with depression, and spoke of suicide starting at the age of 6. Adopted children are four times more likely to attempt suicide. Simply being relinquished is a trauma that can cause abandonment issues that last a lifetime. I didn’t know any of that when I adopted my babies.

When they were 16, at my sons’ request, we traveled to Paraguay to meet their birth mothers. I worried that we’d find only one of them, but with the help of local facilitators, we found both women.

The day we met, the boys and their mothers sat next to each other on couches, the tropical sun shining through the high windows, the breeze gently bending the palm plants beside them. Each birth mother shared the same forehead, the same cowlick, the same tilt of the head as her son.

The boys’ biological siblings were eerily familiar strangers, replicas of my kids from the past or future, depending on their age, with the same mannerisms and features, the same laugh, the same eyes.

My older son’s mother was a year younger than me but looked a decade older, weathered and frail. She spoke of how her husband would get drunk and beat her until she bled onto the dirt floor of their one-room home. He’d abandoned her since then, leaving her with the children and a sewing machine to earn what she could as a seamstress. Only the two children closest in age to my son had any awareness of his existence. The others, either born after my son, or older by just four years, were often out on the street begging, wandering or working starting at the age of 10.

According to his birth mother, who was not forthcoming with the details of his origins, my younger son had been relinquished when his father, who she hinted was an office worker where she cleaned, would have nothing to do with her after she became pregnant. She carried and gave birth to my son while living on her own in the city, poverty and distance keeping her secret for her. She didn’t see her family during that time. She told only one sister after the fact.

The lawyers from the adoption agency had told them their babies would have a better life. Maybe they also told them they’d never be able to care for their new babies. Maybe they reminded them of the hungry mouths they could feed with the adoption money they were being offered.

What I thought — what most adoptive parents thought — was that we were helping children who would otherwise languish in orphanages.

The truth, made horribly plain in the stories recently released, is something very different. In international adoptions, children are often coerced away from mothers, or literally stolen. My kids weren’t stolen, but there have been confirmed cases of babies stolen in Paraguay and everywhere else there is international adoption.

And either way, the inequities of wealth and privilege mean the “choice” to relinquish a child may not be a true choice at all.

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How much money would have allowed my children’s birth mothers to keep their boys? It cost me more than $30,000 to adopt my sons. The agencies got the bulk of it, and there were travel and hotel expenses. I was in Paraguay for nearly three months of bushwhacking through red tape and fees before I could get us home. My hotel bill would have housed and fed both families in relative luxury for at least a year.

But the adoption industry isn’t propelled by altruism. It is a multi-billion-dollar business. The product they sell is children. There is no money in the family-saving business. There are untold riches in the family-making business.

Had I been asked, I would not have given that same $30,000 to save my sons’ biological families and come home empty-handed, a difficult truth to reckon with.

There’s no way to know what the boys’ lives would have been like if they’d been able to stay with their biological mothers, and I don’t presume to speak for the mothers and say they’d have chosen that path. But because they were adopted — because I adopted them — my sons suffered developmental and emotional consequences they might otherwise have been spared. As I watched my older son laughing with his sister, as I watched my younger son being hugged by his uncle, I had to wonder what “a better life” really looks like.

If the goal of adopting my children was to give them the best life possible, then first, ideally, I should have done everything possible to keep them with their biological families.

If the goal of adopting my children was to build a family, then I need to take a hard look at the families I dismantled to build my own.

I cannot imagine my life without my sons. They are the foundation of my world, even as adults living their own lives in other cities. Every day for the last 30 years has been better because of them.

But I would not adopt again, at least not the same way I did back then, knowing what I know today. I feel complicit in one of the world’s greatest injustices, unintentionally perpetrated upon the people I love the most.