From Bangladesh to a life of searching

August 11, 2023 12:13 AM

‘I’ll never know where I’m from’: plight of the adopted children of Bangladesh’s Birangona women and "‘My mother spent her life trying to find me’: the children who say they were wrongly taken for adoption" - two excellent long reads from the Guardian today interviewing Bangladeshi adoptees with complex stories.
posted by dorothyisunderwood (6 comments total)

I know a couple of the people interviewed and orgs mentioned, and these are really solid reporting stories for their balance and focus having worked with adoption trafficking (anti, just to clarify!), very moving and thoughtful.
posted by dorothyisunderwood at 12:14 AM on August 11, 2023 [2 favorites]

I had no idea of any of this. What a story, thank you dorothyisunderwood.
posted by Meatbomb at 3:22 AM on August 11, 2023

A childhood friend's brother is currently going through exploring his own adopted-baby past. He's from South Korea as opposed to Bangladesh - and has recently been finding that this kind of thing may have happened there as well.

It's raising some very uncomfortable questions for me about that wave of Chinese babies getting adopted by couples in the US in the 1990s as well.
posted by EmpressCallipygos at 4:57 AM on August 11, 2023 [1 favorite]

Heartbreaking. I had no idea. As a (domestic) adoptee myself, Jane's words "When you're adopted, you only know what you're told," really resonate with me. You have to rely on the kindness of others to be forthcoming about what they know--if they're even still around.

And Kohinoor's words “When you’re a brown kid adopted from a developing country by white folks, everyone sees what you’ve gained but not what you’ve lost,” rips at my heart. All adoptions begin with loss. All of them.

"All claim they handed over their children believing it to be for temporary care, only to discover that they had vanished abroad to be adopted by strangers."

This is still happening. International adoptions are virtually unregulated. Friends of mine did a US-based adoption (even though they live as US expats in an EU country) from what was billed to them as an orphanage in Ethiopia. The first time they visited it was part of a work-related volunteer trip. They weren't looking to adopt. The second time they visited as volunteers, they decided to pursue adoption. After the process was legally complete and the children had been enveloped into their new family thousands of miles away from Ethiopia, my friends learned that at least one of their children had a living biological parent, who parented the child up to about age 8, who thought the placement of the child in the "orphanage" was temporary.
posted by ImproviseOrDie at 6:55 AM on August 11, 2023 [1 favorite]

Like ImproviseOrDie, I'm also a domestic US adoptee. Their words are so true and really hit my heart. I was adopted by Jewish parents and always told they would only adopt a Jewish baby. DNA results (when I was in my late 60s) exposed that as a lie. My birth mother's family was protestant, and my paternal Catholic grandparents emigrated from Sicily.

I once read about the feeling of being unmoored since we don't know anyone to whom we are related. It helped me better understand my intense need to have children and the utter euphoria upon the births of my children.

My heart is with these adoptees and the birth families from which they were stolen.
posted by Scout405 at 9:04 AM on August 11, 2023 [3 favorites]

International, transracial adoption is an utterly fishy business. People spend more time and care ensuring the ethical background of their coffee than they do of their adoptions. The Korean internet forums made by young birth mothers tricked out of their children are heartbreaking, I remember one woman who had a picture cut from an American magazine that she believed/dreamed was of the child she “temporarily” placed in care while she figured out her options, all of course on the recommendation of Christian “crisis pregnancy advice” groups.
posted by Iteki at 11:44 AM on August 11, 2023 [2 favorites]