To hell with China and their babies. There are PLENTY of babies right here in America that need good homes. And their are babies in Europe that are in need of a family. Those babies should NOT go to homosexuals, druggies or alcoholics but that only rules out a very few people.

Gabbie Wade wrote a thoughtful editorial, and her attempt to be insightful shows. However, most people who have never been closely touched by adoption don't truly understand it.

Adoption is very complex, and many people not intimately familiar with adoption miss the point that it is not simply about "helping children." In many cases, perhaps even most, it is about people wanting to form a family when they are not able to or choose not to have one in the traditional way, through biology. It is about their need for a child in order to form a family, not their need to save a child. Most people would feel good knowing that they saved a child's life, and so do adoptive parents, but it is generally not the motivator to adopt.

What I think would be of great benefit to the paper's readership is to really get to understand adoption. It is becoming more and more common, and it may touch the lives of many more students than most think. My suggestion is to run a series of articles, each one exploring adoption from a differnt perspective (e.g., adoptee, birthparent, adoptive parent; international, domestic, or adoption through foster care; closed, partially open, or fully open). I think this would go a long way toward reaching out to the adoption community that many may not even realize exists right within the walls of this university.

Where is the anti-immigration crowd on this issue? Chinese babies are smart and will take our good jobs. Oh wait, they'll go to our public schools and become fat, lethargic, pot-heads. Now is the time to "buy low" on Asian-themed tie-dye.

Thank you Gabbie for your thoughtful editorial.
However, as mom to a child adopted from Vietnam, where corruption is rampant, the fact that China's more stringent regulations will send prospective parents to other countries isn't the silver lining you might think it is. International adoption is a hugely profitable and largely unregulated business driven by the vast number of prospective parents who will basically do just about anything to bring home a child. Nearly all sending countries have a deplorable history of trafficking, bribes, corruption, and the outright manufacture of orphans (falsifying paperwork on children with living relatives) to fill the demand and line their pockets.
Now that so many prospective parents are thwarted by China, they're flocking to other countries. Greedy adoption agencies are only too happy to entice them to sign on.
It's a mess and it's only going to get messier.

Adoption is both beautiful and heartbreaking. As the mother of a child from China, I see that these new rules eliminate many people who would be wonderful parents. If China chooses to slow the exodus of their children to other countries, they can either extend the "wait time" (my agency recently received referals for families who sent their paperwork to China in October of 2005) or be more selective in who is allowed to adopt. Unfortunately, there is no way to objectively measure how "good" a parent would be, so the only restrictions feasible are those that can be quantified. They may seem arbitrary to us, although perhaps less so when taken in cultural context. Besides, it's China's right to make any rules they want. I can only hope that as they scale back on international adoption, they are finding a way to let families raise the children they birth, or that failing finding permanent adoptive homes in China.

As far as the deadline goes, it is important to note that the new rules are scheduled to go into effect for applications (dossiers) officially received by the Chinese Center for Adoption Affairs (CCAA) on or after May 1. It is common for that official receipt date to be a month or more from the time the application is actually sent to China. The process of making that application is exacting and time consuming; many of the steps are not under the control of the people wishing to adopt. It is not uncommon for the process of gathering documents for the application to take 4 to 6 months. The rate limiting step is usually receiving official permission from the US government to bring a foreign child to the US. No doubt, as families rush to beat the May deadline, there will be more applications to process and more time needed ti do so. Thus, it is only responsible for agencies such as Great Wall (which we did not use) to turn away applications from individuals who will no longer qualify, rather than let them invest time, emotional energy, and a significant amount of money, in the process with little chance of success.

Many people turn to international adoption because it is, in some ways, more predictible than domestic adoption. There is no "waiting for a birth family to pick us". The time course may change as you are in the process (when those people who recently received their referrals sent in their paperwork, it was taking 6 to 9 months to receive referrals), but there is some assurance that at the end of it, you will have a child in your home. There is also the perception that international adoption is "safer" in that the birth family disappears, and that the children are less emotionally scarred than a child adopted domestically from the foster care system. These perceptions are fatally flawed, but they may have an apparent emotional validity for the people pursuing adoption, many of whom carry their own scars from their experiences with infertility.

Adoption *IS* a very complex and layered issue, and everyone who has been touched by it in any of its myriad forms will have their own story and perspective, and may never have heard or considered the other sides. I think that much good would come from following a previous commentor's suggestion to investigate the topic in depth via a series of articles exploring adoption's different facets.