Orphanage And Tourism

Two words – Orphanage Tourism – that should NEVER be linked together but sadly are.

I had no idea that this was a thing or problem. Lumos, a children’s charity founded by Harry Potter author, J K Rowling, is shining a light on a practice that is seen as contributing good but is actually causing the problem of family separation and child trafficking.

“Despite the best of intentions, the sad truth is that visiting and volunteering in orphanages drives an industry that separates children from their families and puts them at risk of neglect and abuse,” Rowling said.

“Institutionalism is one of the worst things you can do to children in the world. It has huge effects on their normal development, it renders children vulnerable to abuse and trafficking, and it massively impacts their life chances. And these dire statistics apply even to what we would see as well-run orphanages … The effect on children is universally poor.”

Huge numbers of volunteers, tourists and backpackers visit residential children’s institutions every year, creating a multimillion-dollar tourism industry that leaves children at risk for many forms of abuse, according to Lumos.

Children in institutions are 500 times more likely to take their own lives, 40 times more likely to have a criminal record and 10 times more likely to be involved in prostitution.

Most people are unaware that 80% of the 8 million children currently living in orphanages worldwide have at least one living parent. The children are placed due to reasons of poverty, disability, or to receive an education, and many have a family who could care for them, given the right support. Parents are told that their child will be fed and educated, yet schooling is rare and the children often go hungry – even as thousands of tourists visited the orphanage each year.

These children are not tourist attractions. They are not zoo animals to be viewed on an outing. They have lives and destinies. Children worldwide are increasingly being trafficked into institutions to attract donations and volunteers. Families, and their children, are being targeted by ‘child-finders’ who are sometimes paying them or otherwise encouraging them to give their child up to the orphanage for a ‘better life’, with education being one of the main reasons, usually because of poverty.

The Sin Of Being Poor

Georgia Tann felt disdain toward poor, white, single mothers directly related to their class difference. She divided people into two types –

Poor people, including single “cow” mothers, were BAD.
Wealthy people “of a higher type” were GOOD.

Georgia believed that poor people were incapable of proper parenting. Their children needed to be rescued. Tann could “save” them. She did it by seizing them and placing
them for adoption.

It would appear that was her perspective regarding my maternal grandmother and the cause of my mom’s adoption. My mom was not unwanted and her parents were married. It was the Great Depression and there was a superflood affecting Memphis at the time my mom was born. Her father, WPA, was out shoring up levees in Arkansas and couldn’t be reached quickly enough to save my mom from the inevitable. Her mother never got over losing my mom.

In a 1935 article in the Memphis Press-Scimitar, Georgia Tann described the first time she placed children for adoption. She was only 15 years old. She had found two children in the corner of her father’s courtroom.

Rather than send them over to the Mississippi Children’s Home Society, she convinced a respectable Mississippi couple to adopt the 5 yr old boy and 3 yr old girl. In the newspaper article, Georgia didn’t reveal the process by which she separated the children from their birth parents.

Yet, her description of the family was indicative of her attitude –

“The father was a man of intelligence but of a mean disposition, who was always getting into trouble. The mother was an ‘ordinary’ woman, from a poor family.” That was certainly true of both of my maternal grandparents. Their only sin was poverty.

The children placed for adoption were sweet and attractive in appearance. The girl eventually received a degree in music. Thanks to the financial resources of my mom’s adoptive parents, she also eventually received a degree in music from the University of Texas at El Paso and that began the profession she practiced for the remainder of her life, right up until her death.

The boy in Georgia Tann’s story received a law degree and practiced his profession as a lawyer. My mom’s “brother” was also a Georgia Tann adoptee. He didn’t become a lawyer but still leads the life he has chosen with financial support from his inheritance.

These early placements by Tann, including both my mom and her brother, were given opportunities of wealth and all of them made the most of it. Some of her later efforts produced some horrific outcomes. My mom and her brother were very lucky regarding the adoptive parents they received. In no way would I say that the wounds of separation from their original mothers were not deep within each of them.

Eugenics

I’ve heard many adoptees actually say that they wish they had been aborted. This is a terrible situation for a human being to feel like. I celebrate that I am alive and the heritage I am saddled with has the wounds of separation inflicted on my own two parents by being separated from their mothers.

Once again Population Control has captured the media frenzy following the Climate Change debate hosted by a CNN town hall recently. Rush Limbaugh was going on and on that Bernie Sanders endorsed mass abortions in third world countries. The truth is a bit more nuanced.

When asked if population control would play a part in his administration’s policy for dealing with climate change, Sanders answered “yes”. “And the answer has everything to do with the fact that women in the United States of America, by the way, have a right to control their own bodies and make reproductive decisions.”

“And the Mexico City agreement, which denies American aid to those organizations around the world that allow women to have abortions or even get involved in birth control to me is totally absurd. So I think especially in poor countries around the world where women do not necessarily want to have large numbers of babies and where they can have the opportunity through birth control to control the number of kids they have, is something I very, very strongly support,” he concluded.

Conservative pundit SE Cupp is taking fire after wrongly accusing Sanders of promoting eugenics, a grotesque means of shaping the human population by selective breeding. What is important is that every child is wanted and every mother is supported in being able to raise her child.

Sometimes It Helps To Know

Street Urchins

The Industrial Revolution in the 1880s and the influx of 35 million European immigrants to the US swelled the ranks of the poor. Some families were unable to care for their children. Desperate mothers gave their babies to workers at foundling asylums. Lacking resources, these children were sometimes boarded with uneducated women who killed them with neglect.

Any abandoned children found by the police were usually already dead.

Poorhouses were filthy institutions to which abandoned children were sent if they lived to the age of 4. In these places, the children were mixed in with criminally insane adults.

In times like that, orphanages must have seemed like progress. However, early orphanages had mortality rates as high as 50%.

Another option was a “baby farm”. These were homes or apartments where, for a fee, uneducated women housed babies whose parents were unable to raise them. Some baby farmers received periodic payments, others were paid in lump sums. Some of these farmers starved, suffocated or drowned “paid for” babies.

If the owner of a “baby farm” took out insurance on the lives of the babies in their care, the death toll rose higher. An 1895 editorial in the New York Times suggested that “life insurance for children should be declared invalid because it was a temptation to inhuman crimes.”

Understandably, children growing up in poorhouses or baby farms, who survived into adolescence, often fled as soon as they were able. Therefore, by 1872, the number of street urchins was high. These children were left to beg, steal, sell newspapers and at times even prostituted themselves for food.

They were the “apple boys” and “flower girls” who sold their goods on street corners, the “singing girls” who boarded docked ships at night to entertain the men with music (and were sometimes raped).

These children slept on steps, in filthy cellars, on the iron tubes of bridges or burned-out safes on Wall Street. Ten would pile together on cold winter nights for warmth or fight for spots near grates through which hot air blew, generated by underground presses.

Homeless children had been so poorly valued that one orphanage in Nashville was called – The Home for Friendless Children. These children were often referred to as “ragamuffins”, “little wanderers”, “street Arabs” or “guttersnipes”.

Massachusetts passed the country’s first adoption law in 1851. Looked at it historically, it would seem an improvement. Poverty has always been – and continues to be – the reason that children are separated from their natural parents. Sadly.

Follow The Money

How did the effort to find homes for orphans who no family would claim or street urchins who did a bit of mischief turn into an industry motivated by profits ? Just follow the money.

In 1916, adoption was so uncommon, children were placed in “foster” homes where they were expected to “work” in return for their keep.

Before that, throughout history, babies were routinely murdered at birth by their parents. Infanticide was practiced and condoned even in ancient Greece, endorsed by Aristotle and Plato.

It is grim. Sickly, disabled or female infants were suffocated, drowned or dashed against rocks. More often unwanted children were “exposed”, abandoned in marketplaces or on hillsides. Most died of starvation, others were forced into slavery or maimed for exhibition.

When my oldest son was an infant, I became aware of this song as performed by Peter, Paul and Mary – it is grim.

Hush-a-bye, don’t you cry
Go to sleepy, little baby
When you wake you shall have
All the pretty little horses

Way down yonder in the meadow
Lies a poor little lambie
Bees and butterflies, picking out its eyes
Poor little thing’s crying, “Mami”

Hush-a-bye, don’t you cry
Go to sleepy, little baby

Poverty was so pervasive and contraceptive methods so ineffective that the killing of children continued. Infanticide was the most common crime in Western Europe between the Middle Ages and the 18th century.

The first orphanage in the US was established by Ursuline nuns in 1727 but such institutions were rare. People were reluctant to support homeless children financially.

When adoption became a profitable business, there was an improvement for many of the most unfortunate children. Then, exploitation of women who would have rather raised their children became a profitable enterprise. After that, corruption set in.

When A Network Has Been Broken

What can we make of our parents, our grandparents, the network of kin who constitute our tribal past ?

If one is an adoptee, they can’t make anything out of it.

If one is the child of two adoptees, the past is shrouded in mystery.

So learning about my original grandparents was the beginning of a process of interrogating the past. Trying to understand why what happened to my parents had happened.

My dad’s situation is fairly easy to understand. It was the 1930s. My grandmother had an affair with a married man. Giving her the benefit of my doubts, I doubt she knew he was married when the affair started. However, given the outcome – that she went to a Salvation Army Home for Unwed Mothers to have him, I’m fairly certain she knew he couldn’t be there for her when she found out she was pregnant. I suspect by then she knew he was married.

My mom’s will forever mystify me with questions that can’t be answered and so I find myself forced to live the questions. Some of the aspects, I have rather solid theories for.

Where it becomes muddied for me is why my grandmother’s husband was unwilling to be there for her. Why did he leave her 4 months pregnant ? Why didn’t he respond when she returned to Memphis, after having the baby in Virginia, and the Juvenile Court sought to inform him of his responsibilities ?

Poverty is certainly part of his equation. A superflood on the Mississippi River that was particularly severe in his home state of Arkansas is likely part of the equation too. Georgia Tann sensing a vulnerable young woman ripe for exploitation certainly put the screws to my grandmother.

At least, I know what my parents died not knowing. At least I know now who my grandparents were. My own process now has been to re-establish my own tribal kin network.

Adoption is not the solution to Abortion

The argument is wrong on so many levels that it is hard to know where to start. One thing that really irks me is when people and organizations use adoption as an excuse to be anti-choice. Being pro-choice is not the same as being pro-abortion. Abortion is often a difficult decision and sometimes haunts a woman for the rest of her life. She should not be forced into back alleys and dangerous procedures when she sees no other way to end a conception that she never intended.

Adoption is not a solution to abortion. Adoption is a choice about whether or not to parent. A lack of family support is often at the root of a decision to abort or surrender to adoption. The separation of a child from its mother has wounds that well-meaning people neglect to understand. The bonding of a child with its mother begins in the womb and no substitute mother is similarly prepared by nature.

How much of a choice is abortion or adoption when you don’t have any other choices? 3 of the 4 children in my family line surrendered to adoption were because there was no other viable choice. Only one intentionally chose to surrender and intentionally chose the adoptive parents. Due to a mental illness that manifested quite strongly after that event, I am grateful she made that choice – the young man has grown into a phenomenal person within a nurturing environment.

I am a believer in Reproductive Justice. Access to safe, legal, and free or affordable contraception and abortion, informed and sensitive adoption policies, comprehensive sex education, and ethical and compassionate immigration policies that don’t criminalize asylum seekers are all examples of reproductive justice issues. Reproductive justice is a framework for considering your ability to control your reproduction and your destiny, safely and with dignity.

Fair Responsibility

The way things are going, it seems like this idea would be fair, if at least this was the law of the land. My mom’s mother lost her when she was exploited by Georgia Tann, because my mom’s father did not take financial responsibility for her life. There is no other perspective I can see as valid. I think he was a good and kind man but why did he abandon them ? That is a question I will never have an answer for.

Though unwed, the married man who impregnated my paternal grandmother did not take any responsibility for his existence either. I don’t know that the man ever knew he was a father, though my grandmother was clear enough about it to give my dad his father’s middle name and keep a head shot photo of the man with his name and the word “boyfriend” next to a photo of her with my dad on her lap.

People who are pro-life are usually only pro-birth. They don’t consider either the prolonged gestation, during which a woman may not be able to work, nor the life-long commitment that having a child entails. Condemning a woman and her children to poverty is not being a supporter of life that has any good qualities beyond love (and of course, love is very important) but that it is okay for them to starve and not have shelter or clothing.

Regardless of the personal hell they will live through, that baby must be born. The new Jim Crow ?

Naturally Reducing The Population

At the end of Real Time with Bill Maher for April 12, 2019, his rant is about population pressures in general and the over population compared to available resources which often drives migration. Maher noted that 18 to 35 year olds are having less sex than previous cohorts. That is a good thing. He advised masturbate don’t procreate.

He noted that more young people remain in their parental homes longer now. That is not a bad thing either. I have no expectation regarding my sons leaving our home. As I approached my senior year in high school, I simply knew my parents expected me to leave and had I not married a month before I graduated, I already had plans to share an apartment with a friend.

When I was in high school, my concern was not getting pregnant out of wedlock and I will admit that I simply got lucky. Having learned my adoptee parents’ origins stories and realizing my mother was pregnant with me out of wedlock and yet she was not sent off to a home to have and give me up, I got lucky then as well.

Another factor in young people having less physical sex may be the easy availability of pornography on the internet which I have read is more stimulating than the real thing and thus the real thing can prove disappointing.

Whatever the reasons, the current population uses 1.7 times more, almost twice the available resources that the planet has to sustain us long term. I don’t recommend wantonly killing off large segments of the population (though some elites and political types seem to favor such a solution) but if a lower birth rate could produce less stress upon the planet, I do believe that would be a good thing.

One final thought – many adoptees wish their original mothers had aborted them instead of giving them up. There is that much trauma associated with the practice. Considering that the planet is already overpopulated and some of those lives that the pro-life folks have preserved wish they had not been, maybe we all should drop arguments against the availability of safe and medically appropriate abortions. Just saying . . . one should think about it more deeply.

Stability Matters

In contemplating how myself and both of my sisters lost custody of our children in a variety of ways, I realize that the main factor was instability and a lack of financial resources.

Though our parents were technically “good” parents, there was this attitude that once we were mature and more especially, once we married and had children, even if our marriages collapsed – we were on our own. Our mother even counseled one of my sisters to give up her daughter rather than face an indefinite period of time when they might have to support the two of them. The other sister simply accepted adoption as a reasonable solution to an inconvenient conception since both of our parents were adoptees.

Of course, we had no idea at the time of the wounds that separating any child from their natural mother, by whatever means, causes in a child. I also realize that many single mothers somehow manage to survive parenting without losing their children. I admire their fierce determination.

Today, is my oldest son’s 18th birthday. I may have spent the rest of my life accepting that my self and my sisters were somehow defective if I hadn’t met my second husband 30 years ago.

My parents were quick to recognize the stability that living with him brought into my own life and were eager to “give me away” in marriage. They were relieved to no longer have to worry about me. My sisters have not been as fortunate.

I have been in my son’s life almost every minute of every day since he snuggled into my womb, then fed at my breast. I now know it was the lack of stability and not that I was inherently defective that kept me from raising my oldest child, my beautiful daughter.