Janine's Project Question #1

My sister, Janine, is taking a class on cultural immersion at the University of LaVerne. With a Chinese niece on the way, she chose China as her culture of focus. Her professor has urged her to narrow that focus to China adoption and to use me as a resource. Of course, I am more than willing to elaborate on the subject to any attentive listener. :o) She has asked a few questions and the next few posts are my responses:

1. What first interested you and your family in considering an adoption from China?

I have thought about adoption as something I definitely could do since a very young age, maybe around jr. high. I have always liked the idea of giving a loving home and family to a child that is already here and desperately needs one. After marriage, I planned to have children the old-fashioned way keeping adoption as a thought in the back of my mind for a later time. I love children and I love being a mom (minus the dishes and laundry!) but after 4 kids and with each pregnancy finding it more difficult to carry the baby to term, I knew that my child-bearing days were over. We definitely felt blessed to have four beautiful, healthy and relatively well-behaved children. Still, we couldn't help but feel like someone was missing from our family. This is when we started seriously thinking about adoption. Why China? I just don't have a great answer for that. I just know that while thinking about adoption throughout my life, in my mind's eye, the child was always a girl and she was always Chinese. In fact international adoption from China didn't really get on its feet until 1993 and I know that it was on my mind well before then. Some would say that spending thousands of dollars and travelling half-way around the world to bring home a baby that doesn't look like us is a crazy idea. We feel like this is the way we were always meant to complete our family. The research that we have done on China adoption has just added a degree of comfort to a decision that was already made. The babies are relatively healthy and well cared-for. HIV and Fetal-Alcohol Syndrome are virtually unheard of because of the simple lifestyle of the birthmothers. The system is stable, predictable and uncorrupt because of a centralized government agency that oversees all adoptions from that country. 95% of Chinese orphans are female and we definitely want a daughter. China's international adoption program is actually one of the least expensive, requires only one trip to the country and the adoption is final a few days after you arrive there. We are also fascinated by the culture and think that Asian girls are beautiful!