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Or Something Far Worse

© Susan Culver

I admit that, every once in awhile, my political correctness - my ability to just shut my mouth - flies out the window. A recent situation reported on ABC's show, 20/20, and the aftermath of it have brought about one of those times.

The show, like so many others as of late, was a portrayal of child adoption gone wrong. But this time, it was a little bit different of a situation. It wasn't a portrayal of bad people wanting to adopt innocent children for purposes unmentionable. It wasn't a portrayal of unscrupulous agencies preying upon innocent, childless couples and their dreams of families. This time it was a story of adoptive couples who'd satisfied every hoop necessary to adopt a child internationally. I say that with much certainty, as I've been through the international adoption process myself, and I know that you don't get into a foreign country and bring home a child if you haven't dotted all the i's and crossed all the t's. Yes, the thirteen families that were the focus of this show had done this. The children in question were legally theirs, adopted from a Cambodian orphanage, with paperwork provided to prove that the parents adopting them had obtained permission from the U.S. government and the Cambodian government. These adoptions were finalized by a Cambodian judge. These children had been issued new birth certificates, listing these American couples as their parents.

And what makes the story so different is not that there was a villain in the deal. What makes it different is who the villain was and continues to be: The United States Immigration and Naturalization Service.

The thirteen families had traveled to Cambodia in early October, and after satisfying the adoption requirements had only one obstacle between their new family and a long flight home. They had to obtain visas for their new babies at the U.S. Embassy in Cambodia. They made appointments to do so, and were - amazingly enough - told by U.S. officials that an investigation into whether their children were actually orphans or not had begun and that visas would not be issued until this investigation was complete. What followed was weeks and even months of a bungled attempt by INS to show that the Cambodian facilitator had somehow "bought" these children from Cambodian parents, and thus the children were unadoptable. I won't go into the full details of how strange this investigation was, as it was already well covered by ABC's reporting staff, but just suffice it to say: an independent investigation by Cambodian officials showed no wrong doing on the part of this facilitator. The INS investigation could not prove that any wrong doing took place. No birthmothers came forward saying that one of these children was theirs, in fact, no birthmothers could be found in this issue at all since these babies were apparently abandoned on village streets in Cambodia.