Orphans? Or "orphans"? What's the problem, anyways?

In a world that's constantly shifting and changing around us, it's reassuring to know that some things never change, like the way people never fail to invoke the specter of orphans if you happen to say anything on social media even mildly critical of current or historical adoption practices and politics. It’s as predictable as the sunrise.

I suspect people invoke the orphan strawperson argument (remember when I wrote about sealioning and the people who demand that I personally solve all of the structural problems of modern adoption practice?) to derail actual conversations about problematic adoption practices because it absolves them of having to think about their own complicity in such systems. The orphan crisis is of our own making, which in turn, makes a lot of people uncomfortable and angry.

Defining Orphans

So what about “the orphans”?

First, I would like to direct you to an excellent tweet thread by fellow adoptee Dr. Sandra Steingraber, who brought up our collective misunderstanding of the relationship between adoption and orphans in a really great thread on Twitter, which you can find here.

Second, some numbers. People who invoke orphans in response to conversations about adoption politics usually cite some very big numbers. Most commonly, people cite anywhere from 140-163 million orphans worldwide. The number comes from UNICEF, which is ostensibly tracking these statistics. The numbers are massive, which prompts people to start thinking that we must have a corresponding massive response to solve the problem.

Third, who’s an orphan? And this is where that huge number of orphans starts getting murkier. Orphans, in public imaginations, are children who have lost their parents and have no living relatives in the world. And if this was true of the 150+ million orphans in the world today, it would be alarming indeed.

But here’s the thing: of those 150+ children considered orphaned, only 13 million have actually lost both parents. The 150+ million includes children with one living parent. So, a child could be a double orphan (having lost one parent) or single (having lost only one parent). You can, and should, read the information from The Schuster Institute for Investigative Journalism at Brandeis University that explains exactly this difference. Essentially, the worldwide orphan crisis is not as big as it sounds at first, despite what the people Kathryn Joyce calls “the child catchers” will tell you. Nonetheless, people in the global north hear the world “orphan” and then take a giant jump to conclusions that all of these children must be orphaned in the double-orphan sense and require well-meaning wealthy foreigners to save them. People hear the first part and disregard the rest.

In addition to likely having at least one living parent, most ‘orphans’ also have extended family. The idea of a child who has lost their complete family would be very rare indeed. (It’s also not lost on me that child adoption, as it’s practiced in the United States, causes children to lose their entire families of origin, essentially transforming children with families into pseudo-orphans that justifies their adoption by strangers.)

Let’s be clear, though: adoption (domestic or international) isn’t an anti-poverty measure, despite the idea that child poverty can be eliminated if everyone would just adoption some kids. Adoption also isn’t driven by children without families; it’s driven by the desires and demands of unrelated strangers to add those children to their own families. The orphan discourse (and the resulting confusion about the actual numbers of orphans worldwide) reflects market demand for children, not children’s actual need for care.

Paper Orphans

If the actual definition of ‘orphan’ wasn’t quite murky enough, orphans can also be manufactured (or laundered) out of children who have parents. So-called ‘paper orphans’ become a massive problem in any country where children becomes the hot new export commodity. Paper orphans start appearing in countries with popular international adoption programs because the high price of international adoption creates huge incentives for corruptions. People who wish to adopt children internationally often want quick adoptions, which means that no one’s looking too closely at the paperwork. Paper orphans are children with families who are presented as orphans for the purposes of adoption through illegal means: falsification of paperwork, corrupt family courts, kidnapping, or human trafficking. Those children are often procured through ‘child finders’ who receive a cut of profits for their work (I mean, where do all those sky high international adoption fees go?).

Some countries that have experienced a boom in paper orphans include: Guatemala (I highly recommend reading ‘Destined for Export’ by Rachel Nolan), Ethiopia, Vietnam, Haiti, India, Romania, and Nepal.

[I was a Peace Corps volunteer in Guatemala from 2004-2006, coincidentally the height of the Guatemalan adoption program that was later shut down because of the problems of corruption and manufactured orphans. It was an alarming phenomenon to witness as new adoptive parents picked up their children and then stayed in fancy hotels in the capital as they waited for the paperwork that would allow them to take those babies to the United States. As of this writing, Guatemala ranks 150th on the Corruptions Perceptions Index. It is outside the scope of this post to do this analysis, but I would guess that a strong correlations exists between various corruption indices and popular countries for international adoption.]

Orphanage Tourism

Not all children who reside in orphanages are orphans, either. Constructing or volunteering in orphanages remains on of the most popular activities for faith-based groups on short term trips to the global south. I get it. Who doesn’t feel good about helping children? Volunteering to build an orphanage or going to a developing country makes the people who undertake those trips feel good.

But, like everything else, it’s a little more complicated that we originally thought. Where orphanages appear, ‘orphans’ appear. Often times, poor parents use orphanages as a short-term solution to stash children they are unable to care for, assuming they’ll receive food and shelter. Other times, parents are paid to intern their children in orphanages, often lured into relinquishing their children with unfulfilled promises of education and health care. Children are generally in orphanages because of poverty, not because they lack parents or family.

If you take away nothing else from this post, I would want it to be this: do not participate in orphan tourism or volunteerism. Tell other people this message as well. It’s demand from people in the global north to see, play with, and perhaps adopt children from the global south that drives this type of human trafficking of children. Visiting orphanages requires that institutions procure children to fill the orphanage for wealthy foreigners to visit; they require an endless stream of cute kids that everyone wants to play with.

Orphan tourism is predicated on the emotional experience of the visitors that arrive, not the children housed there. It also feeds into one of my least favorite tropes, the “doesn’t visiting poor people just make you feel so grateful?” Poor children in the developing world don’t exist for the purpose of making wealthy foreigners feel gratitude about their lives. (And Googling about this topic also brought to light the fact that orphan tourism experiences are popular subjects for college admissions essays because they demonstrate a transformational experience in the potential student’s life. YEESH.) People who have visited orphanages often describe the experience as “heart-warming.”

The children in those institutions play host to a parade of foreigners from whom they are expected to procure money for the orphanage in the form of donations. Lots and lots of donations.

What does adoption have to do with orphans?

Truthfully, not much. Every time someone starts squawking about how if people don’t adopt children, orphanages will be flooded with children. (It’s even weirder when people make this argument about domestic adoption in the United States. Where do they find these orphanages that haven’t existed for many decades?) And as I’ve often said, people who think that I want children to grow up in orphanages misunderstand the scope of the changes I’m proposing: I don’t want orphanages to exist either. I think they harm children and we can do better in addressing how we care for children in poverty.