Comment by enko | Hacker News Reader

Comment by enko | Hacker News Reader

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> China and Russia would often give severely challenged children to US adoptive parents

About 2 years ago I was watching a documentary about china-to-america adoptions on japanese television. While the point was never explicitly raised, the viewer could not help but notice that most or all of the children up for adoption - no interested chinese parents having being found - were, and there's no nice way to say this, quite physically unattractive, developmentally challenged, or both.

The program showed American couples arriving to claim their new family member and I was struck by how unwitting they seemed. I got the impression they simply did not have enough experience with asian children to realise that their adoptive child had, to put it brutally, a pretty poor genotype, with a host of physical and behavioural ramifications.

I'm currently in China now adopting my fourth child. I would not agree with this comment, although obviously I'm biased. When you adopt you have the choice between accepting a child that is healthy and one with special needs. Sometimes these needs are severe, sometimes minor. If you accept a child with special needs, the wait for placement can be much quicker. That is what we did and our child has a minor issue that can be corrected with cosmetic-level surgery. In my opinion, that is nothing. But to be clear, there are perfectly healthy children open for adoption as well.

I've seen multiple people now talk about how unprepared the adoptive parents seemed to be. From my view, this is the minority. We are currently at the end of our stay and are at a hotel with maybe 10-15 other families. Every one we've spoken to were very prepared and knew what they were getting into.

Well, I'd certainly never pretend to have the first-hand experience you have! I was only reporting my impressions from a TV documentary, 2 years ago. I don't even remember which area it was, or the program's name. You obviously seem to know what you're doing; maybe my impressions were incorrect, or the program spun it that way.

As for the kids - don't get me wrong, plenty were healthy; but they did not conform to normal asian notions of physical attractiveness. The unavoidable conclusion was that the chinese adoptive parents, who had first choice, cared greatly about this factor, whereas the americans either couldn't tell or didn't care.

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