Out of Ethiopia: Is international adoption an ethical business?
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26 June 2012 Last updated at 08:11 GMT
International adoption is big business in Ethiopia and the country accounts
for almost one in five international adoptions in the US, but how ethical is
the process? BBC Africa's Hewete Haileselassie reports in this article which
appeared in the latest issue of our Focus on Africa magazine.
Twenty-five years after leaving Ethiopia, Matthews Teshome decided to come
home from the United States. This time for good.
He had left much behind in April 2007 - most notably a successful career in
IT. But his reason was simple. "There is work to be done," he said at the
time.
Soon after returning to the capital, Addis Ababa, he befriended a young boy
he saw running errands and shining shoes around his hotel.
Zeberga, who was then 13, used the little money he made to clothe and feed
himself, pay his uncle rent, put himself through night school and send money
back to his mother in rural Ethiopia.
"As I was in the country to help out, if I couldn't help this boy then I
wasn't doing much," says Mr Matthews, who was determined that Zeberga should
return to school full-time.
After promising to continue the monthly $3 (£2) remittance, he received
permission from Zeberga's uncle and his mother to support Zeberga.
Within months the young boy had moved in with Mr Matthews, who employed a
lawyer to facilitate the adoption process not only of Zeberga but also of
his younger sister who was working as a maid in the capital.
Drawn to Ethiopia
Meanwhile, 8,000 miles (13,000 km) away, in the US, Bridget Shaughnessy gave
birth to her daughter Elia. It was also April 2007.
Mrs Shaughnessy (centre) and Teshale at Addis Ababa's airport Photo: Lynsey
Epp PetersonIt took the Shaughnessy family three years to take Teshale to
the United States.
In the final weeks of her pregnancy, Mrs Shaughnessy was diagnosed with a
rare birth complication which meant that the baby had to be delivered early.
Elia arrived safely but her birth was both traumatic and risky for Mrs
Shaughnessy.
As she and her husband Luke watched Elia grow up in Denver, Colorado, they
decided that adoption was the only way to complete their family.
They both felt drawn to Ethiopia, its culture and history, and so made
contact with an agency specialising in international adoptions.
That was the beginning of a three-year process that ended in their bringing
their son Teshale home from Ethiopia.
Back in Addis Ababa, Mr Matthews says the biggest obstacle he initially
faced in the adoption process was being a single man with no biological
children of his own.
But once the authorities were convinced of his motives and character, the
process proved less difficult than he had anticipated.
While it is common in Ethiopia for families to incorporate children of
relatives into their own households, formal and legal adoptions remain the
preserve of foreigners.
Parents vetted
Official Ethiopian data is hard to come by but Dagnachew Tesfaye, a lawyer
who has handled many adoptions for the country's children and youth affairs
office, estimates that there are around 5,000 international adoptions a year
from Ethiopia.
Almost 19% of all children adopted from abroad and taken to the US come from
Ethiopia, according to the US department of State - the most famous case
being actress Angelina Jolie and her daughter Zahara.
It costs up to $25,000 to adopt a child to take abroad. In contrast, Mr
Matthews says he paid roughly $300 for his own in-country adoption.
Mr Dagnachew, who has also presided as judge in many high profile
international adoptions, says that while the fees are high - leading to
accusations of impropriety in some cases - the government is in no way
profiting.
He adds that the amounts paid to the courts in processing fees, for example,
were "laughably small", with the difference being taken by the agencies who
handled the foreign adoptions.
Mr Dagnachew explains that the Ethiopian government sees international
adoption as one of the measures used to tackle the country's large number of
orphans - said to be five million, from a population of 85 million.
The United Nations defines an orphan as a child having one or more dead
parents.
The Ethiopian ministry of women's affairs is also putting in place various
checks to ensure that the adoptive families are thoroughly vetted. This can
include visits to children in their new homes abroad.
'Amazing moment'
Mrs Shaughnessy, who blogs at <
http://www.stickymangofeet.com/>
www.stickymangofeet.com, says that she was drawn to Ethiopia because of its
"open" and "ethical" adoption process.
She also points out that children maintain access to information about their
birth families.
In fact, soon after she contacted the adoption agency in Minnesota that
would link her to a government orphanage in Ethiopia, she had a home visit
from a government representative.
She describes the moment when she took the telephone call that informed her
she had been allocated a child as "surreal - very exciting. A really amazing
moment."
The Shaughnessys travelled to Ethiopia in November to meet Teshale and to
start the process of taking him to the US.
Mrs Shaughnessy says that by the time they met him in an orphanage in Addis
Ababa - where he had been for almost a year since being placed there by his
birth mother - "we had already fallen in love with him, but he didn't know
who we were."
As for Teshale, who was not yet two at the time, Mrs Shaughnessy says he was
scared and overwhelmed.
"He knew something was happening but not what," she says. She spoke of tears
each time he left the orphanage to spend time with them.
Once in the US, she kept her son's Ethiopian name as part of honouring what
his birth mother had given him.
She added that she keeps in close touch with other adoptive families who
also have Ethiopian children.
Controversial practice
But this still remains a highly controversial practice. One high-profile
former adoptee is a United Kingdom-based poet and playwright, Lemn Sissay.
He entered the British care system in the 1960s having been given up for
adoption by his mother who gave birth in England before returning to
Ethiopia.
He says that non-Africans should be closely "monitored" when seeking to
adopt African children and that while many good adopting parents exist,
"having an African baby is often a sign to non-African adopters of their
philanthropic, political, familial or religious credentials."
Ultimately, he says, "taking a child from another culture is an act of
aggression".
Selamawit (not her real name), an independent consultant who works with
women's affairs organisations in Addis Ababa, shares Mr Lemn's concerns
about screening adoptive families but says that "adoption in principle is
not a bad thing" although it is best for children to remain with their birth
families or, failing that, the extended family.
She argues that in Ethiopia adoption has become far too lucrative a business
where children's interests seem secondary.
She also says there is a pressing need to monitor internal adoptions, formal
or otherwise, as children can be subjected to child labour when sent to live
with family members.
These cases tend to fall outside monitoring mechanisms.
Selamawit suggests that the money should be reinvested into the orphanages
to help those children left behind.
Five years on from being adopted, Zeberga is legally an adult and his sister
is 16.
Their father, Mr Matthews, runs a successful restaurant in Addis Ababa and
says that some of his colleagues who were the most wary of his plans to
adopt later became the most supportive.
"Adopting has become one of the best experiences of my life," he says.
Mrs Shaughnessy echoes these sentiments saying of her son Teshale: "We are
beyond in love with him. I don't even know how to make sense of it, it's
amazing what happened."
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Out of Ethiopia
* An estimated five million orphans in Ethiopia
* One out of five children adopted in the US are from Ethiopia*
* Since 1999, 11,524 Ethiopian children have been adopted by American
families*
* Families in Spain, France and Italy also adopt several hundred
Ethiopian children per year
* Source: US Department of State
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Received on Tue Jun 26 2012 - 18:31:39 EDT
