On one of our adoption trips to China, we visited an orphanage.
Several of the children there had significant special needs. The director of the orphanage explained that their files would never be put together for international adoption because they knew that no families would adopt them. I wasn’t surprised, but it was still hard to hear. There are moments when you feel completely helpless, and that was one of them for me.
I walked out of that orphanage 13 years ago, but I have never left that visit behind. I think often of the children who never find families, the children whose family are the orphanage staff and the other kids there. I pray that those children have found a way in the world, that they have received all the care they might have needed, and that they have experienced love.
I thought of those children when I learned last week that China has closed its international adoption program. More than 160,000 children have been adopted by families outside of China since 1992, according to Reuters. The closing is a blow to a program that has brought so many families together.
With the closure, families who had been matched with children and waiting—some since 2019 before Covid—will not be able to travel to their children.
Children who had been matched with families—and were likely aware that they were waiting to meet their new parents—will never meet them.
It’s heartbreaking.
Adoption isn’t perfect. It doesn’t solve everything. It doesn’t erase the loss. But it does bring beauty to brokenness. It provides space for love and healing. It creates families. It builds a path for a bright future. At its best, adoption embraces the loss and grief and tragedy, picks it up, and moves into a new chapter with light and hope and love.
Generations of families—including mine—have been created through adoption from China. The closing of the program closes the door on that happening again in the future.
Yes, there is a small, slowly growing footprint of domestic adoption that happens in China, and I hope that will continue to grow. As I understand it, the emphasis on family lineage makes it hard for families in China to adopt male children who don’t have a traceable bloodline. It’s also hard for children with special needs to find families since medical care is not as affordable and accessible in China. Maybe this is changing. I hope it’s changing quickly enough to make it possible for children to get the care and the love they need.
This decision means that numerous children will grow up without families. This decision also eliminates another option for American parents whose hearts are open to children but who cannot conceive, bear, or adopt children in other ways. If you have ever struggled to start a family, you know that you don’t have many options.
Every child deserves to know the love of a family. Right now, my prayers are with the children—and with the families who were waiting or hoping to bring a child from China home. I wish there were more I could do.
“Love is stronger than everything,” Pope Francis said just the other day. “The beauty of love can heal the world, because it finds its roots in God.”
I hope you will join me in prayer for those affected by this change, keeping faith in the power of love.
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