Adoption Agency Ratings

I had never planned to post comments in public about my experience adopting a child through Commonwealth several years ago, but yesterday I received a letter from the agency encouraging me to log on to this and another website to post positive comments to counter ones posted by clients who "did not have a blessed experience." Well, the very fact that they would send such a letter to us given that we emphatically did not have a "blessed experience" with them should tell you what you need to know about the difference between their rhetoric of caring about children and the reality that this agency has a long history of treating adoptive children and their parents unethically--as least if our experience is any indication. They care nothing about the day-to-day post-adoptive realities of their clients down the road--otherwise, why would they send us such a letter? Moreover, I fully agree with the postings of clients who say that CAI would like to silence or discredit those of us who have had bad experiences--either recently or in the past. A truly good agency does not need to send out letters asking former clients to write nice things about them on the internet.

I would have to write a book to really explain all the nuances of why our adoption experience was so bad, and some of the issues are way more critical than others. The in-country associate was horrible, Marina Mayhew's husband got involved and gave us erroneous information about country requirements, there was a lack of follow-up support and information regarding how to handle post-placement reports, you name it. Most significantly in speaking to the overall ethics of the agency, though, is this: Commonwealth had, or should have had, reason to suspect that our daughter was born with neurological damage, but they presented her to us as a healthy infant.

I myself perceived from my brief encounters with her in the orphanage that she had neurological "soft signs," but the in-country associate refused to take me to the orphanage for more than a few minutes at a time every few days, and he never gave me a chance to speak with the pediatrician on staff. By the end of about two weeks, I figured out from talking with some German adoptive parents that I could have been spending up to four hours a day at the orphanage visiting with our daughter and talking with staff, but by that point it was time to return to the States to wait until the paperwork could be processed and we could return to bring our daughter home. So I barely saw our daughter on my whole first visit, and the degree of stress I was under about the reasons I wasn't being taken to see her (was the in--country associate too lazy to take me? was he trying to prevent me from finding out more about her background and health condition?) is evidenced by the upwards of $700 in international phone charges I ran up due to calling my partner repeatedly to try to figure out what to do. Even to this day it is not entirely clear to me what was really going on, but my best guess is that CAI hired an unethical in-country associate and that once things went wrong, their only focus was on protecting themselves legally. We never had any intention of bringing a lawsuit; we just wanted the truth about why the experience was so horrible: what did the associate know about our child's background and health status? why wouldn't he take me to visit our daughter while I was in the country? what did CAI know about the situation? This questions will be with me for as long as I live, as will my feelings of anger and betrayal at being manipulated and lied to.

For obvious reasons this is a hard thing to talk about in public. We love our daughter dearly and recognize that there are no guarantees when it comes to becoming a parent--either via adoption or via childbirth. We are not angry that our child has disabilities (significant ones that will prevent her from living independently); to risk invoking a cliche, she is a vibrant, lovely child who has enriched our lives immeasurably. What we're angry about is that Commonwealth lied to us and that Commonwealth has never (again, presumably for legal reasons) acknowledged that it failed to fulfill fundamental obligations such as seeking out all available information on the child we were assigned, sharing that information with us, and so on. In the first few years after we completed the adoption, we tried to maintain a civil correspondence with the agency, but in more recent years I have decided to cut off contact. The memories of being left alone for days at a time in a hotel room when I could have been with our child, the anxiety of perceiving that she very likely had disabilities but not being given access to basic medical information that was known at the time, such as the fact that she was born via C-section (suggestive of a difficult birth scenario), and so on--all that lingers with me even today.

I'm sure there are people out there who would want to be sanctimonious and dismiss me as someone who was looking for a "perfect" child. That's not the case. We are adoptive parents "by choice," and when our daughter was two we adopted another child from the same country, albeit using a different agency. We love both our children as they are. The issue is one of ethics and honesty: Commonwealth at the time was vastly more concerned about creating a "niche" for itself as an agency working in this particular country than with the welfare of the adoptive children. After all, any respectable agency that really cared about a child such as ours, one that had a reasonable possibility of having special needs, would have wanted to talk straightforwardly with the prospective adoptive family so as to try to make sure they were committed to raising a child with special needs. Let me stress: Had CAI had no reason to suspect that she would have disabilities, that would have been a different story. But we found out later that the orphanage staff had devised a special set of "exercises" to improve our child's muscle tone from the time she was an infant. The staff knew something was wrong, we think the in-country associate knew or had good reason to suspect, and if CAI didn't know, it clearly should have. We were the ones kept in the dark.

Obviously not all CAI country programs are alike, and much time has passed since the fiasco of our bad adoption experience, but when I noticed some of the comments from people posting about their recent bad experiences, it reminded me of what had happened to us. I am writing to convey my support for those of you who had bad experiences, as I have lived for years now with the pressure to stay silent. I feel that I am somehow betraying my child in posting this comment; yet it would also be a betrayal to remain silent, since it was CAI that originally betrayed her by treating her as an item of market-based exchange rather than trying to assess her real needs and to determine if we were a family that had the capacity to meet them. I like to think we've done a pretty good job--goodness knows we are trying our best--but we have spent years and years of our lives bouncing from doctor to doctor, seeking out different types of therapy, doing battle with our insurance company over claims denied, working with teachers to try to devise appropriate educational opportunities, etc. Had CAI simply given us the medical background we very likely would have gone through with the adoption anyway, but it would have made a world of difference to have gone in armed with more information: we might have had a better idea what specialists to seek out, we might have sought out some specialists sooner than we did, etc.

By the way, we adopted our second child in 2001 via World Child International. It was a wonderful experience. I'm still in contact with folks from World Child, and we send them money every year for their in-country programs. There's no way I would ever send CAI money, as I have never received any concrete information from them regarding what they do with it. I'm sure that many, many good people have worked for CAI over the years. But those of us who had bad experiences are not just "cranks." We're real human beings. My partner and I will spend the rest of our lives caring for (and planning for the care of) our disabled child, a child we adopted through CAI. Imagine if you were in our shoes, and the only time CAI ever contacted you post-adoption was to ask you to provide a fairy-tale story of a perfect adoption with a happily-ever-after ending. I am posting this comment in honor of my daughter, a beautiful child who deserved to be treated with more respect than CAI showed her. In many ways we do feel that our lives have a happily-ever-after ending, but it's despite CAI, not because of them.