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Parents reach across globe to embrace adoption |
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By Julie Carroll
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Wednesday, 12 November 2008 |
Before she was married, Judi Spencer, a parishioner at St. Charles Borromeo in St. Anthony, started an organization called the East European Children’s Fund to assist orphans in Romania and Ukraine, where she lived for six years.
Enjoying life as a multicultural family are, clockwise from left, Sebastian, Augustine, Dominique, Christiana, Judi (holding Danielle), Victor and Paul Spencer of St. Charles Borromeo in St. Anthony. Photo by Dave Hrbacek / The Catholic Spirit
The experience, she said, “opened my eyes to the wonders of adoption.”
So in 1999, after Spencer and her husband, Dr. Paul Spencer, of
Shoreview, had given birth to their son Sebastian, 11, the couple
decided to adopt a child from Ukraine. Twenty-two-month-old Christiana,
now 11, joined their family later that year.
Around the same time, the Minnesota agency that facilitated
Christiana’s adoption told the Spencers that there were also babies in
Mexico awaiting families. So the couple, who wanted to have a large
family, adopted their son Augustine, now 9, from Mexico.
Since then, four other children — two girls from Guatemala, Dominique,
8, and Danielle, 21 months; another boy from Ukraine, Victor, 6; and a
biracial girl from Minnesota, Magdalene, who died of sudden infant
death syndrome in 2006 — joined their family through adoption.
The Spencers hadn’t planned to have such a multi-cultural family, Judi said. It just happened.
“We were always open to any child that was available here,” she said.
“We put it in God’s hands. We feel like God chose those children for
us.”
International adoptions
According to the U.S. Office of Immigration Statistics, about 19,500
children in the United States were adopted from foreign countries in
2007. Over a 12-year period, more than 220,000 international adoptions
have taken place in the United States, the office reports on its Web
site.
Some people choose to adopt from other countries because of long
waiting lists for infants in the United States. Others choose
international adoption to give a child opportunities that might not
exist in the child’s birth country.
But whatever the reason, people who choose to adopt from a different
country need to prepare for certain challenges that go along with
international adoption, according to Connie Roller, an adoption
services counselor at Catholic Charities of St. Paul and Minneapolis.
For example, Roller said, each country has certain rules and
requirements that prospective parents should be aware of. In recent
years, some countries, such as Guatemala and Romania, have closed to
international adoptions. Others have imposed strict criteria for
foreigners seeking to adopt from their countries.
International adoptions also can be expensive, ranging from $30,000 to
$40,000 depending on the country, and take a long time to complete,
Roller said.
Once adoptive parents find a country whose requirements they meet, they
should inquire about the quality of care the child has been provided,
if the child has been in foster homes or an institution, and what that
might mean to the child, Roller advises. Parents also should be aware
that they may receive limited medical and background information about
the birth parents.
Then there are issues of identity and cultural attachment that are bound to arise as the child ages, Roller added.
She advises adoptive parents to seek training around raising a child of
a different race. “You don’t want to take that for granted and assume
that love is enough,” she said.
“We encourage and usually have a plan for how a family would stay
connected to the culture [of the adopted child],” Roller added.
Parents adopting through Catholic Charities are required to travel to
the child’s birth country, and the organization continues to work with
adoptive parents after the child is placed in their home to assist in
addressing any cultural issues that come up, Roller added.
Staying connected
To help their children maintain a connection to their birth countries,
the Spencers celebrate holidays of the different countries, invite
friends from those nations into their home, and plan to travel with the
children to their birth countries.
When the Spencers recently traveled to Guatemala to pick up their
daughter Danielle, they brought their four oldest children with them.
“It was a wonderful experience for them, especially Dominique, who got to see her country and her heritage,” Judi said.
Anne Attea, pastoral associate at Ascension in Minneapolis, also plans
to travel with her Guatemalan-born daughter, Isabela, to the girl’s
birth country when she is older, Attea said.
She speaks Spanish with 2-year-old Isabela at home, has a “strong
network” of Latino friends, and plans to expose Isabela to Guatemalan
holidays, music and culture.
“I really want her to be proud of her origin and her culture where she
comes from because that’s part of her identity,” Attea said. “I want
her to know that her country of origin and her identity are important
to me, too.”
Attea, a single parent who worked in the archdiocesan Office of
Hispanic Ministry before a reorganization of the archdiocese’s central
offices eliminated her position, decided to adopt a child from a Latin
American country “because of my love of the Spanish language and Latino
culture,” she said.
“I thought that that would be a gift that I would be able to give a
child of Latin American origin, so that was primarily why I decided to
go that route,” she said.
At the time, the only Latin American countries open to single people
seeking international adoption were Peru and Guatemala, Attea said.
After waiting two years to adopt a child in Peru without success, she
decided to try Guatemala.
When Isabela was a month old, Attea began the nine-month-long process
of adopting her. In February 2007, she traveled to Guatemala to bring
her new daughter home.
Multi-cultural pioneers
Mary Ann Kuharski, director of the St. Anthony-based organization
Pro-Life Across America, was one of the pioneers of multi-cultural
adoptions in Minnesota.
Six of her 13 now-adult children were adopted from different countries
and cultural backgrounds at a time when the state discouraged, and in
some cases outlawed, adopting children of different races, Kuharski
said.
After giving birth to two children, Kuharski and her husband, John,
decided to open their home to special-needs children. At the suggestion
of their adoption agency, the couple adopted two children from Vietnam.
The state of Minnesota then recognized them as a mixed-race family,
opening the door for the Kuharskis to adopt a special-needs child of
African-American descent from Rochester.
Other adoptions followed — from India, the Philippines and the United States.
“One thing wonderful about international adoption . . . is it brings
Americans out of our little hemisphere and makes us keenly aware of the
politics, the needs, the culture of somebody way across the globe from
us,” Kuharski said. “I think it makes us realize that we’re all God’s
children.”
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