Traveling Show

thecurvature:

Loyda Rodriguez Morales felt someone tug at her daughter as she tried to enter her simple home with three young children in tow. She turned to see a woman whisk the 2-year-old away in a waiting taxi. After nearly five years of searching, posting fliers, being turned away at orphanages and even staging a hunger strike, Rodriguez now holds what’s believed to be an unprecedented Guatemalan court order declaring the child stolen and ordering the U.S. couple who eventually adopted her to give her back.

The foundation doesn’t allege the U.S. couple knew the girl they adopted had been kidnapped, only that the girl was snatched by a child trafficking ring and put up for adoption with a new name. 

Guatemala’s quick adoptions once made this Central American nation of 13 million people a top source of children for the U.S., leading or ranking second only to China with about 4,000 adoptions a year. But the Guatemalan government suspended adoptions in late 2007 after widespread cases of fraud, including falsified paperwork, fake birth certificates and charges of baby theft - though they still allowed many already in process.

My god. And then there’s this:

Smolin said this is the first case he knows of a foreign judge ordering an American family to return an adopted child to her native country. He adopted two children from India who he later discovered were stolen, a situation he resolved by allowing the birth parents regular visits.

Well, my. DOESN’T THAT SOUND NICE.

I’m going to just go cry in the corner, now.

And you know that people are going to argue that it’s “wrong” to move the child back to the mother she was stolen from. “Sure it was wrong to steal her,” they will say, “but two wrongs don’t make a right.” And besides, she is BETTER OFF in the U.S. than in Guatemala! Just look at the “spacious house on a large, wooded lot with a carriage driveway and an orange soccer ball on the porch”!!! How could that not be better than wherever her mother lives in the icky country where they steal children to send to nice places like the U.S.??? Why is her mother so greedy and selfish, to want her stolen daughter back? Why doesn’t she LOVE her and want her to have a BETTER life?

I think things are more complicated.  If the girl was taken at age two and has been with her adoptive family five years, she may not remember her birth mother.  She may not speak her biological family’s language.  It would be hard on all parents involved, but the best solution might be to give the kid dual citizenship and find a way for these families to live near each other either in Guatemala, the U.S., or both by splitting time.  It would definitely be best for the birth mother to have her daughter back, but being yanked from the people who have been her parents perhaps as long as she can remember would be cruel to the little girl. 

For all I know, the Guatemalan mother would give her child a better home.  She sounds devoted.  Even if she is an infinitely better parent than the Americans, imagine being put on a plane and sent to your “real family” at age seven, leaving everything you know behind.  I wish her and her families the best.  I hope she grows up feeling loved by both groups and with the full benefit of two cultures.

(Source: abbyjean)