Creating "Paper-Ready Children"
“More domestic families have adopted children from our center in recent years and economic and social development has meant that fewer children have been abandoned or orphaned.” (Lu Ying, director of the China Center for Adoption Affairs (CCAA))
With the recently announced changes by the CCAA, the adoption community has turned its attention to why the CCAA appears to be cutting back on the number of families that will be eligible to adopt in the future. Several China-adoption "resources" have continued to assert, contrary to the statements of the officials with the CCAA, that the problem is not in the number of children available for adoption, but in the number of "paper-ready" children available, as if there is some technical difference between the two classes.
What follows is the process employed by China's orphanages to produce the paperwork necessary to adopt a child internationally. It begins the day the child is found.
A child is brought to the orphanage by the area police. Sometimes the police phone ahead, usually not. Within days of arriving, the orphanage will have either a staff doctor (if they have one) or a doctor at an area hospital do a complete physical on the child to determine if he or she is healthy, or carries any communicable diseases. The findings of this first medical exam determine whether the child will be classified as "healthy" or "special needs."
Also within a few days to two months, depending on the province, a photograph will be taken by the orphanage and forwarded to the Provincial Civil Affairs Office with the finding information taken from the police report. The finding ad, which costs the orphanage around 450 yuan to publish, is a legal notice to the child's birth parents that legal custody of the child will transfer to the state should the child not be reclaimed within 60 days. The legal notice usually reads like this one from the Guangdong Civil Affairs Office:
"In order to locate the birth parents, we are issuing the public announcements for the 26 abandoned babies in Gaoming City Social Welfare Institute and other Social Welfare Institutes. The birth parents or other guardians can come to the Social Welfare Institutes to claim their babies within 60 days of the publication of the Public Announcements. Please bring identification cards, the employer’s certificate, or the certificate of the Residential Villager Committee, or the certificate of the Residents’ Committee. After that period, the Social Welfare Institute will consider them as abandoned babies and process their paperwork according to the law."
During the next 60 days, the orphanage will monitor and examine the child to make sure all of its health issues are known. It doesn't matter whether the foundling was a day old or a year old; all are observed for 60 days to make sure any problems the child may have are discovered.
Two months after finding, the formal paperwork is started to begin the process for international adoption. Completing the paperwork was described by one director as "requiring patience" due to the detail and comprehensive information that is required. Medical information, progress reports, photos and other details are laid out in a package that, when completed, is forwarded to the Provincial Civil Affairs Office. The Civil Affairs Office reviews the paperwork, according to one director, for 15 days, contacting the orphanage if there are any issues, and then forwards the files from the entire province to the CCAA in Beijing.
Every director interviewed clearly stated that dossiers are prepared for every child in their care, unless the child is determined to be unadoptable. Unadoptable children are those with debilitating mental or physical handicaps. The orphanages tend to be lenient in determining which children are unadoptable, and will sometimes submit dossiers to the Civil Affairs for children with questionable problems in an effort to get them adopted. The Civil Affairs, conversely, tends to reject the severe cases, sending the files back to the orphanages in order to avoid problems with disrupted adoptions down the road.
The orphanages are assessed no fee to submit files to the CCAA, and therefore have no incentive to hold files back. In fact, the incentive is for orphanages to submit as many files as possible, in order to have all the children in their care adopted. The alternative is that the child remains in the orphanage until they reach 18 years old, an outcome that is expensive for the orphanage and least preferred for the child.
Once the paperwork is forwarded to the CCAA for international adoption, the orphanage continues to monitor the child. If the child is placed in a foster family, follow-up visits are made at least monthly, with measurements being taken to insure the child is being well-cared for and is healthy. Although some orphanage directors will allow a child to be adopted domestically after the paperwork has been forwarded to the CCAA, many of those surveyed indicated that once the paperwork was submitted by the Civil Affairs Office to the CCAA, the child is no longer eligible for domestic adoption.
When the child has been referred to an international family for adoption, and that family has accepted the referral, the CCAA contacts the orphanage to alert them of the date and time the child is to be brought to the provincial capital for adoption. In most cases, this is the only contact the orphanage will have with the CCAA regarding the child after the dossier has been submitted. The orphanage will prepare the adoption paperwork prior to the family arriving, keeping copies of the completed paperwork along with a copy of the original police report transferring the child to the orphanage. The rest of the original dossier is kept at the provincial Civil Affairs Office.
Knowledge of the paperwork process invalidates the theory that the current wait times, rule changes, etc., are results of not enough "paper-ready" children. In fact, every indicator suggests that it is exactly as asserted by the CCAA, an imbalance between the number of families applying to adopt, and the number of healthy children in China's orphanages. The process itself, coupled with little or no financial disincentives (and significant financial incentives), results in paperwork being submitted by the orphanage for every adoptable child in their care. The declining abandonment rates of healthy children, coupled with an increase in demand from both domestic and international families, has resulted in China taking steps to curtail that demand, at least from the international arena.
For more detail on the number of children in China available for domestic and international adoption, see my article “The Hague Agreement and China's International Adoption Program”.
With the recently announced changes by the CCAA, the adoption community has turned its attention to why the CCAA appears to be cutting back on the number of families that will be eligible to adopt in the future. Several China-adoption "resources" have continued to assert, contrary to the statements of the officials with the CCAA, that the problem is not in the number of children available for adoption, but in the number of "paper-ready" children available, as if there is some technical difference between the two classes.
What follows is the process employed by China's orphanages to produce the paperwork necessary to adopt a child internationally. It begins the day the child is found.
A child is brought to the orphanage by the area police. Sometimes the police phone ahead, usually not. Within days of arriving, the orphanage will have either a staff doctor (if they have one) or a doctor at an area hospital do a complete physical on the child to determine if he or she is healthy, or carries any communicable diseases. The findings of this first medical exam determine whether the child will be classified as "healthy" or "special needs."
Also within a few days to two months, depending on the province, a photograph will be taken by the orphanage and forwarded to the Provincial Civil Affairs Office with the finding information taken from the police report. The finding ad, which costs the orphanage around 450 yuan to publish, is a legal notice to the child's birth parents that legal custody of the child will transfer to the state should the child not be reclaimed within 60 days. The legal notice usually reads like this one from the Guangdong Civil Affairs Office:
"In order to locate the birth parents, we are issuing the public announcements for the 26 abandoned babies in Gaoming City Social Welfare Institute and other Social Welfare Institutes. The birth parents or other guardians can come to the Social Welfare Institutes to claim their babies within 60 days of the publication of the Public Announcements. Please bring identification cards, the employer’s certificate, or the certificate of the Residential Villager Committee, or the certificate of the Residents’ Committee. After that period, the Social Welfare Institute will consider them as abandoned babies and process their paperwork according to the law."
During the next 60 days, the orphanage will monitor and examine the child to make sure all of its health issues are known. It doesn't matter whether the foundling was a day old or a year old; all are observed for 60 days to make sure any problems the child may have are discovered.
Two months after finding, the formal paperwork is started to begin the process for international adoption. Completing the paperwork was described by one director as "requiring patience" due to the detail and comprehensive information that is required. Medical information, progress reports, photos and other details are laid out in a package that, when completed, is forwarded to the Provincial Civil Affairs Office. The Civil Affairs Office reviews the paperwork, according to one director, for 15 days, contacting the orphanage if there are any issues, and then forwards the files from the entire province to the CCAA in Beijing.
Every director interviewed clearly stated that dossiers are prepared for every child in their care, unless the child is determined to be unadoptable. Unadoptable children are those with debilitating mental or physical handicaps. The orphanages tend to be lenient in determining which children are unadoptable, and will sometimes submit dossiers to the Civil Affairs for children with questionable problems in an effort to get them adopted. The Civil Affairs, conversely, tends to reject the severe cases, sending the files back to the orphanages in order to avoid problems with disrupted adoptions down the road.
The orphanages are assessed no fee to submit files to the CCAA, and therefore have no incentive to hold files back. In fact, the incentive is for orphanages to submit as many files as possible, in order to have all the children in their care adopted. The alternative is that the child remains in the orphanage until they reach 18 years old, an outcome that is expensive for the orphanage and least preferred for the child.
Once the paperwork is forwarded to the CCAA for international adoption, the orphanage continues to monitor the child. If the child is placed in a foster family, follow-up visits are made at least monthly, with measurements being taken to insure the child is being well-cared for and is healthy. Although some orphanage directors will allow a child to be adopted domestically after the paperwork has been forwarded to the CCAA, many of those surveyed indicated that once the paperwork was submitted by the Civil Affairs Office to the CCAA, the child is no longer eligible for domestic adoption.
When the child has been referred to an international family for adoption, and that family has accepted the referral, the CCAA contacts the orphanage to alert them of the date and time the child is to be brought to the provincial capital for adoption. In most cases, this is the only contact the orphanage will have with the CCAA regarding the child after the dossier has been submitted. The orphanage will prepare the adoption paperwork prior to the family arriving, keeping copies of the completed paperwork along with a copy of the original police report transferring the child to the orphanage. The rest of the original dossier is kept at the provincial Civil Affairs Office.
Knowledge of the paperwork process invalidates the theory that the current wait times, rule changes, etc., are results of not enough "paper-ready" children. In fact, every indicator suggests that it is exactly as asserted by the CCAA, an imbalance between the number of families applying to adopt, and the number of healthy children in China's orphanages. The process itself, coupled with little or no financial disincentives (and significant financial incentives), results in paperwork being submitted by the orphanage for every adoptable child in their care. The declining abandonment rates of healthy children, coupled with an increase in demand from both domestic and international families, has resulted in China taking steps to curtail that demand, at least from the international arena.
For more detail on the number of children in China available for domestic and international adoption, see my article “The Hague Agreement and China's International Adoption Program”.