Nevertheless science has the drive to discover the unrevealed; there are some limits when getting across the line human dignity gets lost.By Yi Jun van Rijn, Adopted from South Korea
Supremacy or Survival
Believing that one race is superior to another has raised many questions in societies nowadays but also found a big group of believers who share the ideas of supremacy and the theories of racial conduct leading towards a certain hierarchy towards racial categories. These concepts has shown in recent history the abuse and neglect of humans and humanity towards other races and cultures; in early decades more explicit as currently but still survived as a strong ideology which does exist and influence social developments in society every day. It is not very surprising to understand that this would lead to cultural ideas and cultural identification within demographic issues like population en reproduction to let the own species survive.
Within a Europe and the rest of the Western world suffering from earlier, poverty, illnesses and later the effect of contraceptives and welfare, foremost wars were man where decimated in the fields of war and due that fact less possibility for healthy man to propagate with their own kind; countries were confronted with a huge decrease of birthrates and problematic scenarios of demographic aging problems, which were directly to find back in the ones who were directly confronted with the aspects of these questions due their infertility.
Lebensborn
Adolf Hitlers ‘Third Reich’ program was not planned to have these problems but due the casualties of war and the need to propagate a next Aryan generation Hitler was confronted with this issue like many other western countries would encounter after the war. The Nazi’s found a solution.
Many of these children end up in German ‘adoptive’ families who had no children or were able to raise more children. Especially in the Bavarian area and other agricultural rural areas, which were allocated as the typical future soil of Germany to be the source of Nazi's next generation, these children live(d) without knowing their real identity and background.
Former Chicken farmer and later Hitler’s most rigorous and extremely dangerous Nazi leader Heinrich Himmler and other Nazi leaders found a solution for this problem of aging and decrease of birthrates in the ‘Third Reich’ dream. Just like animals, human beings would be programmed to propagate in a technically planned scheme. The Nazis called this idea; ‘The spring of life’ or ‘Lebensborn’.
In whole occupied Europe, the Nazi’s created so called ‘spring of life houses’ were selected ‘Aryan’ woman were ‘invited’ to conceive children from selected Nazi SS men. Without any ‘shame’ these women gave birth to children, born out of men and fathers they probably never would see or know. Especially this engineered laboring babies was a well-accepted and successful implemented plan in Germanic and Aryan areas like Denmark, Sweden and Norway. Especially in Norway the government was very willing to cooperate. Not very surprising, Norway, besides Germany, became the most successful country within occupied Europe to deliver the highest rate of ‘Aryan’ children for the ‘Third Reich of Dreams’. Famous Abba singer Frida Lyngstad is a Lebensborn child from one of the Norwegian Spring of Live houses.
Lebensborn children in Europe were after the war perceived as inbreed of ‘Nazi Swines’ and imprisoned by the same people who were willing to facilitate the Nazi program without any hesitation. Many times the children of the Lebensborn program, who were not redistributed before the end of the war, ended up in ‘Psychiatric closed facilities’. For them, their lives started like e hell, instead of the heaven they were destined for.
Early Child Trafficking
When the Nazi’s found out that the Lebensborn Program did not deliver the rate of children they had foreseen, they issued a decree to kidnap as much Aryan looking children as possible. Especially in the eastern part of Europe thousands (estimated + 250.000) kidnapped ‘blond Aryan looking’ children. They were selected in the ones who were acceptable and adaptable to the Nazi program and after training and education adopted by (childless) German families. Others, the so-called minor variables, were used for medical experiments or just killed in Concentration camps.
Also other international developments are showing bits and pieces of the same ideas and practices. If we look into the practices of stealing children for (domestic) adoption and other ‘illicit’ adoptions we can find such examples during the Spanish dictatorship of Franco, the Junta in Argentina, the stolen children from China, the stolen children of India, Peru, Colombia, Brazil, Korea and so on and so on. Many questions remain open like what happened and happens with children of political prisoners like in China. We have some answers looking at Argentina were Adoptee Maria Eugenia Barragan found out that she was taken from her real parents after they were killed by 'comrads of the dictatorship' and falsely adopted into another Argentinean family who were connected with the Argentinean Junta in the seventies.
Connection with present Adoption Practices
On the other hand, the recent history shows similarities of Lebensborn practices and race and gender preferences for babies for (intercountry)adoption. In South Korea, Guatemala, Bulgaria and other countries, Maternity homes, 'delivery rooms' close to adoption agencies has been practice since national law or governmental control (or involved parties in the illicit adoption practices) was not in place.
Comparative Child Migration and Forced Migrations
While international adoption was initiated on a large scale in connection with the Korean War, European missionaries, soldiers and settlers had occasionally adopted “indigenous” or “native” children prior to this time. Examples of transracial adoptions, preceding as well as paralleling the Korean case, are the 50,000 Native American children, the so-called “lost birds”, who were placed in white families in Canada and the U.S.up until as late as the mid-1990s, and the “stolen generations” of 25,000 Aboriginal children in Australia, who were forcibly separated from their parents, between 1900-1970, and transferred to the custody of Anglo families as a civilizing project.3 However, contrary to international adoption, these examples of adoptions of children from indigenous and minority groups to white families are today highly contested or charged and sometimes even branded as ethnocide or cultural genocide.
In a comparative migratory perspective, the closest parallels to international adoption in the history of child migration would be the 130,000 children, who were shipped by the British Empire to populate the colonies between 1618-1967, and the 100,000 American children, who, between 1854-1929, were transported by the “orphan train” from the East coast to settler families in need of labour in the Frontier Midwest.4 While questions of race and ethnicity are seldom considered in relation to these early child migrations, an incident that
occurred during the orphan train program, illustrates their racial and colonial underpinnings.5
In 1904, a group of forty New York orphans was sent to live with Catholic families in Arizona. However, the Catholics turned out to be Mexicans and the local Anglos were so outraged at this race boundary transgression that they instigated a mass abduction of the children. Through this direct action, trans-racial adoption as a white privilege was resolutely reinforced. This privilege continues in the contemporary era. One can only imagine the reactions occuring, if Korean middle-class couples, whether living in Korea or overseas, suddenly started to adopt white children, or if Korean children were to be sent to Latin American or African countries for international adoption. In the pre-Civil Rights United States, a handful of states even went so far as to legislate against interracial adoption or even fostering of white children by non-whites, and in the late 1990s a widely publicized controversy erupted, when a black woman in Detroit wanted to adopt a white girl.
Having imported almost half a million children to Western countries over a period of fifty years, contemporary international adoption has come to have many parallels to the Atlantic slave trade. Examples include the shipping of 11 million Africans to indentured labour in the New World, between 1510-1870, 12 million Indians and Chinese dispatched as “coolies” to the vast European Empires between 1834-1941 and, finally, the contemporary trafficking of non-Western women for international marriage and sexual exploitation. These four examples of forced migration can be conceptualized as a long standing Western tradition of commodification and intercontinental transportation of non-white populations.
Part of the article: Between European Colonial Trafficking, American Empire-
Building and Nordic Social Engineering: Rethinking International
Adoption From a Postcolonial and Feminist Perspective by Tobias Hubinette.
We have seen the transfer of these practices moving from one to another country when international critics appeared or the countries became memeber of the ‘Hague Convention’; which results many times in stopping the huge supply of babies for Intercountry Adoption to the west. Abour South-Korea, people have even been speaking about so-called 'one stop shopping' principles looking to the Holt facilities in the capital Seoul were you find, delivery clinics close to travel agencies and adoption facilities working for the same American-Korean international adoption ‘pipeline’. Instead or besides solving domestic demographic problems they have or will have due aging problems of the society. These so-called baby factories became huge suppliers for 'to be wish parents' in the west and became because of this big business.
Even the practice of delivery of youngest and healthy babies for adoption has been without no shame nowadays. For white babies and after these, the Asian babies, the prices of these children for adoption are the highest at the adoptionlist. Even more particular; the babies with the whitest skin are the most valuable and the most expensive ones in many ways.
Within the field of intercountry adoption these hidden facts have always been (un)consciously or secretly used or/and practiced, for example by adoption agencies, but never revealed itself to the open. But how can a (western) culture think that what has been developed, educated and accepted for many decades, even maybe centuries, would automatically disappear within a few years when none western children entered western soil in western families due intercountry adoption. Did denial tried get rid of these thoughts ?
Physical Engineering
Eugenics became quite popular in whole Europe and the States. The (pseudo) scientifical approach about, reproductive technology, race concepts, health and purification of races became a well-known motive in the ideas of a healthy Europe and western world.
Second World War Nazi’s like Auschwitz dr. J. Mengele and earlier noted SS leaders Himmler were well known followers and sympathizers of these ideas; also almost the whole Scandinavian area and northwest Europe. It’s not very surprising to find many ideas about racial purification and racial segregation in whole Europe due the fact of this eugenics during this period but also before and the postwar period.
What the public does not know is that regarding adoption, the ideas and philosophy of Eugenics existed and still exists. Eugenics and adoption has close encounters in the shades of adoption debates and demographic solutions of aging and planning of healthy offspring and racial issues.
Social Engineering
As we can follow the development besides the physical engineering we should also understand the wish to let adoptees adapt to a society of western morality and ethics (social engineering) were the force of adoption parents and their society learned adoptees from none western countries and cultures to become as white as possible. No one 'except the few who dared to challange the common perspective of intercountry adoption like Tobias Hubinette and Sunny Johnsen place the displacement of adoptees as a major issue on the international agenda of intercountry adoption.
One of the critics of these adoptees is the sexualisation behind adoption and the shades of dangerous background and history of racism which is still denied untill today regarding adoptees of color. Especially the (over)sexualisation of Asian children, focussed on willingness to serve and to obey in many ways has created a huge confrontation and conflict in the western world of adoption.
Many of us would understand in this perspective why Asian adopted children are far popular (after or equal to Caucasian children) above any other race when many theories state that this race became second in hierarchy after the Caucasian. Even Nazi's believed in a connection with Asians due the fact that they thought that Tibetans and other Asians had connections with the purity of the master race. Besides this all, many believed that after three or four generations Asian looks would be disappeared after intermarriages between Asian women with Caucasian men. Some even believe it might improve a healthy offspring as some articles states. Especially focussed on Asian woman dating Caucasian men. Something, which had its impact on the sexual discourse of this (questionable) idea for many Asian adopted woman without understanding the real motives behind it.
It’s not very surprising after understanding this, why the biggest group of adoptees are adopted from Asia (especially girls); Vietnam, Cambodia, Philippines, Thailand with biggest suppliers; South Korea and China. Concentrated in foremost northwest Europe (Scandinavia has the highest population) and in the USA in Minnesota and other former German, Scandinavian Settlements.
To find one of the leads of this perspective we should not try to hide any longer the hidden ‘dynamics’ behind the transracial adoptions which intercountry adoption practically is.
Conclusion
Knowing and understanding all this, the conclusion is hard to draw. What to say if morality seems to be an exclusive right and ethics an intellectual possession for who can afford to discuss it.
I have no conclusion as this one. Look into these facts. And getting close to the details and the suffering of all involved. Is (intercountry) adoption any longer just in the interest of the Child?
0 reacties:
Een reactie plaatsen