A Long, Difficult Road for Gay Adoptive Parents
This post was submitted by Lindsay, who regrets that she has to attend a midwestern hetero wedding this weekend instead of Homo/Sonic.
My cousin Tom is adopted. His ethnic heritage is Vietnamese and I am white. (I cannot emphasize this enough. I am the whitest person I know.) This tends to confuse people when I introduce my dapper Asian-American cousin.
Also – Tom is gay. I am bisexual. (Yay for common bonds!) When I first moved to the DC area, I lived Tom and his partner Jeff, who is white. So, whenever I introduce myself as “Tom's cousin” to people who know them as a couple, they look at me blankly. They think I am really confused. Thanks, I know who my family members are.
I digress. During my six-month stint with them, Tom and Jeff put into motion their long-developed plans to adopt a baby from Vietnam. As you can imagine, and I learned first-hand, the international adoption process is long and expensive. I felt fortunate to have this unique position observing a process I may go through myself some day. To say the least, the process is rigorous and emotionally exhausting.
Vietnam does not allow gay adoptions, so they proceeded with Jeff as the sole adopter. Because I was over 18 and living with them, I was required to be involved with every step of the adoption process. I met with a social worker, had a few physicals, got tested for a plethora of diseases, submitted to a local and federal background check, was fingerprinted, and on and on. I know full well that all I went through was nothing compared to what Tom and Jeff were doing – constant meetings with the adoption agency, social workers, lawyers, what have you. At one point, they had to pay something like $13 per page to have a 100-page legal document translated into Vietnamese!
Needless to say, I was happy to do what I could, and began to get caught up in the excitement as they were buying baby clothes, furnishings, etc.
After my first semester of grad school I moved out of their place, but because I worked for Jeff, I saw them often. They finally received a picture of the beautiful five-month-old baby girl who would join their family. They were told that Jeff would travel to Vietnam within two months to be with his child. Excitedly, Tom and Jeff made all the preparations parents-to-be make. They threw a baby shower with friends and family, who all signed a picture of the baby girl, writing messages to her to let her know how lucky she was to have two amazing dads.
Two months came and went without travel plans. The adoption agency told Jeff to sit tight, everyone in their travel group (a group of about 13 adoptive parties) was in the same position.
Vietnam had slightly adjusted its legal procedure for international adoptions and a form that once had to be completed when the adoptive parent arrived in Vietnam to meet their child, now had to be submitted from the United States. Tom and Jeff (as well as all of the other adoptees in their group, many of whom were also gay couples) had to resubmit everything. The adoption agency told them that this might tack on a few months to their wait, but that they would file a petition on Tom and Jeff’s behalf, since their applications had been submitted before the law changed.
It seemed like things were turning around when Jeff received a call at the office from the agency – the petition was under review and he was “more than likely” going to Vietnam with two days’ notice. The agency couldn't officially promise anything, but they told him to immediately contact his travel agency and place a ticket to Vietnam on reserve.
Four days later -- four days of packing, pacing and practicing wearing a BabyBjörn complete with teddy bear in it, Jeff was at work instead of in Vietnam. The petition had been denied by the Vietnamese government. He and Tom, and the other potential adoptive parents, were devastated.
This all took place last year. Tom and Jeff were supposed to have their baby by July 2007. It is now July 2008, their baby girl is 18 months years old, and there is no end in sight.
Sadly, much of this has to do with politics, as the United States is attempting to cut off all adoptions to Vietnam in order to gain favor with China. It seems there is some Vietnamese oil of which China wants a piece. The United States is supporting China, and though U.S. and Vietnamese officials won’t admit that the oil business has anything to do with it. Instead the United States claims it is conducting "investigations" into the orphans – checking on their general well-being and ensuring that they do not have any living relatives (I guess the whole Madonna-style of adoption doesn't really fly in Vietnam). The adoptions are not yet closed though, and there is something you all can do to help.
I think taking action is important here, because as Allison pointed out in her post, the path LGBT parents take to get to their children can be long and extremely complicated. For Tom, to be able to help a child who has no family of her own – just as he had no family left in Vietnam in 1974 – and to share that experience with his partner, is something he can’t replicate by adopting from a different country or by hiring a surrogate mother.
Obviously, if Tom was straight and going through this process with a woman, nothing would change legally – his adoption would still be held up by the Vietnamese government. This post is not meant to be an argument that LGBT couples have more trouble adopting than do straight couples (although that is sometimes the case, I can’t give that issue its proper weight here), or that the hold up in Vietnam is in anyway related to sexuality. Rather, building from Allison's post, this is meant to be one snapshot of what one gay couple is going through to get their daughter.
If you would like to help, you can contact your representatives and senators, asking that they help in keeping Vietnam adoptions open and help get Thanh Hoa (the province in Vietnam where the children are) unblocked so that all of the 13-plus families with babies in Thanh Hoa can complete their adoptions. Unless we get our representatives and senators to put pressure on U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services and the Department of State to complete the Thanh Hoa adoptions, it appears that nothing will happen and the children who have all been assigned to families in the United States – they will be stuck in the orphanage.
You can find your representatives by entering your zip code and/or address at "Contact the Congress," a database of contact information for members of Congress.
The following links contain more information on other things you can do and background information.
In addition, if anyone is interested in how this all relates to the 2008 U.S. Presidential Election, check out this story outlining John McCain and Barack Obama’s stance on LGBT adoption.
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