This is sort of pertinent to some of the threads of discussion raised here in the Head Shop and here in Conversation.
It's this comparison that came up on Jane Jeong Trenka's blog, a kind of connect-the-dots thing that worries me.
And I'm speaking as an internationally-adoptive parent, now.
The first dot, with figures from the U.S. Department of State:
Let's look at the numbers of Korean kids sent to the U.S. over the past 14 years:
1990: 2,620 (two years after 1988 the Seoul Olympics, when Korea vowed it would stop sending children away by the year 1996.)
1991: 1,818
1992: 1,840
1993: 1,775
1994: 1,795
1995: 1,666
1996: 1,516
1997: 1,654
1998: 1,829
1999: 2,008
2000: 1,794
2001: 1,870
2002: 1,779
2003: 1,790
2004: 1,716
Will they do it by 2015? The Lucky 8 Ball says: NOT LIKELY.
The second dot is a Korean government program, reported in the Korean paper Chosun Ilbo:
Gov't in All-Out Effort to Make Koreans Make Babies
The government will consider fresh incentives to families with more than two children to reverse Korea's declining birthrate after criticism that current cash rewards for a third child and help with the cost of upbringing are ineffective. No more than 10 percent of Korea's newborns are third children.
The government was out in force at a discussion chaired by Prime Minister Lee Hae-chan at the Central Government Complex on Monday to examine ways of reversing Korea's low birthrate. Besides the finance, education, agriculture and forestry, labor and health ministers, it was attended by the head of the Presidential Committee on Aging and Future Society and the Cheong Wa Dae secretary for social policy.
It goes on more than that, but those first two grafs sum it all up.
Governments collect fees for international adoptions. In China, they call the biggest one a "gift" to the China Center for Adoption Affairs, but it's basically a big fat fee. I don't know what Korea charges.
One of the things I like to tell myself is that things are improving, that money into the system helps speed up the time when there won't be any more orphanages. Or close to it, anyway.
Something seems wrong, though, when the babies are still leaving a country as fast as ever while the government is launching programs for their people to make more babies.
In Korea, it could be just a symptom of the North-South divide, but even so. Even so.
Disturbing precedent. |
