Adoption In China

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Lisa Ling’s study showed that over ¼ of babies adopted and brought to the United States are from China. Most of these babies are girls. Due to the one child policy to control population, these unwanted girls are aborted, abandoned or hidden. They might even get killed. Boys are preferred because they will carry on the family name and they will stick with the family to care for them as they get older. These girls have never known a father. They have never known a mother, and they never knew a big sister. Most of them will be adopted from families in the United States. Others will stay in an orphanage until they are old enough to be on their own. China is one of the world’s oldest civilizations with over 4,000 years of history and culture. Today, …show more content…

The adoption process can take more than one year and cost a family up to $18,000. Couples wait anxiously for the government’s approval, then the government assigns them a baby. Couples are given nothing more than a picture of the baby. They don’t have the child’s medical information, who the parents are, etc. Finally, three days after the arrival in Beijing, the couples get to meet their baby for the first time. Under Chairman Mao in the ‘50s and ‘60s, China’s population exploded. By 1980, Mao’s successors limited families to having only one child. Sometimes, families were allowed to have two. This was the largest human population control effort in human history. China’s population is coming under control, but there are consequences no one intended. Couples feel that they must have a boy because boys often carry on the family name, provide work and they stay with their parents at old age. Possibly, over 100,000 baby girls are abandoned every year. Many of them will end up in an orphanage. Today, 1in 4 children adopted overseas come from China. The babies adopted by Americans are only a fraction of the millions of girls believed to be missing from China’s population. While the number of girls are being giving away, the number of boys are becoming way out of proportion. Today, boys greatly out number girls and its only getting worse. This relates to cultural relativism,

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