Like learning Mandarin, adopting a child from China has been more complicated than my wife and I anticipated. We adopted our first daughter in the U.S., and when we started on the second I'd been led to believe the Chinese route was easier. Yet it's been two years of mind-numbing paperwork, meetings, home studies, medical tests and background checks. Also bank checks. Lots of those.
You learn not to question the requirements. Why do we have to be fingerprinted twice? Why do notaries in China seem to charge so much more for their services than their American counterparts? Who knows? We just do as we're told.
Meanwhile, on "Sex and the City," Charlotte and Harry were assigned a Chinese baby almost immediately after their domestic adoption (itself arranged in record time) fell through. We hate them.
When I mention that we're adopting a girl from China, even to strangers such as the teller at our bank or the customer service representative at our insurance company, the usual response is, "Oh, that's so wonderful!" If it's so wonderful, why is it so hard?
Like most people who adopt, we've been struck by the dichotomy between the legal treatment of biological parents, who are presumed fit unless there's good reason to believe otherwise, and adoptive parents, who must prove their fitness -- in the case of overseas adoptions, to the satisfaction of two governments. Among other things, this entailed writing a letter to the Chinese government promising that we would feed, clothe and shelter our new daughter; that she would be treated as a member of the family; and that we would not abandon her by the side of the road when we got her back to the United States.
Biological parents, by contrast, do not have to make any showing that they are ready, willing and able to raise a child. I'm not advocating a license for childbearing. But it's clear that more children would find homes if adoption were half as easy as it seems on TV.