My friend Judy and I had arrived in Yinchuan, the capital of Ningxia in western China the evening before. After two years of waiting, we had each received a picture of a baby with an accompanying medical report in Chinese early in the new year of 1998. Would we please fill in the accompanying form to say whether we accepted or declined the infant and, in the event of acceptance, make our travel arrangements?
Six weeks later we were in China, skirting gingerly around a wheelbarrow full of chickens’ feet as we made our way from the dining room to the minibus waiting to take us to the Civil Affairs Office where we would meet our babies and begin the formal process to adopt them.
Many years earlier, as soon as it became obvious that we might not become parents quickly or easily, my husband Orlando and I decided to adopt a baby. We wanted to get on with the business of being parents, not wait around for a miracle. Above all we wanted to steer clear of the IVF clinic with its reckless destruction of human life.
So we became the parents of Damian, a seven month old baby with Down’s Syndrome, while we were in our twenties. A few years later we were able to adopt another son, Orlando, and a daughter Maria, tiny infants born in El Salvador. Although we had always wanted a large family, we felt at this stage we had been luckier than most to be able to adopt three and that we would be unlikely to get another chance.
Then I saw the program, “The Dying Rooms,” and became aware of the large number of babies in China waiting for families, mostly in vain. It felt like a very clear call. Then I became pregnant for the first time at the age of forty-two, but lost my baby in a miscarriage. The call now sounded deafening.
After a lot of waiting around in various offices, Judy and I were finally invited into a large room where two nurses from the orphanage held our babies. Ignoring oriental decorum, we ran to them. The little boy, 15 month old Laifu, went happily into Judy’s arms. My little girl, Xinli — aged 13 months, allowed herself to be held briefly by me, but carefully avoided eye contact. I gave her a little toy, a plastic clown which emitted the tune “Rock-a-bye Baby” when his string was pulled. This fascinated her and she played with it all day.
After many hours of questioning and form-filling, the babies were finally ours and we took them back to our hotel to begin our life-long journey with them. Less than two weeks later, we were home.
During our stay in Yinchuan, we had a lot of contact with the orphanage staff who visited us and the babies regularly and invited us to see the orphanage. Their loving concern for the children was very clear. The day we visited, the off-duty staff had come in especially to meet us. They competed with each other to cuddle the babies and we were escorted around by a large cheerful crowd. The children’s rooms were very bare with few toys, but the children were well fed and very cleanly and warmly dressed.
When we finally left, the atmosphere changed as the staff bid a final good-bye to the babies. Everyone was quiet and subdued and many were in tears. This was no “dying room” but a place where the children were loved and would be dearly missed.
My daughter's development in her first few months with us bears witness to her good start. She (now called Jacinta) is a happy, well-adjusted bright little girl who has bonded like super glue to her new and “forever” family. We have seen none of the emotional and behavioral difficulties sometimes associated with institutionalized children.
Headlines often describe IVF children as “miracle babies.” At about the same time that the baby I had conceived was dying, my Chinese daughter was conceived, later to be born and then abandoned in desperation on the other side of the world. A year later she was in my arms, meeting her Dad and her brothers and sister who would be hers forever. That seemed to me to be a real miracle.
The Catechism of the Catholic Church warmly endorses the institution of adoption. Despite the carnage of abortion making domestic adoption so difficult, it has never been easier to adopt a baby from abroad. The sort of political correctness that would condemn a baby girl to life in an institution rather than “deprive her of her ethnicity” is dying a well-deserved death. If, as I was, you are married and childless, but have a nagging feeling that God’s will for you is to be a parent, then trust Him; but realize that your journey might take you a little further than the local maternity hospital!
(Mrs. Villalobos and her family live in England. She writes for Canticle Magazine, among others. This article was reprinted with permission from Catholic Family, a newspaper published in England.)
