China’s abrupt decision to ban international adoptions last month appears to have crushed the dreams of hundreds of foreign families and possibly ended the last chance many Chinese children would have had of a family life.
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“You’re losing a kid even though you didn’t give birth to them and you haven’t even met them,” said Kathy Rice, one of the affected would-be parents. “But they’ve been part of our family all this time and all of a sudden we’re losing them.”
Rice had been waiting for five years to adopt Ruby, a teenager with Down’s syndrome, and bring her home to Michigan.
By 2019, when Ruby was 13, Rice had finished most of the paperwork and had the adoption approved provisionally. Had the process stayed on track, she would have met Ruby in Qingdao on the east coast of China and taken her back to America in time for her 14th birthday – but then the pandemic struck.
As is common in such cases, Rice never met the child in person nor did she make direct contact with her or even with the staff in the care institution.
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All contacts were through an agency, which would sometimes send pictures and videos of the girl and pass on gifts Rice sent to her.
Beijing has offered no clear explanation for its decision to overturn the three-decade-old foreign adoption programme, which was deeply entwined with the strict enforcement of the one-child policy that ran between 1979 and 2015.