Before we started our adoption process in Guatemala, we had filled out paperwork to adopt a baby from Latvia through an agency in Ohio called European Adoption Consultants. The director was named Margaret Cole and today I read Margaret Cole has been sentenced to federal prison for “schemes to corruptly and fraudulently procure adoptions …through bribing officials and defrauding U.S. adoptive parents.”
I can’t remember the exact reason why we left European Adoption Consultants back in 2002–the tipping point–except that dealing with the agency and its players made me uneasy. Soon after, we switched to Guatemala, which of course closed adoptions to the US in December 2007, also due to corruption and irregularity.
One of the final scenes in my memoir, Mamalita, describes my watching an episode of Dateline NBC titled “The Baby Broker” and seeing our facilitator filmed in the shadowy hallway of the Camino Real, one of Guatemala’s so-called baby hotels, where adoptive parents like us met their children and then spent weeks and months trying to sort out complicated adoptions. Ultimately, I rented a small house in Antigua, Guatemala and moved there with my daughter, where I was immersed deeply into the world of intercountry adoption—the players, the practices, the regulations, the deals. Everything that went on was impossible to avoid.
Sometimes I ask myself why I’ve spent the past 20 years thinking and writing about adoption—thinking and writing about adoption and virtually nothing else–and then I read that Margaret Cole is going to federal prison and I know why. The experience of becoming a mother through international adoption changed me.
I’m still trying to make sense of it.