Domestic news organizations have verified that the woman identified by CNN as “Isabel” was originally named Ho Hsiao-feng, a Paiwan Aborigine from Taitung County. Sold by her parents at age eight to a buyer in Taiwan surnamed Liu, she was later taken to the USA, forced into a fake marriage, and required to work at a Liu family jewelry store. During her years with the Lius, abuse was commonplace.

In an interview, Isabel is overcome by the sadness of her memories.

“You were sold by your family?”

“Yes, my family was very poor.” Her eyes tear up and her voice trembles: “If I can find my mother, I’m going to tell her, ‘I love you so much.’”

“I was very, very sad. It hurt me.” She eventually breaks down completely before the camera.

This cross-border tragedy has triggered many questions. For one thing, given that the US court document states that Isabel was “sold into slavery by her Taiwanese father,” why has the Child Welfare Bureau at Taiwan’s Ministry of the Interior (MOI) stated to the media that there is no record of her ever having been put up for adoption? Can a person’s identity be switched just like that, without ever being recorded?

It is generally thought that Isabel’s is anything but an isolated case, but in fact is typical of the sort of thing that often happened to children from remote areas in Taiwan years ago when the adoption system here was riddled with problems.

Has Taiwan’s adoption system seen any improvements in the intervening years? The fates of adopted children range from happiness to hell, depending on the family.

The Child Welfare League Foundation filmed a documentary to encourage the public to abandon old prejudices about adoption. Xiao Wenxing and Ren Xianghua tell their adoptive daughter Xiao He: “We used our ‘hearts’ to give birth to you!”

Hsiao-feng’s life took a big turn when she was sold in 1985, and it so happens that Civil Code provisions governing adoptions underwent a major amendment in that same year. Under the amended provisions, an adoption must be approved by a court before it can go through. Before the amendment, adults simply made an agreement between themselves and registered a change to their respective household registries. It is very possible that Hsiao-feng was registered as another family’s daughter before the amendment to the Civil Code took effect, but the US court document describes her as having been “sold into slavery,” so her informal adoption was clearly a case of human trafficking.

As well as the requirement for court approval, the adoption system later incorporated the provisions of the 1993 Child Welfare Act (later renamed the Children and Youth Welfare Act), which called for a social worker to make home visits and submit an evaluation report for the court’s reference. However, this did not put an end to informal adoptions, so the opportunity for human trafficking still exists.

According to figures from the Child Welfare Bureau, informal adoptions have numbered about 2,000 annually in Taiwan in recent years, thus accounting for about five in six adoptions.

Director Chang Shiu-yuan of the Child Welfare Bureau remarks that after amendments to the adoption provisions in the Civil Code and the Child Welfare Act, police still uncovered cases of obstetricians arranging the sale of children born to single mothers. However, no case of this nature has been reported in the past five years.

The Children and Youth Welfare Act was amended again in November 2011 (and renamed the Act for Safeguarding the Welfare and Interests of Children and Youth). The amended provisions limit informal adoptions to cases in which: (1) the two parties are collateral blood relatives within six degrees of kinship or collateral relatives by marriage within five degrees of kinship, and members of the same generation within their family tree; or (2) a spouse by remarriage is adopting the other spouse’s child. All other adoptions must be arranged via a court-approved agency.

The amended provisions will take effect in May 2012. Alicia Wang, CEO of the Child Welfare League Foundation (CWLF), states that the new provisions requiring adoption via an agency limit the opportunity for informal adoptions, and this will help to eliminate human trafficking.

According to figures from the Child Welfare Bureau, at the end of 2011 Taiwan had 11 approved adoption agencies, including MOI children’s homes, the CWLF, Cathwel Service, St. Lucy’s Center Tainan, Good Shepherd Social Welfare Services, and Christian Salvation Service. Many of these organizations are religious in nature, and have over 20 years of experience in arranging overseas adoptions. Within two years after the amended provisions take effect, all adoption agencies will have to be recertified by the government to continue providing adoption services.

In 1993, the international community acted to regulate intercountry adoption by passing the Hague Adoption Convention, which had 85 signatories as of January 2011, including mainland China. Taiwan is not a signatory, but it did incorporate the spirit of the convention into the Children and Youth Welfare Act by, for example, placing priority on placing the child within the state of origin, and on the arrangement of adoptions via agencies.

A few years ago, the news media gave prominent coverage to overseas adoptions of AIDS babies and severely disabled children from Taiwan. Deeply moved, people began to ask themselves: Why can’t we keep such children in Taiwan? Are we to believe our people are any less compassionate than foreigners?

MOI statistics show an annual average of 300–400 children from Taiwan being placed for adoption overseas over the past 10 years, with the largest share going to the USA. The US Bureau of Consular Affairs reports that families in the US adopted about 2,000 children from Taiwan from 1999 through 2011, and its statistics on incoming adoptions by country of origin ranked Taiwan at number five in 2010, and among the top 10 in 2009.

MOI figures show the Netherlands as the single biggest European destination for adoptees from Taiwan, taking an average of 30–40 children per year, over half with physical or mental disabilities.

Why should these particular countries be the most common destinations?

There are historical reasons, explains Alicia Wang: “Taiwan has close ties with the US (such as US aid to Taiwan after World War II), and the island was once colonized by the Dutch. Moreover, American churches and social welfare groups provided early training and support to help many groups in Taiwan (such as the Taiwan Fund for Children and Families) to get established, so there’s a natural comfort zone in dealing with those countries.”

Also, some adoption agencies in Taiwan have long had cooperative ties with overseas institutions. The Dutch justice ministry, for example, established the Mei­ling Foundation in 1989 to arrange intercountry adoptions. Since then, the foundation has worked regularly with several adoption agencies in Taiwan, and by the end of 2010 had arranged for the adoption by Dutch families of 860 children from Taiwan. Of these, 859 were placed for adoption via either Cathwel Service or Christian Salvation Service, while one adoption was arranged via the CWLF, which has begun only in the last few years to provide small numbers of children for intercountry adoption.

Major adoption agencies in the West have long regarded Taiwan, China, South Korea, Russia, Ukraine, the Philippines, and Haiti as their main countries of origin.

An online search turns up dozens of websites that deal specifically with the topic of adopting children from Taiwan. Click into the hits and you will find any number of adoptive parents who have posted family photos on their blogs, showing them with their adopted children from Taiwan. Warmly emotional captions appear below the photos—“We are family” and “Our forever family,” for example.

Many of the Taiwanese kids in the photos have disabilities. Some are in wheelchairs, while others have atrophied limbs. But the one thing they all have in common is beaming smiles.

In adoption parlance, these kids are called “special-needs” children. In Taiwan, special-needs children of all ages have the same problem as other kids who’ve passed the age of three—they have little chance of being adopted by anyone in Taiwan.

About 1,000 children and youths were admitted to care institutions in 2011 due to domestic violence or other family breakdowns. Shown here and on the facing page are two infants being cared for at Cathwel Service’s Jonah House orphanage.

Adoptive love in a foreign land

The more highly developed social services and care systems of advanced nations make it easier for adoptive parents of special-needs children to deal with the extra burdens involved, which is one reason why people there are more willing to adopt such children. Even in the highly capitalist US, adoptive families can apply for tax breaks.

Cathwel Service and the Meiling Foundation once helped arrange for adoption in the Netherlands of a Taiwanese girl whose mother had died in childbirth. Lack of oxygen during birth left the girl with multiple disabilities, and now she is jointly cared for by her adoptive family and Dutch social services. Unable to speak or get around on her own, she spends Monday to Friday in the care of social services, then her adoptive parents take her home on the weekends. This arrangement means their work schedules are completely unaffected.

Meiling even set up a special team just to help with special-needs children from Taiwan. In 2010, of 28 children adopted via Mei­ling’s auspices, 16 had special needs. Their problems included premature birth, delayed development, hypospadias, glucose-6-phosphate dehydrogenase (G6PD) deficiency, heart disease, EEG waveform abnormalities, and drug withdrawal syndrome.

Cathwel executive director Rosa Wang has worked in adoption services for over 30 years. She comments: “Virtually no one in Taiwan is willing to adopt a special-needs child, but families overseas cry tears of joy when they’re told such a child is available.”

Chang remarks that adoptive parents in Taiwan are also very loving, but they reserve their love for healthy children, and strongly prefer the very young. In comparison, the love of adoptive families overseas transcends the boundary between healthy and disabled. The fact of a child’s disabilities does not in any way diminish their love for the child.

Xie Hui­zhen is a social worker at Christian Salvation Service, which has arranged nearly 1,000 intercountry adoptions in the past 28 years. She feels religious faith is a big reason why families overseas are much more willing to adopt special-needs children. She reports that CSS only places children with families where both parents are Christian. Chinese people see infirm children as a form of retribution for past misdeeds, but adoptive families overseas simply feel, “Since God has given us a challenged child, He will help us care for it.”

Stories of the children from Taiwan, placed for adoption in foreign lands, who emerge from broken homes to build happy lives, cannot but tug at the heartstrings. Their stories also remind us that if we are to safeguard the human rights of children placed into adoption, it is important—whether the adoptive family is in Taiwan or overseas—to have a fully developed legal environment, sufficient social services support, the right attitude toward adoption, and an adoptive family full of love and joy.

Let us all hope that no adopted child ever again has to experience what Isabel went through.

About 1,000 children and youths were admitted to care institutions in 2011 due to domestic violence or other family breakdowns. Shown here and on the facing page are two infants being cared for at Cathwel Service’s Jonah House orphanage.