Persuasive Speech- Jessica Nelson

When a grandparent is sick people often get overcome with emotion, as they should. But once the emotion is cut through, they find comfort in making the decision to stop the kimo treatments or pull the love one off of a venalator based on “quality of life”. But what no one ever seems to consider is the quality of life at the start of it. As I hear people argue for the outlaw of abortion I can’t help but fixate on the quality of life for children in orphanages.

I have firsthand experience with some of these children. For about a year I babysat on a regular basis for a mother who was fostering 3 related children. One night when the oldest, a 6 year old little girl, had been having a particularly rebellious night (which including letting the dog into her room after being warned not to multiple times because come to find out her sister had, unbenounced to me, fed it chocolate ice cream earlier that day and it proceeded to throw up in her bed) we were having a conversation and she began to tell me how her real mother didn’t love her and how she had hit her and her siblings, and how they had been bounced around from home to home. I was staring into the eyes of a six year old who had already experienced more tragedy than my 13 year self had, despite having moved away from all my family, dealing with one of my parents having a cancer diagnosis, and coping with the death of 6 loved ones. And she was lucky. She didn’t have to live in an orphanage, she was able to stay with her siblings, and she had a foster mom who could provide for her with no ulterior motive but the memory of having a mother who didn’t love her will haunt her forever, regardless of how lucky she is.

While she will always be somewhere in the back of my mind, I am more concerned about the children who don’t get so lucky, who stay trapped in an orphanage. The U.S. Department of Health and Human services says that “There are over 120,000 orphans in America, while another 400,000 children live without permanent families”, that is crazy isn’t it? And the numbers increase exponentially when you start to look at other countries. There aren’t enough foster families to accommodate them all, (at least until Michelle Dougar stops being able to have kids and resorts to adopting them faster than Brad and Angelina) but on top of that age out of the system at a rate of 27,000 a year in the U.S., and are left with “with little financial or emotional support” according to the Adoption and Foster Care Analysis and Reporting System (AFCARS).

But there are clear reasons why these children aren’t getting adopted on average it takes 896 days and $28,000 to adopt a child from any country. The price is big for the families adopting but the price is bigger for the children. Children lose 1 or so months of linear growth for every month in an institution, and children over the age of 2 will become shy and withdrawn, and have slowed social development if not a mental illness. I have babysat for 2 other 6 year old little girls making 3 if you include the one I mentioned earlier. 2 of them are foster children and the 2 that are foster kids are much behind the other intellectually. Neither of the 2 foster kids could read even the simplest of books and could hardly struggle through assigned vocab words, despite both of them having teachers as caregivers. The other 6 year old reads to me from her chapter book before she goes to bed. So why don’t we pass legislation to try and fix it, well we did, that’s the problem. The Hauge convention is the piece of legislation for international adoption striving to reduce the risk of child abduction and streamline the basic processes between countries so we could easily facilitate adoption in the best interest of the child, yeah that didn’t happen. The U.S. signed the treaty in the 1994, and it took effect in 2008, red flag number 1.  Make that 2 because I’m fairly certain that expecting the state department to move with a sense of urgency of the issue was red flag number 1. And number 3 is the apology given by one of the main pioneers of Hauge policy Louisianna Senator Mary Landrieu as documented in the film Stuck (along with the rest of the facts from this section). She admits that the process now takes much more time and money than it did before, which discourages people from adopting and is the opposite of what they wanted the treaty to do.

We aren’t U.N. members, it’s not feasible for us to think we are going to be able to fix this. But there are people out there who can and no one is trying to. The issue is being overshadowed by gay marriage and abortion. Yes, I get it, gay marriage means a lot to people, it’s not to be forgotten, but the right to be adopted is not just the right to love, it’s the right to be fed every day, to develop as you were intended, to leave the building you’ve been locked in your entire life, is the right to marry really more of a basic liberty than the right to safe and nourishing place for a child? At least gay people can defend themselves, abandoned children have no voice to the world outside of their locked gate. And if it is wrong to terminate an unborn baby when did it become ok to terminate the chance of a child having a happy and healthy life? So I propose that we be the voice for them. The easiest step we can take toward fixing this problem is to stir the pot, blow it up on social media, and lobby for it. The most I’ve seen this issue in the media in my lifetime has been a joke that was featured on ifunny several weeks back that I will shamelessly share with you now: “why can’t orphans play baseball? Because they can’t find home” when testing this joke out on my friends they replied that that was heartless but hey at least the author is doing something to call some attention to the real issue here. As I was searching for my documentary for the annotated bibliography I found 3 in existence and one wasn’t even in English. With such a lack of information you might find it difficult to advocate for the issue because you yourself cannot think of a solution to the problem. Fear not, let me share with you a quote from Alison Leviene. For those of you who don’t know who she is she my women crush Wednesday, she has completed the Adventure Grand Slam which requires climbing the highest peak on every continent and skiing to both poles, and she is also the women who was asked to leave the girl scout national convention this year after her speech for comparing something to talking about sex with the pope and proudly displaying her “fenis” (as in the penis like contraption that ladies use when they need to make some yellow snow on the mountain) for her audience which unfortunately contained 5 and 6 year olds. She told us that “you don’t need absolute clarity to put one foot in front of the other”. All I ask is that you take the first step with me and maybe in the time it would take to adopt one child under the current procedures we can change the process for all that will follow.

Works Cited

1.     Stuck. Dir. Thaddaeus Scheel. By Jennifer Latham. Globox Media, 2013. Netflix. Web. 23 June  2014.

2.     "Understanding the Hague Convention." Intercountry Adoption. U.S. Department of State, n.d.       Web. 25 June 2014.

3.     "Adoption Laws." International Child. Adoptionservices.org, n.d. Web. 27 June 2014.

4.     Levine, Alison. On the Edge. N.p.: Grand Central, 2014. Print.

5.     United States Department of Health and Human Services. "Data Brief 2013." ACYF Office of Data, Analysis, Research, and Evaluation Data Brief 2013-1 (2013): 1-6. Web. 16 Nov. 2014.

6.     "Children's Statistics." Worldwide Orphan Statistics. SOS Children's Villages USA, n.d. Web. 16 Nov. 2014.