WATCH THIS PROG..............................BABY__BE__MINE..................BBC1...............9.00pm.........................

[RTKangaMummy]

WEDNESDAY 25 JANUARY

Current affairs

Baby Be Mine: Journey of Love

9:00pm - 10:00pm

BBC1 London & South East

VIDEO Plus+: 8361
Subtitled, Widescreen

Here's a two-parter that shamelessly plucks every heartstring as it looks at three very different tales of adoption. Bill and Jane, from Shropshire, go to China to collect their new daughter, 18-month-old Kai Ya, one of many thousands of Chinese baby girls abandoned every year. In Romania, a British woman, Sarah, fosters Dylan, a young boy with autism whose mum decides she wants him back. And in the USA, a hollow-eyed Amy gives an emotional account of her family's adoption of two Siberian children, and its terrible outcome. You'll need a soul made of concrete not to be moved - assuming, that is, you can get past the frequently cloying narration by Sophie Okonedo and the lounge-music soundtrack.

RT reviewer: Alison Graham

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hi,

i thought there would be a thread about this...
i was sooo upset by the programme, i agree, that woman showed no remorse at all. Perhaps one thing is that it will make people think very carefully about adoption and not to presume, i suppose, that it will all go smoothly and that the child will instantly 'love you'.

poor little boy.

what is worse is that she is a nurse fgs! surely she would know that such burns would need immediate medical attention!! poor thing must have been in so much pain, maybe in a way it is a relief he is no longer suffering.

would love to adopt from overseas. i get so angry when babies are abandoned especially just because they are girls

I coudln't watch after seeing that Romanian baby lying in a pool of its vomit

Fortunately DS woke up and we went to bed together; I supposed to start sleep training last night. Wee tike got off lightly

What happened to the Siberian kids? (if it's not too upsetting to talk about)

Right, I've contacted Goodrock to sponsor a child. SO thank you Bluesky and Rhubarb for your recommendation. Have to do it.

Highlander - The children adopted by the US couple travelled back to Ohio with their new family. The little girl, Irina, seemed to settle well, but the little boy, Dimitri (later named Liam) was very institutionalised and struggled to settle and bond with his new mother. This made his mother depressed and angry (at herself and Dimitri) and she eventually, after 6 months, stopped trying to be affectionate with him because he would always pull away. She began to have thoughts of 'wishing for the childrens demise' which she shared with her H , personally I think it was a result of her depression. Things got worse and they began to neglect little Dimitri because he was so unaffectionate .

One day the adoptive father was giving Dimitri a bath (the mother was at work) and he scalded the little boy. He phoned his wife (a nurse) at work, and told her that the water was a little too warm and that he'd burnt the baby. She asked if it looked serious and he said no, it looked ok. So she left it at that. Days passed and the burns got worse, the mother wanted to phone 911, but the father told her that if she did then they'd remove the children (including her own 2 birth children) and put them into care, and they'd be investigated for child abuse. The mother (being interviewed from prison) said that she was so scared of having her kids taken away that she kept schtum about the scalding. About a week later Dimitri started experiencing breathing problems and so they phoned 911, the poor little guy died in the ambulance . It was his 3rd birthday.

The couple were arrested and sentenced

Was also shocked at the birth family of Dylan, the little boy fostered by the British care worker. The mother was a heavy drinker and so was her 13 year old daughter (very very very obviously plastered during filming). Dylan's birth mother couldn't remember how many children she had . I did get the feeling that she was being forced into 'reclaiming' Dylan by the Romanian authorities, though. I was SO happy for them at the end when his foster mum (the brit) was granted honorary citizenship which meant she could adpot Dylan and bring him to the UK . That was a very happy ending, but I couldn't help wondering about what was going to happen to the young children who still remained with Dylan's birth mother, what will become of them living in a shanty with an alcoholic mother?

am going to cry again just thinking about all of this.

I liked the couple from Shropshire and I thought they managed the whole scenario very very well, they obviously adore their little girl, but there was something odd about their attitude towards international adoption. She (the adoptive mother) was continually pressing the point of 'rescuing a child', she seemed pretty wrapped up in the 'heroic' element of the adoption, IYSWIM.

yeah and she said they could have kids of their own but they wanted to adopt?? Is that a little odd??

I have a friend who feels the same - she would like children but feels no real need to be pregnant or to have children that are biologicaly hers and says that she would rather give an abandoned child a home - I would also like to adopt one day but also have 2 ds's of my own.

link to Goodrock

Rhubarb - if you don't mind me asking - what sort of work did you do ?

bump

on tonight

Have just watched it - shocking, and horrible, especially the little baby that died - so sad.

I think if I was ever going to adopt, I wouldn't even consider international adoption now.

But why is it - in all these countries like Russia etc. that there are so many children that can't be cared for properly BUT is it so difficult for people that want to help them ?? Poor little mites.

watched this tonight too, can't stop thinking about the little girl in russia that the couple went to see first but didn't adopt, the one who couldn't open her eyes properly. i wish they'd said what had happened to her.

I think that the reason a lot of these kids can?t be helped by westerners has a lot to do with the infrastructures of the countries they come from. After all, you don?t see hundreds of thousands of abandoned children living in orphanages in this country ? it just wouldn?t be tolerated by the people here, and if such a situation arose then there would be a queue of people waiting to adopt them. But in these countries it says everything about the people who live there that they are prepared for so many of their children to be abandoned and ultimately taken out of their culture to the west. I also think that for a lot of couples wanting to adopt, there is a certain kind of romantic ideal about ?rescuing a child from a poor country?, and I think a lot of the time couples just aren?t prepared for the amount of burocracy involved, and the amount of physical and emotional problems that a child from a foreign country comes with, problems that far exceed the problems of children who are available for adoption in this country. I think the couple who turned down the little Russian girl had no idea what they were letting themselves in for. They talked about going over to Russia to pick a little girl, almost in the same way as one might go and pick a puppy out of a petshop. and I think they were genuinely shocked by the state of the country and the orphanage they first visited.

I think also that the sad reality is that only the best children are adopted by westerners, the children who are pretty, who have limited medical problems (because most of them do have medical problems), and the rest have no future at all and are pretty much left to wrot. I wonder what happens to these children if they actually make it to adulthood.

I felt particularly sad watching the young Cambodian girl. She still feels obviously torn between knowing she left her real family behind. She was 6 when she was adopted so she would remember her original family a fair bit.

I also wondered in tiday's world of modern communications whether there wasn't some way in which she could keep in touch with her real family, perhaps by letter through some aid agencies.