More of my thoughts

When my husband and I first started investigating international adoption, long long ago, I was pleasantly surprised to learn that the CCAA seems to always have the best interest of the babies at heart. And I still think that this is the case. Not only from looking at their process and guidelines, but now I know people who have met with the various directors and other employees of the CCAA and all of these people talk about how they came away feeling that you could really feel the concern for the babies they were responsible for. I have been critical of the way the CCAA handles the flow of information, and of the way they seem to have been hit unawares with the flood of parent dossiers even though they should have known about them when they were logged in. I have had my share of venting, and will probably do so again. But, I do ultimately think that the employees of the CCAA have the best interest of the babies at heart. I also have a feeling that if there is a purposeful slowdown going on, that it came from the Chinese Government as a decree that the director(s) of the CCAA must follow. I don't know that this is the case and I'm not speculating that it is.. I am only saying that IF they are slowing things down on purpose, I would bet it's not a decision the CCAA made. Now, as to the discussion of why there is a slowdown. The thing many people seem to be overlooking is that we have evidence that there are less (a lot less) referrals being made per month this year than there were last year. The reason is said to be a lack of paperwork for babies. So the next question is - why is there less paperwork? I've seen various reasons:

• The CCAA didn't plan well (I don't really buy this one)
• The Hunan situation (I think this is a big part of it)
• Less healthy babies being abandoned (I think there has been a change in demographics, so perhaps some of the orphanages that previously submitted paperwork for a lot of babies no longer have as many babies, but perhaps other orphanages that previously didn't have as many now have more but aren't approved to send in paperwork)

We also hear that they have a lot more paperwork from parents, but the thing that keeps sticking out to me is that they are sending less referrals now than they were last year. Even if they had the exact same amount of paperwork from families, they would still be falling behind. The slowdown is not because there are more parent dossiers. The extent of the slowdown is worse because of this, but even if they had the exact same amount of parent dossiers, there would still be a slowdown. Plus, if you keep in mind that the numbers of parent dossiers goes up pretty dramatically EVERY year, so they have always planned for that and haven't been phased by it for the past several years - well, this just means the fact that there are more parent dossiers does not seem (to me) to be the reason for the slowdown. I've had a couple of people email me about what I think is going to happen after this batch. For a rough estimate of what I think, see the bottom part of this post. Once we are sure of a cut-off for this batch I promise to do an in-depth re-analysis of the numbers and go out several months. But, to answer a specific question, I do think we are close to the point that they might be able to start doing more than two weeks per month and maybe even somewhere around a whole month. Probably not this month. But if they manage to get past the 6th then maybe next month (or maybe not), and the next month I'd say probably (based on the numbers from the polls). As for the talk about a quota. When they put it in place last time each agency was allowed to submit a percentage of the dossiers they had submitted over the past year. I have said many times that if they were going to follow their past patterns they would have put a quota in place this time last year. I don't know why they didn't, unless they thought they could keep up. Perhaps if they hadn't been blindsided with the problems in Hunan they could have. Since they aren't putting one in place now and apparently have no plans to, I have to think that they either have a plan to get caught up, or want it to keep slowing down. Which takes us back to the question of whether it is intentional or not, doesn't it.