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The Virus Babies
How a pandemic killed adoption
The pandemic wreaked havoc with everything. Courts were shuttered. Flights cancelled. Borders sealed. Adoptions, both international and domestic, became mired in dysfunction. Adoptive parents got stuck abroad, and if you believe the stories, some couples are still enmeshed in far-flung places like Nigeria almost 18 months after the virus first appeared in North America. Just a few weeks of quarantine, officials told these potential parents. Then strand after strand of red tape unfurled and these people found they were adopting a new country, not a child.
In the U.S. virtual adoptions were a thing at first. A judge and a family and the kid all on Zoom. Papers signed with electronic signatures. There were even a few foreign adoptions kept percolating over the internet. Children on the other side of the world, breakfasting via cell phone or webcam with their prospective American parents — bleary-eyed hopefuls, nibbling toast in New York at midnight and sipping a stiff shot out of a coffee cup. Nothing good came of any of this. Everyone was pretending. No one could go anywhere once we realized the virus was going to spike again and again.
When the internet crashed the pretending was over. Nothing was ever going to be as it was before the virus. Even on days when the world wide web rose from the dead and people…
