Like children conceived with the help of anonymous sperm donors, adopted children can use DNA websites to search for family members. For children adopted from China during the one-child policy period, that can mean finding siblings and even parents who may have put them up for adoption under duress.
The New Yorker has the story:
The Chinese Adoptees Who Were Stolen. As thousands of Chinese families take DNA tests, the results are upending what adoptees abroad thought they knew about their origins.
By Barbara Demick May 23, 2025
"Back when China started allowing foreign adoptions, in the early nineties, there was no expectation that adoptees would ever connect with their birth families. The babies, mostly girls, were said to have been picked up at train stations, markets, and roadsides, where they had been abandoned by families fearful of the ruthlessly enforced one-child policy. They had no identification. Even the orphanages didn’t know who they were. And China, with its staggeringly large population—more than one billion—was so far away from the adoptive parents. An adoptee finding her birth family seemed no more likely than locating a particular grain of sand.
"Those assumptions have been upended in recent years. Like it or not, and many do not, technology has compressed this vast world into an interconnected village. Adoptees who could only fantasize about their birth families are now identifying them through DNA testing and chatting with them online. Even more unexpected, Chinese birth parents and, sometimes, adult siblings are seeking out and finding their lost kin who were adopted abroad."
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