Surgery Gives Orphan From China a Second Chance
Children like 8-year-old Samantha Paolitto often wait years to be adopted.
Aug. 7, 2008 — -- Lisa Paolitto hadn't found her "Mr. Right," but that didn't stop her from fulfilling her dream of having a child.
"I just wanted to be a mom," Paolitto said. "I wasn't going to wait for anyone else to come around and make it happen."
That's how the schoolteacher from Shady Side, Md., found herself on a plane bound for Beijing in January 2006 to meet her new 6-year-old daughter. She remembers it being "love at first sight" when she laid eyes on Samantha at the orphanage in China's Anhue province.
"She's had so many caretakers," Paolitto said about Samantha. "I let her know I'm her mommy forever. I'm her forever mom."
Thirteen months after filing for adoption through the agency Adoptions Together, Paolitto brought Samantha across the world to her new home on the Chesapeake Bay.
But there was a medical hurdle Paolitto said she wasn't quite expecting when she took her daughter to Johns Hopkins Hospital for a full physical examination. Eventually, the new mother found herself not only helping Samantha adjust to life in America, but also helping to prepare her for major heart surgery.
For Americans looking to adopt internationally, China is one of the most popular choices for several reasons. All foreign adoptions are centralized under the Chinese government and the China Center of Adoption Affairs works with selected adoption agencies in the United States to match children to families based on the adoptive parents' dossier.
Because of the cultural imperative of having males in a family and the laws that limit family size, thousands of baby girls are abandoned every year in China, at places like supermarkets and train stations.
"I know about their one-child policy and I knew that I wanted a girl," Paolitto said. "And it would be easier to adopt a girl from China."
