Shelby's Life and Whatnot

Update on China

China sent their July matches this weekend, so I thought now was as good a time as any to give an update on our adoption. In a nutshell: Still waiting, still slow. We've revised our estimated match time to "Sometime in 2011." I know this is vastly different than what we were saying before and it seems hard to believe, so I thought I would put everything in a table to give you an idea of what I mean when I talk about a slowdown and how I've come to believe that 2011 is very likely.

As a reminder, China matches families once a month according to Log-In Date (LID). Your LID is assigned when your completed dossier is entered into China's system, and LIDs from all countries in the world and all agencies are matched in order. So each month a batch of referrals (matches) has a cutoff LID, which is that all families from the previous cutoff to that date have been matched.

Our LID is March 20, 2007.

First, let's take a look at the matches for this calendar year:

As you can see, it will take them over 5 months to finish off January 2006 LIDs. Incidentally, in the "old days" LIDs were referred an entire month at a time, not just a handful of days like it has been lately.

Here's a look at referrals since our LID:

It's not hard to see a trend, and not a cheerful one either.

There's no way to predict what's going to happen, but the evidence is clear that this slowdown has been happening over a long period of time. Some believe that China deliberately slowed things down for the Olympics, but the fact is that by the numbers, this started back in late 2005. China has long maintained that the Olypics will have no effect on adoptions, and that historically appears to be the case. No word on what or when the August batch will be, but it will likely be the only batch to have been affected by the Olympics. This also means that the chances of a post-Olympic speed-up are unlikely as well.

The next batch will likely appear to be a larger one, but only because it will probably cover January 28-February 7, 2006, which was Chinese New Year and their office was closed, therefore very few people have LIDs in that week. Following that, a dramatic speed-up is not likely.

So why so slow? That's the million-dollar question here. Nobody knows for sure--even China says that they don't know for sure. What we do know is that the China adoption program became increasingly popular among parents culminating with an enormous amount of dossiers in late 2005-early 2007. The number of children has not grown, however. China reports a rise of domestic adoption and a decrease in abandonments--both of which are wonderful for the children but result in a longer wait for us.

Since it seems unlikely that China is going to somehow produce more children, the fact is, really the only factor that will improve our wait is attrition--families ahead of us dropping out. There is definitely evidence of increased attrition, but it doesn't appear to have resulted in any appreciable speed-up yet. My personal prediction is that by this time next year we will start to see some tangible effects of attrition. On China message boards, it seems like a lot of people are waiting until December of this year to decide whether or not to stay in the program. Since I don't think there will be a speed-up, I think a lot of families will drop out in January, except for those who are "next" (my second prediction is that in January they will still be matching March 2006 families) so by July we'll start to feel the effects of January drop-outs.

No matter what, it seems clear that, doing the math, our earliest hope is 2011 for our match. But we are committed to the end, no matter how long it takes!