ABC NEWS SPECIAL : SAUDI CHILDREN LEFT BEHIND Link to the YouTube video.
I'm linking to this video rather than embedding it because there is a commercial attached. This is the story of one man, one of many children, whose pregnant mother was abandoned by his father, a college student in America at that time. It focuses on the difficulty he has because of the fact that what his father did - having sex without marriage and with a woman not of his culture and religion - is a shameful thing among his own. Certainly such men know what they are doing. So take responsibility already!
The man is able to connect with younger family members who do not have the same attitude, but his birth father shuns him, as he always did, even when he travels all the way to Saudi Arabia.
Saudi Arabians are not the only college students who come for an American education and use the comparative liberalness of America and American women to experience sex and then abscond to their own far-away countries leaving women to raise the child without their support, without marriage.
While not every foreign student is this way and the abandonment of women and children also happens by native-born men, the great numbers of people who approach me hoping to find a birth parent leads me to think seriously about this as an issue.
Recently I worked with a person who's mother - in her 80's - still wants to know who her mother's birth parents were. We got as far as learning that her adoptive parents died within a month of each other when this adopted girl was only 18 and using census, that they were born and raised in different states but managed to adopt when they were living in Chicago. Women were having their babies without fathers in Chicago at the turn of the century. There is still hope.
