Why?

Fourteen years ago, a well-to-do couple from Santiago de Compostela adopted a one-year-old girl from a Chinese orphanage. They had obviously passed all the tests that couples who want to adopt have to go through and were allowed to bring the child home to raise as their own. They happened to be the first couple in the area to adopt a Chinese child (since then there have been many such international adoptions, including a couple neighbors of mine). They were even interviewed for a news program when the girl was six years old. They were a happy family, walking through the medieval center of Santiago. The child was happy. The parents were happy, too, and mentioned that adoption was just the same as having a child of their own, that it was something that would be permanent, "for the rest of our lives," as they mentioned in the interview.  Everything seemed to go well until the parents divorced and the mother got custody of the child. The mother became depressed. One day two years ago, shortly after school had begun, the mother denounced the disappearance of her daughter. That night, the child's dead body was found next to a lane near her grandparents' house outside Santiago. The child was twelve years old, a few days shy of thirteen.

Her estranged parents were arrested and will stand trial as of today for her death. They are both accused of collusion in the child's death, with the mother as the instigator. They are supposed to have put enough of the tranquilizers prescribed to her mother in the girl's last meal at her father's apartment to kill her. It was said that the daughter was now an impediment to redoing their lives. As if with the divorce they wanted to rid themselves of all the baggage of their marriage and their child was an unwanted piece. And I ask myself, can these two people have changed so much in eleven years that they go from desiring to raise a child of their own to killing her? If the child had been their natural child, could they have been capable of doing this to her? All the psychological screening adoptive parents go through, before and after an adoption, do they look for any signs of parental failure? Do they ever find them? I know of another couple, distant in time and space, who also adopted a daughter and then stopped loving her and mistreated her psychologically, though she survived and is living a full and productive life now. What makes a parent a parent?

Difficult questions. When a parent kills his own child it's an abomination. But when an adoptive parent does so, it's doubly tragic. Because that person was deemed fit to raise a child. And that child will have been betrayed twice.