Visual artist Marina Cruz was having difficulty conceiving with her fellow artist husband Rodel Tapaya 15 years ago due to polycystic ovarian syndrome when they finally decided to adopt.

Cruz initially underwent some workups and treatments, which she found to be “very stressful, frustrating and depressing.” So the couple decided to “think outside the box,” filled out some forms, waited for a match and finally brought home a son some months later.

When she embarked on her adoption advocacy 10 years ago, Cruz had hoped to encourage more families to adopt. However, these days, she wishes to amplify the voice of the orphans, abandoned and adoptees themselves instead.

“It’s hard to tell people to adopt. There’s a stigma,” she said. “The stigma surrounding not just adoption but being an orphan in general lingers in many forms: in media coverage that misrepresents these topics, in TV shows, movies, in other people’s speeches—sometimes in religious settings.”

Lack of empathy

“We fail to empathize,” said Cruz. “Perhaps we are always thinking of it from ‘outside the orphanages.’ What if we were to imagine an exchange of places and find ourselves in an orphan’s shoes?”

Cruz and Tapaya established Istorya Studios, a small, independent publishing house that produces card games, artist-authored books, zines and comic books. It recently came out with a comic book anthology titled “Elipsis” (written by Ran Manansala and illustrated by Jose T. Gamboa) depicting three different facets of adoption: an international adoption, a successful adoption of a child who is aware that s/he’s been abandoned, and a child who is aging out of the orphanage without getting adopted.

“I realized that more and more Filipino children are aging out, meaning they are not adopted at all and they have to learn to fend for themselves,” Cruz said, adding that she wants to help empower these children and teens.

She cited a 2022 Philippine Daily Inquirer article that said there were at least 2 million orphaned children in the country. But the odds of being adopted were a mere 0.0000695 percent, according to data from the Philippine Orphanage Foundation. This is because prospective adoptive parents often prefer children not older than 2 years old. That makes older children’s chances to get adopted very slim, and by the time they reach 15 years of age, they become unadoptable.

Still waiting for family

“Elipsis” author Manansala was able to give voice to the millions of human beings still waiting for a family or navigating how to find resolve and face adult life despite the lack of a family/tribe they hope to have, said Cruz.

By publishing these stories from the eyes of the orphaned, the abandoned, and the adopted in comic book form, Cruz is hoping to remove the stigma surrounding them so that people become more willing to discuss the subject out in the open.

“We feel that comic books are the best way to start this advocacy to stretch our notions on what exactly is adoption, what is an orphan,” said Cruz. During a project they did last year on sexually abused children, she realized that when they just left comics lying about in a school, the children and teenagers definitely browsed through them.

“So, first, attract them visually. And then it’s easy to follow with the conversation being Taglish. Slowly, they will learn to appreciate it. And then, later on, they’ll realize that they’ve already picked up a thing or two about the subject.”

It is also Cruz’s wish to roll the comic book out to children and teenagers, and for it to empower the kids in orphanages so that “even if the odds might not be on their side, our hope is that they would find a seed of inspiration from this comic book and that it would be able to help them figure out how to find a family through friends, colleagues, and meaningful acquaintances.” INQ