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The Lie We Love: Who's your mommy? Parents might never know if their adopted child is truly an orphan.

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kippah...@hotmail.com

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Dec 10, 2008, 11:09:39 AM12/10/08
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http://www.foreignpolicy.com/story/cms.php?story_id=4508

The Lie We Love
By E. J. Graff
November/December 2008

Foreign adoption seems like the perfect solution to a heartbreaking
imbalance: Poor countries have babies in need of homes, and rich
countries have homes in need of babies. Unfortunately, those little
orphaned bundles of joy may not be orphans at all.

Who's your mommy?: Parents might never know if their adopted child is
truly an orphan.
We all know the story of international adoption: Millions of infants
and toddlers have been abandoned or orphaned—placed on the side of a
road or on the doorstep of a church, or left parentless due to AIDS,
destitution, or war. These little ones find themselves forgotten,
living in crowded orphanages or ending up on the streets, facing an
uncertain future of misery and neglect. But, if they are lucky,
adoring new moms and dads from faraway lands whisk them away for a
chance at a better life.

Unfortunately, this story is largely fiction.

Westerners have been sold the myth of a world orphan crisis. We are
told that millions of children are waiting for their “forever
families” to rescue them from lives of abandonment and abuse. But many
of the infants and toddlers being adopted by Western parents today are
not orphans at all. Yes, hundreds of thousands of children around the
world do need loving homes. But more often than not, the neediest
children are sick, disabled, traumatized, or older than 5. They are
not the healthy babies that, quite understandably, most Westerners
hope to adopt. There are simply not enough healthy, adoptable infants
to meet Western demand—and there’s too much Western money in search of
children. As a result, many international adoption agencies work not
to find homes for needy children but to find children for Western
homes.

Since the mid-1990s, the number of international adoptions each year
has nearly doubled, from 22,200 in 1995 to just under 40,000 in 2006.
At its peak, in 2004, more than 45,000 children from developing
countries were adopted by foreigners. Americans bring home more of
these children than any other nationality—more than half the global
total in recent years.

Where do these babies come from? As international adoptions have
flourished, so has evidence that babies in many countries are being
systematically bought, coerced, and stolen away from their birth
families. Nearly half the 40 countries listed by the U.S. State
Department as the top sources for international adoption over the past
15 years—places such as Belarus, Brazil, Ethiopia, Honduras, Peru, and
Romania—have at least temporarily halted adoptions or been prevented
from sending children to the United States because of serious concerns
about corruption and kidnapping. And yet when a country is closed due
to corruption, many adoption agencies simply transfer their clients’
hopes to the next “hot” country. That country abruptly experiences a
spike in infants and toddlers adopted overseas—until it too is forced
to shut its doors.

Along the way, the international adoption industry has become a market
often driven by its customers. Prospective adoptive parents in the
United States will pay adoption agencies between $15,000 and $35,000
(excluding travel, visa costs, and other miscellaneous expenses) for
the chance to bring home a little one. Special needs or older children
can be adopted at a discount. Agencies claim the costs pay for the
agency’s fee, the cost of foreign salaries and operations, staff
travel, and orphanage donations. But experts say the fees are so
disproportionately large for the child’s home country that they
encourage corruption.

To complicate matters further, while international adoption has become
an industry driven by money, it is also charged with strong emotions.
Many adoption agencies and adoptive parents passionately insist that
crooked practices are not systemic, but tragic, isolated cases. Arrest
the bad guys, they say, but let the “good” adoptions continue.
However, remove cash from the adoption chain, and, outside of China,
the number of healthy babies needing Western homes all but disappears.
Nigel Cantwell, a Geneva-based consultant on child protection policy,
has seen the dangerous influence of money on adoptions in Eastern
Europe and Central Asia, where he has helped reform corrupt adoption
systems. In these regions, healthy children age 3 and younger can
easily be adopted in their own countries, he says. I asked him how
many healthy babies in those regions would be available for
international adoption if money never exchanged hands. “I would hazard
a guess at zero,” he replied.

THE MYTH OF SUPPLY

International adoption wasn’t always a demand-driven industry. Half a
century ago, it was primarily a humanitarian effort for children
orphaned by conflict. In 1955, news spread that Bertha and Henry Holt,
an evangelical couple from Oregon, had adopted eight Korean War
orphans, and families across the United States expressed interest in
following their example. Since then, international adoption has become
increasingly popular in Australia, Canada, Europe, and the United
States. Americans adopted more than 20,000 foreign children in 2006
alone, up from just 8,987 in 1995. Half a dozen European countries
regularly bring home more foreign-born children per capita than does
the United States. Today, Canada, France, Italy, Spain, and the United
States account for 4 out of every 5 international adoptions.

Changes in Western demography explain much of the growth. Thanks to
contraception, abortion, and delayed marriages, the number of
unplanned births in most developed countries has declined in recent
decades. Some women who delay having children discover they’ve
outwaited their fertility; others have difficulty conceiving from the
beginning. Still others adopt for religious reasons, explaining that
they’ve been called to care for children in need. In the United
States, a motive beyond demography is the notion that international
adoption is somehow “safer”—more predictable and more likely to end in
success—than many domestic adoptions, where there’s an outsized fear
of a birth mother’s last-minute change of heart. Add an ocean of
distance, and the idea that needy children abound in poor countries,
and that risk seems to disappear.

But international adoptions are no less risky; they’re simply less
regulated. Just as companies outsource industry to countries with lax
labor laws and low wages, adoptions have moved to states with few laws
about the process. Poor, illiterate birthparents in the developing
world simply have fewer protections than their counterparts in the
United States, especially in countries where human trafficking and
corruption are rampant. And too often, these imbalances are overlooked
on the adopting end. After all, one country after another has
continued to supply what adoptive parents want most.

In reality, there are very few young, healthy orphans available for
adoption around the world. Orphans are rarely healthy babies; healthy
babies are rarely orphaned. “It’s not really true,” says Alexandra
Yuster, a senior advisor on child protection with UNICEF, “that there
are large numbers of infants with no homes who either will be in
institutions or who need intercountry adoption.”

That assertion runs counter to the story line that has long been
marketed to Americans and other Westerners, who have been trained by
images of destitution in developing countries and the seemingly
endless flow of daughters from China to believe that millions of
orphaned babies around the world desperately need homes. UNICEF itself
is partly responsible for this erroneous assumption. The
organization’s statistics on orphans and institutionalized children
are widely quoted to justify the need for international adoption. In
2006, UNICEF reported an estimated 132 million orphans in sub-Saharan
Africa, Asia, Latin America, and the Caribbean. But the organization’s
definition of “orphan” includes children who have lost just one
parent, either to desertion or death. Just 10 percent of the total—13
million children—have lost both parents, and most of these live with
extended family. They are also older: By UNICEF’s own estimate, 95
percent of orphans are older than 5. In other words, UNICEF’s
“millions of orphans” are not healthy babies doomed to institutional
misery unless Westerners adopt and save them. Rather, they are mostly
older children living with extended families who need financial
support.

The exception is China, where the country’s three-decades-old one-
child policy, now being loosened, has created an unprecedented number
of girls available for adoption. But even this flow of daughters is
finite; China has far more hopeful foreigners looking to adopt a child
than it has orphans it is willing to send overseas. In 2005, foreign
parents adopted nearly 14,500 Chinese children. That was far fewer
than the number of Westerners who wanted to adopt; adoption agencies
report many more clients waiting in line. And taking those children
home has gotten harder; in 2007, China’s central adoption authority
sharply reduced the number of children sent abroad, possibly because
of the country’s growing sex imbalance, declining poverty, and
scandals involving child trafficking for foreign adoption. Prospective
foreign parents today are strictly judged by their age, marital
history, family size, income, health, and even weight. That means that
if you are single, gay, fat, old, less than well off, too often
divorced, too recently married, taking antidepressants, or already
have four children, China will turn you away. Even those allowed a
spot in line are being told they might wait three to four years before
they bring home a child. That has led many prospective parents to shop
around for a country that puts fewer barriers between them and their
children—as if every country were China, but with fewer onerous
regulations.

One such country has been Guatemala, which in 2006 and 2007 was the
No. 2 exporter of children to the United States. Between 1997 and
2006, the number of Guatemalan children adopted by Americans more than
quadrupled, to more than 4,500 annually. Incredibly, in 2006, American
parents adopted one of every 110 Guatemalan children born. In 2007,
nearly 9 out of 10 children adopted were less than a year old; almost
half were younger than 6 months old. “Guatemala is a perfect case
study of how international adoption has become a demand-driven
business,” says Kelley McCreery Bunkers, a former consultant with
UNICEF Guatemala. The country’s adoption process was “an industry
developed to meet the needs of adoptive families in developed
countries, specifically the United States.”

Because the vast majority of the country’s institutionalized children
are not healthy, adoptable babies, almost none has been adopted
abroad. In the fall of 2007, a survey conducted by the Guatemalan
government, UNICEF, and the international child welfare and adoption
agency Holt International Children’s Services found approximately
5,600 children and adolescents in Guatemalan institutions. More than
4,600 of these children were age 4 or older. Fewer than 400 were under
a year old. And yet in 2006, more than 270 Guatemalan babies, all
younger than 12 months, were being sent to the United States each
month. These adopted children were simply not coming from the
country’s institutions. Last year, 98 percent of U.S. adoptions from
Guatemala were “relinquishments”: Babies who had never seen the inside
of an institution were signed over directly to a private attorney who
approved the international adoption—for a very considerable fee—
without any review by a judge or social service agency.

So, where had some of these adopted babies come from? Consider the
case of Ana Escobar, a young Guatemalan woman who in March 2007
reported to police that armed men had locked her in a closet in her
family’s shoe store and stolen her infant. After a 14-month search,
Escobar found her daughter in pre-adoption foster care, just weeks
before the girl was to be adopted by a couple from Indiana. DNA
testing showed the toddler to be Escobar’s child. In a similar case
from 2006, Raquel Par, another Guatemalan woman, reported being
drugged while waiting for a bus in Guatemala City, waking to find her
year-old baby missing. Three months later, Par learned her daughter
had been adopted by an American couple.

On Jan. 1, 2008, Guatemala closed its doors to American adoptions so
that the government could reform the broken process. Britain, Canada,
France, Germany, the Netherlands, and Spain all stopped accepting
adoptions from the country several years earlier, citing trafficking
concerns. But more than 2,280 American adoptions from the country are
still being processed, albeit with additional safeguards. Stolen
babies have already been found in that queue; Guatemalan authorities
expect more.

Guatemala’s example is extreme; it is widely considered to have the
world’s most notorious record of corruption in foreign adoption. But
the same troubling trends have emerged, on smaller scales, in more
than a dozen other countries, including Albania, Cambodia, Ethiopia,
Liberia, Peru, and Vietnam. The pattern suggests that the supply of
adoptable babies rises to meet foreign demand—and disappears when
Western cash is no longer available. For instance, in December 2001,
the U.S. immigration service stopped processing adoption visas from
Cambodia, citing clear evidence that children were being acquired
illicitly, often against their parents’ wishes. That year, Westerners
adopted more than 700 Cambodian children; of the 400 adopted by
Americans, more than half were less than 12 months old. But in 2005, a
study of Cambodia’s orphanage population, commissioned by the U.S.
Agency for International Development, found only a total of 132
children who were less than a year old—fewer babies than Westerners
had been adopting every three months a few years before.

Even countries with large populations, such as India, rarely have
healthy infants and toddlers who need foreign parents. India’s large
and growing middle class, at home and in the diaspora, faces fertility
issues like those of their developed-world counterparts. They too are
looking for healthy babies to adopt; some experts think that these
millions of middle-class families could easily absorb all available
babies. The country’s pervasive poverty does leave many children
fending for themselves on the street. But “kids are not on the street
alone at the age of 2,” Cantwell, the child protection consultant,
says. “They are 5 or 6, and they aren’t going to be adopted.” That’s
partly because most of these children still have family ties and
therefore are not legally available for adoption, and partly because
they would have difficultly adjusting to a middle-class European or
North American home. Many of these children are deeply marked by
abuse, crime, and poverty, and few prospective parents are prepared to
adopt them.

Surely, though, prospective parents can at least feel secure that
their child is truly an orphan in need of a home if they receive all
the appropriate legal papers? Unfortunately, no.

NURSERY CRIMES

In many countries, it can be astonishingly easy to fabricate a history
for a young child, and in the process, manufacture an orphan. The
birth mothers are often poor, young, unmarried, divorced, or otherwise
lacking family protection. The children may be born into a locally
despised minority group that is afforded few rights. And for enough
money, someone will separate these little ones from their vulnerable
families, turning them into “paper orphans” for lucrative export.

Some manufactured orphans are indeed found in what Westerners call
“orphanages.” But these establishments often serve less as homes to
parentless children and more as boarding schools for poor youngsters.
Many children are there only temporarily, seeking food, shelter, and
education while their parents, because of poverty or illness, cannot
care for them. Many families visit their children, or even bring them
home on weekends, until they can return home permanently. In 2005,
when the Hannah B. Williams Orphanage in Monrovia, Liberia, was closed
because of shocking living conditions, 89 of the 102 “orphans” there
returned to their families. In Vietnam, “rural families in particular
will put their babies into these orphanages that are really extended
day-care centers during the harvest season,” says a U.S. Embassy
spokeswoman in Hanoi. In some cases, unscrupulous orphanage directors,
local officials, or other operators persuade illiterate birth families
to sign documents that relinquish those children, who are then sent
abroad for adoption, never to be seen again by their bereft families.

Other children are located through similarly nefarious means. Western
adoption agencies often contract with in-country facilitators—
sometimes orphanage directors, sometimes freelancers—and pay per-child
fees for each healthy baby adopted. These facilitators, in turn,
subcontract with child finders, often for sums in vast excess of local
wages. These paydays give individuals a significant financial
incentive to find adoptable babies at almost any cost. In Guatemala,
where the GDP per capita is $4,700 a year, child finders often earned
$6,000 to $8,000 for each healthy, adoptable infant. In many cases,
child finders simply paid poor families for infants. A May 2007 report
on adoption trafficking by the Hague Conference on Private
International Law reported poor Guatemalan families being paid beween
$300 and several thousand dollars per child.

Sometimes, medical professionals serve as child finders to obtain
infants. In Vietnam, for instance, a finder’s fee for a single child
can easily dwarf a nurse’s $50-a-month salary. Some nurses and doctors
coerce birth mothers into giving up their children by offering them a
choice: pay outrageously inflated hospital bills or relinquish their
newborns. Illiterate new mothers are made to sign documents they can’t
read. In August 2008, the U.S. State Department released a warning
that birth certificates issued by Tu Du Hospital in Ho Chi Minh City—
which in 2007 had reported 200 births a day, and an average of three
abandoned babies per 100 births—were “unreliable.” Most of the
hospital’s “abandoned” babies were sent to the city’s Tam Binh
orphanage, from which many Westerners have adopted. (Tu Du Hospital is
where Angelina Jolie’s Vietnamese-born son was reportedly abandoned
one month after his birth; he was at Tam Binh when she adopted him.)
According to Linh Song, executive director of Ethica, an American
nonprofit devoted to promoting ethical adoption, a provincial
hospital’s chief obstetrician told her in 2007 “that he provided 10
ethnic minority infants to [an] orphanage [for adoption] in return for
an incubator.”

To smooth the adoption process, officials in the children’s home
countries may be bribed to create false identity documents. Consular
officials for the adopting countries generally accept whatever
documents they receive. But if a local U.S. Embassy has seen a series
of worrisome referrals—say, a sudden spike in healthy infants coming
from the same few orphanages, or a single province sending an
unusually high number of babies with suspiciously similar paperwork—
officials may investigate. But generally, they do not want to obstruct
adoptions of genuinely needy children or get in the way of people
longing for a child. However, many frequently doubt that the adoptions
crossing their desks are completely aboveboard. “I believe in
intercountry adoption very strongly,” says Katherine Monahan, a U.S.
State Department official who has overseen scores of U.S. adoptions
from around the world. “[But] I worry that there were many children
that could have stayed with their families if we could have provided
them with even a little economic assistance.” One U.S. official told
me that when embassy staff in a country that sent more than 1,000
children overseas last year were asked which adoption visas they felt
uneasy about, they replied: almost all of them.

Most of the Westerners involved with foreign adoption agencies—like
business people importing foreign sneakers—can plausibly deny
knowledge of unethical or unseemly practices overseas. They don’t have
to know. Willful ignorance allowed Lauryn Galindo, a former hula
dancer from the United States, to collect more than $9 million in
adoption fees over several years for Cambodian infants and toddlers.
Between 1997 and 2001, Americans adopted 1,230 children from Cambodia;
Galindo said she was involved in 800 of the adoptions. (Galindo
reportedly delivered Angelina Jolie’s Cambodian child to her movie set
in Africa.) But in a two-year probe beginning in 2002, U.S.
investigators alleged that Galindo paid Cambodian child finders to
purchase, defraud, coerce, or steal children from their families, and
conspired to create false identity documents for the children. Galindo
later served federal prison time on charges of visa fraud and money
laundering, but not trafficking. “You can get away with buying babies
around the world as a United States citizen,” says Richard Cross, a
senior special agent with U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement who
investigated Galindo. “It’s not a crime.”

Buying a child abroad is something most prospective parents want no
part of. So, how can it be prevented? As international adoption has
grown in the past decade, the ad hoc approach of closing some corrupt
countries to adoption and shifting parents’ hopes (and money) to the
next destination has failed. The agencies that profit from adoption
appear to willfully ignore how their own payments and fees are causing
both the corruption and the closures.

Some countries that send children overseas for adoption have kept the
process lawful and transparent from nearly the beginning and their
model is instructive. Thailand, for instance, has a central government
authority that counsels birth mothers and offers some families social
and economic support so that poverty is never a reason to give up a
child. Other countries, such as Paraguay and Romania, reformed their
processes after sharp surges in shady adoptions in the 1990s. But
those reforms were essentially to stop international adoptions almost
entirely. In 1994, Paraguay sent 483 children to the United States;
last year, the country sent none.

For a more comprehensive solution, the best hope may be the Hague
Convention on Intercountry Adoption, an international agreement
designed to prevent child trafficking for adoption. On April 1, 2008,
the United States formally entered the agreement, which has 75 other
signatories. In states that send children overseas and are party to
the convention, such as Albania, Bulgaria, Colombia, and the
Philippines, Hague-compatible reforms have included a central
government authority overseeing child welfare, efforts to place needy
children with extended families and local communities first, and
limits on the number of foreign adoption agencies authorized to work
in the country. The result, according to experts, has been a sharp
decline in baby buying, fraud, coercion, and kidnapping for adoption.

In adopting countries, the convention requires a central authority—in
the United States’ case, the State Department—to oversee international
adoption. The State Department empowers two nonprofit organizations to
certify adoption agencies; if shady practices, fraud, financial
improprieties, or links with trafficking come to light, accreditation
can be revoked. Already, the rules appear to be having some effect:
Several U.S. agencies long dogged by rumors of bad practices have been
denied accreditation; some have shut their doors. But no international
treaty is perfect, and the Hague Convention is no exception. Many of
the countries sending their children to the West, including Ethiopia,
Russia, South Korea, Ukraine, and Vietnam, have yet to join the
agreement.

Perhaps most important, more effective regulations would strictly
limit the amount of money that changes hands. Per-child fees could be
outlawed. Payments could be capped to cover only legitimate costs such
as medical care, food, and clothing for the children. And crucially,
fees must be kept proportionate with the local economies. “Unless you
control the money, you won’t control the corruption,” says Thomas
DiFilipo, president of the Joint Council on International Children’s
Services, which represents more than 200 international adoption
organizations. “If we have the greatest laws and the greatest
regulations but are still sending $20,000 anywhere—well, you can
bypass any system with enough cash.”

Improved regulations will protect not only the children being adopted
and their birth families, but also the consumers: hopeful parents.
Adopting a child—like giving birth—is an emotional experience; it can
be made wrenching by the abhorrent realization that a child believed
to be an orphan simply isn’t. One American who adopted a little girl
from Cambodia in 2002 wept as she spoke at an adoption ethics
conference in October 2007 about such a discovery. “I was told she was
an orphan,” she said. “One year after she came home, and she could
speak English well enough, she told me about her mommy and daddy and
her brothers and her sisters.”

Unless we recognize that behind the altruistic veneer, international
adoption has become an industry—one that is often highly lucrative and
sometimes corrupt—many more adoption stories will have unhappy
endings. Unless adoption agencies are held to account, more young
children will be wrongfully taken from their families. And unless
those desperate to become parents demand reform, they will continue—
wittingly or not—to pay for wrongdoing. “Credulous Westerners eager to
believe that they are saving children are easily fooled into accepting
laundered children,” writes David Smolin, a law professor and advocate
for international adoption reform. “For there is no fool like the one
who wants to be fooled.”

rkb...@pacific.net.sg

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Dec 10, 2008, 3:01:11 PM12/10/08
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Excellent article. I can't help but agree.

Even though I've always supported international adoption, I think the
world is changing. On the whole it's for the better - there are fewer
babies needing homes.

I whole-heartedly agree with the conclusion of the article - the money
needs to stop.

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