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 ...

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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.

On Dec 10, 8:09 am, kippaherr...@hotmail.com wrote:

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