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Baby or Bust

The Business of International Adoption

by Mark DeYoung

International adoption took center stage recently when a Tennessee woman sent her seven-year-old adopted son on a plane back to his native country after claiming the boy had psychological problems. Following this extremely neglectful and possibly criminal action, Russian officials immediately suspended all pending and future adoptions to American families.

Such is the scandal of foreign adoption in recent years.

Guatemala suspended its adoption program in 2008 following the revelation that some women’s babies were acquired coercively, among other abuses.

China, the number one adoptive baby supplier to American families over many years, made a series of new requirements for would-be adopters in 2007 that effectively forced a massive reduction in adoptions.

Earlier this year, Haiti halted the departure of orphans to ensure that only legitimate adoptions took place, recognizing the increased potential for child trafficking after the earthquake. They resumed the international adoption process just a few weeks ago.

The adoption business follows a strange evolution in most countries: A nation opens its borders. Adoptions accelerate. Corrupt forces infiltrate the process. A media-worthy scandal occurs. The borders close.

International adoption advocates argue that the stories of corruption and human trafficking are isolated incidents, claiming the process is overwhelmingly successful. The United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF) and other international agencies constantly remind the public that there are still over 130 million orphans in need of help.

So what’s the real story? Is foreign adoption an unmitigated charitable good or is it a demand-driven, highly corrupt business?

First of all, it’s important to take a hard look at the actual numbers. While there are more than 130 million orphans in the world (according to international definitions), the vast majority are only partial orphans, meaning they still have one living parent. The reality is that only 13 million orphans are missing both parents, and of those, most have access to extended family.

“It’s not really true that there are large numbers of infants with no homes who will either be in institutions or need intercountry adoption,” stated Alexandra Yusta, a senior advisor from UNICEF.

For example, Guatemala was the number two provider of adopted children to the U.S. in 2006 and 2007. According to a study co-sponsored by UNICEF, the Guatemalan government and Holt International (the largest international adoption agency), 98 percent of the babies sent to the U.S. were not from orphanages or institutions. Most of these babies were signed over to private attorneys for a considerable fee, with no official review by the government or any social service agency. According to a May 2007 report on adoption trafficking by the Hague Conference on Private International Law, Guatemalan families were paid between $300 and several thousand dollars for each child. Before it suspended adoptions, Guatemala was a $100 million per year industry, with parents paying upwards of $30,000 for each baby.

A former consultant for UNICEF Guatemala, Kelley McCreery Bunkers, put it bluntly:
“Guatemala is a perfect case study of how international adoption has become a demand-driven business…an industry developed to meet the needs of adoptive families in developed countries, specifically the United States.”

Similar trends were found in a dozen other countries with a large outflow of adoptions to the U.S., such as Cambodia, Ethiopia, Liberia, Peru and Vietnam.

In very impoverished nations, the promise of large sums of cash to relinquish healthy infants is often too much of a temptation for struggling mothers. Katherine Monahan, a U.S. State Department official who oversaw thousands of adoptions from around the world, stated in an interview with Foreign Policy magazine, “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.” Another U.S. official (also interviewed by Foreign Policy) who worked with embassy staff in a country that approved more than 1,000 adoptions to the US in a single year, was asked how many of the approved adoption visas made him uncomfortable due to possible ethical compromises. He replied, “Almost all of them.”

The cycle of corruption seems to play like a broken record on the world stage. One country becomes a popular source for adopted children while another country fades away after various scandals. Fortunately, with new conventions and legal mandates on international adoption, along with new public awareness concerning the ethical downsides of this massive “business,” important reforms are being made.

For those desiring to adopt, the hard fact is that there are many orphans available, but they are usually older (most no-parent orphans are five years or older) and often have significant psychological and/or physical ailments. These are simply not the kinds of children most couples want to adopt.

The painful truth is that no one has a right to a child, but generous couples can welcome those orphans who are truly in need of our help and our homes. 

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(The views expressed in this column are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the positions of Headline Bistro or the Knights of Columbus.)