Adoption-Ed 101: International Adoption

I don't pretend to be an expert when it comes to International Adoption but this blog post in an attempt to show the side that nobody likes to talk about.

Adoption recently is posing an interesting supply and demand problem.  There is simply not enough domestic supply to meet the demand.  Sound cold?  The adoption industry brings in billions of dollars a year.  It's economics.  Lets just forget for a minute we're talking about children, because I can almost guarantee that the people who profit from adoption are doing the same thing.

Because of the domestic supply problem, more and more Potential Adoptive Parents are going overseas.  They may have more luck with international adoption.  Also, I've found that a lot of Americans feel they can "save" children from their fate if they are left in the countries in which they were born.  I used to feel this way too about international adoption, so I'm not really one who is in a position to judge.

For whatever reason, many PAPs seek to adoption internationally.  The biggest countries are China, Ethiopia, Russia, and South Korea.  It costs lots of money, a bit more than domestic adoption, and the parents have to travel to the country to pick up their child.  Some have to travel there more than once.  Eventually, they are able to bring their new child home with them.  These are usually not babies either.  They are children who speak another language, and often have been living in orphanages.  However, most of them are not really orphans.

Some countries have halted adoptions to the US.  Russia halted all adoptions by American families after a child was put on a flight back to Russia after his adoptive parents decided they didn't want him anymore.  He was alone.  Other countries like Kyrgyzstan, Mexico, Nepal, Guatemala, Swaziland and Sierra Leone have also halted adoptions due to civil unrest or flaws in the adopting process.  Ethiopia recently slowed down the adoption process.  They were processing about 50 adoptions a day and now they have it down to 5 per day in order to investigate the corrupt system.

How is it corrupt?  Well, for starters a number of these children are not orphans.  Some have been sold by their families because they simply cannot feed them.  Other families have been told that their child will get a better life if they are adopted and then when they are older they will return to their families.  Others have been taken from their families.  Don't get me wrong, there are defiantly some ethical and legal international adoptions.  But there are a lot that are not ethical or legal.  There are two sides to this story, and most people only hear the flowers and rainbows version of this sad story.

Never mind the fact that if the paperwork isn't processed correctly, children can be deported from the US.  It has happened before.  These children lose more than a typical domestic adoptee.  They lose their language, their culture, their country, and it is harder for an international adoptee to enter into reunion.  These are children who look radically different than their adoptive families.  These are children who have feet in two worlds.