E.J. Graff has investigated and written extensively about international adoption, and what she has found is hardly a feel-good story of child rescue. Rather, she concludes that hopeful parents from wealthy nations (the U.S., European countries, Australia) have created a market where babies are bought and sold.
Here's what she has to say, in a New York Times editorial, about international adoption and Madonna's latest attempt to add to her family.
But in trying to adopt a child who already has a family, Madonna is
inadvertently exposing the seamier underside of international adoption:
the fact that, too often, the amounts of money that Western adoption
agencies spend in poor countries is helping to defraud, coerce or kidnap children away from families that wanted to raise them to adulthood.
Graff writes that happy families created in the adoptive countries have, in countless instances, left anguished ones in search of their missing children. Even more heartbreaking is that families who search for -- and, against all odds, eventually find -- their stolen children aren't necessarily reunited with them. So has been the case of a number of children born in Nepal and adopted in Spain.
In a slideshow on Slate, Graff tells the stories of some of the families who were affected by an often corrupt international adoption system.
So how has this happened? With millions of abandoned babies and toddlers throughout the world, how could a baby-selling market thrive? For starters, those millions of babies? Total myth, Graff writes.
From Slate:
Westerners have been sold a myth that poor countries have millions
of healthy abandoned infants and toddlers who need homes. But it's not
so. In poor countries, as in rich ones, healthy babies are rarely
orphaned or given up—except in China, where girls have been abandoned
as a result of its draconian one-child policy.
Yes, tens of thousands of needy children around the world—many
languishing in horrible institutions—do need families. But most
children who need new homes are older than 5, sick, disabled, or
somehow traumatized. Quite reasonably, most prospective Western parents
don't feel prepared to take on those more challenging kids, preferring
to wait in line for healthy infants or toddlers.
The result is
a gap between supply and demand—a gap that's closed by Western money.
Adoption agencies spend sums in-country that are enormous compared with
local per-capita incomes. In poor countries without effective
regulation or protections for the poor, that can induce locals to buy,
coerce, defraud, and kidnap healthy children away from their birth
families for sale into international adoption.
To use the language of globalization, orphans are sometimes
"manufactured": Children with families are stripped of their identities
so that Westerners can fill their homes....
Families who lost their children aren't the only ones who suffered. More than one adoptive family has found out -- once their child learned English -- the circumstances they truly left behind, including a mother, father and siblings.
Still, others argue that shutting down international adoption ignores the needs of children who truly are abandoned or facing a childhood of institutional living. Four others who work in adoption or study the laws and consequences weigh in on the international adoption in the Times "Room for Debate" feature. Some argue, like Graff, that a lack of oversight and regulation has created this baby market. Others defend Madonna and other families who look overseas for children, saying forget politics, forget money, these kids just need a loving home.
Be sure to check out antiracistparent.com for arguments against Graff's conclusions.
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Photos: NY Times, Slate
