Have you adopted a baby in Guatemala? Other countries? Are you concerned your baby was kidnapped and sold?

Question

International adoption is rife with fraud, baby sales, corruption, and kidnapping. Now Guatemala is investigating 2,286 pending adoptions in Guatemala and thousands of completed adoptions as another baby-sales ring has just been busted in Guatemala. If you have adopted or plan to adopt in Guatemala, Cambodia, China, or elsewhere, are you concerned that your baby may have been kidnapped and sold, or that smuggling ring member connived or coerced a teen into a sexual relationship to obtain babies to be sold through "international adoption" rings? Should the US ban all international adoptions?

Answer 1

Interesting, I just did a blog post on this today...

Don't forget Vietnam too :)

I absolutely think adoptions should be halted.

Answer 2

no, but that's interesting,..

Answer 3

We adopted two school-age children from Liberia.  

While corruption exists with international adoption (along with adoption in every other form), the vast majority of all adoptions are conducted legally and ethically.  

International Adoptive parents have always been very active in international adoption ethics and working to combat the "baby stealers".  

It is the responsibility of the adoptive parents to research agencies and the process carefully, to ensure that they are dealing with an accredited agency.  

Ask questions about how the agency guarantees that the children have not been trafficked.  Find out how the children come to be available for adoption.  

What international organizations is does the agency belong to?  Example: Are they Hague accredited?  Member of the JCICS?

Be aware of red flags.  Know the country program and the process and look for discrepencies from what the agency is telling you.  Example:an agency says they have some kind of "deal" with the government so the Ap's don't have to go through the usual wait time.  Or a country program typically has only older children available for adoption, yet an agency quotes a 9 month wait for an infant.

The APs need to demand that agencies are proactive in their work to not fuel the corruption.

But to answer your question, in our case, I am secure in the knowledge that our children were not kidnapped and trafficked. We had the opportunity to meet our children's mother in-country.  They were old enough to identify her as their mother.  We discussed the adoption and her voluntary decision to reliquish her  children for adoption by Americans.  

And no, I don't feel all international adoptions should be banned.  Take a look at how Romania's orphans are doing, since Romania has closed down international adoptions.  And since corruption can exist in any kind of adoption (domestic and foster adoption) singling out only one avenue while ignoring the others just doesn't make sense.

Add more safeguards, certainly.  If this makes the process longer or more expensive, that's fine.  

ETA: Yes, Romania has shown that the number of abandonments has decreased, but the standards in which the children are raised is virtually unchanged, particularly children with physical and mental handicaps, as reported in 2006.

Answer 4

Don't forget Bangladesh, Bulgaria, Costa Rica, Ethiopia, Greece, Haiti, India, Kenya, Laos, Liberia, Mexico, Moldova, Nigeria, Russia, Sri Lanka, Togo, Uganda and Ukraine, to name but a few.

There is often no way of telling how many adoptions are done ethically. Whether they are legal depends on which jurisdiction you look at. In inter-country adoption the child-trafficking itself doesn't take place in the receiving countries, so adoption agencies in receiving countries can most of the time keep their hands clean. So from that point of view most adoptions are legal, because the agencies did the required paper work according to the law of the receiving country.

The dirty work takes place in the sending countries, where like all corrupt practices things are dealt with on a need-to-know basis. For traffickers, agencies don't have to know about the trafficking, so agencies are not informed about malpractices taking place and many agencies don't want to know either.

Even the most respectable and fully accredited agencies are confronted with cases of child trafficking. For the US it is too early to tell the impact of The Hague Convention, but in the Netherlands, where I live, which ratified the Hague Convention already years ago, several child-trafficking cases surfaced over the last couple of years.

In all these cases the agency responsible for the placement was Hague accredited and had a good reputation. Unlike the US the Netherlands has only a handful of agencies that are strictly monitored by the Ministery of Justice.

Still several child-trafficking cases surfaced, despite the monitoring, despite the Hague Accreditation.

Hague Accreditation is more a streamlining of adoption protocols than it is an effort to actually do something against child trafficking. Their office is run by only a handful of people that can't even maintain the statistics of their membership countries.

Last year I compiled the inter-country adoption statistics from the various countries and already found out that the figures The Hague Convention published were very much outdated. So I visited the various websites of the central authorities of both the sending and the receiving countries and did a comparison.

The conclusion: matching figures were an extremely rare exception. See http://poundpuplegacy.org/node/4585

I emailed the Hague Convention about the discrepancies and their response was that they acknowledged their collection of statistics is not a reliable source of information and that they don't have the time nor the resources to do much about it.

Furthermore the Hague Convention doesn't even comply with the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child, which in my opinion should be the guideline according to which inter-country adoption should be measured.

Altogether, Hague accreditation hardly means anything with respect to child-trafficking. The best it does is see to it that the paper work is done according to certain prescribed standards.

For agencies it is of course publicity. It looks good to be Hague accredited. In the mean time the whole accreditation process is circumvented by using umbrella'ing constructions. In which an unaccredited agency collaborates with an accredited agency to do the adoption. For the sending country the accredited agency is seen as the placement agency, while for the receiving country the unaccredited agency is seen as the placement agency.

In Russia, that has its own non-Hague accrediting system this has led to the situation that many AP's had to lie to a Russian judge about the name of the adoption agency.

In response to Jennifer L's remark about Romania:

Contrary to popular belief, the abandonment situation in Romania has very much improved since they banned inter-country adoption. Of course the lobby to reopen adoptions from Romania, wants the public to believe that decision was disastrous, but it wasn't. The latest figures about child abandonment show that abandonment in maternity centers (the most common form of child abandonment) has dropped from 5,130 cases in 2003 to 1,710 in 2007.

Especially France and Italy, that are confronted with a huge demand for inter-country adoption, are continuing to put pressure on Romania to open their borders again for ICA. Since Romania doesn't seem to budge they are now trying to force Romania by introducing European legislation to have an open market for inter-country adoption within the European Union.That way Romania will have to comply because of its membership of the European Union. France and Italy are pretty clear about the fact they want children for parents. The interest of the child is an afterthought.

ETA: The situation in the so-called camine spitals (homes for disabled children) has always been used as an argument in favour of adoption from Romania, while hardly any of these children were ever adopted. Romania was first and foremost a supplier of babies and younger children. Older severely disabled children are not all that much in want.

While the images from camine spitals were sent out all over the world to show the deplorable state these children were living under, much of the aid never went to them.

Instead Holt Romania, received funding to run a maternity home, which in effect only stimulated abandonment.

The situation in the camine spitals was even falsely portrayed by SERA (a French charity organization, that, even though they don't do adoptions themselves, has been a huge promoter of Romanian adoptions to this day) by using 8 year old pictures of camine spitals to raise awareness (and money) for the current situation in those homes. Many improvements had been made in the meantime and only the worst and most deplorable pictures were used in SERA's campaign.

Much of the money spent by SERA went into moving around camine spitals, spending lots of money on the move, while not actually contributing to any improvements.

Francois de Combret, founder of SERA and board member of Renault, is still lobbying to reopen Romania for inter-country adoption and has much influence, both within the French government and in the European Commission.

Also the MDRI report from 2006 sought sensation above truth. One of the of the homes they reported about was already closed for months when their report came out.

It is a common theme in the Romanian case, using outdated information in attempt to prove that their was no progress being made, all because a country had the audacity to say no to having their children removed.

Both the situation of disabled and non-disabled children has improved considerably over the last 10 years, thanks to big investments made through Europe's Phare funds. Many camine spitals have been closed. Romania has a foster-care system, something they didn't have in the early 1990's. Most of the casa de copii have been transformed from large institutions to smaller group homes and a system of domestic adoption has been instituted.

Inter-country adoption didn't help Romania one bit. What did help were substantial investments by the European Union into the build up of a proper child-welfare system.

The situation still needs improvement, that's why the European Union keeps investing in their membership state.

Answer 5

Thanks for the updated post on that case.  I think its about time that they started looking into completed adoptions and requesting DNA samples from a-parents that have kids in the US. Lets see how many Ap's do the right thing and return the kidnapped children. If they don't I think they should be locked up and the US gov't better stand up for the rights of these children and their mothers.

Kidnapping should never be tolerated whether its through "legal?" adoption or not.  There are hundreds of mothers in Guate looking and fighting to get their children back that were kidnapped.