Illegal business: adoption

Business ‘of’ and not ‘for’ kids

International adoption is emerging out as a new illegal business

Adoption predominantly and fundamentally was meant to provide a better living and growth environment for orphans. Historically, the process of adoption was given a very high social recognition and was seen as a community responsibility. Of late, especially in the developed world, the increase in infertility rate has shifted this process of adoption from realm of domestic region to international markets. With Hollywood celebs like Madonna and Angelina Jolie adopting numerous children from world’s poorest regions, the whole concept of adoption seems to have become an international fad now.

Westerners see this act of international adoption as a rescue measure for orphans from poverty-stricken life. But then, this act at no given point of time convalesces the fundamental and core reason of poverty. Moreover, these so-called adopted children are actually either kidnapped, stolen or transacted and not really adopted. Social unrest, poverty and natural disaster make it very simple for child traffickers to export or import babies like any other commodity behind the veil of adoption.

International adoption has today become depraved business of supplying children to rich Westerners. Children are literally assumed as commodities and are sold to those who can afford it. In regions like Haiti, Guatemala, China and Africa there are agencies that deal in international adoption. Going by a conservative estimate, adoption today stands as a $100 million industry and agencies charge anything between $25,000 to $40,000 per child from adoptive parents.

According to an adoption advocacy organisation in the US, around 13 countries have put a ban on international adoption. There have been numerous cases where adoptive parents later kill the children or these orphans find themselves in foster care.  So much so that these so-called orphans turn out to be local children and not actually orphans. This can be exemplified by recent arrests of American missionaries in Haiti — accused of trafficking 33 Haitian children out of the quake-stricken country. A few countries use this process for exporting their socially detested or undesirable children to foreign families.

All in all, international community (viz. Hauge, UNICEF) need to urgently give a pause to the on-going glamourisation of international adoption and make it more transparent and regulated process. In the light of natural disaster and social and civil unrest, it is pertinent for countries to arrange bilateral arrangements and developed agencies based on proper accreditation norms. Otherwise soon this gratifying gesture of better-off society will take a shape of gigantic business and become an ‘icon’ among modern families. The present form of international adoption provides a different life, but do not promise a better life. What else could be the reason behind an American flying a thousand miles to adopt a baby while the next-door Canadians prefer adopting, more than 100,000 children, from the US itself?  In the same breath, a very few Americans find time to adopt orphans after the Katrina or Rita disasters; but don’t mind flying thousands of miles away and adopt a few so-called orphans from Africa, Korea or other south Asian nations.  Sounds quite morbid, isn’t it?