U.S. couples adopting from abroad often think they’re helping vulnerable children. The reality is more complex–and poorly regulated.
When Katie and Calvin Bradshaw adopted three young sisters from Ethiopia in 2006, they believed they were saving AIDS orphans from a life of poverty or near-certain prostitution. But after learning English, the girls told their new parents that they believed the adoption agency, Christian World Adoption, had paid their birthfather for them. The girls said they had expected to return to their extended Ethiopian family, who were middle-class by local standards, as both CBS News and Australia’s ABC News reported. The Bradshaws were rightly horrified. (Today, the two younger girls are still with them, while the oldest daughter lives with Katie Bradshaw’s mother; in a lengthy response to the CBS News report, Christian World Adoption said it had no contact with the girls’ birth family).
I’ve heard a string of similar tales from families in Italy, Canada, Austria, and other Western countries adopting from Ethiopia, the current hot adoption source. In the past five years, Ethiopia’s adoptions to the United States alone have expanded exponentially: Americans adopted 442 Ethiopian children in 2005, and 2,277 in 2009, ranking Ethiopia right behind China as a source for our international adoptions. The combination of skyrocketing numbers and troubling stories suggests that Ethiopia has become the latest country beset by an all-too-common problem: a poor country in which unscrupulous middlemen are sometimes buying, defrauding, coercing, or even kidnapping children away from their families to be sold into international adoption.
Most nations’ adoption programs are relatively clean. But during some periods, in some countries–Cambodia between 1997 and 2002, for instance, or Vietnam between 2005 and 2009–evidence from government, newspaper, and NGO investigations strongly suggests that many international adoptions involved fraud. Serious problems have also been documented in such countries as Liberia, Nepal, the Marshall Islands, Peru, Samoa, and most notably, Guatemala, whose processes were so riddled with corruption that it was finally closed to adoption in 2009, after 10 years during which Americans adopted more than 30,000 of its children, in some years bringing home an astonishing one of every 100 babies born there.
