Potential adopters must have "good mental health, a healthy harmonious personality, a good marriage, a nuanced environment", wrote county social director and later chairman of the youth commission Lars Lundgaard in 1982 about the adoption of foreign children and continued:
“It’s not just superhumans who meet these conditions. But there must be profit and harmony. It is also there in the ordinary Danish family. "
Approximately 15 years before, the market for illegal adoptions had been brought under control by issuing permits to the persons and organizations that for years had provided Afro-German children to Danish couples in direct violation of the law.
What had not changed, however, from the illegal 'child import' of the 1950s to the regulated adoption industry of the 1980s, was the belief in "profit and harmony" in the "ordinary Danish family". A view that has now for 60 years legitimized adoptions from abroad to Denmark. Whether it's 'illegitimate' children of white German women and African American soldiers, children of single mothers in Korea or of AIDS-stricken Ethiopian parents, the argument for picking up these children, transporting them across borders and installing them in new homes in Denmark been that they would get better here. Because there is profit and harmony in the ordinary Danish family.
Child imports