The Lie We Love: Foreign Adoption Seems Like a Win-Win Arrangement. Unfortunately, Those Bundles of Joy May Not Be Orphans at All.

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The exception is China, where the country’s three-decades-old one-child policy, now being loosened, resulted in an unprecedented number of abandoned girls. But China has far more foreigners looking to adopt than orphans it is willing to send overseas. In 2007 China’s central adoption authority sharply reduced the number of children sent abroad. That has led many prospective parents to shop around for a country that puts fewer barriers between them and the children they hope to adopt.

One such country has been Guatemala, which in 2006 and 2007 was the number-two exporter of children to the United States. Incredibly, Americans adopted 1 of every 110 Guatemalan children born in 2006. “Guatemala is a perfect case study of how international adoption has become a demand-driven business,” says Kelley McCreery Bunkers, a former child welfare consultant with UNICEF Guatemala.

A survey conducted between October 2007 and March 2008 by the Guatemalan government, UNICEF, and Holt International Children’s Services found approximately 5,600 children in Guatemalan institutions. Fewer than 400 were under a year old; not all of those were available for adoption. And yet in 2006, more than 270 Guatemalan babies, all younger than 12 months, were being sent to the United States each month.

So, where had some of these adopted babies come from? Consider Ana Escobar, a Guatemalan woman who in March 2007 reported to police that armed men had locked her in a closet and stolen her infant. After a 14-month search, Escobar found her daughter in pre-adoption foster care, just weeks before the girl was to be adopted by a couple from Indiana. Hers is not an isolated case.

More commonly, according to NGO reports, young, unmarried, or otherwise vulnerable women were defrauded or coerced into relinquishing their children. Or poor families were given a Sophie’s choice: Sell us one child in exchange for enough “aid” to feed the rest. In January 2008 Guatemala closed its doors to international adoptions so the government could reform the broken process.

Guatemala’s example is extreme; it is widely considered to have the world’s most notorious record of corruption in foreign adoption. Yet the same troubling trends emerged on a smaller scale in more than a dozen other countries, including Albania, Cambodia, Ethiopia, Liberia, Peru, and Vietnam.

Even with all the appropriate legal papers in hand, prospective parents cannot necessarily feel secure; inadvertently, they might have paid someone to “find” an orphan who otherwise would have been raised by her birth family. In many countries, it can be astonishingly easy to fabricate a history for a young child and, in the process, manufacture an orphan.

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