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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Western adoption agencies often contract with in-country facilitators—sometimes orphanage directors, sometimes freelancers—and pay per-child fees for each healthy baby adopted. These facilitators, in turn, subcontract with child finders, often for sums in vast excess of local wages. In Vietnam, for instance, a finder’s fee for a single child can easily dwarf a nurse’s $50-a-month salary. Sometimes child finders simply pay poor families for their infants—promising that the children will return later.

In other cases, unscrupulous orphanage directors, local officials, or medical professionals persuade illiterate birth families to sign documents—papers that the families may believe enable their children to get temporary food, shelter, education, or medical care. But those signatures legally relinquish the children to be sent abroad for adoption.

For instance, in August 2008 the U.S. State Department released a warning that birth certificates issued by Tu Du Hospital in Ho Chi Minh City—which in 2007 had reported 200 births a day, and an average of 3 abandoned babies per 100 births—were “unreliable.” Most of the hospital’s “abandoned” babies were sent to the city’s Tam Binh orphanage, from which many Westerners have adopted.

Many adoption agencies and adoptive parents passionately insist that crooked practices are not systemic, but tragic, isolated cases. Arrest the bad guys, they say, and let the “good” adoptions continue. Remove cash from the adoption chain, however, and outside of China the number of healthy babies needing Western homes all but disappears.

Nigel Cantwell, a Geneva-based consultant on child protection policy, has helped reform corrupt adoption systems in Eastern Europe and Central Asia. Asked how many healthy babies in those regions would be available for international adoption if money never exchanged hands, he replied: “I would hazard a guess at zero.”

Buying a child abroad is something most prospective parents want no part of—so how can it be prevented? The best hope may be the Hague Convention on Intercountry Adoption, which has 78 signatories. In countries that refer children for overseas adoption, reforms have included a government authority overseeing child welfare, efforts to place children with extended families and local communities, and limits on the number of foreign adoption agencies authorized to work in the country.

In adopting countries, the convention requires a central authority to oversee international adoption. The United States formally entered the agreement on April 1, 2008. Already several U.S. adoption agencies dogged by rumors of bad practices have been denied accreditation; some have closed. Many of the countries sending their children to the West, however, have yet to join the agreement—and the United States permits unaccredited agencies to work from these nonsignatory countires.

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