November 22, 2009
UTNE READER

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

(Page 4 of 4)

May-June 2009
by E.J. Graff, from Foreign Policy 
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Perhaps most important, more effective regulations would strictly limit the money that changes hands. “Unless you control the money, you won’t control the corruption,” says Thomas DiFilipo, president of the Joint Council on International Children’s Services. “If we have the greatest laws and the greatest regulations but are still sending $20,000 anywhere—well, you can bypass any system with enough cash.”

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Improving regulations will protect not only the children who are being adopted and their birth families, but also the consumers: hopeful parents. Adopting a child can be made wrenching by the abhorrent realization that a child believed to be an orphan simply isn’t.

One American who adopted a little girl from Cambodia in 2002 wept as she spoke at an adoption ethics conference in October 2007. “I was told she was an orphan,” she said. “One year after she came home, and she could speak English well enough, she told me about her mommy and daddy and her brothers and her sisters.”

Unless we recognize that behind the altruistic veneer, international adoption has become an industry—often highly lucrative and sometimes corrupt—many more adoption stories will have unhappy endings.

“Credulous Westerners eager to believe that they are saving children are easily fooled into accepting laundered children,” writes David Smolin, a law professor and advocate for international adoption reform, in the Wayne Law Review (Vol. 52, #113). “For there is no fool like the one who wants to be fooled.”

 

E.J. Graff is associate director at the Brandeis Schuster Institute for Investigative Journalism. For documentation and more information about corruption in international adoption, go to www.brandeis.edu/investigate. Excerpted from Foreign Policy(Nov.-Dec. 2008); www.foreignpolicy.com. © 2009 Washingtonpost.Newsweek Interactive LLC.

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