Big
Business In Babies: Adoption,
The Child Commodities Market
By Mirah Riben
25 April, 2007
Countercurrents.org
Adoption
was once a process by which the community took responsibility for orphans.
Increased access to birth control pills and legal abortion, and a lessening
of the stigma of single parenting, coupled with an increase in infertility
resulted in a demand for babies that outstrips the “supply.”
And where there is demand – be it for diamonds, drugs, sex, or
babies – corruption follows.
Adoption is racist. The scarcity of “white American-born babies”
has led to an increase in international adoptions, fracturing family
ties and heritage in what some are calling cultural genocide. Madonna
was criticized. Angelina confounds. Westerners, however, continue to
believe that adoption “rescues” orphans; though saving children
from poverty, one at a time, does nothing to ameliorate the conditions
that continue to produce them. And, many so-called orphans are in fact
stolen, kidnapped, or their parents were coerced to relinquish them
under false pretenses to be sold on the black and gray adoption markets
with prices set by age, alleged health, skin color, gender and nationality.
As Americans import mostly
light-skinned babies, non-white children are left behind, and the number
of black, American-born babies adopted by overseas families has increased
significantly in recent years, with black babies being placed with Canadian
couples more than ever before. Adoption trends follow poverty and sociopolitical
upheaval from Latin America to Asia and Eastern Europe. Since the 1990s,
China and Russia have become the largest exporters of children for international
adoption. Unrest and poverty in these nations makes them ripe for corruption
and trafficking. In April 2007, the U.S. State Department confirmed
that Guatemalan babies are kidnapped for adoption and other mothers
pressured to sell their babies by corrupt, inadequately supervised notaries.
The previous month, a Utah adoption agency was indicted for “systematically
misleading birth parents in Samoa into signing away rights to their
children while telling adoptive parents in the United States that the
children had been abandoned and were orphans” (“Pacific
Islands Report: Utah Agency Indicted In Samoa Adoption Scam,”
March 5, 2007 http://pidp.eastwestcenter.org/pireport/2007/March/03-05-01.htm).
All of this while UNICEF is investigating child trafficking and babies
being sold for adoption in Nepal (Nepal: Unicef On Inter-Country Adoption
http://peacejournalism.com/ReadArticle.asp?ArticleID=17655).
As abuses are exposed, countries
are restricting out-of-country adoption of their children. According
to Ethica, a nonprofit adoption advocacy organization, 13 countries
have suspended or ended their adoption programs in the past 15 years
and four more countries temporarily stopped adoptions to investigate
allegations of corruption or child trafficking. The U.S. passage of
the 2005 Trafficking Victim Protection Reauthorization Act verified
recognition of international adoption providing an incentive for child
trafficking. Yet, ethnocentricity and a national policy of spreading
democracy and the American way of life to the world, combined with a
desire to parent, continues the romanticized “rescue” myth.
Free enterprise in America
is a breeding ground for adoption scams, exploitation and coercion as
infant adoptions have become a multi-billion dollar privatized, entrepreneurial
industry. The patchwork of laws that vary from state to state create
a playground for unscrupulous attorneys—some working in conjunction
with facilitators, procurers, or “match-makers” placing
ads to lure those in crisis. Unethical adoption attorneys, such as Maxine
Buckmeier, Seymour Kurtz and others, are masters at using legal loopholes
to their advantage. They set up shop in one state, advertise in another,
send expectant mothers to another state and finalize the adoption in
yet another. They isolate expectant mothers from their families and
create a dependent bond with them by having prospective adopters pay
their living and medical expenses and virtually hold them hostage, blackmailing
them to relinquish or pay back those expenses.
Randall B. Hicks, an adoption
attorney in Riverside, California, and author of Adopting in America,
said facilitators are “not licensed nor trained to do anything.”
Along with physicians and attorneys—with no training in child
welfare or adoption—others such as a Artie Elgart, former car
parts salesman and Ellen Roseman, a former flight attendant arrange
the transfer of custody of our most vulnerable citizens.
According to Ann Babb author
of Ethics in American Adoption there is “no professional association
or academics, no certification or licensing procedures, no professional
recognition as adoption specialists, and no training or educational
qualifications.” Adoption “[p]rofessionals have yet to develop
uniform ethical standards… or to make meaningful attempts to monitor
their own profession,” says Babb. “In other professions
and occupations, licensing or certification in a specialty must be earned
before an individual can offer expert services in an area. The certified
manicurist may not give facials; the certified hair stylist may not
offer manicures ….Yet…individuals with professions as different
as social work and law, marriage and family therapy, and medicine may
call themselves ‘adoption professionals.’”
Alex Valdez Jr., spokesman for the California Department of Social Services,
said, “Essentially, [adoption facilitators] are required to have
a business license, publish a list of their services, and [have a] $10,000
bond before they hang a shingle.” These untrained facilitators
receive $6,000 to $20,000 often just to introduce prospective adopters
to an expectant mother who may or may not decide to surrender her child
for adoption. If a match fails, a facilitator can bring the same expectant
or new mom to another couple and collect yet again, making adoption
risky business for all of the parties involved—the mothers who
have their parental rights irrevocably relinquished, those attempting
to adopt, as well as the children whose custody is being permanently
transferred. Adoption practitioners being paid for results leads to
slip-shod home studies that have put many adopted children in serious
danger. Since 1996 more than a dozen children adopted from Russia by
Americans have been killed by their adopters. Others adopted from Russia
and elsewhere have been physically and sexually abused, caged, starved,
and criminally neglected. At least two such children were adopted by
pedophiles for the specific purpose of rape and child pornography.
Adoption, which was a means of providing care for children who needed
it, has become a perverse business of providing children for those who
feel entitled to one. Consumerism has led many westerners, particularly
Americans, to believe that if they can afford “it” they
deserve to have “it”—even when “it” is
a human child. Adoption needs to return to basics. We need to halt profiteering
from what should be a social service to protect families and children
in need. Adoption can only guarantee a different life, not necessarily
a “better” one. Adoption moves children from lower to higher
socio-economic status, yet even when a child is adopted into a loving,
caring family who may provide a more prosperous lifestyle—the
end result does not justify the means if the child was kidnapped, stolen
or their mothers coerced, deceived or exploited. Adoptions that obliterate
a person’s original identity and leave him no legal access to
his family are a risk and a violation of human rights as expressed by
UNICEF.
All adoptions are not the happily-ever-after fairy tales we’d
like them to be. Many are sad and sordid. For this reason we need to
stop promoting “adoption” without distinguishing between
those that are necessary and in the best interest of children and are
handled ethically—from those which are not. The former deserves
support; the latter needs to be exposed and ended. We need to stop glamorizing
foreign adoption as a rescue mission but recognize that every international
adoption leaves behind half a million children in U.S. foster care.
Of those, 134,000 children cannot be reclaimed by family members. Adoptions
of such children only are worthy of promoting and financial aiding in
the form of taxes and other incentives and benefits. Monies paid to
non-relative foster parents would be better spent to preserve, maintain
and protect the integrity of families in need, including aid to grandparents
and other extended family members struggling to keep families intact.
Additionally,, the U.S. ought to consider a tax on international adoptions
with funds used to support families and children in the U.S. in crisis.
Adoption needs to be far
more transparent, open, honest and regulated to ensure it serves the
best interest of those it is intended to serve.
Mirah Riben, author of shedding light on…the
Dark Side of Adoption (1988) and The Stork Market: America’s Multi-Billion
Dollar Unregulated Adoption Industry (www.AdvocatePublications.com,
2007); former director-at-large, America Adoption Congress.
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