A Mothers' Day Letter to Angelina Jolie...

“Given that many birth mothers [worldwide, are] living on less than two dollars per day—and some among those living on less than one dollar per day—it could be argued that relatively small amounts of money might help keep the child with the birth family…. As an ethical matter, it is perverse to spend thousands of dollars taking a child from the birth family, when a much smaller sum would have kept the family intact…..where parents give up their children for the lack of a few hundred dollars, or less, but the intercountry adoption system spends tens of thousands of dollars completing the adoption of the child, the concept of compassionate adoption becomes a cruel hoax… upon closer examination it appears that the ethics of the adoption systems, both domestic and intercountry, are just as illusory and fictional as the legal prohibitions on child-selling.… Intercountry adoption is a form of child trafficking not because adoptive families in rich countries obtain poor children from developing and transition economy nations. Rather, intercountry adoption is a form of child trafficking because the law and current systems of intercountry adoption permit it to operate as such.…the system as a whole is corrupt because it has no effective means of preventing intercountry adoption from degenerating into illicit child trafficking.”