International adoption has become an unregulated “entrepreneurial venture,” according to Debra Harder, network director for Adoptive Families of America. (Laura Mansnerus, “Market Puts Price Tags on the Priceless” New York Times, October 26, 1998)
Högbacka additionally finds that internationally, as well as domestically: “Demand is focused on quite a small group of under three-year-olds, where the number of potential parents far exceeds the supply of children.” (Riitta Högbacka, Feb 22, 2006 “The global market for adoption.” SixDegrees cover story)
Child trafficking for adoption is an issue of concern addressed by UNICEF and other non-profit watchdog agencies throughout the world. Sandra Soria, executive director of Peru’s nonprofit Institute for Infancy and the Family said: “It’s a situation that favors the proliferation of these trafficking rings and creates the markets and conditions for these international networks to operate,” said. Soria notes that it is impossible to know how many children are sold each year, for adoption, forced labor, or the sex trade. (Rick Vecchio, “Pregnant Teen’s Murder Shocks Peru.” Associated Press, March 13, 2006.)
The recent incident in Chad illustrated the fact that worldwide 80% of children targeted for international adoption have parents. Even those in orphanages have family who visit them and use these institutions for temporary care. Such was the case with the family of David Banda who Madonna adopted. Children who are truly orphaned, could be adopted within their own nation if not for the competition of foreign fees to orphanages.
Program director of International Social Service, Chantal Saclier is responsible for the United Kingdom’s ISS Resource Centre on the Protection of Children in Adoption. Saclier finds that although inter-country adoption is intended to find stable homes for children who do not have the opportunity for a loving family environment, many of the children being adopted have a family that could have been preserved. Factors such as pressure from wealthy adoptive families, and the selfishness and greed of officials, have created a situation in which economically disadvantaged children are exploited and sold. (Chantal Scalier, “In the Best Interests of the Child? International Resource Centre for the Protection of Children in Adoption.” In: Selman, P.)
Peter Dodds, author Outer Search\Inner Journey: An Orphan and Adoptee's Quest finds: “International adoption isn't the answer to improving the overall plight of children in developing countries. Even the strongest supporters admit the movement of adoptees across international borders represents only a tiny fraction of the neglected, abused and abandoned children in these countries. And supporters of international adoption are quiet about the children who are not adopted and left behind.”
The stripping of children from eastern Europe, Asia and South has been called colonialism and cultural genocide. According to Ethica, thirteen countries have suspended or ended their adoption programs in the past fifteen years. Another half dozen countries have temporarily stopped adoptions to investigate allegations of corruption or child trafficking, the latest Chad.
Jane Jeong Trenka is a Korean born adoptee whose Korean mother searched and found her after she was sent to the U.S. and before she was legally adopted. Trenka was raised in rural Minnesota by white American parents, and has been going back and forth from Korea since 1995 maintaining continuous contact with her Korean family since 1988. She writes extensively about the need to end exporting children from Korea. (Jane’s Blog http://jjtrenka.wordpress.com/2007/06/27/fifty-years-of-korean-adoption-is-enough/) Other Korean born adoptees are returning to their homeland, and some are filled with pain and anger that they were torn from their rich cultural heritage. (Vanessa Hua, “Korean-born in U.S. return to a home they never knew Many locate lost families, others work to change international adoption policy” San Francisco Chronicle. September 11, 2005)
Trenka says, “South Korea’s dependence on the international adoption program has stunted the growth of more appropriate government-funded social welfare programs, as well as delayed the social acceptance of single-parent families….International adoption is NOT the solution. Instead, the South Korean government must find its own solution by investing in sex education, supporting single parents and creating incentives for domestic adoption.” (Jane Trenka, “Adoption from South Korea: Isn’t 50 Years Enough? Jane’s Blog, June 27, 2007)
Jae Ran Kim, a South Korea-born/American raised adoptee and social worker in the field of adoption and child welfare laments: “It is ethnocentric and arrogant to think that the United States has any business telling another country how they should manage the problem of orphaned, abandoned or relinquished children. We can’t even solve this problem within our own shores. (
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