Sticks and Stones

At first glance, international adoptions appear to simultaneously solve the growing demand by infertile parents for children to adopt and the constantly growing number of child orphans in countries such as China and Romania. Yet the issue is a complex one, and one that certainly merits some attention.

International adoptions create several problems; children feel dislocated with parents who are ethnically and culturally different to those that they have become accustomed to, international adoption has been used as a front to child laundering and trafficking with children being “stolen” in order to feed the high demand and large amounts of money that Western families are prepared to spend, and the creation of an international market can make it harder for domestic and more suitable parents to adopt needy children since they cannot compete financially.

Some of these problems are clearly more pressing than others. The issues relating to a sudden change of culture and a feeling of dislocation, for example, are not very significant in a multicultural and tolerant community such as that of the USA. In order to solve the problems associated with children trafficking, however, it is necessary for international adoptions to become truly international; with clearly transparent regulations through approved international bodies, with the support of participating nations as well.

International adoption has the potential to (and indeed often does) allow parents to provide the love and support they wish to those who need their love and support. For this reason, it is certainly a desirable goal and one that deserves our efforts to achieve.