USA Makes Adoption Harder
U.S. officials want adoption back in the hands of government.
Feb 6, 2008 — -- Do you want to rescue an abandoned child and give him a loving home?
Don't even try, says the U.S. State Department.
That's not exactly what the bureaucrats said, but it's close. The State Department says the Guatemalan adoption system "unduly enriches" so-called baby brokers and that "Guatemala has not established the required central authority to oversee intercountry adoption."
"Central authority"? This from our government? They sound like Soviet apparatchiks.
Last December, the U.S. consul even butted his way into the Guatemalan Congress to make sure a sweeping new adoption law was up to American standards. The law is designed to put those profit-making brokers out of business by making adoption a government monopoly. But to thousands of kids awaiting adoption, a government monopoly could be a death sentence.
Yes, there have been horror stories about adoption fraud. Some children were stolen from families. This is horrible, but far from the norm. Out of more than 100 cases of alleged "baby stealing," only five were confirmed as true, says Guatemalan journalist Marta Yolanda Diaz-Duran. That's five crimes versus about 4,000 legal adoptions from Guatemala in 2006 alone. Guatemala has been the second leading source of adopted children coming to America -- after China and ahead of Russia. The adoption-broker system -- which relied on entrepreneurs providing a service for a fee -- worked well enough that Guatemala was an adoption success story.
American adoption agencies (charging a fee) worked with Guatemalan adoption brokers (also charging a fee) to match willing couples with the right children. There was a near-perfect safeguard against baby stealing: two rounds of DNA tests to prove the biological mother gave consent.
The process wasn't cheap -- parents paid $25,000 or more, and brokers who spent months or years jumping though the bureaucratic hoops -- made, horrors, a profit! Hence our State Department's outrage about adoptions that "unduly enrich." The sentiment was captured perfectly by a UNICEF representative who huffed to The New York Times that adoption "has become a business instead of a social service."
