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Save the Children and Unicef both believe that children are better off in their home countries. Save the Children has gone so far as to say that international adoption can actually  “exacerbate the problem it hopes to solve…the very existence of orphanages encourages poor parents to abandon children in the hope that they will have a better life.”

E.J. Graff states in yesterday’s New York Times article that “too often, the amounts of money that Western adoption agencies spend in poor countries is helping to defraud, coerce or kidnap children away from families that wanted to raise them to adulthood”.

Are there really that many families being coerced into giving their children away?

And, are we, adoptive parents, suppose to leave children in orphanages so they can sleep 10 children to a room, eat cold and non-nutritious food, and in my son’s case, be so neglected and abused that he still has Post Traumatic Stress?

Unicef argues for the creation of foster care but looks the other way when they know that in most countries foster care does not work as well as adoption. Sure, there are plenty of cases of kidnapping and extortion. We all know there is SOME corruption. Fix it.

But, what about the best interest of the child?

Shouldn’t that be the standard? Both my sons needed a home. We gave it to them. We didn’t save them, we didn’t kidnap them from their birth parents. We adopted children who were in need of parents and in need of a home.

Were they orphans? No. In fact, most international adoptees are not actually orphans. What happens more often than kidnappings and extortion is hardship:

After losing a husband to AIDS and facing their own sickness, poor women may turn to adoption in a desperate attempt to secure a brighter future for their children. These brave, selfless and courageous women should not be branded as “baby sellers” or too ignorant or poor to love their children.

The antiracist parent, Julie Corby has the standard right in her rebuttal to E.J. Graff…

It seems to me that Graff is against any international adoption. I don’t think anyone would argue that the best thing for a child would be to grow up with his birth family, in his country of origin, but what about the kids for whom that is an impossibility?