Some of you may have read
a recent article in the New York Times which must have been pretty upsetting to everyone who read it. As an adoptive parent-in-waiting, it was particularly upsetting to me in the way it implied that most adoptions of Guatemalan children are unethical.
I was disappointed in the Times; to start with, the reporter didn't do basic fact-checks which put his other conclusions at serious risk. The easiest whoops, which the Times has now corrected online, stated that the current President Berger signed the Hague Convention on Intercountry Adoptions in 2002, when it was actually President Portillo. More damaging was the statement that "after years of legal challenges the nation’s Constitutional Court ruled definitively this year that the country must abide by it." That's just not true. The Guatemalan Constitutional Court had previously ruled that President Portillo's accession to the treaty was unconstitutional; their recent ruling says that regardless of the unconstitutionality, the current President cannot be forced to withdraw from the treaty. It's a complicated impasse, but should not have been papered over with that definitive but incorrect statement.
Why does the Hague treaty matter to Guatemalan adoption anyway? The Hague treaty does seem to want to help children. Unfortunately it has the same downside as another piece of well-known legislation that wanted to help children: the No Child Left Behind legislation. Both are unfunded mandates, meaning that significant rules are instituted with no additional funding to institute them. The Hague would require the government to take over all adoptions, but children in Guatemala whose families cannot take care of them do not go into foster care unless they are given into the care of a private attorney for international adoption. They grow up in orphanages and then are on their own at 18. The Hague would also strongly encourage domestic adoption options for all children to be exhausted before the children would be available for international adoption. But in Guatemala, domestic adoption is extremely rare because of cultural traditions, and holding every child for the rare domestic adoption would mean that the vast majority of children would spend more years in an orphanage.
A study released today on children in orphanages and adopted from orphanages in Romania showed that adoption increased the health and IQ of the children, especially when they were adopted before age 2. Anti-international adoption groups are already assailing the study, correctly assuming that it will be used to pressure countries to reopen international adoptions. Some people think that preserving the culture of the children is of paramount importance--this study shows clearly that with that goal they are sacrificing the health of the children. Therefore, implementing the Hague treaty in Guatemala (if the impasse is somehow solved) will very likely have unfortunate deleterious side effects on a large number of children.
The major theme of the Times story was baby-buying, and told a story of an unscrupulous attorney giving money to a birth mother in exchange for her baby so that the child could be adopted internationally. That story should be upsetting. I do not doubt that some attorneys and agencies are corrupt, or that some adoptive parents are desperate, clueless, or careless enough to accept the referral of any child. But responsible adoptive parents should choose their agency carefully. We did serious homework before we chose, and our agency has a long history of ethical international adoption. They continue to work in countries where the international adoptions have been closed, for the sake of the children, and they are non-profit. They run background and reference checks on their attorneys, and those attorneys are responsible to direct supervisors in Guatemala and the U.S. supervisors who frequently travel there.
This whole post means: we are neither desperate nor clueless, and we do care very much that our adoption is conducted in an ethical fashion. It was insulting to us and to many other ethical adoptive parents, agencies, attorneys, and notaries for the Times to publish such an inflammatory article which suggests that an ethical adoption from Guatemala is not possible. However, these articles seem to come out about every six months. Consider them rebutted. We have done our homework, we are behaving responsibly, and our Ronald will NOT have been bought.
Happy New Year, dear reader. We don't have any real news today, except to brag about our sweet new enormous dresser for the baby's room (show of hands: who is now officially sick of hearing people describe things as ginormous? The zeitgeist really spat that one in our faces this year, didn't it? In 2007, let's turn it around and start using egantic.)
