International Herald Tribune, Saturday, November 29, 2003
November 29, 2003
PARIS Children are our most precious resource - and like most precious resources, they are traded across borders. Over the past decade, international adoption has become a boom market, with some 34,000 infants now leaving Asia and Eastern Europe for new homes in Western Europe and North America.
Because the demand for infants from poor countries is rising among potential parents in rich ones, this "baby trade" has become severely distorted by corruption. Unscrupulous go-betweens buy or even abduct children from desperate biological parents and sell them to eager adoptive families.
The United States and European Union have responded to this corruption by placing moratoriums on countries like Cambodia and Romania, where the problem has been detected. But banning adoptions is hardly a solution. That policy only succeeds in denying orphans the opportunity to find parents, while shifting the demand to new suppliers such as Russia and China....
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