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Moral failures and market failures: why we should abandon intercountry adoption and support local foster care

By Vittorio Cintio - posted Wednesday, 12 November 2014


Adopt Change, a high profile lobby group has persuaded the Abbott government to cut the red tape to speed up intercountry adoptions. In December 2013 the SMH reported that

Tony Abbott says he wants to make it "much much easier" for Australian couples to adopt children from overseas, saying tens of thousands of babies could be brought to Australia from orphanages.

The Prime Minister invited Hollywood actor Hugh Jackman and his wife, the adoption advocate Deborra-Lee Furness, to Kirribilli House on Thursday to announce that his government would deliver "reform on overseas adoption" within 12 months.

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"There are millions of children in orphanages overseas who would love to have parents," Mr Abbott said. "And thousands of those, maybe even tens of thousands of those could come to Australia".

In May 2014 the Prime Minister announced that a would be a new national system in operation by early 2015.

Adopt Change also claims that there are "almost 18,500 kids in foster care in Australia needing a family". Is this accurate? And is adoption a solution?

Let us be clear: there is no eager queue in the US or Australia of people waiting to adopt a child from out of home care.

Whatever the consequences of adoption from foster care, it does not increase the quantum of carers as it mostly formalizes existing care arrangements.Paradoxically, in 2013, the NSW Government spent a million dollars in a campaign to recruit more foster carers. The Minister said,

"There is urgent need for new foster families to provide safety and stability for vulnerable children and young people,"…"We have 9,000 amazing foster carers across NSW, but we need more. In the next year alone we need at least 450 new carers."

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There were no Hollywood celebrities at the launch.

We know from past history that adoption flourishes when governments deny the resources that families and communities need to look after their own children. It then becomes easy to break the connection between birth parents and their children. This in turn frees up a larger pool of children available to be adopted.

Do social inequality and high adoption rates go together? Well…..yes.

Consider this UNICEF league table of child poverty*.

 

 

UNICEF Innocenti Research Centre (2012), 'Measuring Child Poverty:New league tables of child poverty in the world's rich countries',Innocenti Report Card 10, UNICEF Innocenti Research Centre, Florence.

In relation to minimising child poverty, Iceland is the best performing country in the world. In 2012 in Iceland there were 34 adoptions. 50% of those were step parents adopting their partners child. The rest were intercountry adoptions, mostly from China. There were no local adoptions at all outside of kinship. Not one single Icelander adopted a local child that was not already known to them. By contrast, The US accounts for half the adoptions in the entire world. A growing underclass ensures that there are tens of thousands of local adoptions where the adoptive parents did not previously know the child. These include adoptions organised a facilitator who charges a fee for linking expectant birth mothers with prospective adoptive parents.

There are many adoption practices in the US that Australians would find abhorrent, including the quasi marketization of the process, including the prospective adoptive parents paying all the birth mother's expenses, as well as being present at the birth.

Organisations like Adopt Change portray adoption as an act of altruism; essentially rescuing orphans from deprivation or worse. Whilst there is usually a significant component of altruism in fostering an older child with special needs and problematic family attachments, the same cannot be said for those people who want to adopt a healthy young baby and have as little as possible to do with the baby's birth family. If the desire is strong, then those with the means will turn to intercountry adoption (or surrogacy).

Intercountry adoption has been plagued with scandal. Child trafficking and/or bribery and corruption have occurred in Guatemala, Albania, Cambodia, China, Nepal, Samoa, Haiti, India, Ethiopia, Liberia, Peru, and Vietnam.

The majority of these countries are parties to the Hague Convention on Protection of Children and Co-operation in Respect of Intercountry Adoption. Supporters and apologists for intercountry adoption offer this convention as a solution for the chronic corruption that plagues the practice, but paradoxically the fatal flaws in intercountry adoption can be found in the text of the Convention itself

Astonishingly it does not require adoptive parents to maintain their child's cultural or religious links with its community of origin.

Most striking of all, the Convention declares its intent to "establish a system of co-operation amongst Contracting States to ensure that those safeguards are respected and thereby prevent the abduction, the sale of, or traffic in children".(my emphasis)

If adoption regulations are 'preventing' a market in acquiring children, the regulations are in effect market regulations.

Supporters of adoption outside one's own community sometimes say that the end justifies the means – after all who could argue with a good outcome? But consider the now famous case of Michael Hess, the US lawyer, adopted by wealthy Americans from an Irish orphanage, who then vainly looked for his mother Philomena Lee. He died without ever meeting her.

We now know in hindsight that this was immoral. Even if Michael Hess had been an orphan it should never have happened. In a more civilized world Michael would never have left his own country. The state should have given Michael's mother and/or extended the family the means to care for him properly. If this was not possible he should have been fostered in his own community.

Despite the propaganda of pro intercountry adoption groups, intercountry adoption is on its last legs. Figures from International Social Services show a global decline of nearly fifty per cent, from 43,142 adoptions in 2004 to 21,991 adoptions in 2011. The decline is not because of market regulation failure, but because of the increasing realisation that it should never have been a 'market' in the first place.

Countries are taking more seriously their obligations to look after their own children. It is unlikely that more countries will sign up to the Hague Convention.

Convention participant countries are taking longer and longer to offer children for adoption and increasingly offering only older children with illnesses and disabilities. In a world committed to social justice and the reduction of inequality, adoption will become a rarity, just as it has in Iceland. Countries are increasingly taking the view that the 'best interests of the child' include keeping the child in its own community and providing that community with the resources to care for its own children.

There are many things that we can do if we want to contribute to the welfare of children both at home and overseas. We can contribute to child welfare charities both at home and overseas. We can lobby our governments to increase welfare payments so that no child lives in poverty. We can insist that the Abbott Government increase overseas aid, and stop counting money used to imprison asylum seekers as foreign aid. We can volunteer to be foster carers and open our hearts to both the children and the communities they come from.

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About the Author

Vittorio Cintio is a senior social worker in NSW Health. He is a former Vice President of the Australian Association of Social Workers, and former President of Allied Health Professions Australia. He blogs about social work and social policy from a social justice perspective.

Creative Commons LicenseThis work is licensed under a Creative Commons License.

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