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

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)