In the US, a lot of families adopt children from other countries. Is this practice more widespread in the US than in other countries? Are French (or Brazilian, or wherever) families as likely to adopt a child from overseas as American families are? Frankly, I am unable to find any good numbers.
There’s generally a trend of adoptions of children from less wealthy countries to wealthy ones; it happens in Europe too. There are two complementary reasons for that: (1) In wealthy countries, there are usually more couples interested in adopting than domestic children up for adoption; (2) in less wealthy countries, there are many poor parents who put their children up for adoption because they cannot afford to raise them themselves.
Cross-border adoptions are bureaucratically quite challenging, because the authorities on both sides have their own processes to follow, and since a child’s well-being is at stake, these processes are understandably often thorough and lengthy. But it’s certainly not an exclusively American trend to adopt children from abroad.
Wikipedia has some answers: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_adoption
Based on Selman’s research,[16] during the year of 1998 and 2007, the top 10 receiving countries of all 23 reported countries, (ranked from the large to small), are the United States, Spain, France, Italy, Canada, Netherlands, Sweden, Norway, Denmark, and Australia. Among these 10 countries, the top 5 accounts for more than 80% of overall adoption, and the US is responsible for around 50% of all cases. Although historically the United States has been among the leaders in adopting children via international adoption, this has changed dramatically over the last decade. In 2004, 22,884 children were adopted internationally, while only 2,971 were adopted in 2019.[14][15] This is attributed to a combination of factors: increased bureaucracy due to implementation of the Hague Convention guidelines, legal changes in the countries from which the adoptions occur eliminating countries from which to adopt,[17] increased cost, corruption in some foreign courts/orphanages, and the policy of many countries to only free children with significant special needs.[18]
Thank you all.
The movie Lion (2016) tells the true story of a man who was one of two Indian orphans adopted by Australian parents in the late '80s, and his efforts to find his birth family later in life. So these channels do/did exist, though it’s not clear from the movie how common or uncommon the practice was in that time & place.
Anecdotally, in 2004, Gerhard Schröder, then still chancellor of Germany, and his wife adopted a child from Russia (they would later adopt another one, also from Russia, after the end of his term as chancellor). The story goes that the adoption process was greatly accelerated by means of influence from friends of Schröder’s in the highest echelons of Russian politics.