Wait, what?
I’d be surprised if this is mostly a US thing. Unfortunately, people don’t have many ways to differentiate the nice American lady who is there to give you a vaccine, and the nice XXX lady who is there to take away your children.
Cool! That means I can still have my daughter’s parents arrested, even though they’re perfectly nice people and the church would have to do without a couple of deacons while they’re in the hoosegow. Or are you saying that it’s okay to adopt American children with living parents who give permission, but it’s not okay to adopt African children under the same circumstances?
No, I’m saying it’s always not okay to adopt children whose parents do not give permission.
Or even better, the adoptive parents could just pay the additional fee—typically quite reasonable—to have the birth parents killed.
I want to get back to the orphans with nearby parents.
So, Ms SmartyPants, who’s gonna mow the lawn? Grass don’t cut itself, ya know.
I think even sven is saying that there are parents who are too poor to care for their kids, and give them up to an orphanage, hoping to be able to raise them themselves later on when they aren’t in such a dire situation. But sometimes these kids get adopted out to foreign parents.
So she’s really pitting a loose definition of “orphan”, I guess.
Parents in impoverised countries sometimes leave their children at orphanages so they’ll be fed regularly. I think what she’s saying is that those children shouldn’t be available for adoption, they should be required to continue living in the orphanage just in case their parents suddenly win lots of money or lose another child and thus have the capacity to take care of them again.
Seems kind of unfair to the kids though.
So. You’re saying “Kidnapping is wrong”? Way gutsy stance there. What would we do without you to teach us about these complex moral issues?
:rolleyes:Someday, the Oxford English Dictionary will contain a hyperlink to this thread under the definition of “condescending”
Fine, but now you’re in charge of figuring out how the hell I’m supposed to spend the rest of my week. :mad: (I already saw The Avengers three times so don’t even suggest it.)
It isn’t really her fault. We’re just running out of things to learn from them.
The articles blur together different lines of thought. even sven is completely correct that fear of wanted children being stolen poisons the well for legitimate inter-country adoption. As the BBC article notes, several countries from whom westerners have typically adopted have tightened restrictions or closed their doors entirely. Adoption agencies in western countries owe it to everyone involved to be as scrupulous as possible.
The incident in Mali sounds like it could have been a kidnapping. I don’t know what the international agency did or did not do, but it sounds like they seem to have proceeded solely on the basis of representations from the orphanage, and not any government agency. FWIW, no one’s adopting from Mali now, since the government has been overthrown.
On the other hand, if parents in another country make a considered decision to terminate parental rights so that their child can have a shot at a different and perhaps better life, I see no reason to oppose that. It’s a heart-wrenching decision, but any decision to put a child up for adoption will be. The BBC article lumps this kind of decision in with “trafficking” unfairly, in my view. And if it’s true that “some orphanages are benefiting [from] - and … promoting adoption basically to be able to sustain and maintain the orphanages,” that doesn’t seem like the worst of motives.
Well, no, of course they shouldn’t. But I can’t see why you’d blame the innocent Americans who were dealing with an organization they had every reason to believe was trustworthy, but THAT organization was (probably unbeknownst to them) dealing in good faith with ANOTHER organization that was stealing children.
Just so we’re clear, nun-beating and puppy-kicking are also wrong. (This is MY brave moral stance)
And there are a complex set of organizations, international, internal to the originating countries, and internal to the receiving countries (in the U.S. it falls under the State Department) responsible for monitoring this. Do bad things happen, yes…and it’s really unfortunate because it creates issues for international adoption as a whole.
Some of it IS outright child stealing. Some of it IS outright child selling. Both of those things are wrong and illegal under international law and where that is an issue, official channels are shut down. Also not uncommon in Africa are misunderstandings that surrendered children are surrendered temporarily. That needs to be fixed. But the majority of international adoptions are above board. It would be great if they weren’t needed, but the reality of our world is that some of these kids don’t have a chance if they stay in their home country. It’s a balancing act, too much of a burden means kids who need homes never get them, and languish in third world orphanages…to little and you end up with child stealing and selling.
I think they should live where the parents want them too. Quite often, non-orphans in orphanages are there on a temporary basis while the parents weather a bad year. Often the parents and siblings visit regularly and even take the kid home over the weekend, but rely on the orphanage to feed and educate their child during the week. In those situations, adoption should only be an option if the parents explicitly agree to it.
But we are not really talking about those cases. We are talking about things like this incident in Haiti where adoption agencies didn’t bother to fill out the paperwork for earthquake “orphans” and later found many of the kids had parents, or this one in Chad where 103 Chadian kids with parents who thought they were sending their kids to boarding school were found being shipped out of the country under the guise of “Darfur orphans” complete with fake war wounds. Or those kids who were apparently snapped up on the streets in Mali, with the German NGO saying they couldn’t possibly be expected to investigate the background of kids they are shipping out of the country (tell me, if they were operating out of their native Germany, would they adopt children out overseas with no questions asked about where the kids came from? I bet they’d figure out some way!)
When foreign NGOs mess with people’s worst fears, like “the rich foreigners are coming to steal my children”, they put everyone at risk. They put the families they disrupt at risk. THey put foreigners who work or travel in the country at risk. In Guatemala, a Japanese person was beaten to death after they took a picture of a kid- a direct result of fears spread by actual child trafficking in the country. And they put the entire nation at risk when that nation cuts itself off from NGOs.
If you are going to work in someone else’s country, and ESPECIALLY if you are going to claim to be an NGO, you cannot use that as a platform to commit gross human rights violations. None of these “on the line” agencies would ever dream of operating that way in their home countries. You don’t get to do it in their’s, either.
We have much to learn from them.
Don’t you guys ever come up with something new?