Hypothetical scenario:
A compassionate billionaire decides that he wants to adopt 1,000 starving orphans from Africa. He signs the paperwork and becomes their legal adopting father. He sets aside a million dollars apiece for every single child’s education, necessities, health care, toys etc., and hires hundreds of good caretakers. He also builds over a hundred big, well-furnished houses for these children. They get tutors, doctors, chauffeurs, etc. Basically, all of their needs are taken care of and their lives have dramatically improved for the better.
But would the government say something like, “You are not allowed to be the legal adopting father of more than 20 children at once?”
None of those things make kid’s lives better. Love and stability makes kids lives better, period. Each adoption case is considered on it’s own, and the well-being of the child always comes first. I would guess you cross the line at some point.
There are child collectors out there, especially among certain sets of evangelicals who see adoption as a means to salvation. They don’t have a great track record and often have to resort to illegal means (re-adoption of adopted kids unwanted by their current family) to get their kids.
Also note that Africa is pretty short on “starving orphans.” Most African kids have an appropriate and interested caregiver-- it’s not like Africans don’t have relatives. And I don’t think there is any part of Africa that is experiencing a famine right now. When there is famine, the answer is to help people get through the bad months, not destroy their families because they had a bad harvest one year.
Many adoptees out of Africa are trafficked children, and when we see large movements of children like those proposed by the OP they almost always are trafficked. Many have living parents and/or other family members. It’s not uncommon for families to be tricked into thinking the kid is going away temporarily for school, or for parents to have their kid stay in an orphanage for a short stay to relieve financial pressure (which a a normal thing to do), only to discover their kid has disappeared. Outright buying and selling of “orphans” for adoption is also sadly commonplace.
For a while it was really bad, with kids being basically torn from loving homes and sold by child brokers under the guise of adoption. We’ve had a few cases where entire planeloads of “orphans” were found to be perfect ordinary kids, some snatched right off the soccer field by their homes and shoved on a plane. African countries have wised up and tightened regulations, but people keep coming to war zones where there are fewer laws looking for kids to traffic.
So I would be very wary of anyone claiming to have access to 1,000 starving African kids.
In each individual adoption case, a case worker makes an evaluation of whether there is a qualified match between the adopter and the adoptee. If the case workers says that a family is already too large to provide a positive home environment for an additional child, then the adoption is declined. What that threshold would be would depend on the particulars of the individual family, as well as the whims of the case worker. A family with 19 children could very well adopy a 20th, while another family down the street with two might be refused a third, purely based on the observed household and family conditions.