Those are the children who are “waiting” - and in Scandinavia, those children aren’t available at all.
It also, almost always, takes a long time to remove parental rights by the court. Its seldom done when a child is an infant - unless the child is part of a sibling group - in which case an effort is made to adopt out the entire sibling group to the same family. There has to be a pattern of pretty serious abusive or neglectful behavior over a period of time.
You’ll see these awful stories on the adoption pages - “John is sixteen and suffers from shaken baby syndrome. One day with continued treatment and therapy he may be able to recognize human presence and voices and respond with grunts. Parental rights are not yet terminated.” Not yet terminated? You shook the kid nearly to death fifteen years ago and we’re still trying to get you to let us take him so somebody can teach him to vaguely respond to people?
I was an older foster kid, well past the ‘sell-by’ date (a teenager) when my mother was sent to prison. Although I’m fairly healthy, intelligent, and (if you read my posts, you’ll see) I have a well developed social conscious, with my age and the abuse in my past combined, the odds I would have been adopted were slim to none. It’s a shame, because I would’ve been thrilled to find a family – yes, even if they were in Norway, or France, or Japan, or most anywhere – who would’ve loved me unconditionally and never hurt me.
So I understand, but I hear rumors that the policy continues unofficially to this day almost everywhere.
Because Americans aren’t poor and can afford to adopt all the children locally unlike other countries. If Americans and other rich westerners weren’t adopting Chinese girls they wouldn’t be adopted.
I have been involved in the adoption community fifteen years and have never heard them.
The Chinese situation isn’t a primarily a poverty driven one, its the one child policy, a cultural preference for boys over girls (especially if you can only have one), and cultural stigma against adoption. South Korea’s adoption situation is mostly driven by the last - Koreans don’t find the idea of adopting a child to be attractive in most cases, its culturally strange - which makes sense in an Asian culture where there is still a lot of emphasis on ancestors and family lines. It certainly isn’t that South Koreans can’t afford to adopt - they are a relatively rich country.
South and Central American adoptions do tend to be more poverty motivated.
Are you serious? Lots of kids don’t get adopted in the US. Some have been labeled “broken,” but sometimes I’ve seen requirements for fostering that were pretty narrow (“their church is very important for these four Miami siblings; oh by the way, it’s a Protestant church with a membership of less than 1000 people” - well, gee, you just ruled out the immense majority of Miami as potential parents!) and without which the kids would have it a lot easier to find a home.