Policy Considerations Relevant to Intercountry Adoption Reform




© Springer International Publishing Switzerland 2015
Heidi Schwarzwald, Elizabeth Montgomery Collins, Susan Gillespie and Adiaha I. A Spinks-FranklinInternational Adoption and Clinical PracticeSpringerBriefs in Public Health10.1007/978-3-319-13491-8_7


7. Policy Considerations Relevant to Intercountry Adoption Reform



Heidi Schwarzwald , Elizabeth Montgomery Collins , Susan Gillespie  and Adiaha I. A. Spinks-Franklin 


(1)
Texas Children’s Health Plan Center for Children and Women Department of Pediatrics, Baylor College of Medicine, Houston, Texas, USA

(2)
Section of Retrovirology & Global Health Texas Children’s Hospital Center For International Adoption; Department of Pediatrics, Baylor College of Medicine, Houston, Texas, USA

(3)
Retrovirology and Global Health Texas Children’s Hospital Center For International Adoption, Houston, New York, USA

(4)
Meyer Center for Developmental Pediatrics Texas Children’s Hospital, Baylor College of Medicine, Houston, Texas, USA

 



 

Heidi Schwarzwald (Corresponding author)



 

Elizabeth Montgomery Collins



 

Susan Gillespie



 

Adiaha I. A. Spinks-Franklin



Keywords
International adoption-reformHague conventionIntercountry adoption



Introduction


Recent debates over the Hague Convention highlight the ongoing tension between several important and often conflicting policy objectives in the area of intercountry adoption (Hague Convention on the Protection of Children and Co-operation of Inter-Country Adoption 1993). The primary objective is to establish regulatory safeguards to protect potential adoptees from child trafficking and other forms of abuse (Hague Convention, Preamble. Hague Convention on the Protection of Children and Co- operation of Inter-Country Adoption 1993). Perhaps equally important, however, is the goal of maximizing the number of unparented children who can be placed with stable and nurturing families (Hague Convention on the Protection of Children and Co-operation of Inter-Country Adoption 1993). Critics argue that in rushing to accomplish the first objective certain members of the Hague Convention have neglected to pursue the second; that increased government regulation means increased delays, and increased delays result in fewer private placements and more children languishing in institutional and foster care settings (Bartholet 2010). The question in formulating policy therefore becomes: where precisely should lawmakers draw the line between workable regulations and bureaucratic excess in devising international adoption reform ?


Analyzing Recent Case Studies: Ethiopia and Guatemala


The recent international adoption reform efforts in Guatemala and Ethiopia illustrate many of the factors relevant to the analysis of intercountry adoption policy. In the 2000s placements from both countries expanded quickly as previously popular sources of adoptable children such as Russia and South Korea began to restrict intercountry placements. Adoptions of Guatemalan children by American families rose from 1,002 in 1999 to 4,726 in 2007, while adoptions of Ethiopian children rose from 105 in 2002 to 2,275 in 2009 (http://​adoption.​state.​gov/​about_​us/​statistics.​php). In both countries prospective parents were attracted by the well-publicized plight of the unparented children and the comparative ease with which the adoptions could be consummated. As with other resource-poor regions, however, the introduction of outside money from adoptive parents soon financed the growth of entire industries dedicated to the identification and international placement of local children. Profit motive, along with cultural misunderstandings about the nature of adoption, resulted in wide-ranging fraud, corruption , and child trafficking (Inside Ethiopia’s Adoption Boom, Wall Street Journal, 2012; ‘The Child Catchers’: Evangelicals And the Fake-Orphan Racket,’ The Daily Beast 2013). Only later, when the adoptive children in the U.S. became fluent in English and were able to share their stories, did it become clear that many of the children had left behind poor but viable families (‘The Child Catchers’: Evangelicals And the Fake-Orphan Racket,’ The Daily Beast 2013). The United States and multinational organizations like UNICEF urged the governments of both countries to enact reform.

Guatemala responded in 2007 by announcing a moratorium on intercountry adoptions. With the support of the U.S. Department of State and UNICEF, the Guatemalan government enacted Decree 77-2007, which created the National Adoptions Board and barred intercountry adoptions until reform measures could be implemented (Guatemala’s Inhumane Adoption Law, Wall Street Journal 2013). While reforms were under deliberation, the total number of orphans placed with American parents fell to fifty children (http://​adoption.​state.​gov/​about_​us/​statistics.​php). Finally, on January 1, 2008, the Guatemalan government entered into the Hague Convention on Intercountry Adoption (the “Convention”), though it has yet to create the central adoption authority necessary to become Hague compliant (http://​adoption.​state.​gov/​country_​information/​country_​specific_​info.​php?​country-select=​Guatemala).

One unintended consequence of the Guatemalan reforms was a shift in demand for intercountry adoptions to Ethiopia. With that demand came many of Guatemala’s problems, and in 2010 the Ethiopian government found it necessary to institute reforms of its own. Lawmakers announced that additional reviews would be conducted to screen prospective adoptions, and prosecutors ultimately brought criminal charges against a number of social workers and police officers alleged to have “discovered” an inordinate number of parentless children who were then funneled into the international adoption market (Joyce 2013). The government began shuttering suspect orphanages, closing fifty in the first year alone, and uncovered an unsettling number of cases in which parents were promised financial rewards in exchange for abandoning their children and falsifying records (http://​www.​thedailybeast.​com/​witw/​articles/​2013/​04/​24/​kathryn-joyce-s-the-child-catchers-inside-the-shadowy-world-of-adoption-trafficking.​html). Often parents were led to believe that the arrangements were only temporary in nature, and that the children would eventually be returned .


Bringing Adoptions to a Halt: Part of the Solution or Part of the Problem?


The reform process illustrates the difficult balancing test that must be applied when crafting intercountry adoption regulations. While Guatemalan lawmakers deliberated over reform, for example, and the moratorium on intercountry adoptions remained in effect (except for a handful of cases commenced prior to the ban), UNICEF estimated that there were some 345,000 orphans in Guatemala (as of 2002) who might have benefited from the intercountry adoption process (pdf.usaid.gov/pdf_docs/PNACP860.pdf). Likewise, in Ethiopia, some 4 million children qualified as orphans while the reform process was underway (Ligtvoet, The Huffington Post 2014). Indeed, the sheer number of unparented children globally (some advocacy groups put the figure close to 200 million) would seem to favor a quicker and more extensive international placement process (Bipartisan Group Seeks to Fix Flaws in International Adoption, Christian Post 2013; http://​childreninfamili​esfirst.​org/​legislation-chiff/​). In making these assessments, however, it should be remembered that reliable numbers are hard to come by because UNICEF, the primary source of country data on parentless children, defined “orphans”, when compiling data on the AIDS epidemic, as any child who had lost at least one parent—a measure which, while effective in illustrating the devastating impact of AIDS on families, now seems to overstate the number of parentless children in need of adoption (Orphans, UNICEF Press Release 2008). Whatever the precise number, it seems evident that several hundred thousand unparented children in Guatemala and Ethiopia remained in need of supportive families while the reform process was underway. Many of those children were instead transferred to the custody of state-run foster care systems.

Orphanages and foster care settings negatively affect a child’s developmental and psychological health. Studies of orphaned children in Bucharest, for example, have linked institutionalization to diminished physical growth, IQ, brain development, and emotional development (Le Mare and Audet 2006; http://​www.​jointcouncil.​org/​what-we-do/​education-research/​#Policy%20​Statements). Although international adoption specialists frequently see rapid and remarkable improvements with time, a nurturing environment, appropriate physical, occupational, speech, and developmental therapy, and/or behavioral or psychological counseling, UNICEF has said that children raised in institutional settings have “difficulty re-entering society once they reach adulthood [and] are ill-equipped to fend for themselves in the outside world” (Children on the Brink: A Joint Report on Orphan Estimates And Program Strategies, UNICEF/UNAIDS 2002).

And while a year or two of regulatory delay may not seem an unreasonable price to pay for the elimination of serious crimes such as child trafficking, the implications of the delay become more concerning when one considers that the institutionalization most often occurs during the child’s formative years, when exposure to orphanages and other foster care settings may result in significant or permanent physical and/or psychological impairment. This again highlights the balancing process that must take place if developing countries are to protect the interests of unparented children as a whole, weighing the effectiveness of proposed regulations against the potential harm of prolonged institutionalization.


Assessing the Impact of Reform: When Does Due Diligence Become Undue Diligence?


The problems illustrated by the reform process extend to the implementation side as well. As discussed in Chapter 6, the Hague Convention requires member states to enact regulatory measures to protect the best interests of the children and to protect the children’s fundamental rights under international law. (Hague Convention 1993) For the most part, the Convention leaves the determination of what policies will protect a child’s best interest to the discretion of member states. The text is not completely silent on the subject, however; it explicitly suggests, for example, that the children’s best interests are served by “placement of the child within the State of origin…” (Hague Convention, Preamble 1993) Likewise, in its position statement on intercountry adoption, UNICEF suggests that virtually all domestic options should be exhausted before intercountry adoption is even considered:

Only gold members can continue reading. Log In or Register to continue

Stay updated, free articles. Join our Telegram channel

Jun 23, 2017 | Posted by in OBSTETRICS | Comments Off on Policy Considerations Relevant to Intercountry Adoption Reform

Full access? Get Clinical Tree

Get Clinical Tree app for offline access