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I must say that this editorial article is a good read whether you are personally touched by Guatemalan adoption and their current reforms or not. In fact, if you’re not really sure what all the hub-bub is about, the article offers some great insight as to why reform is necessary in a quick, easy to understand way. And yet, while reading, I began to ask the same questions about our country.
Let me quote the paragraph that got my wheels turning:
The larger ethical issue has been the role of buscadoras, recruiters hired by Guatemalan adoption lawyers to search for pregnant women willing to relinquish babies, in some cases offering them money. As the demand for babies has grown, so has the power of the buscadoras; to connect a lawyer to a pregnant mother, they demand as much as $8,000. Meanwhile, Guatemalan children who have no living parents, who aren’t infants or who have special needs constitute only a tiny fraction of completed adoptions.
Alarming, isn’t it?
But what about the children in our own country? What are we going to tell them about unethical agencies? Especially when there are no real attempts to reform those types of unethical processes. Americans are rightly concerned with the goings-on in Guatemala but want to turn a blind eye to the coercion, both subtle and blatant, going on within our own country. I’ve always wondered why.
There will always be those who say that those kinds of things don’t happen in our “advanced nation.” However, I just read this morning that a known unethical agency/facilitator charges adoptive parents almost ten thousand dollars, up front (before the homestudy!), for “media advertising and marketing.” That’s a fancy term for “ten thousand bucks to find a pregnant woman.” Sigh. While that agency/facilitator isn’t physically hunting down mothers, the intent is the same as that of the buscadoras in Guatemala. Promises are made, half-truths are told and rights are trampled upon by those agencies that refuse to act in ethical manners with either adoptive parents or birth parents.
We talk about reforms in other countries and while people get their feathers ruffled as what, exactly, should happen, people agree that things aren’t exactly as they should be. Yet when people, no matter their position in the triad, talk about it regarding domestic adoption, they are dismissed as bitter, negative or overly idealistic. Why? Why can’t we admit that something is wrong and some things need to change? Admitting problems doesn’t negate the adoptions that currently exist. It doesn’t make those that have adopted or placed their children for adoption evil or bad people. It doesn’t make the children any less. It just means making adoption safer and better for future generations.
And shouldn’t we always want better for the next generation?
Sigh. Anyway, I’m now enlightened about Guatemala. But just as stumped with how to bring change to our own country. Such is life. I think the last sentence of the Guatemala article would be an appropriate ending to this piece as well.
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For more on adoption reform, read these posts.
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Photo Credit.
I’d argue that it’s harder for Guatemala to make reforms due to poverty and the fact that there isn’t even a centralized system of child welfare. I don’t know if the government there has it as a high
priority, things seem that dire.
We really should fix our foster care
system. It should be on each politician’s platforms. Guatemala has recently ended a civil war, a huge precentage of people there live in poverty. What is America’s excuse?
And with that should come adoption reforms.
I’d argue that it’s harder for Guatemala to make reforms due to poverty and the fact that there isn’t even a centralized system of child welfare. I don’t know if the government there has it as a high
priority, things seem that dire.
Oh, I’d agree here, Chromesthesia, especially regarding things I’ve been reading as of late. Of course, as you said, our own foster care system is so out of whack that I don’t know where we would begin either. My parents have been fighting with their state for three years now… and nothing has changed.
And as you say… what is OUR excuse? That’s a good question. I’m off to ponder.