"The Orphan Trade"

Slate has an article and slide-show essay on corruption in international adoptions.

Westerners have been sold a myth that poor countries have millions of healthy abandoned infants and toddlers who need homes. But it's not so. In poor countries, as in rich ones, healthy babies are rarely orphaned or given up—except in China, where girls have been abandoned as a result of its draconian one-child policy.

Yes, tens of thousands of needy children around the world—many languishing in horrible institutions—do need families. But most children who need new homes are older than 5, sick, disabled, or somehow traumatized. Quite reasonably, most prospective Western parents don't feel prepared to take on those more challenging kids, preferring to wait in line for healthy infants or toddlers.

The result is a gap between supply and demand—a gap that's closed by Western money. Adoption agencies spend sums in-country that are enormous compared with local per-capita incomes. In poor countries without effective regulation or protections for the poor, that can induce locals to buy, coerce, defraud, and kidnap healthy children away from their birth families for sale into international adoption.

(The image, from the slide-show essay, is of an adoptive couple from Australia, their adopted children from India, and the kids' birth family whom the children visit regularly.)