Adoption: for love or money?

UNESCO Courier, Feb, 1999 by Martine Jacot

Racketeers are trying to make a profit out of couples in rich countries who want to adopt orphan children from the developing world. Twenty-five nations have now agreed to follow a code of conduct governing international adoption

They're in love. They live comfortably somewhere in the "first world". One day, they decide to have children. But the months and years go by without any "happy event". In the end, they go to a fertility expert. But fertility treatment doesn't always work and eventually becomes very distressing for the couple, who feel wounded because they can't fulfil their reproductive instincts.

As they become more and more deeply involved in medical treatment, the idea of adopting a child takes root. Why not open their lives to an unloved baby or youngster who has been abandoned and dumped in an orphanage? After all, the couple has lots of love to give and the means to bring up a family.

Since contraception became common and abortion tolerated in the world's rich countries, abandoned children, young or older, have become few and far between. At the same time, many more people, both couples and single persons, are seeking to adopt. As a result, adoption of children from poor countries by couples from the North has soared over the past 20 years (see box).

Long and tricky negotiations

With few exceptions, the process of adopting a foreign baby is a long and complex one, involving talks with social workers, doctors and psychiatrists. A lot of paperwork has to be done before consent is given. In most cases, the process is just as complicated in the child's country of origin, and the rules vary widely from country to country. "It's like an obstacle race," say parents who have been through it.

Yet scandals regularly come to light, mainly because dubious go-betweens in some poor countries take advantage of the rising demand for adopted children to relieve wealthy couples, tired of waiting for offspring of their own, of huge sums, sometimes as much as $60,000.Worst of all, these racketeers manage to trick needy mothers into parting with their biological children.

The case of young Pablo in Guatemala helped to raise international concern. He spent the first year of his life in an orphanage while his fate provoked a legal battle. His natural mother, 30-year-old Elvira Ramirez Carlo, had given her written consent for his adoption by a Spanish couple. But she claimed she had signed some kind of document in a moment of distress even before the child was born, because her husband had left her when he found out she was pregnant.

The Spanish couple's lawyer paid her money. But Guatemalan law allows a mother to renege on such an agreement, and with the backing of a charitable association, Caza Alianza, Elvira managed to get baby Pablo back in August 1998, not long after his first birthday. This was the first time a Guatemalan court had ever returned a child to its natural mother after a dubious adoption.

"The Pablo affair shows the kind of pressures and manoeuvres that are typical of lawyers and people paid to find babies for adoption. They always go for mothers who are poor and illiterate," say officials of Caza Alianza, whose lawyers are handling the cases of 17 other such mothers. The association reckons that about 440 children have been fraudulently adopted in Guatemala since 1996, a year which saw the end of a 36-year civil war in which more than 100,000 people died.

Guatemala, a crackdown on racketeers

Not many countries have such simple adoption procedures as this poor Central American state. A notary obtains the consent of one or other of the child's biological parents, and then lawyers acting for the adoptive parents present this document and a social report to a juvenile court judge who decides whether or not the adoption can go ahead. In the case of orphans and abandoned children, the judge has to certify first that their parents have vanished or are unknown. In each case, a lawyer is necessary.

So Guatemala has become a favourite destination of Western couples looking for a foreign child to adopt. The number of requests received rose from 900 in 1996 to 2,304 in 1997, most of them from Americans, French and Canadians. Officials in all three countries have stepped up their warnings about the risks of adopting Guatemalan children.

"Lawyers seem to be in collusion with doctors, nurses and social workers who pressure mothers to let go of their children. They are then placed with foster mothers known to the lawyers in 'clandestine orphanages'," says the International Adoption Mission, France's official body responsible for monitoring the arrival of adopted children in France.

Compulsory DNA tests

The Canadian consulate in Guatemala City has uncovered another racket, even worse. Several mothers who gave adoption consent to a judge were found not to be "their" child's natural mother after undergoing DNA tests. The babies had been taken from their real mothers at birth in the countryside by women who were paid to say it was they who had given birth to them.