Slate has an alarming piece on the sordid truth behind international adoption. As we’ve noted before, it often isn’t so much adopting as kidnapping. From Slate:
Who wants to buy a baby? Certainly not most people who are trying to adopt internationally. And yet too often—without their knowledge—that’s what happens with their dollars and euros.
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.
The piece includes a haunting and very descriptive slide show of exactly how the families left behind, usually mothers, suffer. And how the brokers get very, very rich. Makes Malawi’s dissing of Madonna make a lot more sense. [Read Meet the Parents: The Dark Side of Overseas Adoption for MoJo‘s special report on the same subject.]
