Saving International Adoption: An Argument from Economics and Personal Experience

by Mark Montgomery, Irene Powell

Choice Outstanding Academic Title of 2018

International adoption is in a state of virtual collapse, rates having fallen by more than half since 2004 and continuing to fall. Yet around the world millions of orphaned and vulnerable children need permanent homes, and thousands of American and European families are eager to take them in. Many government officials, international bureaucrats, and social commentators claim these adoptions are not "in the best interests" of the child. They claim that adoption deprives children of their "birth culture," threatens their racial identities, and even encourages widespread child trafficking. Celebrity adopters are publicly excoriated for stealing children from their birth families.

This book argues that opposition to adoption ostensibly based on the well-being of the child is often a smokescreen for protecting national pride. Concerns about the harm done by transracial adoption are largely inconsistent with empirical evidence. As for trafficking, opponents of international adoption want to shut it down because it is too much like a market for children. But this book offers a radical challenge to this view—that is, what if instead of trying to suppress market forces in international adoption, we embraced them so they could be properly regulated? What if the international system functioned more like open adoption in the United States, where birth and adoptive parents can meet and privately negotiate the exchange of parental rights? This arrangement, the authors argue, could eliminate the abuses that currently haunt international adoption.

The authors challenge the prevailing wisdom with their economic analyses and provocative analogies from other policy realms. Based on their own family's experience with the adoption process, they also write frankly about how that process feels for parents and children.

288 pages, Hardcover

Published January 30, 2018

Reviews

[Maureen Flatley · Rating 1 out of 5]

The authors, academics who are also adoptive parents, exhibit jaw dropping naiveté about the problems that have plagued international adoption. They casually dismiss serious abuses like unregulated custody transfer (aka rehoming), child fatalities in adoption, careless screening that has resulted in serious abuses of adoptees, the failure of the US government to ensure comprehensive citizenship rights to all adoptees and fraud that has risen to the level of criminal prosecution....shortcomings that have badly eroded the confidence of foreign officials in the United States as a destination for their children. Their assertions that less regulation in a field that suffers from a patchwork of inconsistent state rules are both troubling and absurd. Their arrogant notion that children from Africa will always be better off in America almost left me speechless. Meanwhile, their insistence on focusing on Africa - because "bad" - while appearing to downplay the very real shortcomings of our own child welfare system was alarming. International adoption is failing for a variety of reasons, mostly due to our collective lack of accountability in this country and the kind of imperialistic attitudes exhibited by these authors. After all, even the most conservative adoption promoters in Congress have rejected the idea that the US government should dictate domestic policy to sovereign foreign governments. Until we take a more consistent, coherent approach to child welfare across silos of private adoption, foster care adoption and intercountry adoption, for instance by insisting on well thought out national home study standards, it seems unlikely that this important and valuable social practice will rebound. Furthermore, until we address our own failures in child welfare in this country it seems likely that foreign governments will continue to scratch their heads at our arrogant insistence that their children will be better off here. Finally, my biggest disappointment with the book had to do with the authors' failure to really address the role money plays in fostering abuses and creating barriers. As economists the authors would seem perfectly positioned to address the elephant in the adoption room - outsized fees often detached completely from work required and the corruption and abuse money has encouraged in a process that should be free of commerce, not driven by it. Instead they seem to defend fee charging and even encourage compensation to birth parents, perhaps the most overt coercion one can imagine in a process fraught with emotional and ethical peril. This book provide dangerous "advice" to would be policy makers and fails completely to plow new ground for a more progressive approach to the process. These are the attitudes that have created the current state of play and only serve to extend, not resolve, the problems many of us are seeking to address.

[Blake Jones · Rating 4 out of 5]

Amazing book, difficult to read because of the topic, an interesting perspective, also helps people understand how complex Adoption and all it entails is. There's no easy answer

[Mills College Library]

362.734 M788 2018