Thoughts on the Hague

This week I read a couple of articles on the U.S.'s ratification of the Hague convention for international adoption .  Reading The Wall Street Journal's article just made me irritated because the article seemed to be saying that this was a good step for adoptive parents, while all the while outlining the ways in which this ratification will make adoption more expensive and more red taped.  I was all set to write a rant about this treaty describing the ways in which it will limit international adoption and keep kids from getting to families that want to raise them.  

In fact, I still will.

<mini-rant>What irritates me most about the adoption community's rah-rahing of this Hague convention as the perfect solution to all of the problems of international adoption (including baby selling, lack of credible information being relaying to adoptive parents, and scamming) is the assumption that you can invest a government agency with certain (ta-da!) powers and that will keep the bad guys at bay.  Everyone knows all you need to do to stop baby sellers at their horrid trade is to require legitimate agencies to pay $7,000-13,000 every four years and periodically fill out boatloads of paperwork underpaid overworked bureaucrats will skim over weeks or months behind schedule.  

That'll do it.  

Or, in all likelihood, what will really happen is that this will drive all but the biggest agencies out of business because little agencies, such as ours, won't have the personnel or the money to keep up with the red tape requirements.  Our agency started off as humanitarian relief.  It's a two woman operation and they run this way to keep costs down so that more parents can afford to adopt from Russia.  But with Russia fiddling with their accredidation process and now requiring all agencies to have Non-governmental organization status, keeping costs down is difficult enough on that end.  If you require Hague accredidation on this end as well, there's no way they can keep doing this cost effectively.  Which means adoptive parents will have no choice but to go to the few large agencies who are willing to play the Hague game.  With less choice in terms of agencies, the already high price of international adoption will skyrocket.  Which means the only people who will be able to adopt are the very rich.  International adoption will decline and a lot of great kids out there won't have the chance to be adopted.

Which means the baby selling market will probably only increase.  Because, like the drug trade, what matters in baby selling is the demand, not the supply.  The Hague isn't going to be able to stop this because all it needs to keep flourishing are either unethical people who are desperate to be parents or clueless people who don't ask enough questions about the origins of their children.  

Ultimately, I think the effects of the ratification of the Hague convention will be a decline in international adoption due to an increasingly costly and difficult adoption process.  On a personal note, I know we couldn't have afforded to adopt under this new system.  </mini-rant>

OTOH, I also read an online article from the New York Times regarding Guatemalan adoptions which made me very glad we did not choose to take that route, as attractive as it was to us as prospective adoptive parents.  Guatemalan adoption is relatively quick, it's possible to get young infants, it's not as expensive as Russian adoption, and the travel requirements are more convenient.  Also, FAS isn't so much of a risk, and children are cared for by foster parents not orphanage workers, so the risk of Reactive Attachment Disorder is much, much less.  What I didn't know about Guatemala is that apparently there are baby scouts who go about the countryside looking to persuade young pregnant girls to relinquish their rights to their children.  I also didn't know that the government doesn't run international adoption down there, lawyers do.  And young infants are available because of the industry aspect: time is not alloted for prospective Guatemalan parents to have precedence over would-be foreign parents.  Currently 1 out of every 100 Guatemalan babies born is adopted by a foreign couple.  Learning all of this made me very uncomfortable as adoption conditions there seem ripe for corruption.  As in breeding for money.  And I definitely don't want to be a party to that.  The Hague convention, which Guatemala signed but is not in accordance with would eliminate these conditions, but since Guatemala is unlikely to change over its system will really result in Guatemala being eliminated from the list of countries to adopt from.  Which seems good and bad: the baby will be thrown out with the bathwater.  Undoubtedly under the current system many children who would not have a life there go on to be cared for by parents who love them.  But is it worth the risk of the corruption that could and likely is happening there?

So, after reading that article, I could see that something does need to be done.  All countries are not going to be ethical in their adoption practices.  At least not all of the time.  But I can't see that the Hague convention is going to accomplish anything other than disrupting and complicating adoptions in countries that have ethical adoption practices.