Guatemala's stolen children

This story about Guatemala is sad example of the result of the demand-driven adoption market. Lawyers, doctors, facilitators bend over backwards to get children for adoption.

That's not just the case in Guatemala, read what Yuri Pavlenko, Ukranian Minister for Family, Youth and Sport, has to say about this: Full text HERE:

... But most of the trouble has been caused by middlemen, who allegedly help foreign families to adopt Ukrainian children and charge $30,000-$50,000 for their services. This is precisely what gives rise to talk of public officers’ supposedly corrupt practice. “They come to the Department and make impudent demands. The system that appears to have been formed in the early nineties has penetrated deep into the country and affected boarding schools, orphanages and maternity hospitals”- says Yuri Pavlenko...”

Liudmila Volynets, Head of the Ukrainian State Department for Adoption and Protection of Children’s Rights is of the opinion that the Hague Convention would be a great benefit in the matter of a full-fledged protection for children adopted by foreign families, and counteraction to corrupt middlemen. Unfortunately experience has proven otherwise. Under the Hague Convention these middlemen set up their own adoption agencies, and business continues as usual. Better regulated, but with a devestating effect on local child protection. Romania, the first country to fully implement the Hague Convention, is the proof of that. For more on this read

THE PERVERSE EFFECTS OF THE HAGUE CONVENTION

To get the full picture, read my book Romania, For Export Only

No More Angels - Operation Babylift

With Courtesy to the Humanist, Published in the May/June 2009 Humanist

For the full article click HERE

No More Angels For You

Vietnam is currently experiencing social and economic growing pains similar to those South Korea went through during the 1970s and 80s. Korean children were the hot commodity in international adoption up until many adult Korean adoptees put the South Korean government’s feet to the fire and made it acknowledge the mass production aspect of its adoption policies. In early 2008, the U.S. State Department investigated a growing number of inconsistencies in the documentation of children’s orphan status and reports of child trafficking. This led to a halt in adoptions between the United States and Vietnam in September. But, much like the attitude exhibited by Americans in 1975 when Operation Babylift commenced and they were criticized for seemingly taking advantage of a bad situation, many prospective American adoptive parents today are incredulous about the charges of official corruption and baby selling. These children only need a home and a loving family, they plead. Who would ever deny them that?

To this day, first-generation transracial adoptees from Korea and Vietnam are generally referred to as “war orphans” in the media and by people we encounter on a daily basis, as if it is a self-applied term of endearment. The main assumption is that we were rescued from a tragic past and handed a hopeful future, and that to look back and piece together the facts behind our orphan status would be counterproductive and even unhealthy.

Yet, this is exactly what we are doing. We dare not only to question the historical interpretations of the Korean and Vietnam Wars, but also other people’s motives and methods for transporting us out of our birth countries. The question we ask is one few people are willing, or even prepared, to answer: Who made us orphans in the first place? In order for us to have gained our second set of parents, we had to lose our first.

Yes, people can say that we were saved. But we’ll be damned if we let them have the last word.

Born Nguyen Duc Minh in the Gia Dinh district of Saigon, Kevin Minh Allen was adopted at nine months and flown to the United States in August 1974. He grew up in a suburb of Rochester, New York, and as an adult moved to Seattle, Washington, where he is currently enjoying the view. He has completed his first, as yet unpublished poetry manuscript, titled The Wind above the Coast.

Adoption: In The Best Interest of Madgeness

Mercy's world of Madgeness

EXCLUSIVE by Nick Owens 21/06/2009
Tot flown 6,000 miles from home to meet new mum Madonna and family in London.. and is whisked straight to a Kabbalah meeting

Little Mercy James spent 12 hours flying 6,000 miles to start her new life with adoptive mum Madonna yesterday… then was driven straight to a Kabbalah meeting.
Under cover of darkness in Malawi on Friday the three-year-old was taken from all that was familiar to her, put on a private jet and flown into Madonna’s arms in London.

But Mercy wasn’t allowed time to play with toys or settle into her new life. Instead, within hours of arriving, Madonna whisked the child and her new siblings Lourdes, 12, Rocco, eight and David, three, to her first lesson in the controversial Kabbalah faith.

Madonna's Adoption the Malawian Way

Madonna, Adoption, Kabbalah & Colonialism

It's a done deal: after pledging 12 million dollar to Malawi, the Malawian Supreme Court allowed Madonna to adopt Mercy James.

The Guardian's below article is worth reading:

Madonna, Mercy and Malawi: her fight to adopt a second African child

Three years ago a storm of protest blew up when Madonna adopted David Banda from a Malawian orphanage. Today the country's highest court is due to decide whether she can now adopt four-year-old Mercy James. Jacques Peretti tracks down the girl's family and asks: what's best for Mercy?

ANOUK - MODERN WORLD

Well these days adoption is a hot thing,
you can get a child for nearly nothing.
You take them home to a nanny,
buy off ur guilt with toys and candy.