The Business of Adoption

This article, written by a professor from the Harvard Business School (who also happens to be an adoptive parent), raises some thought provoking questions. It was too long to copy here, so I've included the first page and a link to the rest. It appeared in the Boston Globe Magazine this past Sunday. The Baby Trade

Each year, Massachusetts families adopt some 3,000 children. One Harvard Business School professor asks if these babies shoul have price tags and if the market begs for more regulation.

By Debora L. Spar | February 19, 2006 The home page for Rainbow Kids is designed to rip your heart out. When you log on to Edited, you see color photographs of beautiful, usually somber-looking children. There are some babies, some older kids. Most are toddlers, clasping toys or sporting huge bows in their hair. All these children are available - waiting, you quickly learn, for their "forever families." As you scroll farther, you learn how to search: by country, gender, age. The toughest one is "date added," which shows, in reverse order, how long some children have been waiting. On a recent visit, for example, you could find 6-year-old Bulat, who had been on the list for three and a half years. "He is described as quiet and gentle," the site reports, "and really enjoys playing sports." Ten-year-old Yamile "likes to write and draw ... and dreams of being a doctor when she grows up." At precious.org, another adoption photo listing, you can learn about Sofia - "sweet and smart, sparkly and fun, polite and inquisitive" - or Rafael, an "A+ student" who "is dreaming to have a family." All these children, like all the Rainbow Kids, are orphans. And, essentially, they are all for sale. Officially, of course, selling babies is illegal. The parents who visit Rainbow Kids aren't looking to buy their children; they're hoping to adopt them. In practice, though, adoption is indeed a market, particularly in its international dimension. There is a huge and unsatiated demand for children, the same demand that propels would-be parents to seek out fertility clinics and surrogacy brokers. There is a tragically large supply of "waiting" children and a panoply of intermediaries - adoption agencies, social workers, lawyers - working to match the two sides. There are prices, too, in the adoption trade, differentiated "fees" that clearly distinguish one child from another. Little Anita from Eastern Europe, for example, is a "sweet, affectionate girl" who suffers from fetal alcohol syndrome. Her adoption fees are reduced. Yi-Wei of Korea, an 11-year-old boy found abandoned on the street, comes with a $7,500 private grant. In purely economic terms, Anita and Yi-Wei are only tiny bits of the global baby trade. Although some parents choose adoption instead of (or in addition to) old-fashioned reproduction, many wander onto the Rainbow Kids site after they've exhausted all other channels of child production. In these cases, the market for existing children functions as a nearly perfect substitute for the nonexistent ones, for the children who weren't born as a result of artificial insemination, in vitro fertilization (IVF), or sex. As with the more mechanical forms of reproduction, adoption carries a price tag, ranging from virtually nothing - the cost of adopting a teenager from the US foster system - to more than $35,000, the fully loaded cost for a healthy white Russian infant. Continued... [url]http://www.boston.com/news/globe/magazine/articles/2006/02/19/the_baby_trade/[/url]