NBC - Rehoming

From the Reuters article: Another parent advertised a child days after bringing her to America. "We adopted an 8-year-old girl from China Unfortunately, We are now struggling having been home for 5 days." The parent asked that others share the ad "with anyone you think may be interested." Reuters analyzed 5,029 posts from a five-year period on one Internet message board, a Yahoo group. On average, a child was advertised for re-homing there once a week. Most of the children ranged in age from 6 to 14 and had been adopted from abroad Ŗ from countries such as Russia and China, Ethiopia and Ukraine. The youngest was 10 months old." I can understand desperate situations in which a child is violent--or has severe special needs that a parent was misled about and is unequipped to handle, but these numbers are staggering. Getting rid of a child after 5 days? Getting rid of a 10-month old? Many of these children aren't "damaged"--they've been taken halfway around the world by strangers and thrust into an alien culture,and probably language in most cases, and then get rejected when they don't morph into somebody's dream child. Some "rehome" the children they don't want and then keep adopting, or trying to adopt (one woman said because being a mother makes her "feel important"), hoping to eventually get the child that they want. And given all the other scandals, who knows how many of these children actually have living parents or extended families in their home countries that lost the children because of poverty or naivete? I'm firmly in the camp that believes that profit needs to be completely eliminated from all aspects of the adoption "industry" (shouldn't be an industry), and that the focus needs to shift to finding good homes for children who truly need them, not finding children for people who want to build their ideal family. The whole mess just breaks my heart.