[jandc]

I cant seem to cut and paste the article but the New York Times did an article on Guatemalan adoptions and it is on the front page. Take a moment to read. The New York Times - Breaking News, World News & Multimedia

[fochtru]

Interesting article...thanks for sharing it.

[sammibag]

interesting!!

[churchvillemom]

I try not to get upset about articles like this, but this one has really gotten under my skin.
I don't believe most, if any, of us adopting from Guatemala are ignorant to the fact that there are problems with the current system. But, for the reporter to intimate that we are "rushing in" specifically to take advantage of the flaws in the system is hugely insensitive and niave. I think this article must have been written by someone who knows little about any adoption process and did not consider the effects his words might have on families who are waiting for the babies they have dreamed of and grown to love to come home. And how hurt our beloved children would feel if they ever read this article and believed even for a second that we adopted them for any other reason than love.
Um, also, they sell suntan lotion in Marriots located near a beach right next to the figurines of dolphins and lighthouses. It's called catering to customers and trying to meet their needs. So what if they sell diapers at the Marriot?
And, we did keep our son's birthname as a middle name and are going to take him back to visit Guatemala when he's older.
And, aren't most birthmothers sad when they give a child for adoption? That does not mean the child was taken from them through dishonest means by a corrupt "baby broker".
Ugh, I could go on but instead perhaps I'd better go take some Midol, eat some icecream, and kiss my sweet, dear son whose dad and I are blessed to be the parents of and who could not be more loved by us.
Sorry for the rant but, now that it's in writing, a do feel a bit better.

[jennifervan]

This article made me so mad. I wanted to tell them that it IS NOT that easy to adopt from Guatemala.
We are at 18 months and this process is not as easy as they have described it to be....maybe for some people but not for us. It just made me sick the way they seemed to show it as something you could quickly do.
Jennifer

And YES we are keeping Ana Gabriela's name.
But first we need to be able to bring her home.

[sak9645]

Although I am not a Guatemala parent, I am upset about the article, too.

Yes, a lot of kids are being adopted from Guatemala. But look at the facts about the country.

Guatemala has a very, very high birth rate, especially among the indigenous ("Indian") population. No one is paying birthmothers to conceive children. They are having lots of children because they often lack education about reproduction, because marrying young and having lots of children is the norm in their culture, and because birth control is viewed negatively, both by their religious leaders and by their spouses.

The indigenous women are often desperately poor. They may not speak Spanish; their language is often derived from ancient Mayan languages. Often illiterate in any language, or with just a grammar school education, they and the fathers of their children cannot get good jobs. The women, if they are lucky, wind up doing domestic work; the men wind up doing manual labor, if they can find work at all. The men often do not help with child care, and a young woman with six or eight children often winds up shouldering the whole burden of their care.

The earnings of these people do not allow them to support the housefuls of children they may have by age 30. Placing their children for adoption is often the only way that they can guarantee that their children will have enough to eat. They don't need to be bribed to give up their children; they know that they have no money for food, medicine, and such. They don't want to see the children die.

Certainly, it would be wonderful if the indigenous women could be helped to get an education, and to get good jobs, so that they can support their children. Certainly, it would be wonderful if the indigenous women could be taught about reproduction and contraception, and could be empowered to tell their boyfriends and husbands that they must use condoms, because they can't afford to raise more children. But these kinds of changes aren't going to happen any time soon. Even if there were organizations trying to do these things, cultural change happens very slowly.

It would also be wonderful if a woman who had to place a child for adoption could place that child with a domestic family. But the fact is that it isn't going to happen, in most cases. Guatemala is sharply divided between "haves", who are largely of European origin, and "have nots", who are largely of the indigenous population. The light skinned Guatemalans of European heritage simply do not want to adopt the dark skinned indigenous babies, even if they support adoption. And many Guatemalans, like people in many cultures around the world, won't adopt any child, because they believe in the importance of the "blood tie."

Again, it would be great if the leaders of Guatemala would advocate for cultural change, so that well to do Guatemalans would want to adopt. However, even if they had this mind set, which they do not, it could take decades till meaningful numbers of domestic adoptions began to occur.

The bottom line is that, unless foreigners are allowed to adopt, Guatemalan children who cannot be supported by their birthparents will wind up living on the streets, or dying of malnutrition and other issues. And, in fact, we know that plenty of Guatemalan kids are already living on the streets -- immersed in a culture of theft, prostitution, violence, drugs, and so on. These are the kids who WEREN'T adopted. Contrast them with the children who WERE adopted overseas -- kids who are able to go to school, have loving families, have enough to eat, have the prospect of good jobs when they are older, and so on. Which option, pray tell, is better? I think the answer is clear.

Certainly, wherever there is misfortune, there are people who try to take advantage of that misfortune for personal gain. There are undoubtedly people who buy and steal babies from birthmothers, then try to sell them to the highest bidder. And there are undoubtedly people who prey on the desperation of infertile couples in the U.S. and other countries, offering them illegally acquired children for enormous fees.

But the U.S. government and the Guatemalan government have worked fairly aggressively to reduce the likelihood that such people will succeed in their nefarious schemes. As an example, the Guatemalan government requires birthmothers to sign relinquishment papers on four separate occasions, giving them ample opportunity to change their minds about adoption. And the U.S. Embassy requires DNA testing of the children and the putative birthmothers, to ensure that the women relinquishing the babies are, in fact, the actual birthmothers, and not folks who have stolen children.

Certainly, more could be done. If Guatemala would make a good faith effort to implement Hague Convention #33, which it ratified, it would be of some help. And if organizations like UNICEF, instead of trying to prevent adoptions, would focus on SUPPORTING ETHICAL INTERNATIONAL ADOPTION, that would go even farther to help the country.

Wishful thinking isn't going to solve Guatemala's problems. The fact is that the country has a problem with too many children who can't be supported by their families. That problem is not going to be addressed by banning international adoption. It should be addressed, short term, by doing everything possible to get rid of the unscrupulous lawyers and facilitators, and to promote international adoption conducted in a highly ethical manner. And, of course, longer term, it should be addressed through efforts to improve the wellbeing of the country's indigenous population.

Sharon

[jandc]

I'm glad to see I am not alone. This article gave my husband and I both knots in our stomach. We did our research and as we can all probably agree that no system is perfect, there seem to be many safeguards in place to make baby trafficing extremely difficult. We have been blessed with 2 beautiful boys and would never consider adoption from a country if we thought the system were so easily manipulated and corrupt. We have met so many couples for whom adoption is the only way they will be blessed with children. NOT ONE has been so blinded by a CUTE child as the article suggests. It is insulting. THis is NOT an easy process and a decision I just don't believe is taken lightly by anyone. Many of these birth mothers have other children and for a miriad of reasons decide this is the best for their baby. That is not a decision a mother makes lightly. The article talks of a 12 year old mother. HELLO? Does that not pretty much sum it up right there? Our baby girl was always Isabelle until we met her, birth name, Ana Lucia. That is who she is to us. She will always know her heritage. I am a 40yr old learning spanish for goodness sakes along with a 4 and 6 yr old boy. Thanks for listening to my tirade. I will go look for the tylenol as well!

[DD Amasa]

It's just so offensive. We're all rushing in to take advantage of poor women who are coerced into selling their babies. And we won't give our names or talk as we slink into the country to steal the children.

There have been so many of these stories lately I wonder if all these reporters are actually spending time in Guatemala and seriously researching the facts, both of adoption and the lives of these children and their birth families, or if they are just repeating what is spoon-fed to them by the anti adoption groups. There have been too many stories recently for me to believe that months ago a slew of reporters nationwide all independently decided to spend months researching adoptions in Guatemala. And then end up all writing from the same angle using the same words.

[Mary Mulcahy]

But aren't we rushing to finish and start adoptions before the Hague. We want to either adopt a child or perhaps a sibling for child we already have from Guatemala. I don't think that its wrong to maybe move plans up to meet the deadline. The fact is that Guatemala which is the size of our state of Tenn. was only third to China and Russia in IA. Guatemala is much smaller and the fact that there is no central authority leave the program open to a lot of critism from UNICEF and others. For some it is not easy to adopt from Guatemala due to their situation (underage birth mom, legal problems, PGN investigations, Embassy investigations). But put your personal feelings aside, don't you think that we need to look at the large numbers of children being adopted and the process of attorneys hiring "baby finders"? Don't you think there should be an outline of the where the money goes in the process and more of the adoption fees going for aid and education and support of the children left behind?

Edited to remove professional adoption service name. THere are many attorneys like this in Guatemala, but it is the rotten apples that operate like snakes, taking the money, giving poor service and harrassing potential birth mothers. And of course the agencies that lie, and work with that slime...all for the sake of a dollar they should be ashamed of themselves.

yes, this articles makes me mad, however it should also get us all thinking about how to improve the process to keep it open and make it better for the children. I don't think implementation of the Hague is the end all answer, I not really sure what the answer should be, but I would like to see more accounting for the money spent and more services given to birth mothers during the process about the adoption plan they are making. I would like to see more p-adoptive parents look at the agencies and facilitators they are using and hold those people more accountable.
Just thinking as hard as it is to read this articles, we all have to answer to our children some day
Mary

[tkincalifornia]

in case you can't link to the article...tk

November 5, 2006
Guatemala System Is Scrutinized as Americans Rush in to Adopt
By MARC LACEY
GUATEMALA CITY — There are business hotels and tourist hotels, and then there is the Guatemala City Marriott. Catering to American couples seeking to adopt, it is a baby hotel of sorts, as the crush of strollers, the cry of infants and the emotional scenes that play out regularly in the lobby testify.

“Oh! Oh! Oh!” shouted a woman from Kansas the other day as she scooped a little girl she hoped to adopt from the arms of her foster mother and held her up toward the chandelier. “You’re just the cutest little thing.”

Not far away, a woman from Texas was beaming at another soon-to-be adopted girl near the reception desk and comparing notes with an Illinois couple, who had just picked up their new chubby-cheeked, black-haired son.

Guatemala, where nearly one in every 100 children is adopted by an American family, ranks third behind much larger nations, China and Russia, when it comes to providing babies to American couples.

The pace of adoptions and the fact that mothers here, unlike in other places, are sometimes paid for their babies have brought mounting concern and the prospect of new regulation that may significantly reduce the number of Guatemalan babies bound for the United States next year, or end it altogether.

Critics of the adoption system here — privately run and uniquely streamlined — say it has turned this country of 12 million people into a virtual baby farm that supplies infants as if they were a commodity. The United States is the No. 1 destination.

While the overall demand for international adoptions has increased over the last decade, adoption from Guatemala has outpaced many other nations. From 1995 to 2005, American families adopted 18,298 Guatemalan babies, with the figure rising nearly every year. Though most families are undoubtedly unaware of the practices here, foreign governments and international watchdogs, like Unicef, have long been scrutinizing Guatemala’s adoption system.

In other countries, adoptive parents are sought out for abandoned children. In Guatemala, children are frequently sought out for foreign parents seeking to adopt and given up by their birth mothers to baby brokers who may pay from a few hundred dollars to $2,000 for a baby, according to interviews with mothers and experts.

Most babies that find their way to America are conceived in the countryside. Some of the birth mothers have brought shame on the family by becoming pregnant out of wedlock. Others are married but had affairs after their husbands emigrated to the United States. Inevitably, the pregnancies were not planned.

Poverty is a way of life in these villages, and infant mortality, at 36 per 1,000 births in 2002, is among the highest in the hemisphere.

Those children who survive have a rough start, with almost half of them chronically malnourished. Guatemala’s adoption system is run not by judges, courts and bureaucrats — as in most other nations — but by some 500 private lawyers and notaries, who hire baby brokers and maintain networks of pediatricians and foster mothers to tend children awaiting adoption. They form a powerful and well-heeled lobby.

“We’re rescuing these children from death,” said Susana Luarca Saracho, one of the country’s busiest adoption lawyers, who has fought for years to keep the current system in place.

“Here, we don’t live — we survive,” she said. “Which would a child prefer, to grow up in misery or to go to the United States, where there is everything?”

To adopt any foreign child, Americans must clear numerous bureaucratic hurdles in the United States, including approval by the Department of Homeland Security. Often, in the baby’s home country, the adoptive parents must make several court appearances.

In Guatemala, the required paperwork can often be handled in one visit, with newly constituted families sometimes spending less than a week in a Guatemala City hotel before leaving for the United States. So many adoptive parents pass through the Marriott — hundreds per year, employees say — that diapers, wet wipes and formula are available in the gift shop, next to the postcards and Guatemalan curios.

“Everyone who goes to a hotel here sees the scene: North Americans meeting with Guatemalan children,” said Manuel Manrique, Unicef’s representative in Guatemala. “Most people think, ‘How great that those children are going to have a better life.’ But they don’t know how the system is working. This has become a business instead of a social service.”

The adoptive parents are often so emotionally involved in the process that they do not adequately investigate the inner workings of this country’s system, adoption advocates acknowledge. The American couples at the Marriott were reluctant to talk or give their names.

“There is sometimes a great deal of naïveté on the part of adoptive parents,” said Susan Soon-keum Cox, a vice president at Holt International Children’s Services, an American nonprofit agency that works in Guatemala and elsewhere, and who was herself adopted from Korea by Americans in 1956. “It’s don’t ask, don’t tell.”

The system is not without controversy in Guatemala. Josefina Arellano Andrino is in charge of the government department that signs off on all adoptions but, for now, is permitted to halt only those involving false paperwork or outright fraud. She relishes the prospect of additional oversight.

“Babies are being sold, and we have to stop it,” she said. “What’s happening to our culture that we don’t take care of our children?”

Alarmed to see so many foreign adoptions in Guatemala, members of the Council of Central American Human Rights Attorneys, who were meeting at the Marriott in August, issued a statement questioning whether the country’s system “converts the child into an object, like a piece of merchandise.”

Key to that business are jaladoras, as the baby brokers are called locally. They ply the Guatemalan countryside looking for pregnant women and girls in a fix. Adoption is presented as the perfect answer, one that will leave the child with a wealthy family and the mother better off as well, by paying for her medical bills and providing some direct money surreptitiously.

Although most countries forbid paying mothers who put up their children for adoption, it occurs regularly here, an open secret that mothers are told to deny if anyone asks.

“They gave me some money,” a 12-year-old mother acknowledged on condition of anonymity in an interview in October at a government office when asked if she had been compensated for giving up her baby. “I don’t know how much. They gave my father some money, too.”

Her father, interviewed separately, denied he had received anything.The payments strike many in the adoption world here as a form of benevolence. Some American couples say that if they are going to pay $25,000 to $30,000 for an adopted child — which they routinely do in the fees that go to American adoption agencies, Guatemalan lawyers and others involved in the system — shouldn’t the birth mother get something?

The Hague Convention on Intercountry Adoptions has an answer. Guatemala’s president, Óscar Berger, signed the treaty in 2002, and after years of legal challenges the nation’s Constitutional Court ruled definitively this year that the country must abide by it.

The treaty states that international adoptions should come only after a loving home, preferably with the child’s relatives, is sought in country. It also aims “to prevent the abduction, the sale of, or traffic in children” and limits payments to “only costs and expenses, including reasonable professional fees.”

Several signing countries, including Canada, Germany and Britain, already restrict Guatemalan adoptions because of apparent breaches. The United States has said it plans to join the convention next year. At that point, officials say, Washington intends to stop approving adoptions from countries that do not meet the treaty’s standards.

“Guatemala is the principal concern that we have,” said Catherine Barry, a deputy assistant secretary of state for consular affairs.

Baby brokers tread carefully as they seek pregnant women in the countryside, where many villagers believe what is apparently a rural myth that there is an active market overseas for children as organ donors.

A few months back, in a village outside the provincial town of Nahuala, two women and a man went house to house selling baby slings, pieces of cloth used to carry infants across the back. It was a ruse, neighbors recounted, to find out who would give birth soon.

The traveling salespeople talked one young woman in the hillside village of Xolnahuola into giving up her baby. She was single and despondent and they offered her about $750, the villagers said.

When the three returned as the pregnant woman’s term neared its end, her parents, who opposed giving up the child, alerted neighbors, who gathered angrily at the scene. The two women’s hair was forcibly cut off, a traditional form of Mayan justice meant to shame offenders. The baby brokers were taken away by the authorities and later released.

In early October, villagers in Ixtahuacán killed one person with machetes, captured another 12 and set fire to five cars when fear spread that a gang of child snatchers was in the area. The police said it remained unclear whether the outsiders had actually been looking for children.

Ms. Luarca, the adoption lawyer, said such episodes have nothing to do with the children she handles, who come from poor mothers who cannot afford to raise them and who give them up willingly without payment.

“We’re not a criminal organization,” she said of Guatemala’s adoption lawyers. “What we are doing is a good thing. At this moment in time it is the only way out for these children. I look forward to the time when they can grow up well here.”

In her opinion, though, that time has not arrived. New regulations will “create a bureaucratic labyrinth,” she says, and she continues to lobby lawmakers to preserve the current system.

Around the corner from her office, Ms. Luarca runs an adoption home, clean, orderly and with attentive nannies roaming among the rooms.

With the prospect of tighter rules, business is surging. Seventy children are there, the older ones in miniature bunks and the many babies wrapped in blankets in cribs.

They came from mothers not unlike a teenager who was encountered at a government office, signing away her baby to a Pennsylvania couple, and a bit melancholy to be doing so. She and her baby, like all birth mothers and their children, must have their DNA tested for the American Embassy to approve the adoption.

“I hope she has a nice family and lives a happy life,” said the 17-year-old mother, who would not give her name. Fidgeting as she spoke, she said she hoped that her daughter, Antonietta, would return one day to visit her and that the adoptive parents would keep the newborn’s name.

Both prospects, those involved in the process say, are unlikely.



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[brinalilah]

“Oh! Oh! Oh!” shouted a woman from Kansas the other day as she scooped a little girl she hoped to adopt from the arms of her foster mother and held her up toward the chandelier. “You’re just the cutest little thing.”

The article lost me at this point- how very patronising of the journalist to intimate this woman was being, in her view, patronising. This is such a special moment, doesn't every mother just melt the moment they get to hold their child for the first time?

I agree no system is perfect but this article has a bias that is so disheartening. I try to think positively when I read these types of articles as it give us a chance to think about this whole process and educate others who read this type of thing and want to ask us questions.

[nina03]

You know, this article really bothers me - it sure would be nice for these papers to write a balanced article rather than this one sided garbage.

[Mariais5]

I will comment that we DID keep both of our of daughter's birthnames. Will our children ever visit Guatemala again? Every year is our plan.. We have become personally involved with a missionary in Guatemala and plan to make missions trips each year ~ helping villages to build churches and working with a home for street children.. We are excited about the day that our two Guatemalan daughters can actively be involved with giving back to their birth country. I also pray that one day they will meet their birth families..

[knarfmo]

This article was very similar to one that was shared on this forum a little over a week ago - to the point I emailed the author of the original article about this. The NY Times article isn't plagiarizing the other article, but it sure does seem "inspired" by it. I think the NY Times was going to stop doing that kind of thing?

[Guatmom2006]

I thought the reporter contradicted himself. One sentence he said Guatemala was a baby farm, then the next sentence, he described terror of what happens to children there (malnourishment, poverty, etc...) I quit reading when he said we pay 25-35K FOR an adopted child. Sensationalism at its worst.