Bashir is on the money here -

but lets face it we in the west have commodified children - we are engineering the type we want when we have them and how we have them - and then there are those who can just fly of to some third world baby mart and shop around:

and woe betide any health practitoner who is involved in the delivery of a sub standard product - while there is no money back garauntee there is always a law suit to off set pain and suffering from what is usually bad luck - of course there is always the option of flushing the faulty ones away as well.

Well, I suppose I will be the first to respond to this as an adoptive mom of 3 children. 2 from Russia and 1 from China. First I will tell you that the orphanages were appalling. The care? they were given was minimal. My daughter had bruses on her legs where they would strap her to a potty to train her. 1 of my sons was mutilated in the care of his birth mom and weighed 16 # by the time we got him when he was 2 years old. The other has severe birth defects and as an adult would have been no more than a begger. But according to most of you I should not have gotten my children and stuck with the USA for kids where there is always the chance that birth mom or dad will suddenly show up? And the kids in foster care in the US are in MUCH better shape and have real hope for a future than the kids overseas. When we adopted each of our children we took as much as we could carry to donate to the orphanages (clothes, medicines, etc.) to try to help others. Not everyone who adopts internationally is made of money and this was all we could do. (Especially considering our Chinese daughter was paid for by putting a 2nd mortgage on our home.) Yes, I think the celebrities can certainly afford to do more than my family was able to do. Perhaps they did. There are a lot of little lives in this world that can be bettered. If you feel so strongly about people adopting American children, start looking at the horrible system there is in place which makes it so incredibly difficult to do! Adopting internationally was not easy but at least it was do-able. We started out to foster with the intent to adopt and were told by the agency that this was a poor thing to do as most kids ended up going back to their possibly abusive, etc. birth parents. No thank you!

Watching those Television adverts of children in deprived areas, made us think of sponsoring two children. We contacted the respective agencies and received all the information, seeing the pictures of these children and reading of their circumstances and environment, brought the reality of that other world out there to us.

However reading of basic needs in the villages, we took another approach and decided to contribute monthly through a secular charity to community needs in those villages.

JSV,

Great to hear your story. I think your children are infinitely better off and some of the luckiest children in the world :)

cheers

Adopt a village! I wish we had the resources. I would say all the adoptive parents I know are like JSV - not rich. Still all the adoptive parents I know support their child's family with money and gifts and/or sponsor children through WV etc, raise money for orphanages, etc.

Nothing in Mr Goth's article alarms, offends or threatens me. Yes as adopting parents we have a need but we would only want to adopt children who are genuinely orphaned or relinquished freely. Countries that are signatory to the Hague convention on international adoption are obliged to ensure this is the case.

I don't know about Malawi but the US have not signed the Hague convention on international adoption that outlaws buy babies - some argument about the constitution preventing any American from making a profit (most US adoptions of children o/s is facilitated by a private agent).

What annoys Australians adopting from overseas is the time. Our first adoption took 4 years. We are up to 4 1/2years waitng for the second. Compare that to celebrity adoptions.

And we are almost paying as much as the celebrities because government agencies charge $10 300 to apply and then full cost recovery for costs of assessing your application, migration sponsorship and visas, court costs, travel, foster care fees, agents fees etc. Its the orphanages that miss out on their cut except for any voluntary donation adoptive parents make.

Our child was relinquished for adoption when the father was killed in a car accident, the mother died and left a 16 year old to care for a 9 year old and 2 year old. Our child comes from a country where the average life expectancy is 45. We now have three daughters 1 here and 2 in our child's country of origin. Don't ask me why we can't bring the other 2 siblings to Australia - it will just make me angry again.