What's wrong with adopting from home?

An article in this week's Time, "The Baby Deficit" discusses how "changing attitudes about international adoption are creating heartbreak for American families." The article tells the story of one family and their challenges in adopting a child from Kyrgyzstan with a secondary focus on the amount of international children adopted by American families. Many countries are enacting policies to curb and prevent adoptions of their children by foreign citizens. Most claim the halt to adoptions is in order to reduce the corruption that is often present and improve the quality for the children. Others may be doing it for more political reasons.

American adopted 22,991 foreign children in 2004 and 9,319 in 2011. That is a large number. I would be curious to know how many American children are adopted by American families in each of those years. Not having this information means this post is just unsubstantiated thoughts, but perhaps at least some of them are merited.

It seems that more families are looking abroad to expand their families, when they are unable or unwilling to begin their own. I wonder why they do not first look to this country. I have heard that the regulations make it difficult to do so and there are certain rights granted to the biological parents that could allow them to change their minds about adoption. Yet when adopting a foreign child can take many years, trips to the nation, and tens of thousands of dollars in costs, I wonder if the issues with the American system is just perceived.

Since 1999, 66,630 children were adopted into the United State from China, with Russia (45,112), Guatemala (29,731), South Korea (18,605), and Ethiopia (11,524) following. Two of these nations are still developing and two have severe ideological differences with the US. Prospective parents interviewed in the article state that they are adopting the children from foreign countries to give them an improved life and others invoke calls from scripture.

Not all of the adopted children are doomed to a life of poverty and terribleness. Many could probably grow up quite fine in their own cultures without any problems. Yet it is how some people view these cultures that results in the general categorization that all these foreign babies have no chance of a good, productive life. But this view is extremely skewed by American standards and is rather reminiscent of late colonial times. People looking to adopt should look first to the home front - there are plenty of children here who need a good family to escape from poverty and grow into good citizens. The challenge, then, is to realize that America is not perfect and there are problems here too. Just because one does not think about them does not mean they do not exist.