Increasing the incentives
Submitted by Kerry on Sat, 2009-06-27 16:48.
See also:
- Russia to toughen adoption rules for U.S. over Harrison acquittal
- The problem with saving the world's 'orphans'
- A Single Square Picture: A Korean Adoptee's Search for Her Roots
- Serious adoption issues came to the fore in Pune
- Burned by a baby broker
- Where will adoptable American children go? (Amici dei Bambini wants to know.)
- The dark side of Chinese adoptions
- Ethiopia - Better Future Adoption Services case
- A story of adoption
- No children for foreigners
I read yet another article about the ways in which adoption agencies work WITH certain companies/business to help assist Americans interested in international adoption.
When Deanna S. Kellogg made the decision with her husband, David, to go through an international adoption, their adoption agency suggested looking into benefits offered through the companies they worked for. [From "Firms step up the adoption time", Casey Farrar, June 27, 2009, http://sentinelsource.com/articles/2009/06/27/business/news/free/id_361416.txt ]
Since her company did NOT offer adoption incentives, she wrote a letter to her newly-employed vice-president, and six months later an adoption benefit for employees was created. The benefit offers $10,000 to help with adoption costs, AND includes up to two weeks of paid vacation after the adoption.
Later in the article, the adoptive mother of one, (who is on the waiting-list for another child from S. Korea) states:
But without the company program, they probably wouldn’t have decided to adopt again.
“It would have wiped us out, financially,” Kellogg said.
To which, regional manager of Wide Horizons for Children, the largest private, nonprofit adoption agency in New England responds:
“What we are seeing is a significant increase in families who are very educated about whether their employer has adoption benefits and any subsidy or grant money available to for adoption even before they call us. ...” Drotos said. “Families are clearly doing their research, using the Internet, talking to friends, talking to other adoptive families, early on in the adoption process to try to make this work for them.”
Of course many of us know working for a non-profit does not mean there is no salary... and many of us know with each adoption from an orphanage, the orphan-keepers are paid a mandatory donation.... money children rarely see because it's paying management salaries.
Is it any wonder why adoption agencies in the United States encourage PAP's to ask their employers/company owners for adoption assistance? How else will the people working for the international child-market get their perks and salaries?
Just how long will it take for people to see adoption drives and incentives feed into the whole supply/demand side of the adoption coin, making children in certain countries easy prey for those heavily involved in child trafficking schemes?
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the reach of adopters
What even makes it worse is that those adoption subsidies given by employers are tax deducatable, so in the end everybody helps paying for these adoptions. When it comes to curbing inter-country adoption nothing good can be expected from the receiving countries. Of course there are many who want to see it stop, but is too big an interest to continue it. Adoption agencies form a powerful lobby and prospective adopters are a relentless group, usually well educated and relatively affluent. It's interesting to see how far that impact reaches. In the mid-1990's first lady Hilary Clinton interceded to get a group of 28 Romanian children to the USA after their mothers had been trafficked to Hungary (see: http://poundpuplegacy.org/node/25940). When Romania closed its borders in 2001 for inter-country adoption, Colin Powel used NATO negotiations to put pressure on Romania to pass so-called pipe-line cases. The prime ministers of France and Italy did the same. So the reach of prospective adopters is as high as the highest officials in countries. The only ones who can effectively do something about it are the sending countries. It's hard for them to do, because much pressure is put on those countries to maintain the flow of children. The prime example is South Korea, which has tried for at least two decades to get rid of inter-country adoption and so far has not been able to pull it off. Guatemala has closed and opened too many times to count. Romania, while having done relatively well since the ban on adoption, after a political change, is now sabotaging its own child welfare system in order to have an excuse to open up again.
The enormous drive to get what they want and the economic status of prosective adopters cannot be matched in the receiving countries. As much as I am opposed to inter-country adoption, my zeal to make it stop cannot match the zeal of a prospective adopter having the blind ambition to get a child. How can a well reasoned argument ever win of thousands of prospective adopters throwing a temper tantrum?