Last week the US Department of State released its annual report on inter-country adoption for fiscal year 2012.

For the 8th consecutive year, the number of inter-country adoptions showed a decline, albeit a smaller one than the year before.

This weekend, the Christian Post published its third installment of their saga about inter-country adoption, under the title: Is the US State Dept. Opposed to Inter-Country Adoption?

More than a century ago, Mark Twain popularized the expression "There are three kinds of lies: lies, damned lies, and statistics". In this post we'd like to focus on the most egregious of these lies, statistics.

In 2007, we started collecting inter-country adoption statistics, which we present on our various country pages. Our first source for these statistics was the website of the Hague Conference on Private International Law, which at the time, published the statistics of several countries for the years 2001-2004.

Last week the US Department of State released its annual report on inter-country adoption for fiscal year 2010.

This week the U.S. State Department presented the figures of intercountry adoption for FY 2009, and for the fifth year in a row the numbers have dropped.

Here are the total number of inter-county adoptions for the last 6 years:

2004: 22,990
2005: 22,734
2006: 20,680
2007: 19,609
2008: 17,475
2009: 12,753

Yesterday, the Associated Press reported the State Department released the international adoption figures for fiscal year 2009. The reported numbers are no surprise, more than a month a ago, we already published the preliminary numbers, and the figure presented now are nearly identical.

This week preliminary figures for the number of children adopted from abroad were made public. Not surprisingly the downward trend continued, and it is to be expected that in there were at least 5000 inter-country adoptions less in FY 2009 than in the previous year.

A big contributor to the decrease is Guatamala, which in 2008 still exported 4100 children and has since stopped inter-country adoptions, except for those cases that were pending. It is to be expected some 750 children have been adopted from Guatemala in 2009.

Almost two years ago we started compiling intercountry adoption statistics to present on our country pages. At the time we had hoped it would be as simple as going to the websites of the various central authorities and download a spread sheet with data, but it ended up to be much more difficult than that.

According to the US Department of States, Bureau of Consular Affairs the following number of children where adopted by the United States of America from Guatemala:

According to Guatemalan authorities as they published their figures to the Hague Conference on Private International Law, the following number of children were sent to the USA for adoption:

With the exception of 2003 all years show Guatemale saying they are exporting more children to the USA than the USA says they import.

Altogether there are 247 children missing from these figures.

Where did they go?