Janus under the umbrella

Since on April 1, 2008 the Hague Convention on Intercountry Adoption entered into force for the United States, one of the shadier aspects of international adoption becomes even more prominent. I am talking about umbrella-ing here of course.

Umbrella-ing is the practice of unaccredited agencies to work with an agency that is accredited to gain access to a foreign adoption market that would otherwise be closed to them. The Hague treaty does not forbid this practice, though for several reasons, I think they should, especially now that the US has become a part of it.

First of all the American adoption market has a disproportionate number of agencies compared to other countries, which makes the pressure to umbrella much bigger than ever before. At the moment the US counts around 2000 adoption agencies. Italy, that has the second highest number of agencies per capita, has around 75 adoption agencies. The number of agencies in the USA is in absolute numbers more than a magnitude higher, but  also relative to the population size 8.5 times higher than that of Italy.

On top of that, the American adoption market is much more commercial than in any other country, with adoption facilitators and adoption attorneys operating and adoption agencies around that have a for-profit status. Together with a free market ideology that seems to be ingrained in the American way of life, it cannot but lead to pushing the boundaries of the Hague treaty to a point where it is more a trade agreement than a means to control inter-country adoptions.

Umbrella-ing is already a shady business as of today. Some countries disallow it, among them are Russia and Vietnam. Of course it does happen. Especially with respect to Russia this is an established fact. We only have to look at the setup of AMREX, to see the umbrella-ing taking place.

For years AMREX, a for-profit organization, worked as an adoption facilitator for over 40 adoption agencies, all but two or three of them being accredited at the time in Russia. Still despite the illegality of umbrella-ing in Russia, non-accredited agencies placed Russian children in the US. At least that's how it looks from the American side. Seen from the Russian side, there was no AMREX, there were just these few agencies that were placing loads of children all around the United States.

In that sense international adoption is a two-faced liar and many of the non-accredited agencies know how to play the game. Despite not being accredited many still have so-called programs for that particular country, not always telling their customers it is in fact an umbrella construct. Once the customer has signed the contract with the non-accredited agency and the payments are in, a secondary contract, with an accredited agency, pops up. Most of these contracts contain confidentiality clauses that forbid the customer to ever show the contract to any third party. Eager to receive a child many prospective adoptive parents sign the contract.

Because of the confidentiality clauses in contracts, much of this is not readily out in the open. People that signed those contract are rightfully afraid to speak up and those that didn't sign those contracts rarely know about it.

Knowing how shady the underworld of international adoption is, we should urge the Hague convention to take a firm stance against umbrella-ing. Accreditation should not be just an administrative measure, to make a country look as if being ethical in doing adoptions abroad. Accreditation should mean the organizations involved all uphold the highest standards possible and behave transparently according to those standards. That's why Umbrella-ing should be made illegal altogether and those agencies that break the rules should loose their license as a consequence.