Foreign adoptions plunge in FY 2009 - more orphans for agencies requested

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.

Not surprising, but none the less distressing, is the enormous growth of Ethiopian adoptions. In 2000, the number of children adopted from Ethiopia was 95, while this year it has sky rocketed to 2277. With this sort of exponential growth, Ethiopia is following in the foot steps of Romania and Guatemala.

Most interesting about the Associated Press article are the responses of Chuck Johnson and Tom DiFilipo.

Chuck Johnson. chief operating officer of the special interest group National Council for Adoption (NCFA), which represents several of the largest christian adoption agencies, made the following statement:

"This drop is not a result of fewer orphans or less interest from American families in adopting children from other countries," he said. "All of us are very discouraged because we see the suffering taking place. We don't know how to fix it without the U.S. government coming alongside."

According to Johnson, the State Department considers its current adoption mandate to be assisting U.S. citizens with foreign adoption procedures and monitoring the integrity of foreign countries' adoption industries.

Johnson said he would like the mandate expanded to give the department explicit authority to encourage more international adoptions, and he suggested a first step could be made if Congress passed a proposed bill called the Families for Orphans Act.

Johnson also said all parties who have tolerated corrupt adoption practices bore some of the blame for the dwindling numbers.

"People in the practice of adoption worldwide have made ethical blunders that have cast a shadow over intercountry adoptions," he said. "It's highlighted how difficult it is for some of these countries to adequately supervise the adoption process, and led some countries to decide it's just not worth the effort."

Although remarkable that NCFA acknowledges the fact that corrupt practices contributed to the dwindling numbers of adoption, and that all parties that tolerated this bore some of the blame, Johnson negates that by turning those corrupt practices into ethical blunders. One doesn't make ethical blunders, one commits ethical crimes. A blunder implies good intentions. Child trafficking, coercion, falsified paper work and forged DNA results, are not blunders, those are crimes.

The AP article writes about Tom DiFilipo, president of the Joint Council on International Children’s Services (JCICS), a trade association of adoption service providers, the following:

Thomas DiFilipo, president of the Joint Council on International Children's Services, predicted the numbers for fiscal 2010 would be even lower — down to about 9,800 — if adoptions from Vietnam remained suspended by the U.S. government and China continued to cut back.

DiFilipo said he'd like to see the State Department become a more active promoter of international adoption.

"One of their primary functions is to help potential adoptive parents, when their focus should be on children in need of adoptive families," DiFilipo said. "The Families for Orphans Act would fill that void."

In a way it is good to see both Chuck Johnson and Tom DiFilipo, being so transparent in their call to get the

  Families for Orphans Act 2009 through congress. With dwindling numbers of adoptions, adoption service providers are in dire straights, JCICS even acknowledged pending bankruptcy with their latest effort, Joint Council on International Childrens Services - Stakeholder initiative.

The

Families for Orphans Act aims to give the US government control over the child welfare programs in other countries, to the benefit of adoption service providers in the US. The proposed bill is every adoption agency's pipe dream, aimed at an unprecedented level of access to children in other countries.

We have written before about the

Families for Orphans Act, and demonstrated the incestuous relationships between congress and the adoption industry in relation to this proposed piece of legislation. The plunge inter-country adoptions have  taken, can create just the momentum to pass this atrocity of a bill. Please read Kill the bill: the Families for Orphans Act and the fraudulent ideology of permanency, to learn why this piece of legislation needs to be stopped and why now is the time.