Adoptions in U.S. Near Six-Year Low as Number of Chinese Orphans Dwindles
By Flavia Krause-Jackson
The number of U.S. foreign adoptions is near a six-year low due to greater barriers overseas and fewer orphans coming from a wealthier China, U.S. Special Adviser for Children’s Issues Susan Jacobs said.
Total adoptions to the U.S. fell last year to 12,753 and will “be somewhere in that ballpark” in 2010, Jacobs said in a telephone interview. “Domestic adoptions in China are on the rise and international adoptions are taking longer, so it’s harder to adopt there.”
Over the next decade, Ethiopia is set to surpass China as the biggest source of U.S. adoptions. The number of children adopted annually from Asia’s biggest economy has dropped to 3,000 from 7,900 over the past five years, State Department figures show. There were 2,277 Ethiopian children placed in American homes in 2009 compared with 442 in 2005, the data show.
After peaking in 2004, total U.S. adoptions began to drop as standards became more stringent and applications from countries such as Vietnam and Guatemala were suspended amid allegations of corruption and fraud. Processing adoptions from Nepal were the latest to be put on hold this year.
Adoptions from Russia, about 10 percent of the U.S. total, also declined. Russian authorities had threatened to suspend adoptions by U.S. citizens after the case earlier this year of a 7-year-old boy who was sent back alone to Moscow by his adoptive American mother.
“The threat was out there but it never came to pass,” Jacobs said. “We have been negotiating with the Russians for a number of months on how adoptions will proceed in the future, and we are getting close to an agreement and we hope we have something signed by the end of the year.”
The adoption figures for the year ended Sept. 30 will be released by the State Department this month.