RK (a new MMW contributor!)
As if adoption weren’t difficult enough: making the decision to adopt, dealing with one’s family and their 2 cents on the matter, the infuriating waiting game… when really all adoptive parents are trying to do is GOOD by opening their home and hearts to a child who maybe would not have been given a full life with their original parents… and now there’s THIS to wrestle with: The possibility of baby brokers. Sick. Sick sick sick.

All Carrie West wanted was a chance to care for an orphaned child. But when she traveled to Vietnam five years ago, she says, she got something else: a quick lesson on the murky world of international adoptions. Here’s how she tells the story: Informed by her adoption facilitator that Thuy, the little girl she had planned to adopt, had fallen deathly ill with tuberculosis, she ended up taking a different child. But Thuy’s plight stayed with her, and she sought out updates on her condition. Eventually, she learned that the child, far from being ill or convalescing, had been adopted by someone else–long before…

Last year, there were nearly 23,000 adoptions from overseas by American parents, a number that has been increasing as domestic adoptions become more rare. “Your neighborhood health club is more heavily regulated,” says Trish Maskew, executive director of Ethica, a nonprofit outfit that advocates for better international adoption laws. “The industry allows unlicensed facilitators to work without oversight. The U.S. government refuses to act, and consumers walk into this blind.”