Last week I posted about E.J. Graff’s article, “The Baby Business,” in which Graff described some countries’ practice of international adoption as “all but free of meaningful law, regulation, or oversight.” Since then, adoption professionals have been responding to the article, including a response by Dr. Jane Aronson. For anyone not familiar with Dr. Aronson, she is CEO and founder of the international organization, Worldwide Orphans Foundation. She is also a pediatrician, known in the adoption world as the “Orphan Doctor.”

In her response to “The Baby Business,” Dr. Aronson states that governments would best serve their children by focusing efforts on addressing what Aronson calls the “international orphan crisis,” a crisis whose magnitude is far more devastating than any earthquake or volcano. Instead of creating more punitive and bureaucratic regulations around international adoption, Aronson says governments should address the underlying reasons why parents relinquish their children for adoption in the first place. Funds should be committed to creating infrastructures designed to keep families intact. Such infrastructures include, but are not limited to, social services, medical care, and free education.

Otherwise, says Dr. Aronson, “…we are effectually ensuring that families will be torn apart by poverty, illness, ignorance and fear, and that children will be abandoned to orphanages or a life on the streets or in brothels. This would be the case even if there were no…international adoption.” (more…)

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