Friday 7 March 2014

Thorny Issues


I was delighted to get my first comment today! Unfortunately, I felt I had to delete it, as it was a virulent attack, which included several ill-wishes towards me and my family. 

It did, however, give me a chance to talk about the thorny issue in adoption, and especially international adoption: that of corruption. 

It is an issue that occupied mine and my husband's minds as we considered adoption from Ethiopia. We put a lot of research into ethical adoption and we read, listened to and researched corruption and ethics in Ethiopia. 

One of the steps that we took included going through a not-for-profit organisation, like International Social Services (whose job is to safeguard the rights of children worldwide). As to the amount of money our adoption cost us I would like to mention that it was nowhere near rge number that the comment suggested. 

Here are a few of the resources we looked at while preparing to make a decision regarding adoption:


The Creating a Family podcast makes an interesting point, in that the fact that there is corruption does not mean that there might not also be need for orphans to find homes. The solution is not banning international adoption altogether, but finding ways to safeguard families, find and uproot corruption and commit to ethical practice. She mentions, though please don't take my word for it and listen to the podcast yourself, that often after international adoption shuts down, children still flood the orphanages (she talks of Guatemala, if I remember correctly, where corruption was very wide-spread) yet there is poor care and no hope of in-country adoption. 

The thorny issue is this: corruption in international adoption exists. It is our responsibilty to make sure, to investigate, to the best of our ability, our agency, our adoption provider, the orphanages, their social workers, the stories of our children.

I have not written about it because I genuinely feel that there are people way more qualified who can say it better than I ever could. But I wanted to say that we have been aware of it, acutely so, during our decision and during our adoption. 

No comments:

Post a Comment

LinkWithin

Related Posts Plugin for WordPress, Blogger...