parents and the permanent removal and placement of children is arranged today by attorneys, physicians, and anyone who hangs out a shingle and calls their business an adoption agency. Adoption policy and procedure varies state to state but most states have no regulations requiring educational certification in the field of child welfare to arrange adoptions. Adoption agencies are licensed as any business. L. Anne Babb, adoptive parent and author of Ethics in American Adoption notes: “In other professions and occupations, licensing or certification in a specialty must be earned before an individual can offer expert services in an area. The certified manicurist may not give facials; the certified hair stylist may not offer manicures ….Yet…individuals with professions as different as social work and law, marriage and family therapy, and medicine may call themselves ‘adoption professionals’.” Globally 80% of children in orphanages have families that visit and intend to bring them home. The major cause for temporary care worldwide is poverty, not abuse, neglect or abandonment. Many others have been stolen, kidnapped or coerced from their families by black market baby brokers who sell them to orphanages who prefer to have them adopted internationally because it is more lucrative. Westerners pay $40,000 and more per child, discouraging domestic adoptions in countries in South America, Asia, and Eastern Europe, all of which have been cited for child trafficking scandals. Children pass through so many hands before coming to the West—in a process adoptive father and child and family advocate David M. Smolin, Director, Center for Biotechnology, Law, and Ethics, Samford University, has identified as child laundering—that the recipients have no way of verifying if the child they are adopting is in fact an orphan. Domestically too, expectant mothers are pressured, and coerced, often taken across state lines, isolated, and exploited at a very vulnerable time. These mothers are also without resources and are given housing and medical care, but are pressured to 'voluntarily' sign papers relinquishing their parental rights or being held liable to repay those expense. For all of these reasons, there is a resurgence of and renewed commitment to family preservation. Many countries have stopped allowing children to be adopted internationally, and all have ratified the Hague Convention designed to put into action the principles regarding inter-country adoption which are contained in the Convention on the Rights of the Child (CRC) except the U.S. which is reported to do so