There are many factors to why this is happening and it was interesting to uncover why there is a difference of thousands of children not being adopted compared to the early 2000’s. I learned that the main reasons have to do with modern acceptance and not having negative stigma around what women choose to do with their children, and also prices have changed the chances of children being adopted internationally. New Fees Make Intercountry Adoption More Expensive. (2018, February 6). Retrieved from https://www.adoptioncouncil.org/blog/2018/02/new-fees-make-intercountry-adoption-more-expensive.
The National Council for Adoption sent out a press release on international adoptions prices rising. On February 1st, 2018 on the U.S department of state released a statement saying that international adoptions prices were rising by a “triple-digit percentage increase in accreditation fees.” Chuck Johnson the president and CEO of NCFA spoke on the issue saying that it will lead to less children being adopted and that the department of state adoption division have a destructive policy that will make international adoption unaffordable. Johnson speaks again on the matter saying that the Department of State has failed in leadership causing many international adoptions to decline tragically annually, and that many orphans worldwide in need of a family will never have one because families in the U.S simply can’t afford it.
I think that this is a major cause of why adoption rates are dropping drastically. It’s beginning to become really unaffordable. The families who do want to adopt aren’t because the prices are drastically rising. And the ones who are suffering the most are orphans who will never find a loving home. There was no author to this blog, but it seems to share the viewpoint of the CEO and President of NSFA Chuck Johnson on the matter of the U.S Department of State's decisions.
Graff starts off with strong by saying that many children from Guatemala were adopted by U.S families between 1998 and 2008. In those years Graff states that 30,000 children were adopted, so 1 in 100 children born in Guatemala was adopted by U.S families. But the background story to this isn’t as happy as it seems. Graff claims that this was a corrupt way for people to make money. Graff says that many of the children were bought, kidnapped, or coerced away from families that actually wanted to raise them. Graff mentions a story written by Erin Seigal called Finding Fernanda A story about an American mother who unknowingly adopted two kidnapped children from a guatemalan mother. Graff mentions an investigation of a guatemalan woman who in the span of three years gave up 33 children to adoption. She claimed that all of them were hers. No one questioned anything because she was going by the legal limit to put children up for adoption. Graff also mentions that the corruption would go as far as doctors and nurses who would tell the young mothers their child died at birth.
This is one of the major reasons why the U.S has blocked adopting from Guatemala. The corruptness of baby trafficking was getting extreme. It’s not just Guatemala whose this corrupt in adoption. It makes sense to why international adoption is being well regulated now and prices are rising to adopt these children who might not be orphans at all.