All children attach to their parents, whether they are birth parents or not, so when I bumped into a very interesting article about how the Web makes adoption easier but more risky, I thought it would be a good item to mention here on Attachment Parenting too..
The article appears in Wired and it’s titled Web Helps Out Adoption Process.
What you might not realize until reading this is that there’s a lot of money in the adoption business: a typical adoption has a fee of $15,000-$50,000 and so it should be no surprise that there are problems and ethical issues that arise.
For example, some agencies lie about a child’s age or medical condition – particularly an overseas adoption – and the parents don’t find out the truth until they’re already overseas, coming to pick up the baby.
I can only imagine the heartache involved when years of waiting and working on an adoption result in your flying to China, Korea, Taiwan, or Russia, just to find out that the healthy 10 week old is actually an ailing 8 month old and then to have the agency representative say “this is the only chance we can offer you. You have 24 hours to decide.”
Most importantly: start any adoption quest a visit to the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services National Adoption Information Clearinghouse. It’s an excellent resource and, in my opinion at least, a very good use of tax money.