Adoptionland: Brutal essays by adult adoptees expose the truth of intercountry adoption

Adoptionland NewsAbout Us, Adoption, Adoption Trafficking, Excerpts, Featured

With news that Vietnam is once again going to allow their children to be adopted out of country, reading a collection of essays by people who were uprooted and transplanted into new cultures is ice water on all those squishy ideals of what intercountry (or international adoption) does. The writers whose essays come together in Adoptionland: From Orphans to Activists …

Ugandan woman’s agony as granddaughter ‘sold’ to Americans

Adoptionland NewsAdoption Trafficking, Agency Complaints, Excerpts, Featured

By Katy Migiro and Tom Esslemont KAMPALA/LONDON, May 28 (Thomson Reuters Foundation) – The first time Jaja, a Ugandan woman, saw her one-year-old granddaughter, she was in the arms of an American man who she was told had “bought” the child. The toddler was sitting with the man and his wife, eating biscuits and drinking juice, as they sought legal …

Foreigners exploiting law loophole to adopt, say Ugandan MPs

Adoptionland NewsAdoption, Adoption Trafficking, Agency Complaints, Excerpts, Rights

Kampala (AFP) – Uganda MPs have raised fresh concerns that hundreds of children have left the country through “dubious circumstances” as a result of foreigners working with local lawyers to exploit a loophole in the law, allowing them to be adopted.  Last September, an official report said a boom in Uganda’s “international adoption industry” had led to some children who …

Earthquake Orphans: What Nepal can learn from Haiti

Adoptionland NewsAdoption Trafficking, Excerpts, Featured

Disaster Following the earthquake in 2010, Westerners flocked to Haiti to “rescue” orphaned and lost children. The “rescue” included the evacuation of children by plane for inter-country adoption and an increase in the number of children placed in orphanages in the following months. The problem that has since emerged is that many of the “orphans” placed in orphanages and sent …