Who Will Fill the Empty Cribs?

For Anna Porras and Miquel Milian, The worst part is the waiting. Back in 2005, when the Spanish couple found they couldn't have a biological child, they took it in stride and set out to adopt. But from where? There was a nine-year wait list for Spanish orphans, so Porras, a language teacher, and Milian, who runs a company that makes signs, took their search overseas. They had heard that adopting from China was relatively easy, but only for married couples. So they quickly tied the knot, filed the paperwork in late 2006, and held their breath. Then the rules changed; Beijing announced that couples had to be married at least two years before adopting."We were crushed," says Porras.Next stop: Kazakhstan, where the wait typically lasts somewhere between eight and 20 months. If all goes well, they will bring home a son or daughter by summer.

That's an increasingly big "if." After decades of nonstop growth, the international adoption mill has begun to stall. Driven by rising affluence, falling birthrates and resurgent national pride, many developing nations are much less willing to let their orphans go abroad. Not only can these nations increasingly afford to care for orphans at home, but they have been spooked by highly publicized international baby-selling scandals into tightening rules. Countries as diverse as South Korea, Russia, Kenya and Brazil now openly discourage foreign adoptions. As a result, intercountry adoptions have plunged 10 percent in the top five receiving nations—the U.S, Spain, France, Italy and Canada—since the high point in 2004, when 45,288 children were adopted internationally.

The turnabout is most dramatic in the United States; after nearly tripling from 1990 to 2004, international adoptions to America have fallen for three years running, dropping from 22,844 in 2004 to 19,411 last year. "Until now we've all been talking about the inexorable rise of intercountry adoptions," says adoption scholar Peter F. Selman, a demographer at Newcastle University. "But around the world we're seeing more and more people wanting to adopt every day, and fewer and fewer children available. The supply of adoptable children is drying up."

Whether this is a crisis depends in part on where you sit. To nations like Russia and China, the dwindling "supply" represents rising standards of living and a growing ability to care for their own. But the need for intercountry adoption—which started after World War II as a way to provide for children orphaned or abandoned in the fighting—remains vital in many parts of the developing world that are not prospering, especially in Africa, where there are an estimated 48.3 million orphans. And now the hodgepodge of national restrictions has been joined by an international contract, the Hague Convention on Intercountry Adoption, designed to encourage adoption at home rather than abroad, and to end the international baby trade. The fear of many adoption experts, particularly in the West, is that these rules may prove so rigorous and indiscriminate that they will severely curtail international adoption as a vital escape route for children in troubled regions.

Supplies are dwindling from countries that have traditionally provided the majority of children for international adoptions. The number of Chinese children adopted by the top five receiving nations dropped from a peak of 14,493 in 2005 to 10,743 in 2006; in Russia the number has fallen from 5,829 to 2,781 since 2004. "Russian society is back on its feet both economically and morally," says Elena Afanasyeva, a Duma deputy and member of the Committee on Women and Family. "We are now capable of taking care of our orphans." In China the number of adoption applications now exceeds the country's ability to process them. As a result, authorities have gotten much more choosy about who can adopt, excluding applicants who may be single, obese, taking antidepressants or over 50, among other things. Other source nations have implemented new restrictions to deter outsiders from adopting: South Africa now demands foreigners spend at least five years on native soil before adopting, and Tanzania three years. Moscow temporarily halted its international adoption program last year, partly in response to reports that 14 Russian children had been killed by their foreign adoptive parents since the 1990s.

In South Korea, which has sent 150,000 children abroad since the Korean War, it's not just the booming economy that has changed social attitudes toward orphans. With a birthrate of just 1.1 children per woman, which is below the level required to keep the population steady, the country needs to hold onto its people. Last summer protesters gathered in downtown Seoul with placards that read KOREAN BABIES NOT FOR EXPORT! Today Seoul offers tax breaks, cash incentives and even extra vacation days to families who take in domestic orphans. The measures seem to be working: last year marked the first time since the Korean War that more South Korean children were adopted at home (1,388) than overseas (1,265).