Who Will Fill the Empty Cribs?

The growing backlash against foreign adoptions is partly a response to exposés of aggressive networks of baby hustlers, in which unscrupulous middlemen charge prospective parents exorbitant fees while conning desperate families into giving up their children for a song. No country better illustrates the system's potential for abuse than Guatemala, which had become a favorite of anxious adoptive parents, especially from America. They were drawn by the few-questions-asked system that dispatched infants in a matter of months. Gays, singles and unmarried couples were welcome. Inspired by the lack of regulations, a ruthless class of jaladoras (pullers) began trolling the city slums and impoverished countryside, sometimes buying babies cheap (or, allegedly, stealing them) and selling them dear. Foreigners shelled out upwards of $35,000 for a Guatemalan waif, with shadowy foster homes and crooked bureaucrats playing midwife to the exchange. In the words of David Smolin, a law professor at Alabama's Samford University, foreign adoptions had turned into "baby laundering."

Such abuses galvanized human-rights advocates and eventually led to the creation of the Hague convention. More than a decade in the making, the convention is designed to restore order, transparency and decency to the adoption process. Signatory countries vow to outlaw adoption for profit; to favor domestic adoptions over international ones; to carefully screen prospective adoptive parents, and to keep a tight rein on social workers, adoption agencies and the juvenile courts. Nations may no longer release a child to a foreign family without formal consent from the birth parents. "The business of selling babies is over," says Rolando Morales, the Guatemalan lawmaker who led the fight to clean up adoptions in his country.

Though many countries immediately supported the treaty when it was first drafted in the 1990s, they have been much slower to implement it. No country could ratify the convention without first establishing a central authority to oversee adoption, and that was a challenge for some nations to pull off. China ratified the treaty only in 2005; Guatemala joined in 2002 but private adoption lawyers challenged it as unconstitutional. After a long national debate, the government finally passed implementation legislation late last year—though it remains unclear how well it will work. Even the U.S., which signed in 1994, only ratified the treaty in December, at least in part because it got so bogged down in transforming the state-run system into a federal one. But with 72 governments now onboard, momentum appears on the side of new regulation. "If the bureaucracy can end the trafficking and the bad matching, it will enable a future for intercountry adoptions which could otherwise be heading for collapse," says Selman.

In the long run, the Hague convention could prevent abuses. But in the short term, imposing tougher standards, screening children and would-be foster families more closely and eliminating for-profit foster care may mean longer stays in orphanages for many children. And the treaty only applies to the countries that have ratified it; those that haven't are free to do business as usual—even with those who have signed on.

There remain flaws in the system that even the best treaty cannot remedy. Orphanages everywhere are overflowing with severely handicapped or older children who often bear deep physical or emotional scars. "Everyone wants a blue-ribbon baby, not the 4-year-old with AIDS, or the 10-year-old with one leg," says Selman. Some adoptive parents struggle to find effective treatments for their children's ills; others seek to give them up. The U.S. Department of Health and Human Services recently found that 81 children adopted overseas were relinquished to foster-care agencies in 14 states in 2006.

In the vast majority of cases, however, foreign adoptions are successful. And for couples desperate to adopt, the shrinking pool of available children is frustrating. Some are turning to Africa, where AIDS, political instability and ethnic violence have taken their toll on families. In Kenya, adoption authorities say the recent upheaval has curtailed domestic adoptions, as parents wonder about each baby's ethnic origin. Celebrity adoptions like those by Madonna and Angelina Jolie have certainly raised the continent's profile. "Our phones were ringing off the hook with families saying, 'We want a baby girl that looks like Zahara'," says Cheryl Carter-Shotts, founder of Americans for African Adoptions, referring to the Ethiopian child whom Jolie adopted in 2005.