The other day, I was reading an article from the Washington Post about adoption from China. The article said that, since China opened its orphanages to international adoption, girl babies have gone from a drain on resources to somewhat of a commodity, because adoptive parents donate $3000 to the orphanage when they adopt, which goes to help those orphans who have not been able to be adopted. However, in some cases, the orphanage directors are corrupt, and keep the money for themselves. Given this situation, some female babies have been kidnapped from their families and sold to orphanages for adoption.

My first feeling upon reading this was horror, and also guilt, because in the last month or so, I have found myself starting to think seriously about our "options" regarding having a child. And, adopting from China was on the list of possibilities. *(Being as neurotic as I am, I've already looked into possibilities for domestic adoption. As far as I can tell, your choices are: private adoption, in which you more or less have to "audition" for the birth parents, pay for all prenatal and birth expenses and other fees, to the tune of about $20,000, and deal with the possibility that the birth parents will change their minds about the adoption after the baby is born; OR, adoption through the state, which is fairly easy and inexpensive if you are willing to take an older child or one with physical, mental, and/or emotional difficulties, and which is not so easy if you want to adopt a baby, as you must start out as foster parents and, again, face the distinct possibility that the baby will be returned to its biological family after several months, as the state usually starts out with "family reunification" as its goal. Frankly, I do not think I could deal with the possibility of losing a baby after it is in our home with us. I think it would completely send me around the bend. Of course, as parents you always take the risk of losing your child, but with domestic adoption, the odds of losing your kid are so, so much higher. And as I mentioned previously, I hate to gamble. My idea of hell would be to live in Las Vegas).*

My second thought upon reading the article was, boy, this is a really slanted article. The truth is that although there are some female babies that are abducted and sold to orphanages, there are *thousands* of babies that are indeed abandoned each year at bus stations, police stations, hospitals, and on the side of the road. But the article did not even touch on that fact. So, the next question is, what can we do about the truly horrible situation in which some children are stolen from their birth families?

I don't know. But, being a fan of hypothetico-deductive thinking, I tried to follow the line of thought through from beginning to end:

The most straightforward answer would be for foreign parents just to refuse to adopt from China. This would ensure an end to abductions and absolve parents' guilt about unintentionally adopting a kidnapped baby. But then what? Those thousands of babies abandoned each year would still be abandoned, and now they would have little choice but to grow up in orphanages--orphanages that no longer had the influx of money from adoptive parents and would likely be grimmer places because of it.

Maybe a better solution would be to have the adoptive parents donate the money directly to a centralized agency that did not have anything to do with the orphanages themselves. Then the money could be distributed by the central agency to the orphanages but not in direct relation to how many babies had been adopted from each particular orphanage.

However, I have absolutely no idea how to go about implementing this idea.

I can only pray that eventually we will be able to have kids without medical or adoptive intervention. Because it seems that, whatever intervention you choose, you're completely SOL.