The Children Money Can Buy

by Anne Moody

  My sample is skewed, given that I most often hear from families who have not been successful in working with a facilitator (since the happy ones have no reason to call), but their anger and disappointment are hard to ignore. Sometimes people are angry for good reasons, sometimes they are angry about situations beyond the facilitator’s control, and sometimes they are angry about things that were simply beyond anyone’s ability to control.

  Like other adoption professionals, I am contacted regularly by facilitators seeking adoptive parents for birth mothers with problematic situations, such as ongoing substance abuse or mental health issues. These women are often asking for, and perhaps in dire need of, substantial living expenses. Facilitators in these situations are not looking only for a good family for a baby, but also for a family who is willing to take on medical risks and possibly long-term developmental and psychological risks and . . . a family willing and able to pay about $35,000. My question is, ”Why does the facilitator have any sort of financial control over this child’s future?” This country is full of wonderful waiting families, many of them already licensed by the state or home study certified by another agency, who would love to adopt that child but who simply don’t have the $35,000 to do so. In these situations, the facilitator is able to essentially put a price tag on this baby. And they are being given this power by the birth mother, who is likely to be unaware of the fact that the facilitator’s “assistance” is actually serving to limit her choices and her baby’s options.

  If the situations the facilitators called me about were not problematic, they would not be calling me. Facilitators also contact families directly, presumably after searching websites where hopeful adoptive parents post their profiles. Families I have worked with are often excited rather than wary when they get this sort of call, but fortunately, they usually call me before sending money off to the facilitator. Then we have a depressing conversation in which I usually end up, as gently as possible, dampening their hopes. But every once in a while, maybe as often as one call in twenty, there is something potentially encouraging about the situation, and the family decides to pursue it further. I can think of only a few times in my entire career when this sort of unsolicited call actually resulted in an adoption. More typically, it results in a loss of money, time, and peace of mind for the potential adoptive family.

  It’s not uncommon to get calls from facilitators about birth mothers who have relinquished previously—maybe even several times. I consider this to be a huge red flag, although the facilitator generally presents it as a positive sign since it indicates that the woman knows what to expect and is more likely to follow through with an adoption. But from the perspective of a counselor, it raises serious questions about why someone who had suffered through a relinquishment wouldn’t do everything possible to prevent having to repeat the experience. The possibilities (none of them good) include exceptionally bad luck, an inability to successfully/willingly use birth control, complicated psychological issues, and/or a financially motivated pregnancy.

  That last possibility is a particularly telling and troubling reflection of the current state of in-country infant adoptions. The ratio of high demand to low supply of babies allows facilitators to find adoptive families willing not only to take on a variety of potentially serious problems but also to pay heavily for the privilege. A typical expense scenario in 2016 involves approximately $16,000 for the facilitator’s fee, $15,000 for the estimated attorney’s fee (which can go much, much higher depending on the legal complexity of the situation), and from $3,000 to $20,000 for “birth mother expenses.” When you include additional expenses such as any medical fees not covered by insurance, a trip or two for the adoptive parents to wherever the birth mother lives, and an approximately weeklong stay away from home when the baby is born, the cost can start at well over $35,000 and go into the $50,000-plus range.

  Furthermore, if the adoption falls through, the would-be adoptive parents are not reimbursed for anything they have spent on legal fees, birth-mother expenses, or travel costs. Typically, a portion of the fees they have paid specifically for the facilitator’s services can be applied to a new adoption effort through the same facilitator, but their money is not returned if the family chooses to go elsewhere to search for their child. Even families who have had a bad experience and lost faith in the facilitator are reluctant to forgo such a significant amount of money and are likely to try again, with ever-decreasing faith in the process. These are some of the unhappy people I hear from, and I definitely feel their pain.

  I recently received a call from an out-of-state adoption facilitator asking if I knew of any families who were interested in a baby who was going to be of Hispanic/Caucasian heritage. I had never worked with this caller before, but I had heard her name and didn’t have any negative associations aside from my normal skepticism about some facilitators. After talking with her, I decided to call a family I had worked with who now had a two-year-old son of Hispanic/Caucasian heritage and was about to start the adoption process again. I told them I was unfamiliar with this facilitator but that, if they were interested, they might call her and find out more.

  The family eagerly called the facilitator and found out that the twenty-nine-year-old prospective birth mother was raising two children, ages twelve and five, and that she had given birth to four other children, all of whom had been adopted. She had gotten pregnant again only a few months after the last baby was born, and this new baby would be her fifth relinquishment. This baby’s father was the father of two of the babies who had been adopted; he also had five other children, none of whom he was parenting. The family was told that the woman used meth “sometimes” and that she was asking for about $2,500 a month in living expenses, for a minimum of seven months. The facilitator spoke enthusiastically about the woman’s beauty, assuring the family that she “looks just like Julia Roberts.” She then emailed them a picture of a woman who looked nothing like Julia Roberts—even if Julia had been playing a meth addict who’d been pregnant for seven out of the past twelve years. The whole situation took on a weird “Emperor’s New Clothes” feel, as though the facilitator felt that if she just kept insisting that everything was great, the family would ignore the massive amount of evidence to the contrary.

  Rather than going along with the facilitator, the family asked some questions, the most important being, “Is this woman getting any counseling?” Instead of reassuring them that part of her service (for which she charged $16,000) was to provide for counseling (hopefully with someone qualified to provide it), the facilitator took offense, supposedly on behalf of the birth mother (let’s call her Julia). She asserted that Julia did not want counseling (no doubt true) and that it wouldn’t be ethical to force someone who didn’t want it to take part in counseling. She acknowledged that Julia’s pregnancy likely was financially motivated, but felt that this was Julia’s choice and shouldn’t be questioned or criticized. The facilitator also informed the family that many of the birth mothers she worked with were financially motivated and that that was just the reality of adoption today. The family told her they didn’t think her services were “a good fit” for them, then contacted me to vent about the sorry state of infant adoptions these days.

  Although I am thoroughly dismayed by this sort of story and by this type of adoption facilitation—which should simply be called “baby brokering”—this facilitator was telling the truth. There are indeed women who are motivated to become pregnant and relinquish their babies simply because there are other people who are willing to pay them for doing so. I’m talking about situations in which women deliberately, and sometimes repeatedly, get pregnant in order to receive money (usually in the form of “living expenses”) in exchange for their babies. Adoption facilitators reap financial benefits with each successive pregnancy; since facilitators charge a flat fee for their services, their hourly earnings skyrocket whenever they work repeatedly with the same birth mother. It is not that time-consuming to shepherd some
one through a second, third, fourth or—heaven forbid—fifth relinquishment, especially when all they want from you is a monthly check.

  The practice of paying finder’s fees to people for locating adoptable babies used to be a common (and highly problematic) practice in some of the other countries whose children were sent to the United States for adoption. The idea was that the “finders” would be social workers, medical professionals, ministers, and others who act ethically and have the children’s best interests at heart. Instead, they often turned out to be people (sometimes even social workers, medical professionals, ministers, etc.) who were primarily motivated by the opportunity to earn per-child fees that could be as high as the average yearly income in their country. Horrifying stories about the kidnapping of babies and the coercion of birth mothers led to investigations that unearthed a history of corruption in Guatemala, Cambodia, Vietnam, Romania, and other countries. In 2008, the Hague Adoption Convention instituted reform and regulation aimed at eliminating rampant abuses in international adoption and, although many of the problems it hoped to solve have proved intractable, there is widespread agreement that the practice of paying people large sums in exchange for locating adoptable children is a powerful corrupting influence and should be prohibited.

  In international adoption these days, it is generally considered unethical to pay finder’s fees to people who connect babies and/or birth parents with adoption agencies, attorneys, or other individuals who arrange adoptions. But in the United States, we seem to have no effective regulation of such practices. Some facilitators do provide counseling for birth and adoptive parents, as well as other services consistent with those offered by a licensed agency, but many do not, nor are they required to do so. Some simply act as brokers between birth and adoptive parents; they attract birth mothers primarily by making promises of financial support.

  There are negative consequences for both birth and adoptive parents in the way the exchange of money can erode their confidence in, and respect for, one another. In the current adoption climate, where money rules, it is hard for adoptive parents not to question the motives of prospective birth parents. The financial rewards for “considering adoption” are high, and women who are less than ethical and/or under financial stress can be tempted to say that they are “considering adoption” whether or not they actually have any thought of doing so. Even women who are completely honest about their intentions are affected by the cloud of suspicion created by false “birth parents,” and it is undeniably true that if these women weren’t claiming to consider adoption, no one would be paying their living expenses. For their part, the adoptive parents are put in the position of trying to ignore or justify the fact that they have found themselves in a position that feels perilously close to (or exactly like) paying a woman for her baby.

  There are also negative consequences for babies who have been adopted in these circumstances and who will one day grow up and discover that they were produced for money. This information is likely to be difficult for them, to say the least, and potentially will damage their relationships with both their birth and adoptive parents.

  One would expect adoptive parents to object most vehemently to current practice, forced as they often are into what amounts to bidding wars for babies. Clearly, they are unhappy that the cost of infant adoption has skyrocketed to the point where anyone who is not solidly upper-middle-class is likely to be priced out of the market. Many people have had to give up on their dream of having a baby because of the cost of adoption. We won’t hear from most of them because they have had to turn their hearts and their attention elsewhere and do their best to accept the fact that adoption of an infant is not a financially realistic possibility for them.

  We also won’t hear much from the people who have managed to adopt an infant. While most will be unhappy about the high cost of their adoptions, and while many will be unhappy about other aspects of the process, they probably won’t be too outspoken. They are now happy and busy being parents and have concluded that their child was well worth whatever it took to get him or her into their lives. They may hope to adopt a second child as well and don’t want to jeopardize their chances by complaining about a system they will be relying upon again.

  Furthermore, few families who have successfully adopted want to be whistleblowers who put other families’ adoptions in jeopardy. Even families who have suffered egregiously during their own adoption process tend to forgive, forget, and move on once they have their child. And the attorneys, who may well share my concerns about ethics, have little incentive to change their lucrative relationships with adoption facilitators. I’m sure most attorneys do their very best to keep their clients as far from trouble as possible and keeping one’s clients out of trouble in such an inherently troubled system can require a lot of billable hours of hard work. The attorneys are not themselves unethical—quite the opposite—but they do benefit financially from working with adoption facilitators and thus have little direct incentive to put a stop to this barely disguised baby brokering.

  So who’s going to blow the whistle? Surely we can all agree that babies should not be sold and that birth parents should not be given money in exchange for their children, either as an incentive to relinquish or as a reward for doing so. Pregnant women who need financial assistance should be guided to services and sources of support that are not influenced by or dependent upon the possibility of adoption. They should not receive payment in exchange for “considering adoption” or for pretending to do so.

  But my wishes are for an ideal world. In the real world, we are dealing with pregnant women who are living lives of poverty and dysfunction and babies who are suffering even before they are born. And sometimes the process of adoption facilitation, imperfect as it is, makes things better for both of them, as well as for the adoptive parents. I did quite a few home studies over the years for gay couples, many of whom then worked with an adoption facilitator in order to find a birth mother. I remember one extremely appealing couple who were quickly chosen by a woman in California who had a long history of substance abuse and identified herself as a prostitute. This baby was going to be her seventh child; she did not know who the father was or what race the baby was going to be. When the couple first met her, she was serving a jail sentence that was supposed to last until well after the baby was born. That all sounds pretty bad, but the good news was that the woman had been in jail since month two of her pregnancy, had not used drugs during that time, and would be getting reasonably good medical care and nutrition throughout the remaining three months until delivery. The couple was not naïve about possible problems, but they decided to go ahead with this adoption.

  About a month into what was supposed to be a predictable third trimester, the court system threw them a huge loop by suddenly deciding to release the woman. At this point, the men made the decision to fly down to California, rent a condo, and spend the next two months taking care of (monitoring? controlling?) the birth mother so that she wouldn’t be tempted to go back to her old lifestyle and endanger herself and the baby. After everything was set up at the condo, one of the men flew home and went back to work (to return every other weekend) while the other devoted himself to pampering the birth mother. He made delicious meals and together they went shopping for both mom and baby, watched movies, went to the spa and to medical appointments, and—most importantly—did a lot of talking. Obviously, it wasn’t all fun times for the whole two months, but that man’s dedication to the well-being (both physical and psychological) of his future child was indeed impressive. And it paid off, primarily in the adoption of a healthy and beautiful baby girl and also in a close and caring relationship with her birth mother.

  But these situations are enormously complex, and I wasn’t too surprised when the birth mother called the men about six months after the birth of the baby girl to ask if they wanted to adopt her next child. They adopted that child, but when she called again the next year, they made the painful decision
not to adopt their almost two-year-old daughter’s and not yet one-year-old son’s half sibling.

  I’m certain that the birth mother found another adoptive couple to work with. Presumably the baby is now part of a happy family, so this isn’t exactly a sad story, but it certainly has its troubling aspects. Did the men’s solicitous behavior and financial support encourage the woman to keep getting pregnant? Probably. Would she have gotten pregnant again without their involvement? Probably. Did the birth mother and the two babies benefit from the men’s involvement during the pregnancies? Definitely. Is it a good thing to encourage women who can’t, or won’t care for their babies to get pregnant? Definitely not. Is it a good thing these three babies were born? Definitely yes. It’s complicated, to say the least.

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  The Ethics of International Adoption

  The idea that money can buy children is openly accepted in international adoption, where parents typically pay high fees in order to adopt. Although we try not to focus on such blunt descriptions, the fact is that money changes hands in adoption, and there is almost always significant financial disparity between birth and adoptive parents as well as between the countries that place the children and the countries that receive them (with Korea’s more recent economic successes making it something of an exception). This financial disparity has contributed to an increasing discomfort with the ethics of international adoption, and there are very vocal factions (adult adoptees among them) calling for its elimination on geopolitical grounds.