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Adoption has its share of questions about ethical practices, but one of the most hotly debated concerns the role of money: how much, what it's used for, to whom it's paid. For some, it all comes down to the question of baby-selling.

Continue reading When Is It Baby-Selling?

Baby-selling is a very hot button issue today. With all of the news stories that we have heard in the last few years involving this, it is very important that you use your common sense when adopting. It makes me wonder how many foreign adoptions are from women willingly giving up their child versus women offered a little money to give up their child. There is just no way of knowing. In many of the countries that we adopt from, the poverty levels are extremely high and the women may feel as if they have no choice. The sad thing is that we may be involved in baby selling and not even know it.

When I read this article, I thought, "Who are they kidding?" ALL of these are examples of treating people (babies) like commodities for sale. In the first instance, if a family in a poor country really cannot afford to feed a new baby, then having someone else raise the baby saves them money - But if we must pay somebody not to kill an infant, there's no reason for such a big markup to the adoptive parents. The middleman here is not in the baby "rescue" business, just the baby market. The fact that people are willing to pay for babies, but must BE paid to take care of older children speaks for itself. In the 2nd instance, the only way it wouldn't be consumerism is if the adoption "costs" didn't vary with the race/gender/nationality of the child. Having a higher price tag on certain types of babies pretty clearly makes it a situation of buying and selling. Any yes, if a lawyer changes parents in mid-transaction because the new parents offer more money, what's subtle about that? To me, the article would have been stronger if the examples were not so clearly exploitive - unless the intention of the article is to illustrate that anyone involved adopting babies for more than the cost of adopting older children is not out to "rescue" anybody, but only to serve selfish motives.