A Look at the Changing International Adoption Landscape

In the last week, The Minneapolis StarTribune has taken a look at the changing international adoption landscape in a series of articles by David Shaffer. The paper offers a quick primer on the Hague Convention on Inter-country Adoption here, and has also published  graphs illustrating the rise and fall of international adoptions in the last 10 years and the top five sending countries. Shaffer looks at several international adoption cases that suggest  misconduct by agencies and the problems with the Hague Convention. Agencies that want to work in sending countries that are Convention signatories must be accredited and are also subject to US State Department oversight, but unaccredited agencies are able to work in non-Hague countries in a largely unregulated environment. Ethiopia, for example has quickly emerged as one of the top five sending countries but it isn't a Hague signatory; non-accredited agencies can legally set up shop there -- and unfortunately they have.