Since our Guatemalan adoption blogger seems to be on vacation from blogger-land these days, I'll hop right in and send interested parties to a good article in the New York Times about adoptions from Guatemala.

Go here to read the full text. You may or may not have to register or see an ad before you read the article.

Now, I am not an adoptive parent of a child from Guatemala, so I can only imagine how upsetting it might be for some people to read an article like this. The article actually seems pretty balanced to me in terms of acknowledging the potential for abuse and corruption in a country where women are actually paid to give up their babies, but then again, I haven't done much research into adoptions from Guatemala. The article is not saying that all children adopted from Guatemala have been involved in schemes that involve abuse and corruption - but it does happen, and adoptive parents need to be aware of it.

This is not hard for me to believe. This kind of thing happens in our own country - why wouldn't it happen in countries where people are so, so poor and have so many fewer resources?

Here's the part of the article that deals with baby-brokering:

The system is not without controversy in Guatemala. Josefina Arellano Andrino is in charge of the government department that signs off on all adoptions but, for now, is permitted to halt only those involving false paperwork or outright fraud. She relishes the prospect of additional oversight.

“Babies are being sold, and we have to stop it,” she said. “What’s happening to our culture that we don’t take care of our children?”

Alarmed to see so many foreign adoptions in Guatemala, members of the Council of Central American Human Rights Attorneys, who were meeting at the Marriott in August, issued a statement questioning whether the country’s system “converts the child into an object, like a piece of merchandise.”

Key to that business are jaladoras, as the baby brokers are called locally. They ply the Guatemalan countryside looking for pregnant women and girls in a fix. Adoption is presented as the perfect answer, one that will leave the child with a wealthy family and the mother better off as well, by paying for her medical bills and providing some direct money surreptitiously.

So - what's a potential adoptive parent from Guatemala to do? Get informed, do your research, and don't be afraid to ask hard questions of your agency. You owe it to your future child to know through what circumstances that he or she came to you.