international adoption

Child welfare issues were never front and center during the 2016 presidential campaign, nor have they been during the early months of the Trump presidency. But this week, adoption got a quick and bizarre cameo in the ongoing investigation into Russia’s interference with the 2016 election.

The current State Department has developed policies that have been disastrous for children languishing in institutions abroad. There are many millions of such children, some of them orphaned, some abandoned by or removed from their birth parents.

Sen. Charles Grassley (R-Iowa), a longtime advocate for children’s rights, released a video this week in acknowledgement of National Adoption Day on November 21st. In the video, Grassley discusses both domestic and international adoption, specifically children in the Congo whose adoptions have been finalized but whose travel documents are being held up by the Congolese government, preventing them from joining their adoptive families in the U.S.

In September 2013, the executive branch of the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC) announced that it had suspended the issuance of “exit letters” to Congolese orphans already legally adopted by foreigners.

International adoptions numbers all over the world have drastically fallen in the past decade, and continue to fall. We often blame wealthy countries for over-regulating adoptions, poor countries for xenophobia, and the international community for creating treaties that dismantle the entire structure for adoptions while removing incentives to create new and effective ones.

Disability Rights International (DRI) is a non-governmental organization that promotes human rights for people with disabilities. Children in institutional care, such as orphanages, quickly become disabled, so it is no surprise that DRI has announced that its newest project is the Worldwide Campaign to End the Institutionalization of Children.

A bill was introduced yesterday that would establish a new State Department bureau, with a Senate-confirmed leader, to handle international child welfare issues, including the increasingly thorny issue of international adoptions.