One of my friends that I am on an email list with recently brought up an interesting topic. My friend has six children already, two of which were adopted, and her and her husband are waiting to bring home three more, hopefully in the fairly near future.

Her concerns were regarding the children she is bringing home soon, and the fact that their birthmother is still alive. She got to travel and meet the children a few months back and also got to meet the birth mother. While the birth mother clearly loved the children, she was unable to care and provide for them because of extreme poverty. She was pleased that the children had found adoptive parents and would have a home and a life in America and spent a decent amount of time with my friends.

After reading some articles by an adult adoptee, my friend starting having thoughts regarding if it was “right” to adopt children from a poverty situation, or if providing the money to the birth family that it would take for them to be able to keep and raise their children would morally be the better decision (keeping in mind that the amount of money spent on one international adoption would probably be life changing to one family in the country being adopted from.)

A lot of interesting discussion followed. A woman that works for an adoption agency in the country that my friend is adopting from pointed out that many birth mothers wanted their children to be placed with American families. Their reasons for placing their children for adoption went beyond just poverty, but also included wanting their children to have access to medical care, be safe from violence, have the opportunity for an education, and in the case of some single birth others, to have a mother and a father, among other reasons.

Other people pointed out that even here in the U.S., many birth mothers place their children for adoption for reasons other than poverty. And since the email list this all took place on is a religion-oriented one, there was a lot of discussion about how God and faith play into all of this.

So how do I feel about it? I don’t think that money is the cure-all. The children being adopted right now, need families right now. They need a solution right now. International adoption is not a solution to the issues of poverty, violence, illnesses and all of the other things that have lead to the huge number of orphans in the world. The number of children being adopted is just a small portion of the number of orphans on the Earth. No, international adoption is just a band-aid on a gaping wound. And yet, it is a solution for those children being adopted. It is not a perfect solution as I have talked about before, but it gets children out of poverty, out of orphanages, etc. and into loving families. I do believe adoption is the best possible option for many, many children at this point in time.

Randomly giving money to families in an attempt to keep them together in my opinion is unlikely to have long-lasting positive effects.

I do not agree with the people that claim that the “demands” of adoptive parents are creating orphans. For one, in China, Russia, Ethiopia and many other countries, there are far more orphans than will ever be adopted. Secondly, when you take a look at countries (such as many African countries) that do not allow international adoption, there are no fewer orphans there, than there are in the African countries that do allow international adoption.

So what is the answer? I believe that at this moment, international adoption is necessary. For millions of children in orphanages around the globe, international adoption is their only hope of love, of family and of a future in this lifetime. And yet I believe equally that adoptive parents, adult adoptees, adoption agencies and others have a moral obligation to work towards change. There is an obligation to support the children left behind, to support programs that work towards positive changes in health care, education, poverty, etc. in those countries and to try and help make changes so that in generations to come, less families are broken and less orphans are created.

To just bring our children home, raise them and move on, is missing the point. To honor our children’s’ birth families and the choices they made, to honor their ethnicities and their cultures and to truly be part of the solution, all adoptive parents need to strive to give back, stay involved and work to be part of positive change in their children’s birth countries. How do we do that? Look for part two of this post coming soon…