12 best countries to adopt children from?

Ethiopia has been closed down to adoptions since January 2018

This list of 12 best countries to adopt from internationally will help you on the way to becoming parents.

Every year, many people start the long and complex process of adopting a child and starting a family. Becoming parents through adoption is not easy at all and sometimes it takes a while before you are allowed to take the child into its new loving home. There are laws you have to deal with before the adoption becomes final but in the end, it’s all worth it. Many future parents decide they want to adopt from another country. Americans who want to adopt a baby internationally have to deal with U.S. federal law, individual state laws as well as the laws of the country the child is from. That means a lot of paperwork and a lot of waiting.

If you are thinking of adopting and you’re wondering what countries are open for international adoption, you should familiarize yourself with the Hague Convention which applies to all adoptions by U.S. citizens adopting a child from another country. The Hague Convention on the Protection of Children and Co-operation in Respect of Intercountry Adoption is an international agreement concluded in 1993 in the Netherlands establishing international standards of practices for intercountry adoptions. 90 countries are party to the Hague Adoption Convention, including the United States. What this means for potential parents is that you may receive greater protections if you adopt from a Convention country. However, some of the most popular countries to adopt from are actually not parties to the Convention.

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12 best countries to adopt from

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Ethiopia bans all international adoptions

Americans want to BUY another person's child but not put that $40,000 into building clinics, schools, and training centers for the people of Ethiopia to dig their way out of poverty and corruption.  Americans are the most selfish of people on the planet.  

https://www.reuters.com/article/us-ethiopia-adoption-ban/ethiopia-adoption-ban-may-curb-trafficking-but-poorest-families-need-support-idUSKBN1F427L

NAIROBI (Thomson Reuters Foundation) - A ban on the adoption of Ethiopian children by foreigners could curb child abuse and trafficking, but more support is needed for vulnerable families within the impoverished country, experts said on Monday.

Ethiopia is one the biggest source countries for international adoptions by U.S. nationals, with about 20 percent of all adopted children coming from the east African nation, according to the U.S. State Department.

Hollywood celebrities Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie are among those who have adopted children from Ethiopia.

Child rights groups cite cases of“child harvesting” where adoption agencies unethically recruit minors for adoption by fraudulently altering paperwork to cast children with families as orphans whose parents had died or abandoned them.

In many instances, parents who cannot afford to look after their children consent to foreign adoption under the mistaken impression that it is like boarding school and they would maintain contact with their children, only to find out later that this is not the case.

Amid concerns that overseas adoptions fuel a trade in children from poor families and put them at risk of abuse, or being trafficked into slave-like conditions, parliament passed legislation on Jan. 10 banning inter-country adoption.

“Ethiopia has negative experiences with foreign adoptions, particularly in regard to child laundering, child harvesting, and children taken from families primarily due to poverty,” said David Smolin from the Center for Children, Law and Ethics at Samford University in the United States.

“Ethiopia’s ban on foreign adoptions is a reasonable response to past problems and to the need to focus efforts on assisting vulnerable children within Ethiopia.”

While many Ethiopian children have thrived due to inter-country adoption, there have been cases where they have faced abuse, and even death, at the hands of adoptive families.

In 2013, a couple in the U.S. were convicted of killing an adopted 13-year-old Ethiopian girl. The crime sparked debate about foreign adoption in a nation where families are forced to give children up due to a lack of money to care for them.

But under international law, poverty should not be a grounds for international adoption, and efforts instead should be made in assisting families to stay together, say experts.

The revised law encourages local adoption, family reunification and reintegration to enable children to grow up within the country, said the state-run Ethiopian News Agency.

Adoption experts emphasized that Ethiopia will need to follow-up the ban with increased efforts to assist vulnerable families within the country, and provide them with the resources to adequately care for their children.

“The most important thing is for the children involved to have permanency, in families,” said Adam Pertman, president of the U.S.-based National Center on Adoption and Permanency and author of“Adoption Nation”.

“The first choice is within their own family of origin, their own community and their own country,” he added.

Reporting by Nita Bhalla @nitabhalla, Editing by Ros Russell. Please credit the Thomson Reuters Foundation, the charitable arm of Thomson Reuters, that covers humanitarian news, women's rights, trafficking, property rights, climate change and resilience. Visit news.trust.org

Our Standards:The Thomson Reuters Trust Principles.

Raising a child is over #233,000 are you financial ready? Don't gripe about $500.00 USCIS increase.

Raising a child costs $233,610. Are you financially prepared to be a parent?

Can you afford to be a parent? A child can cost $234K

Author: Aimee Picchi, USA TODAY

Published: 7:20 PM EST February 20, 2018

Updated: 9:43 AM EST February 26, 2018

Four years after getting married — and after a lot of financial planning — Jennie Kennedy and her husband welcomed their baby son into their Spokane, Wash., home.

Kennedy, 34, recalled their discussions before their son was born: “ ‘Are we ready? Are we in a good spot?’ We probably over-thought it because we put off getting pregnant.”

Not quite. Kennedy and her husband took all the right steps before having a child, including putting money aside and analyzing their finances, experts say. Adding a child represents a major financial stress: The cost of raising a child today is $233,610 – excluding the cost of college – for a middle-income family, according to the U.S. Department of Agriculture.

The stakes may be higher for new parents than in previous generations, thanks to a combination of changing demographics and economic pressures.

Women are delaying motherhood, a trend especially pronounced for college-educated women. That means new parents typically have a better financial foothold than in earlier decades, yet it can deliver other challenges, such as a higher rate of fertility problems and tough decisions about balancing work and family.

How to budget for baby

Where to start? First, financial experts recommend socking away six months of living expenses, which will help if a parent wants to take unpaid time off from work or if the family encounters surprises.

Next, get a grip on your budget. Estimate how your expenses might change after the baby arrives. While there will be new expenses – such as higher costs for food, clothing and child care – some couples may spend less on restaurants and entertainment, said Adrienne Penta, senior vice president at Brown Brothers Harriman’s Center for Women & Wealth.

Savings filled with American coins and bills.

IcemanJ, Getty Images/iStockphoto

“Think about what your life will be like after a baby, which isn’t the same as two professional people in the city,” Penta said.

Financial programs such as You Need a Budget or Mint can help would-be parents set up a budget and model expenses after a baby. One of the biggest costs is child care, which can vary considerably depending on your location. Talking with friends and family who have relied on child care can give a sense of your area’s costs, said Kelly Barrow, a wealth management adviser with financial services firm TIAA.

Setting up a health savings account (HSA), available to people with high-deductible health care plans, can also prove helpful, as New York mom Priya Raghavan discovered. She and her husband relied on an HSA to help cover unexpected medical expenses, such as an unplanned hospital visit for their newborn daughter.

“I was surprised because we have good insurance,” Raghavan said.

Fertility treatments and adoption

With more adults putting off parenthood, some are finding themselves blindsided by another health expense: fertility treatments. One round of in vitro fertilization (IVF) can set a couple back by $15,000, and often multiple rounds are required to conceive. Adoption within the U.S. can range from $15,000 to $40,000, while international adoptions can cost as much as $50,000, according to the Child Welfare Information Gateway, a division of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services.

Put some legwork into research, such as what benefits your employer offers and how the fertility industry works, said Kelley Long, a certified financial planner with Financial Finesse, who herself is pursuing IVF treatments.

“If I had to go back and start over, I would do things differently,” she added. “Part of educating yourself is knowing what costs are negotiable,” such as fertility drugs.

Hope for the best, plan for the worst

Lastly, create a will and take out life insurance before the baby arrives, financial experts say.

mother hold feets newborn baby [Via MerlinFTP Drop]

mbot, Getty Images/iStockphoto

“Everyone needs a plan, if you have $100 million or $150 in your bank account,” said Brown Brother Harriman’s Penta. “Take a 50,000-foot view before you have these people in your life who have personalities and needs.”

Saving for a child’s college education is another step, although 529 plans are typically opened for a child after their birth because it requires a Social Security number for the beneficiary. Consider asking family members to contribute, rather than buying a new toy or clothing, experts say. College costs rose more than 3% last year, outpacing inflation, and the average private college now costs almost $47,000 annually.

Raghavan said her advice for people who may be thinking of starting a family: “Start saving.”She added, “Prioritize what you want for your child and for yourself. It shouldn’t be that hard, but every little thing adds up.”Copyright 2017 USATODAY.com

Why International adoptions have decreased? it's the laws - people don't want to be involved in child trafficking.

(Metro Creative Graphics)

When Ethiopia stopped allowing its children to be adopted by foreign parents in January, it became the latest country to eliminate or sharply curtail the practice. In recent decades South Korea, Romania, Guatemala, China, Kazakhstan and Russia – all former leaders in foreign adoption – have also banned or cut back on international custody transfers.

In 2005, almost 46,000 children were adopted across borders, roughly half of them headed to a new life in the United States. By 2015 international adoptions had dropped 72 percent, to 12,000 in total. Just 5,500 of these children ended up in the U.S., with the remainder landing in Italy and Spain.

Today, most children adopted internationally come from China, Democratic Republic of the Congo and Ukraine. But even China, which has been the top sending country since the late 1990s, has decreased its foreign adoptions by 86 percent.

Why are international adoptions imploding? Our recent book, “Saving International Adoption: An Argument from Economics and Personal Experience,” explores the rationale – both real and invented – that countries use to explain curtailing foreign adoptions. Here’s what we found.

It’s in the child’s ‘best interest’When countries with high rates of international adoptions suddenly put an end to the practice, officials usually cite examples of abuse. The policy change, they say, is in “the best interest of the child.”

In 2012, when the Russian parliament voted to ban adoptions by Americans, for example, lawmakers named the new law after 2-year-old Dima Yakovlev, who died in 2008 after being locked in a hot car by his adoptive father.

Ethiopian lawmakers likewise recently invoked the 2012 case of a neglected Ethiopian 13-year-old girl who died of hypothermia and malnutrition in the U.S. to justify their new ban on international adoptions.

Such events, though high profile, are rare. Of 60,000 adoptees from Russia to the U.S., only 19 have suffered from abuse or neglect in the last 20 years, according to The Christian Science Monitor. That’s an abuse rate of about 0.03 percent. In Russia, the rate of child abuse is about 25 times higher.

Such statistics call into question whether “the best interest of the child” is really why countries cancel international adoptions.

Politics and humiliationOur analysis suggests that politics may more strongly influence many countries’ adoption policies.

Russia ended U.S. adoptions two weeks after the 2012 U.S. Magnitsky Act, which imposed sanctions on some allegedly corrupt Russian officials. Asked about the new ban, Putin essentially linked the two events, saying, “The country will not be humiliated.”

Political pressures can also be external. As it sought to join the European Union in the early 2000s, Romania – which in 1990 and 1991 sent more than 10,000 adopted children abroad – halted all international adoptions. The EU’s rapporteur for Romanian accession to the union, Baroness Emma Nicholson, was famously opposed to the practice.

We also found that embarrassment can spur countries to halt international adoptions. After bad publicity during the 1988 Seoul Olympics, South Korea – which had been allowing adoptions to the U.S. since the 1950s – temporarily banned overseas adoption. The remark of sports commentator Bryant Gumbel that the country’s “greatest commodity” for export was its children likely helped trigger this policy change.

And after Guatemala imposed a moratorium on foreign adoptions – which dropped from 4,100 in 2008 to 58 in 2010 – a former member of the country’s National Adoption Council expressed pride. “Our image as being the number one exporter of children has changed,” he said. “Guatemala has dignity” again, he added.

Adoption scandals can also lead countries to rethink international adoptions. Every major sending country has seen accusations of “child trafficking” because some birth parents were paid to give up their children. There have been rare cases, too, where a child was kidnapped and put up for adoption.

Although infrequent, such incidents bring bad press, and with it pressure from international child welfare organizations like UNICEF and and Save the Children to improve – or shut down – foreign adoptions.

Who’s in charge hereThe Hague Convention on International Adoption was supposed to resolve such problems by making adoption safer and more straightforward. This 1993 global agreement, which 103 countries signed by 2016, creates uniform regulations for adoptions worldwide.

But rather than encourage foreign adoptions, many experts argue that the convention has contributed to their decline.

Poor countries often struggle to meet The Hague’s high international standards, which include creating a central adoption authority, accrediting local agencies and tightening approval procedures.

Even after Vietnam ratified the international adoption convention in 2008, the U.S. refused adoptions from the country because the State Department found it fell short of Hague rules. Vietnamese adoptions of special needs children to America reopened in 2016.

Rigorous international regulations have also made adoptions more expensive by imposing fees on agencies, adoptive parents, orphanages and countries. We believe that rising costs – which may have increased up to 18 percent in some countries – will lead to a decrease in the number of international adoptions.

The high costs of no adoptionsCritics will likely welcome the current decline in international adoptions, citing concerns that foreign adoptions remove children from their “birth culture”, exploit poor birth mothers and enable illicit child trafficking.

But our book finds powerful – if uncomfortable – arguments in favor of foreign adoptions. When the child of a desperately poor family is taken in by parents from a wealthy country, the material benefits to that child are significant.

Children raised in rich countries are far more likely to receive a good education, for example. While the literacy rate in Ethiopia is 50 percent for males and 23 percent for females, 100 percent of people in most high-income countries, such as Canada and Norway, can read.

Our research shows that adoption can even save lives. We examined mortality figures for children under the age of 5 in Ethiopia and Guatemala and found that adoptions to the U.S. likely prevented the deaths of more than 600 children between 2005 and 2011.

Studies also show that the emotional costs borne by children of color being raised by white parents – which often occurs with international adoptions – are less dire than critics believe. Such adoptees do about as well on a wide range of indicators of self-esteem and ethnic identity formation as their non-adopted siblings.

Foreign adoptions can’t solve global poverty. But ending them merely punishes thousands of vulnerable kids and their potential parents worldwide. And that’s in nobody’s best interest.

This article was originally published on The Conversation. Read the original article here. The Conversation is an independent and nonprofit source of news, analysis and commentary from academic experts.

International Adoption fees increased by $500 for Americans seeking to adopt overseas as 2017 falls to 4,600

Ending International Adoptions. The Trump Administration has imposed new fees and regulations that threaten to end international adoptions. The U.S. State Department imposed a new $500 “monitoring and oversight fee for adoptive families.” The new fee went into effect Feb. 15. The fee will fund a new agency called the Intercountry Adoption Accreditation and Maintenance Entity that will monitor international adoption agencies. Agencies will now have to file for accreditation every four years. Chuck Johnson, president of the National Council for Adoption (NCFA), believes the new regulations could bring an end to international adoptions. In 2004, U.S. families adopted more than 22,000 children. In 2017, that number had fallen to about 4,600.

click here for rest of article decrease in adoptions increase in fees

Hague Video What is international Adoption?