80% drop in international adoptions, agencies are asking Trump to intercede.Children's Hope Int'l went from 800 a yr to only 24 adoptions last year 2017

ST. LOUIS (KMOV) -

   Adoption agencies and hopeful families are sounding the alarm on the plummeting number of international adoptions. The reasons are varied and complex, but the impact is clear.

According to data from the U.S. Department of State, in 2004, 22,989 children were adopted from abroad into U.S. homes. By 2017, that number dropped to only 4,714, nearly an 80 percent decrease. At adoption agencies in the St. Louis area, the drop is even steeper.

“Our peak was 2004 when we have more than 800 adoptions,” said Nicky Losse, adoption services director for Children’s Hope International. “And last year in 2017, we just completed 24 adoptions.”

Each number represents a family, like the Roussin’s from Jefferson County.

“Due to some health things, I had to have a hysterectomy so adoption was the only way we could have a family,” said Jenna Roussin, who adopted two sons from China with her husband. “We didn’t want to go through Missouri and be a foster parent and deal with heartache of losing children again and again. We weren’t ready to take on any more that could possibly cause more heartache so international adoption was the best choice for us.”

Losse said that’s a common reason hopeful parents turn to international adoption, as domestic adoptions can fall through if a birth mother chooses to keep her child at the last minute.

“Also, we have a lot of Christian families and missionary families that go overseas and see these kids in impoverished countries and want to help,” said Losse.

But, that is becoming more and more difficult.

“The U.S. ratified the Hague in 2008 and that was to promote ethical adoptions and all the adoption agencies were on board with that and wanted ethical adoptions but it also caused a lot of blocks for families, a lot of paperwork, a lot of additional requirements,” said Losse.

The Hague Convention on the Protection of Children and Co-operation in Respect of Intercountry Adoption is an international agreement to safeguard intercountry adoptions.

Losse also faults the director of the Office of Children’s Issues and the State Department revising definitions and reinterpreting parts of guidelines.

“We are all for ethical adoptions. We believe in the standards and follow them. We follow the guidelines of the foreign government as well as our government but it seems to be they are pushing the envelope a little bit too much and imposing regulations that aren’t always necessary,” said Losse.

She is particularly concerned with banning soft referrals, which are when a child is matched with a family before the family’s background check is complete. This can especially impact children with disabilities. Losse said in the latest guidelines, soft referrals are still allowed if agencies continue to advocate for that specific child and if another family that is home study ready comes forward then the agency must put forward that application as well. That means a family that is non-home study ready has to understand that they could be matched and the referral taken away if another family comes forward that is further along in the process. 

“As you can imagine this is not good for families and they are not happy with this. Once they see that pictures of a child and decide that child is meant for their family it’s a very emotional process.  Then losing that child is another loss for some families that have already struggled with infertility.  So it makes families nervous to move forward with this type of adoption,” said Losse.

News 4 reached out to the U.S. Department of State, which overseas international adoptions, to inquire about the changing regulations.

A spokesperson said the main reason for fewer international adoptions is because of changes in other countries.

“In Russia, the government stopped intercountry adoptions for political reasons. In China, a rising middle class has allowed more families to provide homes domestically - tens of thousands of children are now placed with families in China each year. And in Guatemala, fraud concerns have led to the Guatemalan government’s long-term suspension of adoptions.  In many other nations, changing cultural attitudes about single mothers and domestic adoption have resulted in fewer children being eligible for intercountry action,” said an official with the Department of State.

The official continued, saying “Proposed regulations were withdrawn last year.  There have been no recent changes to the regulations governing intercountry adoption, the Accreditation Entity (AE) role, or the performance standards for accredited/approve ASPs. The Department continues to operate with the accreditation regulations in place since 2006 and subsequently extended through the Universal Accreditation Act of 2012.  The IAA, UAA, and the implementing regulations provide that the Department oversees the accreditation process for ASPs to ensure intercountry adoptions are safe and ethical.”

However, Losse, who was adopted as a child and has an adopted daughter of her own, says the damage is already done. She, along with other agencies across the country, are asking the Trump administration to take a look at the Office of Children’s Issues and see if the change in regulations are legal and justified.

“It’s hurting the kids,” she said.

It’s the kids the Roussin family worries about, too. Now at home with their two sons, Asher and Adam, they still keep tabs on the conversation about international adoption and want others to know why they feel it’s important.

“Even though they are on the other side of the world, they still need homes. Location shouldn’t matter when it comes to a child needing a family,” said Roussin.

http://www.kctv5.com/story/38127500/missouri-adoption-agency-sounds-alarm-on-plummeting-international-adoptions

MEANWHILE 83 AMERICAN CHILDREN WERE ADOPTED OVERSEAS

https://travel.state.gov/content/dam/NEWadoptionassets/pdfs/Annual%20Report%20on%20Intercountry%20Adoptions%20FY2017%20(release%20date%20March%2023%2020.._.pdf

The overall number of adoptions to the United States in FY 2017 was 4,714, a decline of 658 from the previous year. This decline is primarily attributable to changes in two countries – China and the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC). The drop in China, to 1,905 intercountry adoptions, mostly stems from changes in Chinese domestic laws related to the governance of non-governmental organizations. These laws were not targeted specifically at adoption, but have had a detrimental impact on the partnerships between U.S. adoption service providers and specific provinces that were designed to improve opportunities for children with special needs. Ninety-eight percent of the intercountry adoptions from China involved children with special needs. We are actively engaged in dialogue with our Chinese counterparts on this issue. The decline from the DRC stems from the fact the country no longer issues exit permits to adopted Congolese children seeking to depart the country with their adoptive parents. The Congolese government has indicated it is working on legislative changes regarding adoption. However, until the Congolese government provides further clarity, the Department strongly recommends against the initiation of new adoptions in the DRC. In FY2017, 83 children were adopted from the United States to seven countries, including Canada (41), Ireland (12), and the Netherlands (20). 

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.