Child Trafficking in Inter-Country Adoptions

On July 29, 2011, a Guatemalan judge issued a landmark decision requiring an American couple, Timothy and Jennifer Monahan, to return their adopted 6-year-old daughter to her Guatemalan birth mother. This child is just one of many from Guatemala who were allegedly kidnapped or coercively taken from their birth mothers by corrupt adoption agencies and ‘legally’ given to American parents with falsified records of their family history and orphan status. Though the Monahans have not been implicated in any wrongdoing in the case, to advocates of adoption regulation, the case is just one of many examples in which adoptive parents and governments in the developed world have willfully turned a blind eye to child trafficking for the sake of successfully processing inter-country adoptions.

By early 2008, Guatemala was second only to China as a source of children for adoptive parents in the United States. In 2007, American parents adopted 4,726 Guatemalan children. Approximately 1% of Guatemalan children born at that time were expected to be raised as American citizens. Guatemala was a com- mon source for adoptive children because it was one of only a few countries in which the government did not regulate inter- country adoption proceedings. For a fee of approximately $30,000 (USD), potential adoptive parents could process an adoption with a private notary in a span of approximately nine months - a relatively short time for an inter-country adoption. The lucrative nature of the child-trafficking business and the lack of adoption regulation meant notaries could earn a stable source of income through these practices.

In December 2007, Guatemala’s Congress passed legislation subjecting adoption to government regulations. Since the legislative change, inter-country adoptions from Guatemala have, for the most part, been indefinitely halted. However, it is only now that the full extent of the previous system’s problems has come to light and is being litigated in court.

While corruption within the Guatemalan adoption industry is being examined, the underlying problems that allowed such practices to occur in the first place have not been properly addressed on a global scale. Despite the fact that Guatemala was not complying with international standards, and is a non-member of the Hague Convention on Inter-country Adoption (Hague Convention), adoptive parents and their governments were not deterred from taking part in the inter-country adoption process.

Since 2007, when most nations indefinitely suspended inter-country adoptions with Guatemala, adoptive parents have turned to other countries that are not signatories to the Hague Convention, such as Ethiopia, to be able to adopt quickly; and their governments are doing nothing to stop this. Hague Convention guidelines need only be followed if both nations involved in an inter-country adoption are parties to the Convention. As such, despite Canada and the United States both being signatories to the Hague Convention, they do not need to follow Hague Convention guidelines when processing adoptions from non signatory countries. This renders the Hague Convention powerless in situations when enforcement of its policies is most necessary.

Advocates for safer inter-country adoption proceedings argue that those adopting from Guatemala willfully ignored red flags for years in order to adopt more quickly. Chris Denton, a Minnesotan woman who tried to adopt in Guatemala described what she witnessed when she moved to Guatemala in the spring of 2007: “There are drivers for adoption, there are discounts for adoptive parents, so it is a business, it’s a market [...] and there’s a lot of talk of corruption, there’s a lot of talk of women making babies for money.” These widespread rumours of corruption also exist in nations like Cambodia, Ethiopia, and Haiti. However, like in Guatemala, the rumours are ignored for the sake of expediently giving hopeful parents a child, and a presumably orphaned child a home.

The expedient nature of adoption proceedings should be a cause of concern for adoptive parents, not a selling point to adopt from that nation. However, the reverse still remains true. When China began implementing stricter regulations for international adoptions, processing times doubled, and the number of US adoptions from China decreased from 7,903 in 2005 to 5,453 in 2007. Those numbers continue to fall.

Despite the Guatemalan court ruling, it is uncertain whether the Monahans will be forced to return their adoptive child to her birthmother. To be enforced, the Guatemalan ruling must first be brought before an American court. Regardless of how the case is ultimately resolved, at least one set of parents will have lost their child due to a process that is supposed to create families, not destroy them.