Guatemala Baby Broker Story
Lest anyone forget all the heinous adoption activities that our elected and appointed officials seem to want to wash away by multiple trips to Guatemala…
An excerpt:
“A couple from Mayer, Minn., adopted two girls from India in 2006, but later discovered they were years older than their doctored birth certificates indicated. One girl turned out to be 21, and both were deported back to India. The family has sued, and state regulators are investigating the conduct of Edina-based Crossroads Adoption Services, which handled the adoption. The firm’s attorney said the claims have no merit. ¶ A Minneapolis couple recently spent two years on a complicated adoption in Guatemala that involved firing their Pennsylvania adoption agency, spending $170,000 on legal and other expenses and unraveling false information about the child’s origins.
Governments hardly ever prosecute anyone for such wrongdoing. Even when state licensing authorities take action against U.S. adoption agencies, international adoption experts say, penalties are rarely severe. Sanctions are based on what those firms do in the United States, not on the core problem of corruption abroad.
In Minnesota, there are 17 agencies that help people find children in foreign countries. In the past three years, state regulators began 14 investigations against eight firms.
A Family Journey, which handled Hibbs’ failed adoption, was cited for 13 licensing violations this year, including overcharging her. Investigators also found that Hibbs paid $9,000 in foreign fees before she fully qualified for adopting.
Attorney Scott Hillstrom, who represents the agency, said state investigators conducted “a blatantly incompetent investigation,” but his 24-page appeal was rejected on every count. Hillstrom said his sister’s agency handled 175 adoptions and failed to deliver children in just two cases, including Hibbs’.
Experts say the willingness of Americans to spend $25,000 or more adopting a child is a big part of the problem and has contributed to illegal activities in such countries as Guatemala, where that kind of money is a fortune.
The money “becomes a motivation for people to illicitly obtain children,” said David Smolin, a law professor at Samford University in Alabama who has written about the ethics of international adoption. “In most cases, the obtaining of the children is outsourced to facilitators and to foreign agencies, and the Americans really don’t know. Some are so ideologically committed to international adoption that they really don’t believe it is happening, even when there is a lot of evidence. Sometimes they just turn a blind eye.”
Read the whole detailed story at Burned by a baby broker [Star Tribune 6/29/12 by David Shaffer]
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