When I was the blogger for Guatemalan adoptions on adoption dot com, I made a vow to contest every inaccurate article about the Guatemalan adoption process I came across. With the suspension of new adoptions in Guatemala, a lot fewer articles have appeared, and I took a hiatus from reading the ones that were blatant lies or simply bad reporting.

But when "S," one of my faithful readers sent this article, "U.S. Adoptions Fueled by Guatemalan Kidnappings," I was compelled to respond. She went on to say that she was horrified at the thought of anyone she knew reading it. The gist of the article is that most Guatemalan children are kidnapped and placed for adoption illegally. The authors boldly state that: "Children are routinely kidnapped and parents regularly coerced to sell their children…”

For those of you who are not up to date on the old Guatemalan adoption process, (to date there is no new one in place), let me explain:

Children placed by their mothers for adoption must undergo a DNA test with their mother to verify that they are indeed  birth mother and child. Additionally, in the last year a second DNA test at the end of the process was introduced to assure the American authorities and the prospective parents that there was no switching of babies.

Children who are abandoned must be issued a certificate of abandonment before they can be adopted. Generally this takes several months, sometimes longer, because the judge in charge of the case must be assured that there are no family members who want to raise the child.

This is where corruption can and does happen, but to what degree, no one has been able to accurately determine. A child who is kidnapped can be placed in an orphanage or handed over to a lawyer by the kidnapper, and then placed for adoption after there is a certificate of abandonment.  

Many adoption agencies, including the one I used for my daughter’s adoption, did not work with orphanages. The children available for adoption were placed by the birth mother. I have yet to find statistics on the number of children adopted by U.S. citizens who were classified as abandoned. So for the authors of this article to make sweeping statements such as the following is infrustrating and infuriating.

Children are routinely kidnapped and parents regularly coerced to sell their children…”

Today, over 2500 of the 3000 adoption cases registered legally under the old adoption system are caught in the sticky web of Guatemalan bureaucracy. Some of the children have been in the adoption process up to a year since being matched with their parents, while others unfortunately even longer. Many adoptive parents are depleting their savings to visit their children in Guatemala as they grow from infants to toddlers while the system changes its requirements to complete the adoption from month to month. The waiting parents are weary and scared, and they have every right to be.

They also have the right to be frustrated with lousy reporting of the kind this article displays.

 Image Credit: wikipedia