Since I started writing for a living, I've been through intense periods of writing mostly about a single subject. There were a few years of international business, followed by time writing only on businesses in New York City. There were years spent on entrepreneurs, and years spent on the world's biggest companies.

For the last nearly 18 months, I have focused much of my energy on adoption, mostly adoption from Russia. On this blog and another, I've had the chance to explore the changes that have made Russian adoption now very different from what I first experienced in 1999.

Would somebody care to tell me what's going on at ABC News? This past week, the network posted not one, but four stories about child kidnapping and adoption. There was "China's Lost Children", "U.S. Adoptions Fueled by Guatemalan Kidnappings", "An Adoption Nightmare" and "Spirited Away: Japan Won't Let Abducted Kids Go".

The stories, all written or co-authored by Russell Goldman, are puzzling on many levels. Usually, packages of this sort are hung on a national or international news peg, but I can't find one. The Hague Convention on Intercountry Adoption, which could help curtail the adoption of children not legally free for adoption, came into force in the United States more than a month ago. National Missing Children's Day, created by John Walsh's National Center for Missing & Exploited Children, is next week. UNICEF is preoccupied with Myanmar, China and children's health. There are no new statistics in the ABC reports, no novel number-crunching.

If you want to start a firestorm, forget the matches. All you really need to get a spark is to say you are going to do something about child welfare.

Want proof? Since Lisa told you a few months back about how UNICEF's child welfare stance favors anything but adoption, her post has been read more than 600 times. UNICEF sees its work as benevolent; its critics, like Elizabeth Bartholet, the founder and director of Harvard Law School's Child Advocacy Program, see the opposite. Here's what she wrote in an article just published in the Georgia State University Law Review:

Opposition to international adoption cannot be justified based on any best interest of the child principle, despite the claims of many children’s rights organizations. Instead it is grounded in a group of commonly shared but deeply flawed ideas about children and the role of the state, and driven by adult agendas that are not truly informed by children’s interests.

The National Council For Adoption put out a press release yesterday announcing that Wal-Mart Stores Inc. is helping it launch a campaign to recruit more foster parents in the United States. The program is called " Families For All" and Wal-Mart is supporting it with a $75,000 donation.

So, being the kind of person who likes to put numbers in context, I started looking for some context for that number.

Wal-Mart is, according to Forbes, the 16th-largest company in the world, with annual sales that last year topped $378 billion. Last year, the Wal-Mart Foundation gave $296 million to charities in the U.S. and says that Wal-Mart employees and customers contributed another $106 million. (The foundation has a program to match hours spent in volunteering with a contribution to the volunteer's charity.) That, plus Wal-Mart's international giving put its total philanthropy for 2007 at $470 million.

Late last night, after the kids had gone to bed and Dancing With The Stars had danced, I got to sit down with my Russian cultural stash. This is the pile of books and magazines that I have put aside to read to learn about the country of my children's birth. It is an actual, physical pile, quite separate from all those Web site bookmarks that have piled up on del.icio.us.

What's in the pile? A copy of "War and Peace", since I'm trying to make some headway with the works of Leo Tolstoy. Several issues of Russian Life, a wonderful little bi-monthly that I discovered last year, as well as Readings, its quarterly literary companion. This latter magazine is a real gem since each issue takes a theme and then presents, in English, excerpts of Russian novels and poems on that theme. The first issue was subtitled "The hearts of dogs"; the second is "Three Russian springs". Many of the items are short enough to make them good reading with the kids. Oh, and in a fit of literary masochism, I asked the town library to see if it could get a hold of "The Magical Chorus", Solomon Volkov's new history of Russian culture from Tolstoy to Solzhenitsyn.

The Magical Chorus: A History of Russian Culture from Tolstoy to Solzhenitsyn author: Solomon Volkov asin: 1400042720

A massive earthquake struck China today and Great Wall China Adoption, one of the largest agencies active in China adoptions, is saying that several orphanages that regularly send it referrals have been affected.

You've seen the drop in inter-country adoptions to the United States. Some of you have experienced the slow-downs in Russia, China and South Korea. Maybe you are trying to sort out the new rules in Ukraine, or cope with the upheaval in Guatemala and the impeding closure of Vietnam to American adoptive parents. There's a larger trend at work here, I think, and it is quite simply this: The golden age of international adoption is now behind us.

"Golden Age" has been a metaphor applied to many events in world history, from the rule of Elizabeth I in medieval England to the invention of radio and television. Wikipedia defines it as "a period in a field of endeavor when great tasks were accomplished", which seems right on the mark for today's discussion of adoption.

Last week, Angela pointed out that Karensadoptionlinks.com had revived its list of the adoption agencies that operate in Russia, by region. I think it's a useful list, but maybe not for the reason its creators had intended.

Few prospective adoptive parents go into a Russian adoption saying something like, "I want to adopt from Novosibirsk, which agencies operate there?" Russia is simply too vast and I found, when adopting my younger son from Sakhalin Island, even Russians can have a sketchy idea of its geography. The exception to this seems to be prospective parents with a fear of flying. While Russia does meet the minimum safety requirements of the International Civil Aviation Organization, its accident record (compiled here by the Flight Safety Foundation, an arm of the company that pioneered pilot simulator training) can cause trepidation. I've known parents who have chosen their agency because it handled adoptions within driving or train distance of Moscow and St. Petersburg.

On May 5, the University of Minnesota released a study on the mental health of adolescents who had been adopted as infants. Researchers at the university, which has consistently been one of the best sources for information on the life outcomes of internationally adopted child, compiled a very large study group: 540 non-adopted teens, 514 who had been adopted from abroad and 178 teens adopted from within the U.S. Their goal was to see whether there was any basis for continuing concern about adoptees being at heightened risk for mental health problems, particularly among children who had been adopted internationally.

The study was published as "The Mental Health of U.S. Adolescents Adopted in Infancy" in the May issue of the Archives of Pediatrics and Adolescent Medicine. It found that most adopted teens in America are psychologically healthy and, to quote the journal's abstract on the study, "adoptees scored only moderately higher than nonadoptees on quantitative measures of mental health".

Colorado has released the results of its investigation into the business practices of 22 international adoption agencies that operate in the state--and they're not pretty.

As I told you in March, the review was prompted by complaints from prospective adoptive parents of excessive fees and by the closings of three agencies that had operated in the state: Claar Foundation, Commonwealth Adoption International and Friends of Children of Various Nations. The Colorado Department of Human Services wanted to see if its regular agency audits were accurate and authentic, and whether its licensing requirements were sufficient.