A Calculation: The ‘Orphan Crisis’ in Ethiopia

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Americans adopt about 2,000 children annually from Ethiopia. If we calculate the median costs for each adoption at $46,000 (Adoptive Families, Winter 2014), then we have a total of $92,000,000, that is 92 times the sum CHIFF has available. Money talks, and money talks in many languages. In Ethiopia 78 percent of the population struggles with an income below $2 a day. So a bribe of $1,000 is a year’s income for many poor Ethiopians. If the adoption industry is not carefully regulated it will result in more adoption coercion, baby stealing, child trafficking and corruption.

CHIFF doesn’t address these difficult issues and focuses on the bright side of adoptions on their Facebook page. I don’t deny that there can be a bright side, but that brightness is, to put it mildly, severely dimmed by the darkness that broods underneath it.

Three more things about CHIFF. First mathematical: imagine CHIFF would pass congress and the new regulations would raise the total annual adoptions to 4,000 or 10,000 or even a million: the problem of the orphans in Ethiopia is not at all solved. To solve the ‘orphan crisis’ bigger and probably more economically painful measures have to be taken. Secondly the US has to do its work in a Foreign Affairs context. Third it must focus on the psychological aspect of adoption. If you were adopted from Ethiopia and at a certain point in life you would understand that your existence in the US depended on cheating out your first parents by a system that was supported and condoned by your by now home country, how would you feel about that country, your adoptive parents, the adoption industry? How would you feel about yourself and who you are?

Ethiopia is but one example of the many countries where the ‘orphan crisis’ plays out. There are, says the CHIFF website, 200,000,000 orphans. As in Ethiopia in all those other countries CHIFF will not make any difference in that crisis. It will make a difference for American families who want to adopt and who, sorry to say, don’t care about the origins of their child.