Anti adoption

Over the past year we've been doing a lot more research into adoption for obvious reasons. I think one of the most surprising things I have come across is anti-adoption writing. Until recently I had never really thought much about why anyone would be against adoption, apart from just not wanting to adopt themselves. When reading an adoption blog the other day I came across this comment from a reader...

“Adoption is based in the leveraging of inequality by a dominant class in order to procure children for those who have none from those who ideally would keep their children except for circumstances that are a direct result of this class difference to begin with.... On the international level, your same class is the one that enables, funds, equips, provides for, and sustains economic and political wars around the world that result in the very "orphans" (who all have extended families) that you claim to "save" by adopting them”

Although the comment itself was a little too generalized to take seriously I did look at a variety of links they suggested as evidence against adoption.

http://www.brandeis.edu/investigate/gender/adoption/index.html

http://www.antiadoption.org/

What interested me most was the issue of international adoption as a corrupt business. Basically poor countries making money from adoption and thus creating a need for more children to be adopted so they can make more money. Obviously I don't think this is the case in all adoptions otherwise we wouldn't be adopting. But it is an important issue to be aware of as someone who wants to adopt. How do we know that the child we want to adopt is not being taken away from a family who could (and would want to) care for the child themselves if they were just given a little more help? How do we know we are not part of the problem rather than the solution?

Actually for us we are quite confident that this will not be the case. For one we are not paying a lot of money to anybody (we're not using an agency and the government costs are minimal). The Philippines does not have a large international adoption focus, they do try to place children within the country with Filipinos if possible. I noted that the Philippines was not one of the many countries on the list of 'Problems in Countries Offering Children for Adoption' at http://www.brandeis.edu/investigate/gender/adoption/index.html

If our situation was different however, like if we lived in the UK or US and were adopting internationally then this would be a much bigger issue for us. However if we did live in either of those place I'm not sure that we would adopt internationally anyway.