(Link to Original Story)

This is the story of a 10 year old adopted girl named Eline, who finds her birth parents in China.

The transcription as done by Mirjam follows here.

This story is from 2007 - and the links to it may or may not be dead, you can try but I can’t read Dutch so… here’s the link http://www.uitzendinggemist.nl/

Navigate to “Spoorloos”, the interview is third along, the child’s name is Eline.

“Cllick orange button with “bekijk uitzending”(watch broadcast).First part is about Dutch couple adopting second cleft-affected son.Second part is about a Dutch agency (Wereldkinderen) that provides means for Chinese foster-parents who are willing to take up severely handicapped children. Third part: Eline. Starts at 0:27:35. Eline’s A-mother is/was a volunteer at Wereldkinderen (agency) who advertises for funds during the program. Same agency is afraid that more searches will bring hazard to future adoptions from China”.

Here is a translation ( thank you Mirjam ) of the interview:

http://www.uitzendinggemist.nl/index.php/aflevering?aflID=3906136

click orange button with “bekijk uitzending” (watch broadcast)

starts at 0:27:35

Background: in church

A church in Noord-Holland (province), a couple of weeks ago. We meet Eline.

Eline is an altar girl and searching for her Chinese parents. For a couple of years now she has been asking her Dutch parents about her roots. Eline was born in the surroundings of Chongqing.

Chongqing ~

Here she was abandoned shortly after her birth. The first months of her life she stayed with a Chinese foster family.

Background: garden

Then she is adopted by a Dutch couple. Eline grows op with Anneli.  Anneli is 7 years old and she is from another part of China. She is also a foundling,

Background: dinner

The children form a family with their mother Wilma and their father Jim, who also has Asian blood.

A-Father: It’s not very obvious that they are adoptive children in our case, so they mingle in and don’t arouse questions of the public. Now and then there is a remark: you are Chinese, well, that’s right.

Interviewer: Eline is now 10 years old, what kind of child is she?

A-Mother: She’s a delightful child. On one hand she is a little insecure. She is a child who asks many questions about the past, about the why, why couldn’t I stay there, why did I have to go, but on the other hand,
she is a very inquisitive child, also a cautious person, but she does embrace
people. That is very good; when she gives herself then she gives herself 100%.

Background: church

The two children are very content, but Eline repeatedly asks questions
about her past.

Interviewer: What kind of questions does she have?

A-Mother: Why did I have to go? Where are they? I don’t have a picture of them, what will they look like? Did they love me? Why wasn’t I allowed to stay there?

Interviewer: And she asked those questions of you.

A-Mother: Yes, mainly of me.

Interviewer: And what was your answer then?

A-Mother: I have always said: sweetheart, if you had stayed there, then they would have loved you enormously, because I can’t imagine that they wouldn’t have loved you. But we also explained to her that they could only have one
child there and that the chances are that she has more brothers or sisters.  Or that her parents were poor and if they have several children, it would not have been possible for you to stay with them.

Interviewer: How does she react to that?

A-Mother: She does understand, but you have been relinquished. It remains difficult. It is an answer, but deep in your heart you just want to be wanted.

Background: violin

Voiceover: Indirectly Jim and Wilma gain contact with a Chinese woman who comes from Chongqing, where Eline was abandoned. She spontaneously offers to search for the biological parents of Eline.

Interviewer: When this search succeeds, then one day you could come face to face with her Chinese parents. What will you say to them then?

A-Father: That’s difficult. For one that we are happy that Eline is with us. There are some things that you can see from Eline, she’s quite small, you have seen that, you will probably recognise that in her Chinese parents as well. And then we will see how the conversation develops. Then you have to start building a contact. What we will ask, we will decide at the time. These are the kind of things, you want to know what kind of people they are, to get an idea of how they live and for the rest we have to see how it develops.

A-Mother: And I think that I would say what a beautiful daughter they have. That they have a child to be very proud of.

Interviewer: Because?

A-Mother: Just how she is as a human being. How she is socially. You don’t see that with all children.

Interviewer: When Eline was abandoned they left a note with her. You gave that to us. Could you read it to us?

A-Father: That’s right, this is a photocopy of the original note. It’s a translation by the way, it said.. (English)..

Eline: Hello mummy, where are you? Who are you? What’s your name? Why did you leave me somewhere? Do you think I’m sweet? I miss you, do you miss me too?

Greetings, Eline Kuiper, bye, I will miss you, bye, bye, I will stop, bye.

Background: violin

Background: ballet

Chongqing

Voiceover: We are in Chongqing, 2000 kilometre from Beijing. In Chongqing and the surroundings 32 million people live. Because of the neon lighting Chongqing looks like a modern western city at night.

By daylight we meet Jocelyn. She was born and raised here and works as a project manager with IBM. Jocelyn managed to get the local media to pay attention to the story of Eline. A local journalist even wrote several articles about it. He did research and a couple of months ago he called Jocelyn with an amazing report.

Background: rural area

“In these surroundings, far from the city, the journalist contacted a farmer and his wife. The man and woman claim that they are the father and mother of Eline. The farming couple is willing to talk to us, but not in their own surroundings.”

Background: city

To abandon a child is of course a big taboo and that’s why they would rather not be seen in their own surroundings with a camera team from the West.

We invite the man and the woman to come to the centre of Chongqing. Here it doesn’t attract so much attention if they have contact with us. We meet in a big hotel where there are a lot of Western businessmen.

Father Wen and mother Ming have two children: a daughter of 17 years old and a daughter of 12 years old, Lu. She also comes. We go to a room on the top floor of the hotel. Here Wen and Ming can tell their story without disturbance.

B-Father: The child was born at home. And I cut the umbilical cord myself.

Interviewer: You didn’t go to the hospital

B-Father: No.

Interviewer: And there was also no family?

B-Father: No, none

Interviewer: You did it all yourself?

B-Father: Yes. When I saw the baby girl, I found her to be very sweet. She had long fingers and long toes. And she looked around immediately. So I could see her eyes. I bundled her up in cloths very well. We didn’t want other people to know that she was born. We wanted to keep her for a while before relinquishing her.

Background: restaurant

Voiceover: The baby is the third child for this couple. After getting their second child, Lu, they had to pay a big fine a couple of years before, which they have still not been able to pay fully. Wen and Ming know that another fine is waiting for them. A fine that they can’t possibly pay with their small income.

B-Mother: We wanted the child to find good fortune. We were not able to raise her. But in our heart we did want the child.

Interviewer: You abandoned the child at the police station?

B-Mother: Yes.

Interviewer: Did you see anyone picking the child up?

B-Mother: Yes, that’s why we waited.

Interviewer: You didn’t walk away immediately?

B-Mother: No.

Interviewer: Didn’t anyone see you then?

B-Mother: No.

Interviewer: Were you alone, or together?

B-Mother: Together.

(We put her in a basket with a note with her birth date and some milk powder.)

Interviewer: What kind of basket did you have?

B-Mother: A regular basket.

We wrapped her things and clothing. And also a bottle of milk. We had to walk to the city. There was no bus. It was far and I had pain in my legs. I didn’t know it was that far. But we didn’t have much choice. We could hardly abandon her in our own village. Everybody knows us there. I remember that we walked to that place. I remember which place it was.

Background: rural area

Voiceover: Father Wen is willing to take us to the place where the baby was abandoned. We follow the road they walked ten years ago. It is hours of driving on dirt roads. We end up in a place that looks very different from the modern looking Chongqing.

In the suburbs the locals go about their daily activities. There is hardly any traffic.

Here and there products are being sold. Chinese people who seem to have nothing to do, give in to another pass time: gambling.

We drive to the centre. At the father’s request we film as inconspicuously as possible.

Then we reach the police station where the child was abandoned. Father Wen asks us to stay seated in the car. We are at the spot where Eline was possibly abandoned 10 years ago. But are these really her biological parents whom we have found?

The answer to that question comes from Amsterdam. In this laboratory a DNA test has been carried out at request. The saliva of the Chinese couple is thoroughly analysed and compared with the saliva of Eline. From the results of this research, it will become apparent whether Eline is indeed the first Chinese foundling who can be put in touch with her biological parents. The research will take a couple of weeks.

Background: violin

The result of the research is known now. The story of father Wen and mother Ming is true. They are the biological parents of Eline.

B-Mother: What happiness! It’s really a miracle that she ended up there.

B-Father: She is beautiful. She must have fallen on her feet.  We must be very grateful to her parents for what they have done. I just hope that Eline does not blame us. I feel terribly guilty.

B-Mother: I hope we will be forgiven. I really hope that.

A-Mother: I have always told her the story as they are telling it themselves now. My feelings always told me that it was this way.

Interviewer: They feel guilty.

A-Mother: They don’t have to. They couldn’t have done anything else I think.

Interviewer: They are also grateful to you.

A-Mother: They also don’t have to be.

A-Father: We now have a beautiful daughter.

A-Mother: What is gratitude? Do the children have to be thankful to us? That they ended up here? Maybe she rather would have stayed there. But you can’t turn back time. And we are trying to give her a future here.

Interviewer: They see that too, don’t they?

A-Mother: Yes.

Eline: I miss you so, I really do. But I really have to stop now, because I have to go to sleep now. I would have had to do the same if I had stayed with you. Bye bye, and good night.  Greetings, Eline.

Background: text

In the meantime Eline and her sister have watched the images from China.

They understood what had happened.

The Chinese parents want to meet Eline and her Dutch family very much.

Jim and Wilma are planning to go to China with the children this year.

The New York TImes

(Original Story)

I AM not adopted; I have mysterious origins.

I have said that sentence many times in the course of my life as an adopted person. I like it so much I put it into the mouth of a character in the novel I’m writing. The character and I are both fond of the idea. We can think of ourselves as living in the dense pages of 19th-century fiction, where one’s origins — the exact mother and father — are not nearly as important as one’s “circumstances.”

Some might say I came to this rationalization because, until recently, everything surrounding my adoption was kept secret from me. Even the date it was finalized was a secret. (The woman on the phone said, “Those records are sealed.” I said, “I know I can’t see what’s in them, but can I find out the date from which I couldn’t see what’s in them?” She replied, “Even the outsides of the records are sealed” — a confounding statement, as I envisioned envelopes surrounding envelopes, all sealed into infinity.)

Of course, mysterious origins are a confusing business these days. One might be gestated in an unknown womb while having genes from some combination of one’s mother and father and a stranger; from a mother’s womb with some combination of known and unknown genes — not to mention the complication of untold numbers of half-siblings who might be out there from the sperm donations of one man. There are adoptive parents and biological parents, surrogates and donors — adults of all sorts claiming parenthood by right of blood, genes, birth, law and affection.

Does one have the right to know all of these people? If so, do they have a reciprocal right to find the child in whose birth they participated?

I won’t even try to answer these questions. It seems we must have a social conversation about this subject that will last for many years. The trend, certainly, is toward openness, a growing “right” to know. I am not against this trend. I simply want to give not-knowing its due.

I like mysteries. I like the sense of uniqueness that comes from having unknown origins (however false that sense may be). I have a dear friend who is also adopted. We spoke as we were considering whether we should enter our names into the New York State Adoption Registry, where we might learn something about our history.

My friend grew up in a small town upstate near a university. She had constructed for herself a satisfying fantasy in which her mother and father were in town on fellowships from the World Bank, had the occupations “king” and “queen,” had ruled in a remote region where everyone was fit, ate a diet centered upon yak yogurt and lived 110 years. She decided not to register. “One family is quite enough for me,” she said.

My own fantasies were more vague: an evolving set of parents including actresses, folk singers, writers and intellectuals. I am certain that none were like the computer scientists and mathematicians who run up and down the bloodlines of my adoptive father’s family. I think it is because of them, the example of those engineers and math professors, that I went into software engineering, a field for which I do not have native talent. (I was good enough, but I had to work at it.) If I had been raised by the word-eaters — writers, readers and long-letter-writers — who I’m certain were my “natural” parents, I never would have spent 20 years as a computer programmer.

Which is exactly my point. I could just see my birth mother looking up from George Eliot’s “Daniel Deronda” (Book V, “Mordecai”) to say, “Darling, why struggle so on those cold programs when you haven’t yet read ‘Middlemarch’?” And so I might have put aside my sweaty attempt to write a bubble-sort algorithm — and thereby missed the defining profession of my time.

No one is a genetic match to his or her parents. Nature has gone to a great deal of trouble to see that we are not like them (a strong argument against adding cloning to the human parental mix). Through the miracle of natural genetic recombination, each child, with the sole exception of an identical twin, is conceived as a unique being. Even the atmosphere of the womb works its subtle changes, and by the time we emerge into the light, we are our own persons. Knowing every single ancestor, therefore, will never solve the deeper mystery, which of course is the dreadful question of who we become.

Ellen Ullman is the author of the novel “The Bug” and the forthcoming “By Blood.”

By Jeanne Marie Laskas

Sunday, February 27, 2005; Page W35
Washington Post

(Original Story)

One of the grandmothers, a gentle woman in her sixties, turns to me and says, “Are your girls real sisters?”

I look at her. We’re at a birthday party. It’s a large one, kids everywhere, pizza boxes half-empty, giant cake decorated with Ninja Turtles about to be cut. Noise level: elevated. My girls, who were both adopted as infants from China, are in this mix, the 3-year-old chasing the 5-year-old, who is tackling the boy she calls her boyfriend.

Now, this grandmother. She often shows up at the birthday parties. She’s been a part of this group since preschool, as have I. I’m taken aback that the question I so often get from strangers should come from someone I know.

“Are they real sisters?” It happens at the grocery store and at the mall and at the bank. I get sick of it. You don’t have to be an adoptive parent to know it’s rude to pry into the details of any family’s genetic makeup. It’s invasive. Would you ask such a personal question of someone who has a child who looks like only one of his parents? Would you say, “Hey, did you have an extramarital affair that resulted in that one?” Would you say, “Wow, sure looks like a donor-sperm baby to me! Am I right, or am I right?”

Most of us have filters preventing us from making those sorts of blunders. But when it comes to adoption, very many of us don’t. I speak from lived experience. The real-sisters question is particularly troubling when, as so often happens, it is asked in front of the sisters in question. Imagine yourself a 3-year-old or a 5-year-old and some grown-up is talking to your mom about whether or not your sister is real.

Parents are born to protect children, no matter what it takes. So the natural tendency here is to go on the attack. “What do you mean, real?” I could say to the grandmother. Or, “Mind your own beeswax, sweetheart.” Or, “What gives you the right to question the authenticity of my children’s place in the world?”

Oh, you can get militant with this stuff. It’s probably the same with any group of people who feel woefully misunderstood. Maybe at first you roll your eyes at the numskulls of the world, but at some point you get so frustrated, you decide to crusade.

I may still decide to crusade, but it won’t be at a kid’s birthday party. What stops me is a memory, the same one that usually puts the kibosh on things when I find myself in this situation. It happened very early on in my parenting years. I was driving home Amy, the college student who was baby-sitting for us. Amy, I knew, had been adopted from Korea, along with her two brothers and sister. She was sitting there in that passenger seat, and I don’t know what came over me. “Now, are your brothers and sister your real brothers and sister?” I said. Me, an adoptive parent, with my adopted kid right there in the back seat.

I was curious! I have no other explanation. I was fascinated by the notion of a family of four adopted kids and wanted to know the story. I have no idea why I felt entitled to it.

Amy told me which of her siblings came to the United States first and second and third and fourth, and said there was no biological connection among them. She didn’t color this answer with a defensive, or even romantic, hue. There was no, “But we’re siblings in every way that matters and feel that our souls are forever intertwined.” It was just a straight-ahead factual accounting. Having gathered myself, I apologized for asking, said I should have known better.

“People are curious,” she said, with a shrug. She had many memories of her mother fielding inquiries about her adoption, always casually, and often with a shrug. The facts of her earliest years were, simply, facts. Her mother never treated them as something odd, or particularly interesting, or as a secret to protect, and so Amy never did, either. “No sense getting all worked up standing up for yourself,” Amy said, “when you’re already standing.”

I’ve never forgotten the line. Any parent, any mentor knows this one: It’s all about the example. If I get on my high horse and crusade for the proper use of adoption language in America today, I’m sending one message to my kids. If I forgive the questioner for the invasion of privacy that I, too, have been guilty of, I have the chance to send another.

“Anna was born in the Shanghai region,” I say to the grandmother. “And Sasha was born in the south, near the Vietnam border.” She nods, listens, seems satisfied with the information, but more interested in making a point of her own.

“You know, I just love your girls,” she says. “I can’t imagine our little group without them.”

Now, see, that was important information I might otherwise have missed out on.

Jeanne Marie Laskas’s e-mail address is post@jmlaskas.com.

by John Palmer / The University of Western Ontario

(Original Story)

The adoption of a child by non-biological parents is the transfer of a limited property right. To understand an economics-and-law analysis of adoption, one must first examine the nature of this property right. Then the conditions of exchange can be studied and assessed.The property right that is being exchanged is a parenthood right — the right to take on the rights and obligations that accompany parenting a child. These rights are limited by governments in many different ways. One may not buy and sell these rights, one may not readily dispose of one’s “property”, nor may one indiscriminately cause harm to the property. Also, one must provide food, clothing, shelter, and education for the property. These limitations have been imposed upon the owners of all such property in the class, whether the property right was acquired biologically or via exchange.

Changing Supply Conditions

Through the first half of the twentieth century, into the 1950s, the primary issue in adoption was finding acceptable homes for children, including adoptable infants born out of wedlock. Beginning in the 1960s, though, shortages of normal healthy infants emerged. This dramatic shift in the supply and demand conditions has been related to many concurrent shifts in relative prices, technology and tastes. Certainly one of the major determinants of the reduced supply of parenthood rights for adoptable infants has been the falling birth rates themselves, throughout the entire populations (and not just among unwed mothers) of industrialized countries. This decline in birth rates has been related to rises in the labour force participation rates of females and to lower-cost and more reliable birth control technologies (see Medoff 1993).

Another variable influencing the supply side of this market has been the continued raising of the social safety net, making it increasingly economically feasible for single parents to raise the children born to them rather than put the children up for adoption. Without increased welfare payments, Aid to Families with Dependent Children (in the United States), and increased support for day care programmes for the children of single parents, many of these parents would choose not to retain the parenthood rights to their children. Instead, they would choose to put the children up for adoption or, in some instances, choose not to create them in the first place.

Interestingly, it appears that the increased availability and declining price of abortions has had no statistically significant effect on the supply of adoptions, at least not in the U.S. (Medoff 1993). It seems a priori that the decriminalization of abortions and the resulting lower price, along with government support for abortions in many countries should have been expected to lead to a reduced supply of adoptions, but apparently these effects have not been very strong.

Within the past few years, another source of restrictions on supply has emerged as unwed fathers have sought to block the placement of children for adoption. Males have successfully filed suit to block the placement of their biological offspring in adoptive homes, arguing that (a) they have a legal entitlement to the parenthood rights even if the biological mother does not wish to retain the rights and (b) they were often not informed about the existence of the offspring (see Hansen 1993 and Shoop 1992 and the case law cited in these articles). The effect of these decisions has been both to reduce the supply of parenthood rights and to increase the risk to the parties acquiring them. One of the features of the U.S. Adoption Promotion and Stability Act of 1996 has been to establish a type of doctrine of lost grant or statute of limitations for claims from biological parents. The desired effect of this provision is to reduce considerably the risk to adopting parents that they will have to relinquish the rights in future years. Another effect, however, is that biological fathers who are not aware of the birth of a child they fathered will lose some parenthood rights they might otherwise have wanted to retain.

Shortages

As a result of these reductions in supply, the market faces a chronic shortage at current prices. It has been estimated that approximately only one in thirty of the couples applying for adoption will receive the child they want (Gubernick 1991a). With shortages this large, one can readily imagine that prices are well below the market clearing price and there is considerable lost consumer and producer surplus. In standard economic markets, a shortage would signal that prices should be expected to rise to re-equate the quantity supplied with the quantity demanded. Yet this has not happened in the “market” for adoptable infants, at least not in any direct way. The sole explanation for this difference is the intervention of the state in this market. If people were free to make contracts about the exchange of this limited property right, and if the state enforced these contracts as it enforces other contracts, then the emergence of a shortage at the current price would inevitably lead to an increase in the price (For one of the earliest academic treatments of this issue, see Posner and Landes [1978]).

The major reason that these markets have not evolved in this fashion or in any other straight-forward pattern is that markets to exchange these limited rights and obligations would give the impression of promoting the exchange of human beings. This commodification of infants is seen as repugnant and unethical by many people. The result of this widely prevalent view is that the state intervenes.

From a broader perspective, state intervention in these markets is justified on the grounds that it is warranted by social-welfare-function considerations. Most reasonable constructions of the social welfare function would include the net present value of the expected future self-perceived well-being of the infants being “exchanged” in these markets, and yet the infants are not in a position to make decisions in their own best interests. In most traditional families, the parents are expected make decisions on behalf of the children, but in the case of adoptable infants, we expect the state to act on their behalf. It is not at all clear, however, that the state does so successfully.

In a review of adoption outcomes, Wierzbicki (1993: 447) found that “…adoptees had significantly higher levels of maladjustments, … higher levels of externalizing disorders and academic problems than nonadoptees.” The crucial law and economics question concerning results like this is, “How would these children have fared under some alternative institutional arrangement?” Would they have done better if their parenthood rights had been be retained by their biological parent(s)? Would they have done better if they had been placed via some alternative scheme(s)? Or are these simply infants who are doomed to unhappiness and maladjustment with a high probability? Because of the counter-factual nature of the hypothesis to be tested, there is no clear answer to this question.

Based on the data that adoptions frequently do not seem to work out, there has been increased emphasis on encouraging biological mothers to retain the parenthood rights to their children. Concomitantly, governments are being exhorted to increase their counseling and training programs for young, single parents, to reduce the chances of their raising poorly adjusted children (see, for example, Donnelly and Voydanoff 1996). Not everyone agrees with these recommendations, however, questioning whether it is more cost-effective to counsel single parents than it is to counsel adoptive parents and their children (for this and related arguments, see Lowe 1996 and Bartholet 1994). In addition, there is evidence that the present scheme may be no better than alternatives which would place more reliance on market forces.

Games and Losses Under Non-Market Allocation

Typically when a prospective couple approaches an adoption agency to adopt a child, they are told that the likelihood of receiving one is low, and even then the wait will be long. They are also told that there are many “hard-to-place” children available for adoption — children who are older, who have physical or mental disabilities, or who are of mixed racial background. They are encouraged to consider adopting one of these children rather than wait for a normal healthy infant.

At this point, the couple must engage in some game-playing with the agency. The typical game is that the couple would prefer a “hard-to-place” child to no child at all, but they would prefer a normal healthy infant to a “hard-to-place” child. Also, they do not wish to appear unloving, uncaring, ungenerous, etc. to the agency worker(s), and so they think they must say they would be willing to adopt one of these children even though they would prefer not to. But then they fear that if they say they would be willing to take a “hard-to-place” child, even though that would be far from their first choice, they will receive one.

Agencies are given authority by the state to act as intermediaries in these transactions. Their mandate typically involves some phrase encouraging them to act in the “best interest of each child,” but when there are many children involved, this mandate is not particularly helpful. Agency workers believe that placing hard-to-place children in adoptive homes is preferable to foster-home or group-home alternatives even though the expected outcome of such adoptions is not particularly good, on average (Society 1993). They also are under financial pressure to place these children in adoptive homes rather than have to pay for their upkeep in foster or group homes. Like many employment, dating, or real estate agencies, their objective often appears to be to maximize placements. After all, maximizing the quality of the placements requires attaching weights to the preferences of all the people involved, a task which would meet with considerable difficulty if anyone attempted to formalize it.

This difficulty can be most readily seen by considering the following dilemma: an agency has two children, C and D to place in two homes, A and B. Both homes would prefer child C, but home A does not have a strong desire to become parents at all. They are on the margin between wanting to acquire a consumer durable, such as a recreational vehicle, and wanting to spend money raising a child. And they definitely do not want child D. Meanwhile home B would be willing to take child D rather than have no child at all, but it would much rather have child C. It is clear that if the adopting homes were required to pay very much for the parenthood rights to these children, home A would choose a recreational vehicle over a child, and home B would end up with child C, the one they prefer. Child D would end up in foster care or in a group home.

Contrast this outcome with the likely outcome under present-day institutional arrangements. In an attempt to maximize adoption placements and minimize foster or group home placements, the agency has an incentive to place child C with home A and child D with home B. In the first scenario, home B receives what it has a strong preference for; in the second scenario, both homes receive a child, but neither home has particularly strong preferences for the result. Follow-up studies of adoption indicate that this second scenario is more likely to lead to poor adoption outcomes (Palmer 1986); nevertheless, it is the more likely outcome under these incentives.

Consumer and Producer Surplus

To formalize the argument in the previous section, the current agency-adoption scheme, by allocating parenthood rights to homes on some basis other than willingness to pay, causes dramatic losses in consumer surplus. Those who are at the upper end of the demand curve may not receive a child, while those who are down near the lower left end of the curve may receive a child. There is a resulting transfer of consumer surplus from those who would be willing to pay high prices but do not receive a child to those who would not be willing to pay very much but do receive a child.

The size of this lost consumer surplus depends on how closely agency allocation criteria mirror consumer willingness to pay, the price elasticity of demand, and the sizes of the administered price (often a nominal fee) and what the market price would be if an unfettered market existed. Palmer (1986) has roughly calculated that for the U.S. market, this loss was somewhere between $45 million and $1.7 billion per year in 1971 dollars. There is quite obviously a great deal of imprecision in these estimates, but even the lowest ones indicate that the loss has been large. And these losses refer only to consumer surplus — lost producer surplus from not allowing people to produce more to satisfy the market demand is not included in these estimates. The size of these losses begs the question of why society tolerates their continuation: why do we tolerate the continued imposition of such large losses on such relatively few people to the benefit of so few whose benefit is so much smaller than the loss?

Why Not Use the Market?

As noted earlier, one important reason for eschewing reliance upon market forces to allocate these parenthood rights is concern about the moral implications of selling babies. Many people have argued informally that the primary reason Richard Posner is not a U.S. Supreme Court Justice is his having published his article with Landes in 1978 [Professor Newman: please feel free to delete this sentence if you wish]. But there are many other reasons as well, some more noble than others.

Among the more noble are concerns about the welfare of the adopted and unadopted children. The present scheme, it is argued, allocates more children to more homes than would a market scheme. This concern is misplaced, however, because it implicitly assumes that there would be one, single fixed price for the exchange of parenthood rights. Instead, a market would likely see a complex structure of prices emerge for the parenthood rights to children of various “qualities”. Normal healthy infants of a desired race and with desirable, credentialized genetic backgrounds would fetch high prices. Others would go for lower prices. Intermediation would continue to evolve to reduce the transactions costs.

The Allocation of Risk

One of the concerns about using market forces to expedite the allocation of parenthood rights to infants addresses a question which lies at the heart of economic analysis of law: who is the least-cost bearer of the risk? What if the child turns out to be different from what the adopting parents expected? Under present schemes, the risk is generally borne by the adopting parents, as it is by biological parents, if the child turns out not to be what they had hoped for. However, contracts to exchange parenthood rights will necessarily evolve to allocate various risks, and the exchange prices will vary with the risk allocation. Also, specialized intermediaries, an extension of many of the private services presently available, would emerge, in part to reduce transactions costs and in part to allocate the risks more explicitly and efficiently.

Recent litigation has indicated that risk allocation is a concern, even under agency-placement schemes. Agencies have long been held liable for misrepresentation of the quality of the product they have sold, e.g. for telling parents that a prospective adoptee has no known health problems when they know it does. Increasingly, agencies are also being held liable for negligence, for not investigating the child’s health and background to identify potential risks. Given the concerns about risk allocation under current schemes (see Hellwege 1995), it is not unreasonable to expect that these concerns will only grow, no matter what scheme is used. As court cases continue to define the responsibilities of sellers, buyers and intermediaries, the allocation of risk will become increasingly clear.

Another concern is the effect of the market on “hard-to-place” children. Some of these children are placed under the current scheme because of the shortages of the easier-to-place children; prospective adopters take them rather than settle for no child at all. Under a scheme that relies more heavily on the market, these children would not be placed at high prices. In fact they might not be placed at even a zero price. Indeed, many of them remain unplaced at low or zero prices under current schemes. The result has been that many of these children end up in perpetual foster care or in group homes. Recent policy has encouraged government funded agencies to provide subsidies to adopting parents to encourage the adoption of such children (Rubin, Katz, and Tin 1996). In essence, these proposals recommend allowing the price of the parenthood rights to these children to drop below zero.

Consider an intermediary who has contracted with a supplier to provide a good of a particular quality to a buyer. If the good does not measure up to the agreed upon quality, the buyer refuses delivery and/or sues for breach of contract. If this were to happen with parenthood rights to a child, the intermediary would have the responsibility of caring for the child. Rather than bear this expense directly, especially since their childcare would likely be under considerable scrutiny and would be quite costly, they would likely prefer to pay someone else to assume the parenthood rights to the child. Put crassly, they would sell the child for a negative price. This market-driven outcome would not, however, be much different from the subsidies offered by government-funded agencies, or from payments to foster parents and to group homes, under current placement schemes.

One type of subsidy that has received considerable support is a tax-credit for adopting parents (Clinton 1996), which has been included in the U.S. Adoption Promotion and Stability Act of 1996. While this tax credit will surely increase the demand for adoptable infants, the hope of its framers is that it would also encourage adoption rather than fostering of other children (Shoop 1994). Another effect of the subsidy is that it brings private adoptions and grey-market adoptions (a euphemism applied to private adoptions which are legal but which many adoption agencies think are immoral and ought to be illegal) within the financial reach of middle and lower-middle income households. Interestingly, schemes such as this could also be used to address the concerns of those who object to more market-oriented allocation schemes on the grounds that under such schemes, less wealthy households would be outbid for the more desirable children. It isn’t clear, though, why this result would be particularly bad, or any more or less desirable than the same result for automobiles, houses, clothing, etc., all of which have higher qualities which tend to be acquired most often by wealthier households.

Many people have been concerned about the effects of transracial adoptions on the ability of the adoptee to identify culturally and racially with its heritage. Because of these concerns, efforts have been made to avoid or reduce the numbers of transracial adoptions. Recent research has concluded, however, that in the case of transracial adoptions involving African-Americans, there is “…no concrete evidence for proving the occurrence of psychological harm to African-American children” (Alexander and Curtis 1996).

It is not unusual that alternatives develop when market forces are constrained by government policy. So it is with the parenthood rights to adoptable children. Private, foreign, and grey-market adoptions have all become increasingly commonplace over the past three decades. The growing practice of foreign adoptions has been a particularly strong response to shortages and low prices in industrialized countries (see Landers and Christensen 1987, Gubernick 1991b, and Ning 1992), leading some writers to worry about the extent to which the transactors are making informed decisions and not being exploited (Hermann and Kasper, 1992), though generally it is difficult to see how expansion of the choice set makes people worse off.

One final area of concern is the contractual agreement between adopting couples and another female for the latter to be artificially inseminated by the male of the adopting couple. This process, commonly referred to as “surrogate motherhood” has raised ethical questions, but the legal framework for the exchanges has evolved fairly quickly and explicitly. The emergence of this particular type of transaction can be ascribed almost entirely to shortages in the other markets for parenthood rights to children. Without those shortages, this supply response would not be so likely to be induced.

Market Evolution

The economic analysis of adoptions is a comparatively recent field of research. Serious shortages did not emerge until the late 1960s and early 1970s. Since then, there have been strong legal proscriptions on the use of markets to alleviate the shortages, but market forces have nevertheless had a strong influence on adoptions. Private adoptions, with large payments to intermediaries and to the biological parents, are commonplace; government-backed bounties are in place to encourage the adoption of children who would otherwise face a childhood of foster and group homes. Although markets will probably never become completely unfettered in this arena, market forces will continue to shape the evolution of the institutions that regulate the intermediation between buyers and sellers of the parenthood rights to children.

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Ning, L. 1992. Foreign adoption of Chinese children legalized. Beijing Review 35: 23-25.

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ADOPTION MOST FOUL: Like many children, Esther was abducted when she was only a few-months-old.

Guatemala: International adoptions are raising some serious concerns as a disturbing story has revealed its dark side. Each year, several thousand Americans adopt children from Guatemala. But not too long ago, the State Department started advising prospective parents to consider ‘other’ options.

Esther Sulamita is finally home and is nestled close to her mother. But like many children Esther was abducted when she was only a few months old - only to re-appear under a different name in Guatemala’s controversial foreign adoption system.

Last year, Esther’s mother Ana Escobar, scoured hospitals and orphanages across the country in a desperate attempt to find her daughter. Now, after a DNA-test which proved her identity, Ana has finally got her daughtrer back.

“It’s something that I don’t know how to express, it is a quite great joy honestly, I’m telling you, I can’t find a way how to express what I’m feeling right now that I have the baby,” says an overjoyed Ana.

Ana says Esther was ripped from her arms by a band of armed men who locked her in a storage closet.

It was a ‘mirale’ as Ana puts it, when she spotted Esther — who is now a toddler — at a state adoption office in Guatemala city. She petitioned for an identity test and the results brought her daughter back home.

“it is the first case of a stolen girl that was found using the council’s verification system, the DNA proved it was the daughter of the mother that was looking for her,” says national council for adoptions’ Elizabeth de Larios.

While Esther’s story ended with a heartfelt reunion, not all of the cases in Guatemala have the same happy ending. In fact, baby trafficking is such a problem that lawmakers have announced an overhaul of the country’s foreign adoption process.

The new policy requires case-by-case review of every pending foreign adoption which means thousands of families hoping to adopt may have to wait a little longer.