Decades of foreign aid and assistance by 10,000 NGO’s, including UNICEF, Save the Children and SOS Children’s Villages, produced a situation prior to January 12 in which Haiti remained the poorest country in the Western hemisphere. Roughly 380,000 children were living in orphanages, of whom an estimated 7,300 were declared abandoned. An estimated 200,000 children were subjected to the practice of indentured servitude known as restavek. Any reasonable person can see that this domestic solution, often within extended family, is sanctioned slavery.
The same organizations responsible for this “ success “story argue that international adoption must be put on hold for years, while children are registered and domestic alternatives explored. Meanwhile children will live in group situations in the naïve assumption that they are not at risk from their caregivers or extended families. The children who were declared abandoned prior to the earthquake are most vulnerable to the exploitative domestic solutions that were already prevalent prior to the recent devastation.
Adoptions must be ethical, legal and transparent. This is not some unattainable goal; in fact,the Haitian government had a process in place prior to the earthquake that saved hundreds of children from domestic slavery.
International adoption may not help every vulnerable child. But to deny it to those children in immediate need is a violation of their basic human right to grow up in a family.
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