Canada Adopts | Internet Adoption Online

Internet Twins Story
It was a story that was heard around the world. American twins "sold" twice on the Internet.

The facts of the story, which became known as the "Internet Adoption Scam", were hard to believe. The impression you got was that babies were routinely being bought and sold online -- auctioned off to the highest bidder like baseball cards on eBay. All you had to do was drag the baby icon over to the shopping cart, pay your fees and within days- - Presto! -- there'd be a knock on the door and you'd become instant parents.

The fallout was huge. Besides setting off a transatlantic war between the two couples who "bought" the twins, the incident gave adoption and the Internet a black eye and probably forced a good number of prospective adoptive parents to think twice about their decision.

So what is the connection between adoption and the Internet? Can you buy a baby directly from the Net? The answer is clearly no. The Internet can help you with your search for a baby, but there's more -- much more -- to adoption than that. (To find out what's involved in the process, check out other sections of the site, particularly Adopting in Canada.)

As it turned out, the Internet angle in the twins story was actually quite minor. What it boiled down to was this: The Net was the place where the facilitator at the centre of the scandal was found by the adoptive couples.

That two couples from two different parts of the world -- the United States and England - were both able to find her speaks volumes about the Net's ability to reach and connect people. But it doesn't automatically make the Net a culprit, the way the media may have had you believe. If the facilitator had been found through another medium - say, the newspaper or the Yellow Pages -- would the headlines have screamed "Newspaper Adoption Scam" or "Yellow Pages Adoption Scandal"?

Ultimately, the twins' story wasn't really about the Net at all. It was about one person's greed and two couples' desperation. Think of it rather as a cautionary tale about what can go wrong in an adoption if you don't do your homework and hire the right professionals.

After initially playing up the more sensational details of the story, the media eventually stepped back and took a more balanced approach. Problem is, by then the damage was done. People had already made up their minds about what had happened. Nevertheless, here's what the Globe and Mail had to say, in an editorial that was published later that week.

The world is full of unwanted and orphaned children. The world -- at least the rich part of it -- is also full of couples who are eager to adopt a child. No matter what happens in the case of the two American babies "sold over the Internet," governments should keep sight of that fact. It would be a terrible shame if the alarm over this case were to stand in the way of the thousands of legitimate international adoptions that take place every year. Those adoptions bring immeasurable delight to the adoptive parents while rescuing countless children from life in an orphanage or a brutal existence on the streets.

In Canada, for example, many couples have successfully adopted children from Romania, where they often lived in poorly run orphanages in wretched conditions. Even more couples have gone to China, where the government's one-child policy combines with a cultural preference for male heirs to produce a surfeit of unwanted girls. The vast majority of these adoptions go smoothly, and all parties benefit. China is relieved of the burden of caring for unwanted children, the children get loving parents and the parents get a bouncing baby girl.

International adoptions are not without their problems. The fees charged are often extortionate -- tens of thousands of dollars in some cases. Unscrupulous middlemen sometimes make things difficult for everyone.

But in the better travelled routes, such as the adoption road to China, most of these problems seem to have been worked out. Many safeguards are built into the process. To protect the parents, experienced agencies make it clear what fees they will have to pay and what paperwork they will have to complete.

To protect the children, Canadian social agencies vet the adoptive couples to test their fitness as parents, just as they would if the couples were adopting in Canada. In most international adoptions, the whole process is governed by the Hague Convention on Intercountry Adoption of 1994, which was specifically designed to set guidelines on such adoptions and restrict child trafficking and fraud.

The case of the "Internet babies" has sounded alarms because it raises the spectre of babies being bought and sold over the Internet like athletic shoes or laptop computers -- just another commodity in the e-commerce age.

The fears are overblown. The fact that the adoption took place over the Internet is irrelevant. It could just as easily have happened by fax or telephone. The fact that money changed hands should not be considered outrageous, either. It may be unpalatable that money is involved when a baby is adopted, but it is misleading to say the baby is sold. Adoptive parents are simply paying a fee for a service -- a complicated and, for them, immensely valuable service.

Even if the middleman or the birth mother herself makes a profit on the transaction, we should not let our distaste blind us to the facts. The case of the US Internet babies was a straightforward case of fraud. The unscrupulous adoption broker tried to double its money by taking fees from two couples. Thus the custody tussle that is now under way.

Everything possible should be done to keep incidents such as this from happening again. The adoptive parents are suffering terribly as their hearts are tugged back and forth, to say nothing of the upset for the babies. But let's remember: Most international adoptions are legitimate and trouble-free. They should be encouraged, not condemned.

Reprinted with permission from the Globe and Mail, January 22, 2001