Having gone through a transnational (this article is the first time I've heard international adoptions called "transnational") adoption of my wife's granddaughter from South America, I can attest the system is fubar. Even though we already had a court decree of custody from the Chilean equivalent of family court, AND we are the kid's grandparents, we still had to go through a four YEAR adoption process because the U.S. refused to recognize the custody decree. We had to get a lengthy, costly, and extremely intrusive home study performed by a recognized agency, which in our state was Catholic Family Services (which became Catholic Charities mid-way through the process). I have remained in contact with the case worker since the adoption, not because we have to but because she's a nice woman. Her office of Catholic Charities has since elected not to renew their accreditation to do home studies for international adoptions, because they've found that there are too may headaches, heartaches, and fraud. (There is one diocese in our state that has maintained international accreditation).
Twelve years ago I went to Russia for ten days. On the way to Russia I met and chatted with a nice young couple from some mid-western state who were on their way to Russia to pick up a Russian baby they were adopting. They were Evangelical Christians, and I'd say they fit the pattern described in this article. Don't know how long they had been married but they had no children of their own ... "yet." And they were IMHO totally unprepared to become adoptive parents of a kid from another country.
It shouldn't have happened, because usually the process in Russia took much longer, but when I was leaving Russia I found myself in the passport control line at Sherametyevo Airport right behind this same couple, and we were going to be on the same flight back to CONUS. They had the kid. He wasn't an infant, he was a toddler and he was beginning to talk. And the problem was, he was talking in Russian and these two young people didn't speak any Russian so they were beginning to obsess about how to communicate with their new child while he learned English.
I had with me a pocket-size but very good Russian phrase book that I had used for my trip, and which I didn't expect to have any further use for. So I gave it to them and they were effusively grateful. Maybe it helped ... I hope so.
But then there are the stories about groups like the Christians who set up an adoption mill in Haiti. It resulted in a number of people being arrested for child trafficking when it turned out that (as reflected in the article) many of the alleged orphans weren't orphans at all, they were children of impoverished families and either the families sent them to be adopted to eliminate a mouth to feed, or the "agency" lied to the families and didn't explain that they were giving their children up for adoption.
Frauds of that nature invariably result in more (ineffective) rules and more (ineffective) red tape, which is why Catholic Charities finally decided it just wasn't worth it and dropped out of the game.
