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  The Universal Declaration of Human Rights, or, Do People Really Steal Babies for International Adoption?

  Posted Thursday, December 11, 2008 2:52 PM | By E.J. Graff

  Yesterday was the 60th anniversary of the signing of the gorgeous U.N. Universal Declaration of Human Rights, worked on by Eleanor Roosevelt (among many others). Like so many statements of high-minded ideals, it has been honored, alas, more in the breach than in the reality. But at least the world has these beautiful paragraphs as a goal at which to aim, a kind of Holy Book or Ten (OK, 30) Commandments of how governments should treat people.

  The particular human rights violation that has preoccupied my attention for the past year has been corruption in international adoption—in particular, the way that Western adoption agencies’ disproportionately large payments for “adoptable” babies have induced unscrupulous locals in poor and corrupt countries to buy, coerce, defraud, and kidnap babies. The stories of families (in Nepal, Guatemala, Cambodia, Vietnam, and elsewhere) that have unwittingly lost their children forever to foreign countries have broken my heart. So have the stories of adoptive families who learned that their older children—adopted purely to save a child from terrifying want!—were sold or stolen, traumatized, and desperately missed their first families.

  Foreign Policy published my central investigation into the supply-and-demand cycle of international adoption, titled “The Lie We Love” and now free online. We’ve loaded a lot of the background research and documentation (and are still adding more!) on the Schuster Institute for Investigative Journalism Web site. Today the Boston Globe published my short essay warning families to be wary of pulling an Angelina Jolie and adopting for humanitarian reasons—lest, instead of saving an orphan, they inadvertently create one. Did any XX’ers know that international adoption could be this ugly?

  Filed under: international adoption, Angelina Jolie, Universal Declaration of Human Rights

About E.J. Graff

• E.J. Graff is associate director and senior researcher at Brandeis University's Schuster Institute for Investigative Journalism, where she directs the Gender & Justice Project. She is a resident scholar at the Brandeis Women's Studies Research Center. As a journalist and author, her work has appeared in such venues as The New York Times Magazine, The Washington Post, Foreign Policy magazine, The Boston Globe, The Los Angeles Times, Columbia Journalism Review, Good Housekeeping, The Nation, The New Republic, and in more than a dozen anthologies. She collaborated on former Massachusetts Lt. Governor Evelyn Murphy's book Getting Even: Why Women Don't Get Paid Like Men--and What To Do About It (Simon & Schuster, 2005). Her first book, What Is Marriage For? The Strange Social History of Our Most Intimate Institution, has been widely cited in legal journals, reprinted for academic use, entered as courtroom exhibits, and quoted by government policymaking bodies.

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