Is it ethical for families from wealthy nations to adopt children from poorer countries?
Honestly, I never looked at it as a question of ethics. If it were easier and less expensive to adopt American children, then more people would probably do so. As for Madonna's adoption issues, it seems she picks children who have families who are still emotionally attached to them, yet do not have the financial wherewithall to care for them. I don't recall Angelina Jolie and Mia Farrow having these problems. Maybe I just wasn't paying attention back then.
Several readers assert that rather than undertake foreign adoption with its attendant problems, ethical and otherwise, Madonna and others should adopt locally. Sadly, as many people who have attempted this can confirm and as some readers note its not easy, and sometimes its all but impossible. I know a couple of families who turned to foreign adoptions only after being thwarted in their other efforts to have children, including through adoption here in the U.S. Which raised this question for some readers: isnt there a greater moral obligation to help those close by? It was once commonly thought so. Samuel Johnson, the great 18th-century moralist, said as much to James Boswell, as recorded in the latters Journal of a Tour to the Hebrides: A man should first relieve those who are nearly connected with him, by whatever tie; and then, if he has anything to spare, may extend his bounty to a wider circle.
There is a creepy evocation of colonialism when a rich American or European swoops into a poor African nation and grabs a child, as if the country were a baby plantation. Critics charge that the adoptive parents benefit from the persistence of poverty. They do, but in much the same way as Lenny Bruce described the modus operandi of Jonas Salk, J. Edgar Hoover and himself: These men thrive upon the continuance of disease, segregation and violence. That is, they respond to but do not promote human misery. (O.K., except for Hoover.) Whats more, poverty is not the sole reason children are abandoned. It was Chinas one-child policy that made so many girls available for adoption. Genocide orphaned thousands of Rwandan children. AIDS still reduces children to wretchedness in many parts of Africa. Adoptive parents do not seek to protract anyones torment but to build a family and help a child, actions we esteem.
Honestly, I never looked at it as a question of ethics. If it were easier and less expensive to adopt American children, then more people would probably do so. As for Madonna's adoption issues, it seems she picks children who have families who are still emotionally attached to them, yet do not have the financial wherewithall to care for them. I don't recall Angelina Jolie and Mia Farrow having these problems. Maybe I just wasn't paying attention back then.