In Defense of Child Trafficking

Scenario 1: My wife and I apply to an agency to adopt a child. We fill out our own body weight in forms. We undergo psychological evaluations that do little more than test our ability to rehearse standard responses beforehand. We wait for months, are initially turned down because the child in question's mother is having second thoughts. Time passes, we hire a lawyer for an enormous sum, appeal, and are finally approved. We adopt our "baby" who is now three years old and scarred by months of uncertainty and foster care.

Scenario 2: My wife and I pay $75,000 to an orphanage and select an infant to adopt. The orphanage's lawyers make sure that we have total legal custody. We have our baby inside of a month.

The first scenario involves heartache, uncertainty, depression, and bureaucracy. It is the currently legal and accepted means of adopting a child.

The second scenario is beneficial to all parties involved, exciting, speedy, and joyful. It is illegal trafficking in children and considered morally reprehensible.

But let's just ask ourselves why.

Certainly you cannot put a "price" on a human life. Instinctively, many would condemn the "selling" of adoptive children on those grounds. A little reflection, however, reveals this for the thin argument it is: adoptive parents are not "buying" a "life." They are buying the right to adopt. There is no moral difference between purchasing this right with $75,000 worth of bureaucracy, time, and tears vs. $75,000 in actual greenbacks.

Perhaps a "trade" in adoption would lead to child snatching for profit and inhuman practices. This argument, however, is defeated by the same virtually impenetrable logic that surrounds legalization of any black markets: opening up the market actually decreases the amount of danger and immorality surrounding it. Prostitutes in the few Nevada counties where the sex trade has been legalized do not face a fraction of the dangers that street walkers in New York City do.

The same must be true for adopted children. Parents who are willing to risk paying for adoption under current laws must necessarily deal with underworld figures who are likely to be adept at using violence to enforce their contracts (after all, the courts will not.) Since there is no need for such criminal rings to worry about reputation effects (they haven’t exactly got a listing with the better business bureau), they may treat either prospective parents or children in rough and cruel ways, so as to extract as much profit from the one transaction for minimal personal expense.

Parents in a “free market” for adoption would naturally choose from the most reputable agencies that treat children with great care. Agencies and orphanages, in order to stay in business, would have to do a great deal to maintain such a reputation. And so on.

Finally, it is argued, a free market would do nothing to ensure the suitability of adoptive parents. As though the accident of birth does? Every human being who was not an adopted child had the following suitability screening performed on his parents: "Reproductive organs functioning? Check. Okay - you pass. Have your child now." After this, we rely on laws against child abuse and neglect to police unloving parents. It is baffling that we should require stricter standards of parents who, far from merely not being handy with birth control devices, actually pay enormous sums to adopt.

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All this is intended to be food for thought for anyone who has heard the proffered justification for Romania’s ban on international adoptions. The justification? That “adoptions by foreigners were so poorly managed that they sometimes resembled child trafficking.”

Heaven forbid. Lest we be accusable of *gasp* putting a price on human life, let us be content to have Romanian children languish in foster-care hell.