Oh, shizzle: “They Steal Babies, Don’t They?”

E.J. Graff, one of our favorite journalists, just dropped this Ethiopian adoption bomb. Damn…

Ethiopia, the Hague, and the rise and fall of international adoption. An exclusive investigation of internal U.S. State Department documents describing how humanitarian adoptions metastasized into a mini-industry shot through with fraud, becoming a source of income for unscrupulous orphanages, government officials, and shady operators—and was then reined back in through diplomacy, regulation, and a brand-new federal law…

In the case of inter-country adoptions, far too often, orphans were “produced” by unscrupulous middlemen who would persuade desperately poor, uneducated, often illiterate villagers whose culture had no concept of permanently severing biological ties to send their children away…

In some countries, humanitarian adoptions metastasize into a corrupt mini-industry shot through with fraud, expanding dramatically and becoming a source of income for unscrupulous locals and government officials—until developed countries, appalled, stop permitting adoptions from that country, thereby marooning the children who do need new families abroad…

An Embassy researcher talked with someone in the Wolayta Zone Administrator’s office who reported allegations that local orphanages were bribing families to relinquish their children, saying, “Parents were given empty promises and did not know where their kids were going.”