There is word from China that the fee required by some orphanages to process an international adoption is about to increase from $3,000 to $5,000. I say "some" because a survey of orphanages in Guangdong, Guangxi and Jiangsu shows that the increase is not unanimous, and it is not being dictated by the CCAA. It appears that it is being left up to the individual directors themselves to charge what they feel appropriate. In other words, it is an attempt to get more money from the adoption program.
Prospective families, by and large, have been understanding of this increase. "Things cost more nowadays," one adoptive parents wrote on a popular adoption newsgroup, "and more special needs children are being abandoned so they need the funds more than ever." Another parents wrote "To tell you the truth, the orphanage donation fee was probably one of the only fees I did feel was justified and the least associated with corruption."
It might help to put this increase (and it is being implimented on a "trial-balloon" basis by individual orphanages) into some perspective. The $3,000 "donation" has been part of the adoption program since its inception in 1992, and has not deviated in the following 16 years.
How much is $3,000 in China? With the average director's salary in the neighborhood of $160 per month, a single orphanage donation of $3,000 will pay the director's salary for a year and a half. With the average foster family expense being around $30 to care for a child for one month, one donation fee of $3,000 will care for eight children for a year.
And, lest we forget, the $3,000 orphanage donation was enough money to convince six Hunan directors to purchase trafficked children for $350, only to turn around and adopt them internationally.
Obviously, $3,000 is still a lot of money in China.
But what is wrong with orphanages increasing the fee paid by adopting families? After all, the dollar is way down, and expenses and overhead are increasing. Shouldn't we be a little understanding on this increase?
No. I wrote two years ago about the financial disparity between internationally adopting families and domestic families in China. Due to Western families' ability to pay what in China is a rich-man's fee to adopt, orphanages were actively discriminating against domestic families in order to maximize their cash-flow. As a result, unless a domestic family was able to approximate the contribution made by international families, orphanages were unwilling to adopt a child to them. In fact, 93% of the internationally adopting orphanages were uncooperative when a middle-income domestic family applied to adopt a child. It should be clear to everyone that increasing the adoption fee to $5,000 will do nothing to solve this discrepancy. In fact, one could argue that increasing the donation fee is in violation of the Hague Agreement, which requires a sending country make a priority of placing children domestically.
But the increased fee will have an even darker result. A significant reason for the decline in abandonments across China is the recognition by birth parents that healthy infants have significant worth, and therefore an increasing number of families are arranging their children to be sold to other families or traffickers rather than simply leaving them on the doorstep of the orphanage. Many orphanages, recognizing this supply-demand reality, are entering the marketplace alongside the traffickers, purchasing babies from birth parents or from the traffickers themselves. A fee increase of $2,000 will only add fuel to the baby-buying problem.
Adopting families should actively work against this tentative fee increase. Families should inform their agencies that they are unwilling to pay the increased fee. Only by "pushing back" will the orphanages attempting to increase their fee be forced to back down.
