What happened to adoptions?
By Manuel F. Ayau Cordon
(Prensa Libre, June 2, 2008)
An unpleasant misfortune imposed by law to the Guatemalan childhood was the success that UNICEF had (with its lobbying and huge contributions, that rumor has it that they were $900 thousand) to ensure the end of adoptions of abandoned children, success that it also had in other countries who heeded its ghostly stories, leaving thousands of boys and girls without a family and in a situation of wretched poverty, begging and prostitution, when they were not aborted, for lack of homes willing to adopt them. (I remember that the US Government suspended its aid to Unicef form indirectly promoting abortion).
There are many fooled by phrases like “They don’t want the children, because they are no longer a business”. It is a cruel cynicism to speak like that about those who use to give the services of receiving, supporting, sheltering, feeding, providing medicines, dental work, of doctors and education to abandoned children, recovering those expenses with voluntary contributions and with the collection of a fee for lending those services to the abandoned youth.
The term “trade of children” sounds as insidious as if it we criticize that the Press sells news for money or that the Unicef diplomats get money for their services. Regrettably, for reasons that come from very far away, since before Dickens, to earn money has a bad reputation, event though everybody does it, because there is nothing wrong with that and even churches request money ( "donations").
It is known of isolated cases of theft of children in Europe, in the United States and in other countries, where the remedy is not to punish thousands of children, but the few delinquents. Has anyone in Guatemala been punished? Do you know that the foreign adoptions are done mainly (95%) to the US and that its government requires two DNA maternity tests and previous authorization?
It is said that babies are abducted to extract organs, as if this does not require of sanitary facilities, qualified medical staff, compatibility testing and proof of origin and procedure by the recipient, a process difficult to achieve, especially in a clandestine way. If the government knows about this, why they do not apprehend the delinquents? Meanwhile, while more yellow and ghostly the tale is, the more it is liked by the morbid minds.
Now it turns out that only the Government can handle adoptions and, consequently, the private orphanages had to close and according to the Press, the adoptions have stopped, because the Government does not have neither the hogars nor the funds to care for those boys and girls. Taking care of them costs money that formerly was willingly paid, without being a burden to the public funds. Now the new bureaucracy resorts to give their care to “chosen" people who will have to be paid to cover up keeping expenses, etc. Now the people will have to support it with their taxes (Trade?, Business?, Bribes?).
The greatest damage, which obviously they do not care about, has been to deprive so many abandoned young people of a family, of a home to grow up and develop, of an opportunity to get an education, and of a promising future. This law constitutes a cruelty, and should be eliminated, even if that is not liked by the ambassadors of countries and institutions who "help" and that only because they give money they believe that they are entitled to interfere and impose their ideological judgments on what is not of their incumbency.