In the Netherlands, adoption from abroad is no longer possible. New ethical considerations explain this policy change, mirrored in the rest of Europe, where fraudulent adoptions have been overlooked for decades.
On May 21, 2024, the Dutch government announced it would halt its international adoption service, once and for all. The reason? The government was unable to stop systemic structural abuses.
Cases of corruption, child trafficking and theft, and falsification of official documents had already surfaced in 2021, following the publication of a report by a committee tasked by the government to evaluate inter-country adoptions.
Revealing decades of abuse, the report also identified the actors and their respective responsibilities, leading the government to first suspend international adoptions in February 2021.
After a pause for almost two years, adoptions were authorized again in six countries at the end of 2022. In the Netherlands, intercountry adoptions to South Africa, the Philippines, Thailand, Taiwan, Lesotho, and Hungary have resumed with more control and a reformed system in a central institution under creation.
Impossible supervision?
The reform project was also supposed to concern intermediaries, those large associative groups or unsupervised private brokers abroad. Many of them — doctors, lawyers, and even criminals — were involved in the abuses reported. With no state control, their impunity was total, so they could take advantage of the situation to kidnap children or lie to parents about the finality of international adoption.
“Brokers were often members of the local elite and were able to use their connections to avoid criminal prosecution. Investigations into abuses were begun in some countries, but the abuses were hard to prove, and the investigations seldom led to convictions,” says the Joutra committee.
Intermediaries are heavily incriminated in the report, which attributes responsibility for deficiencies in the adoption system far more to them than to the government, which ignored the various complaints for decades. The Joustra committee proved that the Dutch government was aware of the issues surrounding intercountry adoptions as early as the 1960s.
The reform plan, now abandoned, was never put into practice, and it is uncertain whether it is really possible to monitor private actors in foreign countries.
Europe questions itself
While Dutch families already involved in the 3 to 4‑year average international adoption process will be able to continue, no further applications will be accepted, Minister Weerwind announced this month. Even by limiting adoptions to a small number of countries, the Dutch government cannot prevent the risk of abuse inherent to the inter-country adoption system and has therefore decided to no longer participate.
This situation is becoming increasingly common in Europe. For example, Denmark and Belgium have acknowledged their inability to ensure the legality of intercountry adoptions, despite the 1993 Hague Convention, which has been adopted by 105 countries.
Last November, Norway announced it was considering temporarily halting adoptions of foreign children. In 2021, Sweden launched investigations into its international adoption activities, especially regarding the connections with Chile’s dictatorship between the 70s and the 90s.
The Swiss government has even apologized to adoptees affected by fraud, as some adults have no way of discovering their true identity because of falsified adoption papers.
The “white” savior complex of the Western world
The Joustra committee states in its report that adoptive parents, governments, and intermediaries were all confident that they were doing a good deed, based on “an unquestioned assumption that these children would in any case be better off in the richer Western world.”
Today, this “good” intention is being called into question, notably by denouncing the “white” savior complex, in the words of Nigerian-American author Teju Cole in a 2012 essay. This notion was unheard of in the 80s, when international adoption was a “social phenomenon,” according to a French government report on international adoptions.
This new awareness, combined with external factors such as better birth control, increased child care, and the rise of domestic adoption in adoptive countries, led to a drop in inter-country adoption. From 1,700 in 1981, there were only 145 international adoptees in 2019 in the Netherlands.
In addition, Statistics Netherlands (CBS) states that children adopted abroad are more likely to need psychological help, experience feelings of loneliness and depression, and are less likely to have a happy childhood.
For the far-right Dutch government, this proves that children’s interests are best served when they can be safely cared for in their country of origin.
