27 June 2007

AMSTERDAM – Prospective parents who would like to adopt a healthy young child have to wait eight to ten years currently. Waiting times have never been this long, Trouw reported on Wednesday.

The long waiting lists at adoption agencies are encouraging more prospective adoptive parents to arrange the adoption themselves. The lobby organisation for couples who make the arrangements for adoption themselves has grown over the past six months from 270 to about 400 members, the paper reports.

Developments in China have contributed to the long waiting times. More children worldwide are adopted from China than from any other single country.

China signed The Hague Adoption Treaty at the beginning of this year, in which it pledges to first look for adoptive parents within its borders before sending children abroad. Far fewer children are being brought to the Netherlands from China as a result, Trouw reports.

Reports of children being abducted and sold into adoption in India have also affected the reputation of the adoption sector. "The Netherlands now thinks that adoption is child trafficking," says professor of adoption studies Femmie Juffer

She says this is unfortunate because adoption is still the best option for many children. Adoptive parents were wrongfully portrayed negatively by the reports on the Indian case. "They are not at all looking to take someone else's child," Juffer says in Trouw.

Trouw also reports however that the waiting list for difficult to place children – those with medical issues, for instance, or older children – is much shorter.

[Copyright Expatica News 2007]

Subject: Dutch news