Every year, approximately 40,000 “intercountry” adoptions take place An intercountry adoption entails “a change of the adopted child’s habitual country of residence but not necessarily of the child’s citizenship. Intercountry adoptions represent fifteen percent of the total number of worldwide adoption. The United States is the leading country for adoptions, both domestic and intercountry, with intercountry adoptions accounting for roughly fifteen percent of all U.S. adoptions.
Every year, a number of children are offered for adoption through illegal means or are adopted by those who should not be adopting children. While these practices are not limited to intercountry adoptions, the instances of wrongdoing are difficult enough to uncover in adoptions that one knows about, and virtually impossible to discover when an adoption occurs overseas, outside of the knowledge of the United States. Because of this difficulty, this Comment will talk about intercountry adoptions alone, but the principles discussed can be applied to domestic adoptions.
Jessica Alexander from the University of Houston Law Center.
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