Please Help!

Please sign this petition to encourage the Ethiopian Ministry of Women's, Children's, and Youth Affairs to reconsider its new policy to review only five adoption applications each day.  To make an impact, 250,000 signatures are needed this weekend. 

MOWA:  The Ministry of Women's, Children's, and Youth Affairs is the government body in Ethiopia that must review each adoption application file and issue a letter of approval before an adoption may be finalized. Until this month, MOWA had been reviewing as many as fifty files each day: in 2010, it approved over 4,000 foreign adoptions, including 2,513 adoptions by Americans (see article).

New Policy:  This new policy is intended to ease MOWA's workload so that its staff may (a) spend more time reviewing each file, in an attempt to reduce instances of fraud, and (b) focus on the children who are not eligible for adoption (see e.g. Ethiopia Adoption Alert). Despite MOWA's good intentions, this new policy significantly harms the very children it seeks to protect and "is a tragic, unnecessary and disproportionate reaction to concerns of isolated abuses," according to the Joint Council on International Children's Services (see article).

Impact on Orphans:  On a conference call this morning, the U.S. State Department said that MOWA now has 800 - 1,000 files pending. Based on limited information, the State Department has suggested that families with open court files may expect a 12-month delay, with file reviews cut back to 5 per day. With an average of 20 files approved each day prior to this policy, this slowdown will have a snowball effect.  By April, the file backlog may be 1,300+.  By the end of the year, the backlog may exceed 4,000, unless families begin to drop out of the Ethiopian adoption program (which seems likely to happen at alarming rates).  At least one agency is projecting that children who are eligible for adoption will eventually have to wait in institutions for more than five years after a family has offered to provide a loving home. 

In our daughter's case, this policy could have been the difference between bringing her home at six months old, as we did, and bringing her home at two-, three-, or even five-years old. Spending a few extra months or years in institutional care can have a profound negative impact on children (see e.g. Harvard research).  Equally distressing, many children who are otherwise eligible for adoption will never have a forever family if these delays are realized.  The new policy will also jeopardize the ability of adoption service providers to continue their donation of orphan care and family preservation assistance to the 1.2 million vulnerable individuals who were helped in 2010, and will overburden already struggling orphanages, who may begin to turn away children who need help because they have no beds available.

Note: as foreign adoptions in Ethiopia have increased (to the U.S., from virtually none in 1990 to 1,724 in 2008), infant mortality has decreased from 12% in 1990 to 7% in 2008 and under-5 (including infant) mortality has decreased from 21% in 1990 to 11% in 2008 (see U.S. Department of State statistics and UNICEF report).  Intuitively, there is some causal correlation between these numbers, as orphanages have had more room and resources available to care for the most vulnerable children. Of course, even if adoption is a factor in these improvements, there are many other factors as well.

Better Alternatives: We absolutely support taking steps to ensure that each child is protected and every adoption is ethical and the best available option for the child, after all other options including family reunification and in-country adoption have been ruled out. There are better ways to improve the system, however.  The most obvious alternative to the proposed slowdown is to increase MOWA's resources.

If MOWA needs to increase its personnel tenfold to continue to thoroughly and timely review files, it should do so.  If funding is an issue, MOWA may charge an appropriate file processing fee.  In comparison, significant processing fees are already paid by adoptive parents to the state and U.S. government for everything from background checks to immigration applications. This fee would not begin to cost adoptive parents as much as the cost of institutional care of their child for the months or years that they wait to bring them home, not to mention the months or years of resources that it may take to counter the physical and emotional damage to the child that may occur while they wait.

Any administrative fee could be used to help fund in-depth file investigation and review, as well as ongoing care for the children who are not eligible for adoption. This alternative would help ensure that children who are ethically and legitimately eligible for adoption are brought home sooner rather than later, that their situations are made better rather than worse by the system that is supposed to be helping them.

Best Interests of the Children:  In the past, MOWA has demonstrated that its primary concern is, in fact, the best interests of the children. Last fall, Ethiopia's adoption program was praised by the U.S. State Department's special advisor on children's issues:  "[T]hey want to do it right. Other countries should look at what Ethiopia is trying to do." (see article).  Given its track record, we are hopeful that MOWA will reconsider this most recent policy decision and conclude that a catastrophic slowdown in file review is not the answer.

In the midst of all of this, we are again thankful that we chose an ethical adoption agency that we can trust.  We are proud that our agency is first and foremost an orphan care ministry that "finds families for children, not children for families."  In 2010, for every one child that our agency placed with an adoptive family, sixty other children and families were served through its outreach programs.  We are confident that adoption was the best option available to our daughter, and we pray that Ethiopia's adoption program will continue to protect and serve the children who wait. 

How You May Help:

1. Please sign the petition to the Prime Minister of Ethiopia.

2. Please share this information with friends and family.  Post, forward and broadcast this request via Facebook, Twitter, and blogs. Include in your email blasts, church bulletin, and church website, and announce it from the pulpit this weekend.

3. Please pray that God will help these leaders make the best decisions for the children who wait, give adoptive families peace about this issue, and guide each of us as we "defend the cause of the fatherless" (Isaiah 1:17). 

We need at least 250,000 people to sign this petition by Monday. As our agency wrote, "If you have been adopted by God, and understand the unmerited favor and love that His adoption delivers, PLEASE TAKE ONE MINUTE to answer His call to be a voice for the voiceless, to defend the cause of these Ethiopian orphans."