Child Laundering: How the intercountry adoption system legitimizes and incentivizes the practices of buying, trafficking, kidnaping, and stealing children

The article title further claims that the adoption system both legitimizes and incentivizes stealing, kidnaping, trafficking, and buying children. The title does not claim that the adoption system explicitly authorizes these pernicious practices, but rather claims that the adoption and legal systems create incentives to engage in these destructive practices. In addition,the legal rules and processes associated with adoption are clearly inadequate to prevent these illicit practices from becoming a significant part of the intercountry adoption system. Indeed, the legal rules of the adoption system are systematically used to “launder” or legitimize these practices, by proccessing as “orphans” and then adoptees, infants and children who were stolen, bought, or kidnaped from their birth families.