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Adoption: Ethiopia

U.S. Embassy in Addis Ababa documents about adoption,
  2000-2013, obtained via Freedom of Information Act

Officials Review International Adoption
in Ethiopia 

“[Some] birth relatives stated that they believed the child would permanently return to Ethiopia at the age of 18. These birth relatives cited conversations with orphanage social workers as the principal source of this information…. Some of these birth relatives also indicated that they believed the adoptive parents would send financial support to them from the United States, or that they expected the child to send back financial support once they reached the age of 18.”

Exclusive State Department internal documents from Freedom of Information Act requests

From 2002 through 2013, Americans adopted more than 14,000 Ethiopian-born children. In the beginning, according to officials at the U.S. Embassy in Addis Ababa, those were humanitarian efforts, carefully overseen by the Ethiopian government, resulting in some needy children finding desperately needed new families.

But by 2010, numbers had escalated from 105 adoptions a year to 2,511, an astounding increase in a short period of time. Some adoptive parents in North America and Europe were reporting that when their newly adopted children would learn English, they would explain that everything in their paperwork was a lie: They did indeed have families back in Ethiopia and expected to return there.

Since 2008, the Schuster Institute has been exposing problems and pointing to potential solutions in international adoption. Congressional hearings prompted by our work led to passage of the Universal Accreditation Act of 2012, first introduced by Sen. John Kerry, which put one of those solutions into effect on July 2014.

And so in response to these and other reports of escalating fraud, the Schuster Institute for Investigative Journalism submitted Freedom of Information Act requests for all adoption-related documents, correspondence, and other written materials from the U.S. Embassy in Addis Ababa.

Four years later, we received hundreds of pages of documents revealing how the U.S. State Department insiders discussed the problems they found, and how their understanding of the crisis—and efforts to stem it—developed, which we have analyzed in “They Steal Babies, Don’t They?” at Pacific Standard Magazine. At this website, we have posted all these documents for anyone to read: cables, emails, reports, minutes of meetings, all redacted by the U.S. State Department before we received them. The State Department explained that the redactions were to protect personal details about American citizens or the children they were adopting.

We realize, however, that these are raw documents, out of context, and give only partial impressions of what some Embassy staff members were thinking at particular moments. To offer a fuller picture of what was happening, we asked every American adoption agency and organization named in these documents whether they would like to submit a response that might clarify, correct, or comment on anything mentioned regarding their organization. Most did so.

Here you will find links that will enable you to read: all of the documents we received from the U.S. State Department; an article analyzing the story to be found inside those documents; an index to every mention of any U.S. adoption agency or Ethiopian orphanage mentioned in the documents; and the responses that those American organizations chose to submit.  

Please contact us if you have any comments that you would like to add. 

• "They Steal Babies, Don't They?"  
  Read our article analyzing these documents
• Table of Contents of Documents
  See the full table of documents received via FOIA
• Officials Review International Adoption in Ethiopia<
• Index of Agencies
  See an index of every adoption agency and orphanage mentioned in these documents, with links to the documents in which they are mentioned
• Adoption Agencies' Responses
  Read comments from those agencies that responded
• Read an article and similar documents about international adoption in Vietnam, and more from Nepal

NOTE: This page from the Schuster Institute for Investigative Journalism website offers documentation of and background about serious irregularities in international adoption. 

Images in collage: 
Mother & Child and Man Walking © Niall Crotty, SXC.hu
Ethiopian Festival © Carolyne Pehora, Dreamstime.com

© 2008-2014 Schuster Institute for Investigative Journalism, Brandeis University, Waltham, MA 02454. All rights reserved.

^{Last page update: November 24, 2014}