Another One Bites the Dust!!

Waa waa waa…

“After 30 years as a nonprofit adoption agency that has placed 4,500 orphaned and vulnerable children from around the world as well as here in Washington state, Adoption Advocates International will be closing its doors to bringing more children into secured and loving homes,” said a statement from the nonprofit delivered to the Peninsula Daily News on Tuesday.

This statement came out with a whisper in only a hyper local Washington State online paper on March 12, 2014.  The same paper then reported that a local church had issued a complaint against said Adoption Advocates International for a $7,000 donation that was to go towards helping a adoptive family “already in the process”. Since Adoption Advocates International cashed the check on March 4th without saying anything about planning to shut their doors  a week later , the Church understandably wants their money back.

AAI, the Adoption Agency that Placed a Murdered Adoptee, Dead!

Now what is not mentioned at all, in either of these articles,  is that  Adoption Advocates International is the agency that placed murdered-by-her-adoptive-parents- tortured-adoptee, Hana Williams. If you missed that awful story, make a point of reading Kathryn Joyce’s Slate article, Hana Williams: The Tragic Death of an Ethiopian Adoptee, And How It Could Happen Again, which goes into detail about placements by AAI and their failure to provide post adoption services. So while we normally might rejoice when adoption agencies close down, this particular agency closing does strike a nice chord in many of us in AdoptionLand.

Jane Jeong Trenka apparently offended someone’s sensibilities (gosh dern!) because she had a gif of a little boy dancing for joy on her post about the closing of AAI.   I personally find the list of abuses and wrong doings at the hands of the agency founder more upsetting than any cute kid dancing could ever be, but here please judge for yourself.

Maureen  Evans questions  how Adoption Advocates International is a Hague-accredited agency, certified by the Council on Accreditation through April 2016. It Is concerning that the  COA accreditation, which is intended to be a high standard that signifies an agency is in excellent financial and programmatic health could miss such things such as abuse, failed placements, criminal conduct and fiscal death.

Adoption Advocates International  Closes due to Money Woes?

But they were a fabulous agency right? Poor them.  It’s just all those annoying other countries kept on giving them a hard time and making their jobs of saving precious orphan so much harder! Boo-fucking -hoo.

Now it is stated that  ” ..financial hardships for the nonprofit over the past few years have necessitated its closure. ”  Now of course, we know that the rates of international adoption in the USA are decreasing and decreasing rapidly.  Thankfully, countries are tightening up their borders, realizing  that sending their nations’ children to the USA for adoption might not be the best way to serve their futures and closing their doors to wealthy American’s.

As I have stated before, this decline in the “products”  aka adoptees , required to keep their lines of business going, has resulted in decreased revenue for many adoption agencies. Of course the agencies are very worried as their nice lucrative cash cows are drying up. And that is why we are seeing the adoption lobby get into bed with various members of Congress for the lousy CHIFF (Children in Families First Act) which really is the adoption industry bailout bill.  They can say it’s all about the welfare  children, but it’s all about increase the numbers of children  being imported into the USA to keep the adoption industry in the black and to keep the paying clients, the eventual adoptive parents, satisfied.

Does The Number of Children Imported Equal Revenue for Adoption Agencies?

Now as example, I took some time and crunched some numbers. I just had an idea and wanted to see what it looked like.

I went and made a simple chart of the numbers  pulled from this CNN article. Just the numbers of adoptees coming into the USA from all the sending countries via international adoption.   CNN has data from 2003 to 2011 so that curve looks like this:

I also made the same kind of chart from Adoption Advocates International “nonprofit” 1099’s. Only the past few years were available so the data set of info looks like this:

The revenue was really the line item that I wanted to look at, so we get a chart that looks like this:

Now before we move on to the next image, I want to talk about what it means.

One chart counts children and the other chart counts millions of dollars in profits and revenue for ONE adoption agency. They really shouldn’t correlate, should they?

If adoption was ethical and not a business and not based on supply and demand than these two charts should not relate to each other at all, right? Especially a fine accredited long standing nonprofit adoption agency like Adoption Advocates International  that has “saved” children for 30 years. And I want to be clear, I actually did this as an experiment. I really had no idea how it would turn out. There has been no manipulation outside using Photoshop to overlay these two charts and line them up.

I have to admit, the results actually made my jaw drop.

The pink line is the numbers of adoptees coming into the USA from 2003 to 2011 with teh numbers on the far left being, of course, the numbers of children. The blue line is if the revenue brought in by Adoption Associates International  with the middle bank of numbers being profits in the millions.  I lined up the years for comparison. The trajectory in the decrease of both  children and profits is pretty much parallel to each other.

I got chills when I saw it. I really didn’t expect it to be THAT clear, but it is.

Adoption agencies such as Adoption Advocates International need children to be coming into the country at a certain rate to keep their businesses running.  Maybe before the boom years, they could have managed with lesser numbers of adoptees imported,  but I think with the international adoption bubble pre-Hague in the early 2000, they all got cash drunk. Many over expanded, maybe made their offices too fancy? I don’t know, but the numbers of adoptee coming in cannot support them anymore.  And so they are dropping like flies and crying to Congress to push CHIFF and bail them out. Bring us more adoptees to “save” they say, but they really want to save themselves by having children to sell for keep their revenues up.

Just look at the picture.  Just look at it.