How the Hague Convention on Adoption Protects Children

Susie Doig, Holt’s senior executive of U.S. programming, explores how the passage of the Hague Convention on Intercountry Adoption enshrined protections and safeguards to ensure that adoptions are done ethically and in the best interest of the child.

When I joined Holt in the mid-1990s as part of the China adoption team, one of my first experiences was traveling to China to help process adoptions for children living in orphanages. I will never forget walking into a room full of babies who were laying in their cribs, wide awake and completely silent. The smell in the room was overpowering, like nothing I had smelled before — a sharp, bitter scent of unchanged diapers and unwashed bodies. The silence that hung in the air settled on me like a heavy weight, as I realized these children had stopped crying because when they cried, no one came. They had come to believe that when they had a need, no one would come to meet it. This reality spurred a tremendous sense of urgency for me and those of us working in the adoption field at the time — the realization that if something wasn’t done, and done quickly, many of these babies would not survive their first year of life.

This sense of urgency to help children living in orphanages, whether in China or other countries, has been a driving force behind international adoptions. But I also learned very early at Holt that this sense of urgency has to be tempered with adherence to an unwavering framework of ethics and rules to protect the long-term wellbeing of these same children.

Until the 2000s, there was no U.S. federal oversight body for international adoption agencies. Any adoption agency that met state licensing requirements could help families adopt children internationally.  Aware of the need in China, many agencies here in the U.S. raised their hands to help. But they did so without an overarching framework in place to guide their decision-making and process to ensure the children’s best interests were protected.

Holt’s Role in Developing the Framework

Several years earlier, delegates from Holt had taken part in an international working group to do just that — develop a framework for what would become the Hague Convention, an international treaty to outline the guiding principles and protections needed to ensure international adoptions occurred in a child’s best interest. Central to the priorities outlined in the convention was the concept of subsidiarity — the idea that solutions to problems should always be looked for as close to the source as possible. When it came to children living outside of family care, this meant pursuing family reunification and then domestic adoption before looking to international adoption as a way for children in orphanages to grow up in a family. For children, this was also about recognizing their inherent right to grow up in their birth country, culture and birth family whenever possible.

This sense of urgency to help children living in orphanages, whether in China or other countries, has been a driving force behind international adoptions. But I also learned very early at Holt that this sense of urgency has to be tempered with adherence to an unwavering framework of ethics and rules to protect the long-term wellbeing of these same children.

By the time the Hague Convention was being drafted, Holt had spent decades building a similar model of care for children in the countries where we worked. Part of my new staff orientation at Holt was learning about the organization’s efforts to keep children and birth families together, find adoptive families in a child’s community or country of birth, and lastly, seek international adoption as a path for children to grow up in families. I learned about our family strengthening programs, our services to help single mothers successfully parent their children in countries where they would face shame and discrimination for having a child outside of marriage, and our advocacy for domestic adoption in countries where the concept of welcoming a non-relative child into your family was not yet socially or culturally embraced. With these concepts also becoming enshrined in the Hague Convention, governments worldwide now have an agreed upon set of priorities to work from when considering how best to meet the needs of vulnerable children in institutionalized care.

The concept of subsidiarity may sound simple and straightforward, yet the work required to bring this vision to reality for children around the world who have urgent needs is complex, challenging and ongoing.  There is a constant push and pull between what a child needs in this present moment, and the time and resources required to develop a system that can meet those needs as close to the source as possible. Governments and societies struggling to address the health and safety needs of large groups of their citizens rarely have the capacity to put in place safeguards to protect children falling outside of family care. Often, the only recourse is to place these children in institutions with too few resources to meet either their immediate or long-term needs — like I saw during my first trip to China in the 1990s.  

Advocating for the Highest Standards in Adoption

Today, in many countries, more and more children are able to be reunited with their birth families or join families through domestic adoption — in part due to Holt’s advocacy efforts and programmatic support around the world.  But still, hundreds of thousands of children are growing up in institutions without the one-on-one devoted care of a loving family.

While we work towards a world where adoption is no longer necessary, and all children can get the care they need and deserve in their families and communities, child advocates fight to uphold the highest standards in adoption processes for those children who, without adoption, would otherwise grow up in institutions.  

The U.S. signed the Hague Convention in 1994, the year after it was finalized, but it wasn’t until 2008 that the implementing rules finally went into effect for U.S. adoption agencies.  A key piece of the implementing regulations requires that agencies must be accredited to provide international adoption services and demonstrate ongoing compliance with all standards set forth by the U.S. Department of State, America’s international adoption authority.

Strong oversight in intercountry adoption is critical to keeping children and families safe and ensuring that all adoption placements are conducted ethically and in the best interest of children.

Anticipating accreditation as a key component of Hague implementation, Holt began working towards general accreditation in the late 1990s through the Council on Accreditation (COA), right around the time I joined the organization.  While accreditation was not yet required for international adoption agencies, Holt wanted to ensure its processes met best practice standards at the time — both to prepare for Hague accreditation, and to better serve the children we united with adoptive families.

I remember being initially overwhelmed by the number of standards that had to be met, and the processes in need of revision in anticipation of accreditation. But by the end of the process, I was able to see how holding ourselves to a higher standard benefitted everyone in the adoption process, especially the children we served. The sense of urgency I felt when I entered that silent room of babies in China was tempered with the understanding that action needs to be guided by principles that safeguard the rights of the children whose needs we are trying to meet. As a result of the accreditation experience, I went back to school to obtain a Master of Social Work degree and eventually became a volunteer evaluator for COA.

Although not every country placing children internationally for adoption has signed on to the Hague Convention, the Universal Accreditation Act of 2012 requires that all international adoptions to the U.S. be held to the same set of standards outlined in the Hague. This was another step forward in protecting the rights of children placed for adoption. 

The U.S. and the global community have a responsibility to continue to find ways to strengthen the safeguards put in place to protect those children whose last and best hope to grow up in a family is adoption. Strong oversight in intercountry adoption is critical to keeping children and families safe and ensuring that all adoption placements are conducted ethically and in the best interest of children.