Marjie Alonso adopted two boys in 1995. She deeply loves them both. In 2011, they all returned to Paraguay; her sons reunited with their mothers there. The reunions were poignant, and eye-opening.

Here is an excerpt from Marjie’s article, “I willingly, joyfully adopted my sons from Paraguay. I would never do it again.’

“What I thought—what most adoptive parents thought—was that we were helping children who would otherwise languish in orphanages. The truth, made horribly plain in the stories recently released (about Korean and Chinese adoptions) is something very different. In international adoptions, children are often coerced away from mothers. or literally stolen. My children weren’t stolen, but there have been confirmed cases in Paraguay and elsewhere…

And either way, the inequities of wealth and privilege mean the ‘choice’ to relinquish a child may not be a true choice at all.”

I agree with Marjie. These are hard truths for adoptive parents to acknowledge. We love our children deeply, and our decision to adopt may have caused them and their original family trauma and pain, due to the vagaries of power, money, privilege, and inequities.

Marjie writes “How much money would have allowed my children’s birth mothers to keep their children? It cost me more than $30,000 to adopt my sons. The agencies got the bulk of it…I was in Paraguay for nearly three months…My hotel bill would have housed and fed both families in relative luxury for at least a year.’

“But the adoption industry isn’t propelled by altruism. It is a multi-billion-dollar business. The product they sell is children. There is no money in the family-saving business. There are untold riches in the family-making business.

Had I been asked, I would not have given that same $30,000 to save my sons’ biological families and come home empty-handed, a difficult truth to reckon with.”

I give Marjie great credit in voicing and sharing these hard truths. I hope it opens more of a conversation about the complexities of adoption, the role we all play in it, the notion of whose best interest is being met, and how we can do so much better.