Tired of waiting
In the black market, couples tired of waiting years for a legal adoption --
or unable to gain approval for one -- pay excessive fees to get a baby.
Compared with a legal adoption, which can run $8,000 to $20,000 in Kansas or
Missouri, black-market adoption costs can be double that or more. To meet
demand, dealers sometimes steal babies or coerce young mothers into giving
them up.
About 50,000 adoptions of newborns by nonrelatives take place each year in
the United States. Nearly all are thought to be legal.
Experts say no hard numbers exist on the number of black-market adoptions,
though they agree there probably are thousands. One Tennessee case alone
involved hundreds of children.
"We've never really had really good data on the black market," said Joan
Hollinger, an adoption expert and law professor at the University of
California-Berkeley. "We're not sure of any kind of increase or even steady
rate of illegal sales of children."
An obstacle to determining the number of illegal adoptions is that adoptive
parents don't want to tell authorities about them.
Stasi and Black Market Adoptions - Labor Law Talk
