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What becomes of the little Guatemalan Baby?
By Neil Ransom | April 27, 2007
Kate and I arrived in Antigua yesterday and have been working through all the hitches associated with first time travelers and backpackers…except we’re really experienced at it…strange, I know. So far we have made every mistake in the book except for counting our money in public (don’t think I didn’t have to tell Kate to put her money away once or twice). You can read more about it on Kate’s article . That’s fine and all. We are a little rusty; it’s been a few months. What I really wanted to talk about is how creepy Guatemalan baby adopters are. It must be because Guatemala City is dump, or there’s something in the water, but it seems Antigua attracts white baby adopters by the truck load. Kate and I sat in the park last night watching, not joke, a hundred couples walking around with baby backpack after baby backpack filled with Guatemalan babies. Watching creepy looking white people tote around these little children I was reminded of another international human attraction I would see in Thailand…prostitution. For some reason I just got the hebby-jebbies (if anyone has a spelling for that please let me know) seeing all these white people with foreign babies. It felt the same as seeing those fat ugly white men in Thailand escorting their tiny Thai escort to their hotel room.
I have no proof, except what my friend Tristan told me he found during his research here, that foreign adoption in Guatemala is human trafficking. Women are coursed into giving up their children for adoption, and then the adoption agencies cheat adopters out of money by telling them there is X, Y, and Z fees or bribes needed to get the baby our of the country. Good meaning Americans think they are rescuing a baby from poverty and what not, but really the baby was only born or put up for adoption to make a lot of money. It is a sad situation and what I have seen in Antigua does nothing but support what Tristan has told me.
Please, please be more careful about adopting little babies from Guatemala, they might have been farmed just for that purpose and you might be doing more harm than good.
Tagged with: adoption • baby-names • Guatemala • Political Issues
June 6th, 2007 at 2:48 pm
i think it’s heebie jeebies…but i like hebby-jebbies better
June 6th, 2007 at 7:46 pm
That is how we say it in Africa.
December 4th, 2007 at 8:29 pm
Really REALLY not fair to judge adoptive parents. Why are we creepy? I have 3 adopted kids…one from Guatemala, and I can tell you that what we had to go through to make sure we were good enough people was soul crushing and over the top..however, it proves that there is a system in place to screen adoptive families. The truths I know about how some of these babies were kept with their bio families before relinquisment would make your skin crawl. So many babies were just left with no stimulation or even tied up so their impoverished mothers could work. When they were told of adoption they felt they were saved.
Please tell me why we are creepy? Do you know how many people would not even consider adopting a child, let alone a child of a different race.
Until you’ve been in our shoes you must never ever judge. There are checks and balances in line to assure that no one is being coerced to give up a child. They are asked multiple times and reunited with their babies in front of the US Embassy officials so they could change their minds.
We adoptive parents need apologies from you oh so judgemental ones.