Overseas adoption can be a wonderful way to help your family grow and to help a child in the process. However, due to cultural differences and lack of oversight, overseas adoptions can also cause harm, placing children whose parents had no intention of surrendering them for adoption with well-intentioned adoptive parents. In some cases, this is due to confusion or lack of means to reunite the child and the family. For instance, Saroo, the author of Lion, had a loving parent to return to but no way for workers to find her.

However, in other cases, children may be kidnapped and sold (brokers make big money for providing children to adoption agencies), or sold by a parent. Sometimes parents  believe that the children are going to the USA for an education with the expectation that the children will be coming back, only to lose all contact with them forever.

The problems with International adoptions, and the lack of good solutions for children, is not unique to India. This CNN article discusses some of the pitfalls of International Adoption. Meanwhile, the New Yorker has a lovely first-hand story of a family who adopted a child from Haiti. It includes some of the troubled history of international adoptions in the past and today.