My recent post on cultural genocide which illustrated a classic example... the Chagossian islanders being removed from their homes to make way for the American military base on Diego Garcia ... leads in to this one through the often-suggested thought that international adoption is in essence the same sort of thing.

Rather than blast away widely at the picture of children taken from countries to join families in others, I'd like to focus on one country, the birth country of my kids, Cambodia, and ask the question: "Has international adoption damaged Cambodian culture?"

We've all heard phrases that start out with something noble-sounding, then end in, " ... one child at a time". Sometimes it's, "Saving the world ... ", others substitute, "Making a difference ...". Whatever, it's the one child at a time that relates to the point.

When genocide is discussed, numbers are always part of what prompts the use of the word. When one rabbi is slain, it's murder. When six million Jews are killed it's a holocaust ... genocide. When ten Hutus kill twenty Tutsis it's a tribal conflict. When 800,000 Tutsis die at the hands of their neighbors, it's genocide.

Certainly, we're not talking about just one child adopted -- the numbers are in the thousands -- but not since the days of the orphan trains have adoptions happened en masse.

Even in countries that sit in the Number One spot as sending birth country for a while (and these change, as we know), the number of children adopted doesn't begin to reach a fraction of the number of children in the country, nor the number of orphans.

China has long been at the top of the international adoption Hit Parade, with an estimated 8,000 children adopted each year by Americans. At that rate, over twenty years there would have been 160,000 Chinese children leaving the country.

Of course, Americans aren't the only families adoption from China, although they do adopt in the largest numbers. I have no figures on the total number of Chinese kids adopted by foreigners, but we can reasonably assume that by doubling the number of American adoptions, we might be close. That would come to a depletion of 320,000 children over the course of twenty years.

At last count there were 319,244,000 children below the age of 14 in China, 15 million of whom are orphans. More are born ... and orphaned ... daily. Subtract the number of children removed from the country through adoption over twenty years and the country is left with 318,924,000 children of which 14,680,000 are orphans.

Cambodia is much smaller, as have been the numbers of adoptions of Cambodian children. In 2001, the last year Americans were allowed to adopt and the one that saw the largest number of adoptions from the country, 407 Cambodian children were adopted by US families. The total population is 4,945,349 children under 14. How many of these are orphans is not known, but one organization alone, World Orphans, had in 2002 funded construction for 47 orphanages housing over 1,500 children.

For more, see the next post.