If your daily life is lived in an hyper-developed country, and if you spend a lot of time reading posts on web groups, list serves and forums from post-adoptive parents much like yourself, you won't be alone if you begin to find yourself assuming that the world has a shortage of unvalued, starving children born to unvalued, starving women who'd rather not have them but have no choice in the matter, and an over-abundance of hopeful adoptive parents desperate for a little one.

Hopeful adoptive parents ... exactly what the posters were at one time ... are sometimes characterized as greedy, self-serving and spoiled, ready and willing to sacrifice all, including their own ethics, to add to their family. Some even go as far as insisting that adopting families are actually part of the problem, rather than any, even miniscule, solution. Even thinking in terms of being part of the solution is a big no-no. Altruism is to play no role in adopting, no matter what. Motivations acceptable are limited to, well, the self-serving: needing a child to complete a family, fill a void, provide a recepticle for love, and so on.

WIth enough of this input, you may eventually catch yourself looking at your child and second-guessing every thought and emotion that brought you to adoption in the first place and worrying how accountable your young one will be holding you someday for your part in becoming the parent.

Here's more from the report quoted in my last post:

Children on the Brink was released at the XIV International AIDS Conference in Barcelona, Spain, and is the third in a series (earlier versions were published in 1997 and 2000). For the first time, the report is being published jointly by USAID, UNAIDS and UNICEF, with estimates developed by the U.S. Bureau of the Census. In addition to providing statistics on orphans from 88 countries, it identifies several trends:

Africa has the greatest proportion of children who are orphans. In 2001, 34 million children in sub-Saharan Africa were orphans, one-third of them due to AIDS. Because of AIDS, the number of orphans is increasing dramatically. By 2010, the number of orphans will reach 42 million. Twenty million of these children - or almost 6 percent of all children in Africa -will be orphaned due to AIDS.

... In 2001, 12 countries in sub-Saharan Africa accounted for 70 percent of the orphans. The three countries with the largest populations also had the most orphans - Nigeria, Ethiopia and the Democratic Republic of Congo ...

... Asia has the largest number of orphans. Due to Asia's large population, the number of orphans in Asia is much larger than in Africa. In 2001, there were 65 million orphans, with approximately 2 million of them orphaned due to AIDS. The populations in many Asian countries are so large, however, that even at a low prevalence, the number of people with HIV/AIDS threatens to surpass the numbers in some of the most severely affected African countries. Even a relatively small increase in prevalence could lead to even greater numbers of orphans due to AIDS.

To be continued...