If you've completed an international adoption, somewhere in the process you probably sought out information on the Internet. There is a wealth out there, starting right here, and once you start looking, you just keep finding.

Once your child is home you will be busy, but may miss the cyber-contact you've become comfortable with ... addicted to. Post-adoption, you might choose to continue your immersion in the online adoption community. Tread carefully!

Opinions amongst adoptive parents, especially those voiced virtually on list serves, forums and web groups can be more than a little skewed; after a while you could begin to believe, among other things, that everyone adopts, and adopts often, and that birth parents are always cheated of their children.

Posts on one of the many groups I participate in frequently refer to the international adoption world as being "market driven", indicating that the number of orphans globally has been increased by the number of families wanting to adopt children. I do not have any statistics on how many prospective adoptive parents there in the world in any given year, but a reasonable person should see that the numbers just don't work that way.

Even taking into account all adopting families, domestic and international, in the North America, South America, all of Europe, Australia, New Zealand, Asia, Africa and podunk little Island States like Seychelles, I seriously doubt that the number of formal adoptions in a year would reach even one million. If we doubled my skeptical assessment, trebled it, even, and jumped adopting families up to three million a year ... four million, even five ... we're nowhere close to finding families for more than a tiny percentage of the world's orphans, no matter how "market driven" the situation may appear to parents busily posting opinions on Internet groups.

I'd like to roll out a few statistics over the next couple of days, compliments of UNICEF, an organization that does not happen to be very friendly toward international adoption, by the way. But even their numbers make my point. Although most of the studies focus on HIV/AIDS-related orphans, the estimates of total numbers ... children not effected by the virus, those abandoned or without families to care for them for any of a million different reasons ... may startle. Should startle.

According to a recent study published by UNICEF in 2004, “Children on the Brink”, there were 43 million orphans in Sub-Saharan African in 2003, an increase of more than one-third since 1990.

In Nigeria, a rapid assessment of orphans and vulnerable children conducted in 2004 with UNICEF support revealed that there were about seven millions orphans in 2003 and that 800,000 more orphans were added during that same year. Out of this total number, about 1.8 million are orphaned by HIV-AIDS. With the spread of HIV-AIDS, the number of orphans is expected to increase rapidly in the coming years to 8.2 million by 2010.

To be continued...