In a previous post, I was writing again about how dangerous fallout from unaddressed anti-adoption sentiment can be, and how easily it creeps into shouting headlines tainting the whole process as those uninvolved and easily misinformed absorb the message without processing the ramifications.

In black and white, shades of gray may just be too complicated to take into account.

Recently, Guatemalan adoptions have been taking heavy headline hits as the story of Casa Quivira spins itself out and about, but it's not alone.

Although not getting nearly the play ... in fact so little that I'm wondering if this one hasn't already died some media version of a natural death ... this on Haitian adoptions via Switzerland through the Associated Press has the Geneva-based International Organization for Migration (IOM) saying that 47 children were "freed" from a "rogue adoption center" in Port-au-Prince and returned to parents who are reported to have been mislead as to what was to have happened to their children and what they were to have received in exchange.

Citing the cooperation of a alphabet soup of NGOs including UNICEF, the IOM report alleges that there are "many other bogus centres involved in the trafficking of children for international adoptions."

As usual, the costs of international adoption is mentioned, as well as the impoverished conditions Haitians families face.

According to their web site, it looks like there's some good work done and that I could fully support an organization like the IOM ... if only ...

Since 2005, IOM has assisted with the return and reintegration of 121 child victims of trafficking in Haiti with funding from the US State Department's Bureau of Population, Refugees and Migration (PRM). In addition to providing medical and psycho-social care, IOM also carries out family tracing, evaluation and reunification, educational/vocational support in addition to giving micro-enterprise grants to parents/caretakers to prevent re-trafficking. Where family reunification is not possible, children are placed in shelters.

Do you see my 'if only' there?

Where family reunification is not possible, children are placed in shelters.

In this report that has not one good thing to say about adoption of Haitian children, the only option for those without families is a form of institutionalization. This, to me, is wrong.

In IOM's own awareness-raising campaign last June, they focused attention on the estimated 173,000 "Restavecks" -- the Haitian Creole word for domestic child servants -- 8.3% of the population of children between the ages of 5 and 17 years.

A government study into human trafficking and modern-day slavery on Haiti explains the situation in one of the poorest countries in the world where the average per capita income is less than $500 per year, as well as the fate of many Restaveks who "work without compensation, reach the age of 15 to 17 years without ever having attended school, are forced to work long hours under harsh conditions, and are subject to mistreatment, including sexual abuse."

And those kids aren't the only ones suffering.

Around 30,000 Haitian children are illegally smuggled into the Dominican Republic every year to work as child prostitutes or be forced into other degrading occupations, UN and Organization of American States (OAS) officials said on Sunday. In Haiti itself, children are recruited as gang members or are tortured, kidnapped, sexually and physically abused, abandoned and traded like personal property.

Obviously, the situation in Haiti, like that in many countries, is dire for many and bad things happen, often to children.

Adoption should not take the rap. As part of the problem, its role is miniscule. As part of the solution, it can be as great as a life.