How many international adoptive parents have certain proof that their children were not stolen from their beds in the middle of the night by criminals intent on making a few bucks out of selling them on to the nearest broker?

With adoptions of Cambodian kids by Americans essentially coming to a screeching halt in December of 2001, most were completed before allegations of corruption appeared on potential adoptive parent radar. Agencies and governments were assumed to be trustworthy and honorable of intent, and people coming to the all new experience, for them, took it on faith that the hoops they jumped through had been arranged on a level course and that everyone involved had their own to negotiate correctly.

When reports began to surface that all was not kosher in world of Cambodian adoption practices, many parents began to look even more closely at their children, and to wonder and worry about the circumstances that brought their family together.

In Kari Grady Grossman's book, "Bones That Float", she writes about Sovann, a Cambodian man who moves from moto driver to trusted employee over the course of her time in the country.

One of Sovann's first duties assigned by the Grossmans is to sift through the haystack that is Cambodia's abandoned children in a search for their son's birth parents. Eventually successful, Sovann has gone on to help other families locate birth parents, histories, and often most importantly, the story of how their child came to the orphanage.

In efforts to establish once and for all the truth of surrender, to address the oozing guilt many parents suffered at the though that their child may have not been relinquished by a loving but desperate mother, but rather stolen or coerced from a family that treasured the child, some have instigated the searches that Sovann and others conduct.

Sovann has found many birth parents, and so far none have had stories that run contrary to the circumstances adoptive parents had been given: death, run-away fathers, illness, no food, or some combination of all these tragic realities was the reason given on relinquishment and is the reason given years later when contact is made.

As Kari's experiences setting up the rural school her organization and book supports has proven, Cambodian birth mothers may be poor, but they aren't stupid. They would not be easily duped into handing over a child, although the thought that they might be has become popular.

The poor in India and Cambodia have far too much in common; life is grindingly difficult and children are often far more a burden than a blessing. There is no shortage of children in developing countries and they're everywhere ... on the streets, in the garbage dumps, in the brothels, in the mines.

Hundreds of thousands are orphaned. Many, many are abandoned out of desperation. Many others are sold, most to slavers of one sort or another, as those are the most aggressive recruiters with the most reliable price structure.

Who can judge the rightness or wrongness of selling one child to raise enough cash to feed others, even if the sale results in a short life of cruelty?

For more of this series, see the next post.