Much like female genital mutilation being considered little more than a cultural quirk and female infanticide getting little more than a wink and a nudge in many countries, fiddling the books on the numbers of orphans is considered a tolerable dodge in many of the nations of the world.

Making strong differentiations between "adoptable" children and those "not available for adoption" is also something authorities are allowed, and you have to wonder how and why some kids fall one way and others, the other. Do they have anything to say about their status?

Some insist that a demand for healthy babies ends up causing widespread kidnappings or baby buying to satisfy the grasping tentacles of adoptive parents voracious for infants, and although this does happen occasionally, proof of such crimes ... and that is what they are -- criminal acts, not aspects of adoption ... does not negate the fact that for millions of children, an adoptive family may be the only chance there would be for a life lasting more than five years.

In today's world, where a new orphan is created from AIDS alone every 14 seconds, does it make any sense at all that adoptions are being curtailed? That families longing to include a child are being discouraged from even considering the option through media swipes at the very idea of international adoption? That people are working hard to close down country after country?

Does it make sense that a country like Nigeria, for example, that is soon to have around 6.7 MILLION orphans should make adoption so difficult that only 65 kids were adopted by Americans in 2005?

I hear the calls for reform, and I agree that adoption should be free of corruption, morally and ethically clean as a whistle and that everyone's rights should be of paramount importance. I also know that every 14 seconds another child loses a parent, and that in many, many cases, the loss means everything and everyone is gone.

Does one family's pain and guilt over an adoption that perhaps should not have happened justify removing the option of adoption for hundreds of thousands of children. Do hundreds of thousands of children justify that one family's pain and guilt?

If it's not one family, but 100 or 1,000? Does that indicate that there is more wrong with international adoption than there is right?

So much of this discussion happens in a vacuum ... a nice, safe, tidy, warm and well-fed vacuum ... and that's a good thing. Imagine if the 240 new orphans made this hour were party to a conversation debating possible family / no possible family, life / death, as often and as cavalierly as the adoption community does.