It's annoying, aggravating, frustrating and maddening enough when trashy tabloids and irrelevant hacks hijack international adoption and run it through a contorted wringer designed to crank out Headlines of Eye-Grabbing Horror and column-feet of pulsating pap in attempts to encourage a malignant miasma surrounding every aspect.

It really gets my goat going bonkers (And that's not good!), though, when a publication that presents itself as a bastion of the respectable press jumps on a bandwagon because it happens to be rolling by.

I am well aware that the British media tends to the hyperbolical by nature, but this article in the Sunday Telegraph comes as a surprise ... and a disappointment ... nonetheless.

For a reasonably reputable newspaper anywhere in this day and age to headline a story, "US child-snatchers plague Guatemala" is shameful enough in its flagrant use of inflammatory invective, but to follow with such a pitifully weak argument as the story presents in an attempt to validate the statement is contemptible.

I have to wonder if the reporter, one Philip Sherwell, hasn't been more than a bit caught up in the pre-Presidential election frenzy the country is experiencing, or has otherwise taken on an agenda that motivates him to intentionally manipulate the present adoption picture in Guatemala into a dangerously unfavorable light.

The article is typical of its kind ... long on tales of adoptive families paying large sums to bring foreign-born children into America families, and stab-to-the-jugular short on evidence of child stealing.

With a transparently affecting photo of an apparently desperate woman plaintively presenting a picture of a child above a caption reading, "Torn apart: Ana Escobar holds a photograph of her daughter Esther, whom she fears has been sold", juxtaposed against a happy American dad holding his new son onboard an plane headed for the US, the tone is set for readers to assume a link between the two.

It takes a critical eye to notice that no proof whatsoever is offered in the body of the story to substantiate any such tie.

The anguish suffered by Ana Escobar, 26, is a painful testimony that reports of baby- snatching are more than myth. Her six-month-old daughter Esther was stolen from her by an armed robber in Guatemala City earlier this year.

She believes she was targeted because she regularly took Esther to her work at a shoe store, where she breast-fed her. The attacker bundled Ms Escobar into a cupboard at gunpoint as she pleaded to keep her baby. "I begged like I have never begged before," she said tearfully, but he barricaded the door and fled with her daughter.

"I'm never going to give up looking for her, but my mother's instinct tells me that she has already been sold for adoption," she said sadly, holding her only photograph of Esther.

As we have seen time and time again in countries all over the world, kidnappings happen. It's a horrible crime, and those involved should be punished to the full extent of the law.

Kidnapping is NOT, however, international adoption, and linking the two in a news item, a self-published anti-adoption book, or on a web group does not make it so. A 'mother's instinct' does not make it so ... in fact I'm sure a few years back Guatemalan mothers of kidnapped children would have had an 'instinct' that their child had been sold for body parts.

Guatemalan adoptions by US citizens now require two DNA tests from birth mothers to establish maternity and confirm the identity of a relinquished child, but there is no mention of this in the Telegraph's report.

Poverty, child mortality, malnutrition, a punishing social climate, all are rife in Guatemala, but you wouldn't get any of that information from reading this article.

This sort of one-sided reporting should be addressed, the reporter and the publication taken to task.

If you would like to tell the Sunday Telegraph what you think of this sham of a news story on Guatemalan adoption, or to pass along some real information that is relevant to the world, the email address to write to is:
sletters@telegraph.co.uk.