After banning adoptions from India in June of this year, Demark has shifted course and is now again allowing its citizens to adopt Indian children.

After a media-festooned frenzy over allegations from a man claiming to have put his kids in an orphanage "temporarily", then supposedly being devastated to learn that they'd been adopted by Danes and whooping and hollering and generally raising a ruckus, the Danish program slammed shut.

Now those claims have apparently been refuted ... and no matter how much I would love to hear the true story behind all the fuss, that part of the story never seems to make headlines ... so the decision has been reversed.

I suppose we can hope no children were left high and dry in the time period between the slam and the reopen, although that seems a pretty big jump to make considering the dire circumstances of millions of Indian children.

At the moment, the Indian government is planning to launch a nationwide drive to register all adoption agencies, as part of efforts to streamline the adoption process and set up a central monitoring system.

Although I'm not sold on the idea that a government that can't run its railroads will do such a bang-up job with an adoption system, popular thinking these days does indicate that governments are the instrument of choice for overseeing all aspects of the adoption process. I'm suspecting a backlash to this thinking in five years or so, but in the meantime it seems where it's going all over the world.

Of course, there are millions of kids in India for whom adoption will never be an option; many have families, and others fall so far outside any support system to be completely on their own.

Back in December, I wrote about a crackdown on child labor in India, and the topic is back in the news today.

Although the news is not news to me, someone figures it's worth BBC headlines to note that there are still millions of Indian kids working even though a ban was imposed a year ago. Official estimates put the number at about 12 million kids under 14 forced to work, and some in dangerous and abusive conditions.

Unofficially, the number looks more like 20 million, and to date only 2,229 violations have been reported countrywide.

Save the Children - which works in the states of West Bengal, Orissa, Andhra Pradesh and Maharashtra - says that most of these child workers are routinely subjected to abuse and are in unsafe working conditions. The study says in Delhi [where there are close to a million children employed as domestics] 99% of child domestic workers are girls and in a large number of cases they are open to sexual abuse.

Poverty forces parents to send their young children to work.

"Most of these young girls who come from poor families are forced to work up to 15 hours a day with no breaks and little or no pay."

Children must eat to live, and if the only way to eat is to work, the choice is simple. To prevent kids from working often means starving them, or forcing them into work even more dangerous.

UNICEF and others have taken the position that poverty is not a good reason for parental abandonment resulting in adoption. I would certainly agree that such a scenario is tragic, but to deny the reality of lives so cruel is supremely unhelpful. Every day in the world poverty causes parents to sell their children as slaves and prostitutes, beat them into submission, and strangle them at birth.

As horrid as it is, it is often those that have a job ... even a job in a fireworks factory or tying rugs 15 hours a day ... really are the lucky ones, and adoption as an option really is a miracle.