Intercountry Adoption After the Haiti Earthquake: Rescue Or Robbery?(Report‪)‬

Introduction On 19 January 2010, a week after the 7.0 magnitude quake hit Haiti, 54 Haitian-born children arrived in Pittsburgh on a flight with Pennsylvania governor Ed Rendell. It was later revealed that 12 of the children were not in the process of adoption and that most of these were not orphans (Thompson G, 2010; see also Armistead, 2010 for a personal account). Ten days later, ten members of an Idaho-based Baptist charity were arrested for trying to take 33 Haitian children across the border into the Dominican Republic without proper paperwork (Hilborn, 2010). It was subsequently found that all 33 children had parents, with whom they were eventually reunited at an orphanage run by the Austrian-based SOS Children's Villages Charity (Bajak, 2010; Radnege, 2010). Other groups of children were taken by air to Canada, France, Germany and the Netherlands in the weeks following the earthquake, raising concerns reminiscent of previous incidents linked to adoption as rescue in times of crisis.