New families meant to be

Some friends of ours from church were mentioned in the local paper in a story about a group of adoptions that were finalized last week, including that of their 15-month-old daughter Marilena. From an article of the same title in The Midland Daily News by Kelly Nankervis:

"We believe our family was put together by God," said Fred Sitter, before Marilena's adoption was finalized. She is the second child Sitter and his wife, Connie, have adopted; David, age 5, is from Mexico. Marilena is from Guatemala. "This is what was meant to be," Fred said of how the family came to be.

Fred spoke in church a month or two ago about their experiences during the adoption process and about the metaphor of adoption into the family of God. On a related note via Today's Papers, recently there was an article in the NY Times by Marc Lacey titled "Guatemalan Adoption System Under Scrutiny":

Guatemala, where nearly one in every 100 children is adopted by an American family, ranks third behind much larger nations, China and Russia, when it comes to providing babies to American couples. The pace of adoptions and the fact that mothers here, unlike in other places, are sometimes paid for their babies have brought increasing concern and the prospect of new regulation that may significantly reduce the number of Guatemalan babies bound for the United States next year, or end it altogether. Critics of the adoption system here - privately run and uniquely streamlined - say it has turned this country of 12 million people into a virtual baby farm that supplies infants as if they were a commodity. The United States is the No. 1 destination.

In other countries, adoptive parents are sought out for abandoned children. In Guatemala, children are frequently sought out for foreign parents seeking to adopt and given up by their birth mothers to baby brokers who may pay from a few hundred dollars to $2,000 for a baby, according to interviews with mothers and experts.