This article describes how many children who were put up for adoption as "orphans" in countries around the world, such as Ethiopia and Haiti, were actually not orphans, and how these incidences of "adoption corruption" have helped to change the direction of a powerful adoption movement among U.S. evangelicals. In previous years, international adoption had been a preeminent evangelical social cause in the United States, grounded in the idea of an "orphan crisis" affecting 143 to 210 million children around the world, including some that lived with one parent or extended family in poor conditions.
At the height of the Christian adoption movement in the late 2000s and early 2010s, adoptive parents were paying $30,000 to $40,000 per internationally adopted child, which helped create new adoption markets. Around 2010, many stories began coming out that the children said to be orphans turned out to have living family, who, in some cases, expected their return. The movement's recognition of the problems emerged, with a number of critics (including Christian adoptive families who had come to rethink the adoption movement) questioning the effects of the adoption movement.
The article describes how the crisis is not "so much an orphan crisis as a crisis of poverty, food insecurity, conflict, and a host of other, less sensational development issues that have rendered children especially vulnerable."