A Call To Action

Please spread this news to your friends, family, church, etc. As I checked the petition last, only 32,000 have signed the so far.


Please sign this petition to encourage the Ethiopian Ministry of Women's, Children's, and Youth Affairs to reconsider its new policy to review only five adoption applications each day. 250,000 signatures are needed this weekend.

MOWA has implemented this new policy change so that it may spend more time reviewing each file and focusing on the children who are not eligible for adoption. Despite MOWA's good intentions, this new policy significantly harms the very children it seeks to protect.

Impact on Orphans: On a conference call this morning, the U.S. State Department said that MOWA now has 800 - 1,000 files pending, and confirmed that parents with open court files should expect a 12-month delay, with file reviews cut back to 5 per day. With an average of 20 files approved each day prior to this policy, this slowdown will have a snowball effect. By April, the file backlog will be 1,300+. By the end of the year, the backlog will be over 4,000, unless families begin to drop out of the Ethiopian adoption program (which is likely to happen at alarming rates). At least one agency is saying that children who are ethically eligible for adoption may now expect to wait in institutions over five years after a family has offered to provide a loving home.


What to expect if this new policy remains in place: it will be a difference of bringing a baby home at six months old, to instead bringing a child home at 5 years old. Spending that many years in institutional care will have a profound negative impact on these children for the rest of their lives, and many children who are otherwise eligible for adoption will never have a forever family. This new policy will also jeopardize the ability of adoption service providers to continue their donation of orphan care and family preservation assistance to the 1.2 million vulnerable individuals who were helped in 2010 (beyond the 4,000 children who were adopted), and will overburden already struggling orphanages, who will begin to turn away children who need help because they have no beds available.

Note: as foreign adoptions in Ethiopia have increased (to the U.S., from virtually none in 1990 to 1,724 in 2008), infant mortality has decreased from 12% in 1990 to 7% in 2008 and under-5 (including infant) mortality has decreased from 21% in 1990 to 11% in 2008 (see U.S. Department of State statistics and UNICEF report). Intuitively, there is some correlation between these numbers, as orphanages have had more room and resources available to care for the most vulnerable children.

(Much) Better Alternatives: The adoption community absolutely supports taking steps to ensure that each child is protected and every adoption is ethical as well as the best available option for the child. There are better ways to do this, however, the most obvious being to increase resources rather than decrease reviews. If MOWA needs to increase its personnel tenfold to continue to thoroughly and timely review files, it may charge a file processing fee to cover the costs accordingly (significant processing fees are already paid by adoptive parents to the state and U.S. government). This fee could not begin to be as much as it will cost families to pay for institutional care of their child for years, and it could be used to help fund in-depth file investigation as well as ongoing care for the children who remain in orphanages. This alternative would help ensure that children who are ethically eligible for adoption are brought home sooner rather than later, and that their situations are made better rather than worse by the system that is supposed to be helping them.

How You May Help: We are all called by God to “Defend the cause of the fatherless” (Isaiah 1:17). We pray that God through us will change the hearts of these leaders. Please:

1. Sign the petition to the Prime Minister of Ethiopia.

2. Share. Please send this Call to Action to family members, other adoptive parents, and everyone you know! Post, forward and share your adoption stories via Facebook, Twitter, and blogs. Include it in your email blasts, church bulletin, church website, and announce it from the pulpit THIS SUNDAY, March 13th.

We need to get at least 250,000 people to sign this petition by Monday. As our agency wrote, "If you have been adopted by God, and understand the unmerited favor and love that His adoption delivers, PLEASE TAKE ONE MINUTE to answer His call to be a voice for the voiceless, to defend the cause of these Ethiopian orphans."

Shared via Withlovingarms.blogspot.com, an adoptive mama.