The Year International Adoption became the latest Fashion Statement - Family

Hardly a day seems to pass by nowadays without some emissary and entourage from a well-heeled location somewhere in the west jetting off to some third world country and returning days later having effectively bought themselves a shining bright new baby. These actions in themselves has in a rather brutal way highlighted one of the great iniquities of modern life

It is hard not to view these incidents as just this year's fashion statement on behalf of the rich and famous.

Last year it was "let's all campaign against the brutality of hunting animals for their fur" and this year it's a case of lets take our obscene amounts of money and go and buy a baby from Africa.

There are several issues on different levels here and on one hand we have to accept that it is every child's right to live in a happy, stable and loving family unit where possible, a right that is sadly all too lacking for about 95 percent of the worlds children. On the other hand you have to accept that in some cases money isn't necessarily the Universal Panacea for the World ills that we sometimes believe it to be.

More often than not there is an upsurge in this sort of activity right after some natural disaster of almost biblical proportions has wiped out either entire coastlines or communities built out of brick living on some geophysical fault line somewhere have suffered a massive earthquake.

In itself there is nothing wrong with this supposed outpouring of communal generosity but sometimes you have to try and view these activities from the other side to obtain a better rounded picture of what is exactly the best course of action to take here.

Adoption experts say the best thing people can do is to donate money to causes that directly help the children. They say it's wrong to take a traumatized child away from the environment that they have grown up in. "Adoptions, especially inter-country ones, are inappropriate during the emergency phase as children are better placed being cared for by their wider families and the communities they know," said the charity Save the Children in a statement released Jan. 6, 2005. International Adoption needs to be well planned "The last thing they need to do is be rushed away to some foreign land," said Cory Barron of Children's Hope International, an American adoption agency. "We have to think of the child first."

Perhaps that is the problem with so many designer International Adoptions nowadays - the parties involved don't necessarily think of the interests of the child first rather a case of satisfying the maternal longings of people who should know better and most cases don't.

Perhaps now would be a good time to start to implement and effect that change.

0