by Lynelle Long, Founder of InterCountry Adoptee Voices (ICAV), Hague Observer
I write this from lived experience, not theory!
In the past month alone, I’ve spoken with four adoptees impacted by suicide. Two had recently attempted, and two are grieving devastating loss. These are not isolated experiences, they reflect patterns I see often in our community.
At the same time, I continue to sit in policy spaces like the EurAdopt Conference and The Hague Working Group on Financial Aspects of Intercountry Adoption, where intercountry adoption continues despite decades of adoptees raising concerns about long term outcomes and the absence of meaningful longitudinal research.
As the only adoptee led Observer organisation in the Hague Working Group, I regularly listen to discussions about our lives that often lack accountability for their long term consequences.
One small but significant shift I’ve helped achieve is that POST ADOPTION COSTS are now at least being named and recognised within the context of Financial Aspects of Intercountry Adoption. Up until 2023, these costs were barely considered, let alone discussed at this forum.
A System that Stops at Placement
If you examine how Hague States regulate intercountry adoption, one thing is clear. They attempt to be meticulous – before a child is placed. Financial flows are meant to be highly controlled, fees are scrutinised, safeguards detailed. Read the Hague’s pre-adoption table of costs and you can see for yourself. Section IV even details financial assistance for prospective adoptive parents and adoption bodies so they can be enabled to complete an adoption. But not a single thought for the child who grows up to become an adult. Where is our financial assistance for the costs we incur?
In the view of most States, once the adoption is finalised, their level of responsibility disappears. This reveals something uncomfortable:
The adoption system is designed to protect the transaction and those facilitating it, but not the person it’s about who enters the system and has to live the consequences.
Adoptees are not treated as lifelong stakeholders. We are treated as if our needs end at placement. But if States accept responsibility to authorise and regulate intercountry adoption, that responsibility cannot end at placement, it must extend to the foreseeable lifelong consequences created by that act.
Intercountry Adoption Does Not End at Placement
For decades, the architecture of the 1993 Hague Intercountry Adoption Convention has focused overwhelmingly on the legality and ethics of the transfer itself—ensuring that children are not trafficked, that consents are valid, that accredited bodies meet certain standards. These are necessary safeguards but they are not sufficient.
A quieter, less regulated economy has grown alongside this system: the market for post-adoption services. It is here, often years or decades after placement that adoptees and families confront the deepest consequences of intercountry adoption: identity loss, trauma, legal insecurity, family separation, and the long search for origins. And yet, this space remains largely outside the regulatory imagination of Hague States.
In my view, that omission is no longer defensible.
Article 32 Was Never Meant to Stop at the Airport
Article 32 of the 1993 Hague Intercountry Adoption Convention is often interpreted narrowly, as if its concern with “improper financial gain” applies only up to the pre adoption phase. But the wording itself is broader: “an activity related to an intercountry adoption.”
Post-adoption services are not incidental to adoption. They are a direct continuation of it, a foreseeable outcome. Failing to plan for them is a failure of system design.
Search and reunion assistance, return to birth country, translation of records, trauma counselling, legal restoration of identity, adoptive and birth citizenship support, and crucially, legal processes to challenge or undo adoptions or to claim reparation from illicit and illegal practices — are not optional add-ons. They are foreseeable, structural needs created by the very act of intercountry adoption. To treat them as separate from the Convention’s financial and ethical safeguards is to misunderstand the lifecycle of adoption itself.
If adoption creates lifelong consequences, then the Convention’s protections must also extend across that lifetime.
The Gap within the Hague System Itself
This is not just a theoretical argument, it is embedded within the Hague system itself. Guides to Good Practice 1 and 2, presented as the benchmark for ethical intercountry adoption, still leave post adoption as a significant and largely unaddressed gap. The guides only briefly acknowledge post adoption services and reporting and fails to establish:
- minimum standards for what those services should include
- mechanisms for ongoing oversight or accountability
- regulation of costs for essential services
- frameworks for long-term outcomes or adult adoptee needs
The imbalance is telling. The system is designed to manage the transaction of adoption until we are in the hands of adoptive parents, but not for its lifelong consequences.
The Emergence of an Unregulated Post-Adoption Market
In the absence of clear State responsibility, a fragmented and often inequitable marketplace has emerged:
- Private intermediaries charging high fees for unlocking archives, tracing and reunion services
- Return to Birth Country experiences packaged and sold at significant cost
- Counsellors, therapists, coaches, alternative healing modalities, all offered but with varying levels of adoption and trauma competency – some with none at all
- Legal professionals with significant fees for identity restoration, adoptive and birth country citizenship claims, access to records, and reparation and justice for illicit and illegal adoption practices
- Adoption agencies and facilitators charging again, years later for access to records and knowledge they controlled from the beginning
- Media organisations monetising off our vulnerability
Some of these actors provide essential, ethical support. Others operate with little oversight, in a space where vulnerability is high and regulation is minimal. This raises a difficult but necessary question:
When an adoptee must pay thousands to recover their identity, to reconnect with their family, or to challenge the legality of their own adoption — who is truly bearing the cost of the adoption?
And post adoption support extends beyond search and identity. In receiving countries like the United States, there are documented cases of adoptees being sent to “private treatment facilities” or “therapeutic boarding schools”. These places operate at significant cost and with limited oversight. Yesterday’s in-depth AP coverage gives an insight into what I’ve had direct connection with via legal representation of vulnerable intercountry adoptees. The AP and legal investigations of these cases raise serious concerns about lack of regulation and accountability, and practices in how vulnerable adoptees are treated after the adoption placement. Post adoption support in the United States is not only unregulated, in cases like these, it exposes adoptees to further harm without any oversight, once the adoption is completed.
Some services are ethical and necessary, but structurally, this is a system where vulnerability can be monetised. Adoptees are not operating in a normal market. We are often working with incomplete or falsified records, navigating urgency, grief and identity loss, and dependent on others to access our own histories and to treat us supportively. In this context, cost and accountability become distorted.
Legal Justice as a Post-Adoption Cost
There is another dimension that States have failed to account for: the cost of pursuing justice.
For adoptees impacted by illegal or illicit practices, the pathway to truth often requires legal action. This may involve:
- adoption annulments
- civil claims
- access to sealed or falsified records
- restoration of original identity or nationality
These processes are complex, cross-border, and expensive. Legal representation, translation, travel, and court proceedings can cost tens of thousands. As an example, in my case, attempting to have a birth certificate re-issued in my country of origin, Vietnam, is impossible without legal support. This is not an abstract policy gap. It’s a lived barrier.
When access to justice depends on personal wealth, accountability becomes selective. And when States do not assume responsibility for these costs, they insulate the system from scrutiny.
A Structural Problem Across Two Jurisdictions
Post-adoption services sit in a uniquely complex space: they span both the birth and the adoptive country. This creates systemic gaps in responsibility and accountability.
1. Jurisdictional ambiguity
Which State is responsible for funding or regulating post-adoption services—the country that sent the child, or the one that received them? In practice, responsibility is often diffused or denied by both.
2. Uneven capacity and resources
Birth countries may lack the infrastructure to provide search, tracing, or counselling services. Adoptive countries may not invest in services that extend beyond their borders.
3. Inconsistent standards and accreditation
There is no globally consistent framework for accrediting post-adoption service providers. Quality, ethics, and pricing vary widely.
4. Financial opacity
Fees for post-adoption services, particularly legal fees, are rarely standardised or transparent. This creates fertile ground for excessive or “improper” financial gain—precisely what Article 32 was designed to prevent.
5. Cross-border legal complexity
Accessing records, restoring identity, securing citizenship, or pursuing justice often requires navigating two legal systems, multiple languages, and bureaucracies that were never designed to cooperate at this stage of the adoption lifecycle.
When States Withdraw, Adoptees Pay
The current model effectively externalises the long-term costs of intercountry adoption onto adoptees.
To reclaim identity, connection, or justice, we are expected to fund:
- document searches and archival access
- translation and certifications
- travel across countries
- trauma support
- legal processes for identity, citizenship, or redress
These are not extraordinary cases. They are common and yet they are treated as private burdens rather than systemic responsibilities. This stands in tension with the spirit of Article 32. If adoption-related activities should not generate improper financial gain, then States must ask whether the current post-adoption marketplace (being unregulated, costly, and uneven) meets that standard.
Ignoring post-adoption responsibility doesn’t just harm adoptees, it undermines the credibility and integrity of the Hague system itself.
Rethinking Accreditation: Extending It to Post-Adoption Services
If Hague States are serious about their obligations, post adoption costs and services must be brought within the same framework as pre-adoption.
A reformed approach includes:
- Minimum standards for post adoption services
- Accreditation requirements for post-adoption providers, including legal and therapeutic services
- Establishing international standards in training and competency for adoption related trauma
- Financial oversight frameworks that allow regulation of fees to prevent exploitation
- Funding access to essential services, including legal pathways to justice and identity restoration
- Strengthening cross-border cooperation
- Monitoring and reporting mechanisms tracking long term outcomes and service quality
- Recognising adoptee-led organisations as central to designing effective systems
Such measures would not eliminate all inequities but they would establish a baseline of accountability where none currently exists.
A Lifetime Lens, Not a Transactional One
At its core, this is a question of how States understand their role. If intercountry adoption is treated as a one-time transaction, then it makes sense within that logic to regulate only the moment of placement. But if adoption is understood as a lifelong legal and social transformation, then responsibility cannot end at the border.
The adoptee does not “exit” the system at placement. They carry its consequences across decades and generations. Adoption must be understood as a lifelong transformation of identity, legal status, and family.
A More Honest Accounting
Article 32 offers a starting point, not as a technical provision, but as an ethical principle:
No improper gain.
Only reasonable costs.
Proportionate remuneration.
Applied honestly, those principles do not stop at placement. They follow the adoptee into adulthood, into systems of redress, into the pursuit of identity and justice.
Toward Responsibility That Endures
Hague Convention States have already accepted that intercountry adoption requires oversight, cooperation, and ethical restraint. The question now is whether they are willing to extend that commitment beyond the moment of transfer.
To do so would mean recognising that:
- Post-adoption services including legal redress, are not optional—they are intrinsic
- Costs associated with those services are not incidental—they are foreseeable
- Regulation, funding, and oversight of those services is not peripheral—it is essential
And ultimately, that responsibility for intercountry adoption does not end when the child arrives. It endures for as long as the consequences do and for as long as justice remains out of reach for those who cannot afford it.
In Conclusion
Hague States must move beyond regulating placement alone and take responsibility for the lifelong realities they create, including establishing guidance, oversight, and accountability for post-adoption costs.
Resources
1993 Hague Intercountry Adoption Convention : portal of resources housed at the HCCH, governing intercountry adoption
What each Country under their Hague obligations reports they do (or not)
Adoptees at the Hague Special Commission (2022)
For adoptee organisations wishing to join into Hague forums as Observers, there are clear Rules of Procedure. Contact ICAV if you would like mentoring or support to become an Observer.