Competing Rights and Responsibilities in Intercountry Adoption: Understanding a Child’s Right to Grow Up in the Context of Her Family and Culture

This chapter explores how US legal scholars tend to ignore this responsibility and instead frame ICA in terms of the competing responsibility to ‘save’ children from poverty and in terms of western adult’s right to have a child. It exposes the centrality of Monohumanism to a western country’s discourse on ICA and illustrates how this discourse obscures states responsibilities to protect children’s rights as they are defined in the CRC. Since the United States ratification of the Hague Convention through the Intercountry Adoption Act (IAA), restrictive definitions of adoptable children have been avoided. The narrative defines responsibility in a way that aligns it with the adoptive parent’s right to have a child, but not in a way that accounts for children’s rights to be raised in the context of their native families and cultures. The humanitarian history narrative also suggests that war-orphans were universally and unequivocally rejected by Koreans due to established Confucian beliefs in strict family lineage.