The Hague:

OK, because of distractions (as previously noted), this will be a briefish overview of this commentary on this mammoth document of international law.

Ethica has some problems with the way the Hague Conventions have been written into the regulations in the United States:

In several critical areas of child and family protection, the regulations may actually worsen current conditions. On the whole, the regulations are a bitter disappointment for those who had hoped that their release would signal meaningful and effective regulation of practices that so deeply affect the lives of children and families, both in the United States and abroad.

It's not all bad.

On the pro side:

Agencies and agency workers need to be accredited and need to have professional liability insurance. Agencies can't go changing their names without letting people know, and they'll have to have public statistics and public complaints. And my personal favorite, adoptive parents are going to have to undergo some pre-adoption training. (The Post-Prune Diaper Dash and Heavyweight Foodstuff/Electronics Retrieval competitions are my favorite.)

On the con side:

It's still OK for adoptive parents to give money to birth parents. (Hear the alarm bells? Maybe you're not listening hard enough. They're the ones going "BABYMARKETBABYMARKETBABYMARKET!")

Overseas facilitators aren't subject to the same oversight & restrictions as the domestic agency staff. They don't have to be named by the agency up front and don't have any obligation to share medical information with families.^* There's no set pay scale for overseas staff, only whatever the market will bear.

Although fees are called "transparent," really the only things that are transparent are the totals, so that the $100 mandatory ante for Facilitator Poker & Martini Night at the Floating Casino Macau Palace^** could be tucked neatly into the broad category "Overseas Expenses."

The Orwellian bit is the section called "Prohibition on Child Buying" that actually loosens the way money enters the international adoption game. Historically (say the folks at Ethica), some poverty-stricken birth parents have been offered wads of cash or big piles of food in return for relinquishing their kids. And sometimes, if the birth parents try to get their kids back, they're told to give back the food and/or aid money. Which is sort of a life-and-death thing in some places, as hard as it might be for most segments of the computer-using population to imagine.

This sentence strikes me as weird from any perspective, though:

...it should also be noted that the payment of expenses to birth parents (except arguably as an incentive to relinquish a child for adoption) is an alien concept in virtually every other country except
the United States.

The point is that there were old visa regulations that did a better job of protecting kids from "incentive payments" than the new ones.

The one thing that I'm taking home from this as an uplifting and hopeful item is that I'm an ordinary guy who's reading about it on the internet. And, of course, writing about it here.

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^*I don't know what this means. The facilitators' medical history or the child's medical information? I'd assume the child, but I don't feel safe making that assumption here.
Oh, wait, they explain it nicely a few pages later:

This provision is seriously weakened by the fact that it requires reasonable efforts to be made only by agencies and supervised providers; therefore, most foreign facilitators/attorneys will be exempt from this requirement. In addition, the provision that calls for agencies to grant parents two weeks to review information is weakened by an exception for extenuating circumstances involving the child’s best interests. This exception can be exploited by pressuring adoptive parents into making quick decisions before gathering all the facts and weighing their ability to parent a particular child.
We urge the Department and accrediting entities to ensure that restrictions are placed on its use.

Ah. Gotcha.

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^**Not an actual event. And if it was, it wouldn't involve any Chinese facilitators, only those international playboy gadabouts from Kazakhstan and Russia^***. In reality, this complaint is about the potential to disguise bribes to birth parents (or worse) as "facilitator fees" or some other kind of "overseas expense."

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^*** Just kidding. But you knew that, right?