The Sun-Sentinel reports on the Hague Convention on Inter-country Adoption.

It's a Guatemala-oriented story, because there's a large Guatemalan presence here in South Florida. But of course, China gets a mention.

The new rules are going to slow things down, the newspapers say.

All this will likely end once the Hague Convention on Intercountry Adoptions takes effect in the United States. The United States will then require all foreign adoptions to meet tougher international standards, which Guatemala ratified in 2003 but has yet to implement.

"We don't want adoptions to stop but we believe the current system does not provide enough protection to the child's needs," said John Lowell, the U.S. consul in Guatemala.

The treaty, also ratified by China, Russia and at least 39 other countries, aims to protect children, birth parents and adoptive parents from abuse, in part by requiring a government agency to regulate adoptions.

Guatemala still allows adoptions to be managed privately, without judicial approval. In many other countries, adoptions take more than a year. Guatemala can deliver children in as little as five months.

Berta Morales, 35, has given the last five of her 10 children to Americans.

"It would have been more of a sin to abort them," said Morales, who lives in Coatepeque, west of Guatemala City. "I'm poor ... but maybe one of them will become a professional." Morales said she was only paid bus fare to Guatemala City, the capital, to sign the papers.

Which is a little jarring to read.

The statistics, as always, are interesting to me:

In raw numbers, Guatemala ranks behind China and Russia among foreign sources of U.S. adoptees, according to the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services. But the 7,939 Chinese babies adopted by U.S. couples last year represented just 0.04 percent of that country's total 17.3 million births, and the 4,652 Russian adoptees were 0.3 percent of Russia's births in 2005, while Guatemala's figure is 1 percent.

.04 percent? It's always staggering just how large China is.