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Baccalaureate Oral Exam 2009: Series A4-A5    

When There's No Place Like Home

Some [children's] advocates blame the decline in international adoption over the past three years on a single surprising source: UNICEF. The United Nations Children's Fund may be known worldwide for helping unprivileged children obtain better health care and education, but when it comes to finding homes for orphans, they argue, the organization places misguided emphasis on maintaining cultural and geographical ties rather than on the child's overall well-being. That's true ever when there is little chance of domestic adoption and virtually no public programs to provide care for abandoned children or struggling families. "National boundaries should not prevent abandoned children from having families" says Thomas Atwood, president of America's National Council for Adoption. "UNICEF's exclusive focus on domestic programs amounts to an obstacle to an international adoption and prevents untold numbers of children from improving their lives through international adoption".
There is no argument over the need for adoptive homes - UNICEF estimates that there are 143 million orphans in the world - or the unprecedented interest among Westerners eager to adopt: And children's advocates of all stripes agree that when possible, children should be raised by their own families and in their own cultures. But there seems to be a discrepancy over what qualifies as "when possible". Rather than promote research that demonstrates the beneficial effects for all types of adoption, critics say UNICEF plays up rare cases of abuse and corruption and actively discourages developing countries from making more abandoned children available. "UNICEF and some foreign critics have encouraged countries to look at international adoption as a form of colonialism", says Dana Johnson, director of the International Adoption Clinic at the University of Minnesota and an expert on global adoption trends.

By Pat Wingert, Newsweek, February 4th, 2008, pp. 48-9

A stripe: (here) a rank
To play something up: to try to make something appear more important than it is.