Photo Essay: The Baby Bazaar

In FP’s November/December issue, E.J. Graff investigates “The Lie We Love”—an international adoption system plagued with misrepresentations, corruption, and emotion. Follow adoption through several continents and countless families and lives in this accompanying online photo essay.

Following a dream: When celebrities adopt children abroad, as Angelina Jolie and Brad Pitt did from the Tam Binh orphanage in Vietnam (pictured here), their story fits the narrative of adoption we all know: There are countless orphans in the world looking for families. Yet many of these children are not orphans at all. The U.S. State Department recently issued this warning about Tu Du Hospital, the facility that feeds into Tam Binh orphanage: Tu Du Hospitals policy [is] to document all children as desertion cases regardless of the actual circumstances leading to their being made available for intercountry adoption.

Photo: HOANG DINH NAM/AFP/Getty Images

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