The Kindness—and Money—of Strangers: Foreign Adoptions from Post-Communist Europe

This article compares the rates of intercountry adoption from 26 sending countries of the former Soviet Union and East Central Europe to 25 receiving countries during the period 2000–2006. While our data confirm that countries adopting foreign children have significantly higher incomes than those from which they adopt, they show no significant discrepancy in birth rates between the two groups, with some sending countries actually having lower birth rates than their corresponding receiving countries. We then suggest that high sending rates result, not from a large ‘surplus’ of children, but from institutions that can connect the sending countries' ‘surplus’ children with prospective parents in receiving countries, and that the legacies of communist rule include such institutions.