Agregate Demand and the US Savings Rate

This very sad story posted yesterday in the UK's Independant:

They came from across China to protest under the watchful gaze of the police, brandishing handmade placards with pictures of their missing children. In a sign of growing discontent, the parents' rare demonstration in the centre of Beijing was aimed at pressuring the authorities to do more to investigate the cases of tens of thousands of children snatched and sold every year.

Although the story notes that many of the children stolen in China are not sold to westerners, but to Chinese seeking boys or to brothels seeking girls for prostitution, it is still worthy of noting that

But the US State Department's trafficking report for 2010 said that despite significant efforts, the government did not comply with the "minimum standards" for eliminating trafficking. It said there were continued reports of children being forced into prostitution.

China does not give figures, but an estimate based on reports for a British television documentary suggested that up to 70,000 children were snatched from the streets every year in China.

Seventy-thousand children. I hope that estimate is high, but even at a quarter of that number, it is far too many children. I have to wonder how much of the demand for thee Chinese children comes from westerners seeking to build their "forever families" through international adoption. If we stopped the practice of purchasing children from adoption agencies and stopped pretending that a purchased child's identity and heritage could be changes by governmental fiat or court decree, how much of this child snatching industry in China, and other countries, would stop? How many of these children would still be with their families if American adopters stopped believing that the life they offer to an adopted child is superior to the life they would otherwise have in their native country?

There are legitimate times when a child needs to be raised by someone other than his or her natural parents, but these times are far more rare than the adoption industry would have you believe, and there are alternatives to their care that do not involve selling them on the open market.