Hard-Sell Adoption.

This is an article that discusses the effectiveness of using aggressive marketing to find homes for orphaned children in Canada. The voice on the radio was saying that in 2001, only 216 of 4,700 permanent wards in Alberta had been adopted. It also announced that Alberta Children's Services had launched a Web site featuring pictures, information and, in some cases, video clips of 90 kids waiting to be adopted. The couple, who run a mixed farm in the Lethbridge area and already had four older biological children and two adopted children, knew they'd found their match. "We felt a little cheap," Esther says about searching for a child online. Esther may also be right about the effectiveness of the Alberta site: in its first year, it received 3.5 million hits and increased public adoption placement rates by 30 per cent.