It took pounds of paperwork, hours of court proceedings, a handful of visits to Ghana and a little tug of war with government bureaucrats before Josh and Lisa Palmer could adopt their son Robert.
“I had to prove that my 5-year-old wasn’t a terrorist,” said Josh Palmer. “If there is a checkbox to be had, it was there.”
And yet, it’s about to become more difficult, more expensive and more restrictive for American families to adopt international children — and the hurdles are particularly compounded in Utah, where one of the four agencies accredited to handle foreign adoptions lost its certification in September and shut down.