Finding Fernanda ─ Two Mothers, One Child, and a Cross-Border Search for Truth

The dramatic story of how an American housewife discovered that the Guatemalan child she was about to adopt had been stolen from her birth mother

Over the last decade, nearly 200,000 children have been adopted into the United States, 25,000 of whom came from Guatemala. Finding Fernanda, a dramatic true story paired with investigative reporting, tells the side-by-side tales of an American woman who adopted a two-year-old girl from Guatemala and the birth mother whose two children were stolen from her. Each woman gradually comes to realize her role in what was one of Guatemala’s most profitable black-market industries: the buying and selling of children for international adoption. Finding Fernanda is an overdue, unprecedented look at adoption corruption—and a poignant, riveting human story about the power of hope, faith, and determination.

Erin Siegal is an investigative journalist and photographer. Her writing and photography have been published in the New York Times, Time, Curve, Newsweek, Mother Jones, Rolling Stone, and with Reuters. She has collaborated on projects with NGOs such as the Urban Justice Center, Human Rights Watch, and the United Nations, and in 2009, her reporting on adoption corruption resulted in a fellowship with the Schuster Institute for Investigative Reporting at Brandeis University. Finding Fernanda is Siegal’s first book.