PROVO — The rising number of African orphans is creating a crisis that makes international adoptions imperative despite concerns about transracial adoptions, says a Brigham Young University professor who herself was adopted from Korea by white parents.

Jini Roby's argument that African nations and American parents should consider a radical increase in adoptions of black African orphans was published in latest issue of the journal Social Work.

Roby said 12.3 million children in sub-Saharan Africa have lost one or both parents, overwhelming the ability of extended families to care for them.

That number is projected to balloon to 18.4 million by 2010.

"That's just in sub-Saharan Africa," Roby said. "There's a huge crisis out there, bigger than we've ever known, and we're not talking about it very much."

Transracial adoption is a controversial subject in the United States. In 1972, the National Association of Black Social Workers compared the adoption of African-American children by white families to genocide.

Today, the NABSW and other adoption groups emphasize kinship care — recruiting relatives to adopt African-American orphans. The same philosophy is the cultural norm in Africa, but Roby said the same factors creating so many orphans are also devastating kinship networks — the AIDS epidemic, famines and civil wars.

"The kin system is becoming overwhelmed," Roby said. "There's all kinds of evidence that the extended family has evaporated in many cases, especially at the bottom rung of the economic ladder."

The NABSW recently accepted transracial adoption as an alternative for American children of African descent, though it maintains the stance that same-race adoptions are preferable.

Roby said the priority for African-American adoptees should be placement with African-American families but found on her first visit to Africa in 2003 that in many cases, African children no longer can be raised by African families.

"I'm not proposing adoption as the first and best solution," she said. "First of all, we need to keep the families intact. In Uganda this summer, I saw mothers infected with HIV who were staying healthy and alive for 15 years or more. First, we need to keep parents alive. Then we need to support the extended families willing to care for these children. A lot of my work is focused on those two areas. This paper is about the small role adoption can play to make a huge difference in the lives of individual children."