Adoption is a market place. Once it was one where supply hugely outstripped demand and virtually anyone who came forward to offer an unwanted child a home would be accommodated expeditiously and with few questions asked.

That, of course, has changed. Now, in the developed world, the supply falls far short of the demand. Under those conditions, there are always moralists anxious to impose rationing systems and opportunists willing to act as middlemen - at a price.

The consequences are inevitable: self-righteous social services departments playing God for the most quixotic of reasons, Third World babies kidnapped for export (especially from countries like Guatemala, where they make very pretty babies), babies bred to order in the ghettos and trailer parks of the US and sold on a sliding scale according to ethnic origin. And no questions asked.

The United States is not one of the commoner sources for British adopters. It has a baby-hungry affluent middle-class of its own. China comes top of the foreign adoption league, followed by Thailand. It is a rare British couple who attempt to adopt from India, the Philippines or South America but very many American couples have success in those places. Many Britons still look to find a baby in Romania and, increasingly, Russian orphanages are attracting couples. All foreign adoptions cost serious money in terms of travel, accommodation and legal expenses but only in the Land of the Free do babies actually quite blatantly come with a price on their heads.

Moral outrage at this "trafficking in human flesh" is obviously the right response. And yet. How is it that whenever another story of adoption with a price tag breaks, everyone one talks to expresses the requisite distaste and condemnation - and then goes on to describe an exception?

Certainly, for anyone with any imagination the story of seven-month-old Baby J, destined to be returned like a wrongly addressed parcel to an adoption agency in Texas, is a shocking one. The initial transfer of the child, at two days old, was admirably speedy and would have enabled her to bond quickly with her new parents. Now that bond is to be shattered.

But practically everything else about that particular adoption appears to be suspect. The initial social worker's report was done by an "independent" operator with no qualifications. The residency requirement for adopting couples in the US was waived, ignored or never raised. No follow-up checks were possible because the child was permitted to leave the country. Even if, by some legal loophole, all that was permissible, the adoption agency did not see fit to contact its opposite numbers in the British social services. It was the latter who contacted the agency when Baby J was somehow "brought to their attention" back in Britain.

The judge in the High Court, Mr Justice Johnson, chose not to comment on the reasons given by the social services department involved which "believed there were compelling reasons why the couple should not be regarded as able to provide a safe and secure home for J". That makes one wonder. The couple could have all sorts of flaws, bad habits and bizarre lifestyle choices. But a lengthy list of reported social service department objections to adoption are known to include many nonsenses, among them: too old, too white, too work-oriented, too achievement-oriented, too house-proud, too laid-back, too religious, too irreligious, too desperate and not desperate enough.

My own exception to the moral outrage rule is a couple, friends for many years, who, having been told in Britain that they were far, far too old to be considered, adopted a black child nine years ago in the United States. They did it completely legally since they were resident there for a year on an academic exchange. But they got a price list: $25,000 for a white baby, $12,500 for an Asian baby and $5,000 for a black one.

"We were told that the money," says Rebecca's doting father, "was for legal fees and medical bills. We wanted a black child but couldn't help but feel uneasy about the whole process knowing that we were expected to believe that lawyers and doctors charged more for their services when a white infant required them."

Rebecca was four months when she arrived from Texas in the arms of a social worker. She was skinny, quiet, undemanding. "She had been in a foster home since birth, one of five babies looked after by this particular woman. The social worker told us that she may have been a little undernourished because she did not cry much so did not get the bottle stuck in her mouth so frequently."

Rebecca at nine is not problem-free. There are moments of great insecurity, dreams and fantasies which can be interpreted as terror of abandonment. But she is essentially happy, outgoing, tall, robust and very beautiful. And she has all the charm of the well-loved child.

If Baby J is white - and at $19,000 she could well be - she will have potential new parents, properly resident in the US, waiting in line to claim her. If she is part or wholly Asian or Hispanic, her chances of slipping fairly easily into a new home are good. If, however, she is black she could find herself in an institution or over-crowded foster home for some time, if not for life.

One cannot question the legal correctness of the judge's decision. "It might be that this is a thoroughly bad example of the way things happen in the US," he said. Something in the phrasing leads one to suspect that he knew that it was not, however, exceptional.

He concluded that he was satisfied that, on her return to Texas, Baby J would not be placed in "an intolerable situation". With all those exceptions to the inappropriateness of cash-on-delivery adoptions in mind, one has to hope that he got it right. Or one shudders to imagine what Baby J's nine-year-old nightmares might be like.

This story was first published in the London Evening Standard