(CNN) -- Malawi's decision to reject pop star Madonna's adoption of a local child has reignited global debate about the ethics of international adoption.

Author Melissa Fay Greene poses with her family, which includes biological and adopted children.

Some international aid groups have praised the decision as best for the child, a 4-year-old girl named Chifundo James.

"I think it really highlights the bigger picture that there are so many children living in poverty in Malawi, and while Madonna has good intentions ... children would be better off staying in their own communities whenever possible," said Karen Hansen-Kuhn, policy director for ActionAid USA, a development group that also works in Malawi.

"We really need to stay focused on the needs of Malawi and of all the children there," she added.

To get another perspective on the situation, CNN also talked with Melissa Fay Greene, an author and mother of five adopted children.

Greene, who lives in Atlanta, Georgia, is the mother of four biological children, four children adopted from Ethiopia and one adopted child from Bulgaria.

The following is an edited transcript of that conversation:

CNN: What's your initial reaction to the news that Madonna's adoption of a Malawian child has been rejected?

Greene: Surprise. ... It was awfully tricky with Madonna's first adoption, when the child turned out to have devoted family members nearby. [The singer's adoption of a Malawian boy was finalized last year.] And if that's true with this child also, it seems a similar sticky situation.

That's not the situation for the majority of orphanage children around the world, who don't have caring grandparents or aunts and uncles a short walk or bike ride away.

I think it gives people an odd perspective on what international adoption can mean for children who don't have any support network outside the walls of an orphanage.

You often hear attacks on international adoption as robbing a child of his or her culture, and that's both true and false. It's true that an internationally adopted child loses the rich background of history and religion and culture and language that the child was born into, but the cruel fact is that most children don't have access to the local, beautiful culture within an orphanage. ...

There's a culture in orphanages that children are eager to escape from, and it's a culture of being reared as a group and not being doted upon by parents. For any child, that's the bottom line. The fact is that a human child wants that mommy or daddy or both. We're just wired to want that and to need that. And there's no way an institutional setting can give a human baby what the child needs. It's impossible. So you have to balance priorities. ...

I think what some of the human rights group say is absolutely accurate: that international adoption does not begin to solve the problems of the world's orphaned children. It's truly not the answer. ...

At the same time, international adoption, even though it doesn't solve the whole problem, it solves a problem for a few. I think it can be a brilliant solution to the problem of adults wanting a child in their lives or wanting more children in their lives and the problem of children who want parents in their lives.

CNN: How is it different for a celebrity person seeking an [international] adoption than for yourself?

Greene: We don't jet in, take a child and fly out with a child. For an average citizen trying to adopt, it takes most of a year. First of all, you work with a country that already has international adoption regulations in place, so you have a bureaucracy dealing with international adoption. A big part of that is determining that the child is a true orphan, that there is no one who can care for the child. And in the case of our older kids' adoptions, people had to come to court to testify that there was no one to take the children. So you don't run the
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