Road to foreign adoption grows longer

March 18, 2008
Kristin Collins, Staff Writer

It seemed like a simple transaction when Tamara Lackey brought her adopted son from Ethiopia to Chapel Hill four years ago: The child had been living in a spartan orphanage, and Lackey was willing to provide a loving home. She filled out paperwork, and five months later her bright-eyed, smiling baby was home.

Hundreds of other families in North Carolina and around the country are discovering that it's no longer so easy to take in the world's neediest children.

Just as international adoption has become a mainstream way to build a family -- helped by celebrity adoptions such as those of Angelina Jolie, who has children from Cambodia and Ethiopia -- the practice is in crisis. Allegations of baby-selling haunt some countries, and some say international adoption's popularity may be creating a worldwide backlash. Adoptions have recently become difficult or impossible in China, Guatemala, Kazakhstan and Vietnam -- four of the main countries that send orphans to the United States. Hundreds of adoptions are in limbo.

"Everything is so volatile right now," said Gail Stern, founder of Chapel Hill-based Mandala Adoption Services, which arranges inter-country adoptions. "If you called me today and wanted to adopt a child, I would tell you to sit on it. We cannot in good conscience tell people that if they start today, things will be smooth."

Concerns about corruption have previously halted adoptions from Romania and Cambodia. But Stern and other experts say they've rarely seen so many countries having problems at once. On Monday, Kazakhstan unexpectedly shut down adoptions with little explanation. China, the largest sender of orphans, has recently scaled back its program so severely that couples might wait more than five years, said Diane Kunz, a Durham lawyer who founded the non-profit Center for Adoption Policy, which promotes adoption. The country now excludes prospective parents who are single, recently divorced, over 50, on antidepressants or overweight -- restrictions that Kunz says ruled out about 60 percent of Americans looking for Chinese children.

Guatemala, another top sender, recently closed adoptions after allegations that babies were sold or stolen. Similar concerns have also arisen in Vietnam.

Those awaiting Vietnamese children are facing months-long delays as the U.S. government investigates each case. The government is threatening to deny some adoptions because investigators can't get the children's hospital records.

In the meantime, families who have invested as much as $20,000 or $30,000 are wondering whether they will ever see the children they hope to adopt.

Delays, no explanation

William Zuercher of Durham said he and his wife began trying to adopt a Vietnamese child in May 2006. They had seen friends adopt a Vietnamese infant, and they were drawn to the idea of helping a child who would otherwise languish in an orphanage or be doomed to street life. "It seemed like a good thing to do in the world," said Zuercher, 36. "There are these kids out there that need love, that need families. We thought, if we could give that, what a great thing that would be for them and for us."

With that sentiment came an added benefit: International adoption was generally easier than domestic, which often requires foster parenting or years on a waiting list. Until recently, applicants to foreign countries frequently had their children before their first birthdays. But nearly two years after applying, Zuercher and his wife don't know when they will get the baby girl whose pictures arrive in the mail.

They have no explanation for why the Vietnamese government hasn't approved them. Once they get that approval, they will be subject to a U.S. government review that could take months. Jill Cunnup of Siler City is in the same situation. In 2004, after years of infertility, she adopted a son from Kazakhstan, who came home at 10 months old. Last fall, she decided to adopt a child from Vietnam, thinking the process would take about nine months.

"I thought the second time would be easy," said Cunnup, 29. "Now, I still have hope that I will finish the adoption, but I have no idea when."

The U.S. government has recently become concerned about the selling and stealing of babies in Vietnam, and investigators are poring over each case to ensure each child is actually an orphan. "These protective measures have been put in place to ensure the integrity of the adoption process in Vietnam," said Peter Vietti, a spokesman for the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Service.

Stern, who runs the Mandala agency, said she believes corruption exists only in a tiny portion of cases. While investigations drag on, she said, children suffer. In the past month, Stern said, six babies set to be adopted by Americans died when a virus swept a Vietnamese orphanage.

International adoption, all but unheard of at the end of World War II, has become a mainstream phenomenon in the past two decades. Each year since 2002, Americans have adopted more than 20,000 foreign orphans, according to the State Department.

As its popularity soars, so does pressure from international groups such as UNICEF, which believe that children should be removed from their home countries only as a last resort.

Fears of baby-selling

"Lack of regulation and oversight, particularly in the countries of origin, coupled with the potential for financial gain, has spurred the growth of an industry around adoption, where profit, rather than the best interests of children, takes center stage," UNICEF states in a position paper on its Web site. "Abuses include the sale and abduction of children, coercion of parents and bribery."

However, among U.S. adopters, those allegations have gained little traction. They focus on the benefits.

Foreign orphans come with scant chance that a birth parent will attempt to reclaim the child or seek a reunion. And some say that foreign-born children, relinquished most often because of poverty, are less likely than U.S. orphans to come from mothers with substance abuse problems. Without adoption, many foreign orphans face a future without governments that will save them from starvation or ensure medical care.

Lackey, 36, a photographer, said she and her husband decided to adopt after an around-the-world trip through more than a dozen impoverished countries. In the orphanage where their son lived, children didn't have basic supplies such as toothpaste or Tylenol. They used rags for diapers and slept several to a crib.

She says the boy they named Caleb has so enriched their lives that she decided to adopt another child. This time, she is waiting for a toddler from Ecuador -- an option open only to couples willing to accept older children and to spend up to two months living in the country. She said she hopes the delays and uncertainty won't discourage people from opening their homes to the world's children.

"It's opened up a whole door that we didn't even realize we were missing," said Lackey, who also has a 6-year-old biological daughter. "These issues that we're talking about are government issues. The children are still there."

USA Makes Adoption Harder
By John Stossel

Do you want to rescue an abandoned child and give him a loving home?

Don't even try, says the U.S. State Department.

That's not exactly what the bureaucrats said, but it's close. The State Department says the Guatemalan adoption system "unduly enriches" so-called baby brokers and that "Guatemala has not established the required central authority to oversee intercountry adoption."

"Central authority"? This from our government? They sound like Soviet apparatchiks.

Last December, the U.S. consul even butted his way into the Guatemalan Congress to make sure a sweeping new adoption law was up to American standards. The law is designed to put those profit-making brokers out of business by making adoption a government monopoly. But to thousands of kids awaiting adoption, a government monopoly could be a death sentence.

Yes, there have been horror stories about adoption fraud. Some children were stolen from families. This is horrible, but far from the norm. Out of more than 100 cases of alleged "baby stealing," only five were confirmed as true, says Guatemalan journalist Marta Yolanda Diaz-Duran. That's five crimes versus about 4,000 legal adoptions from Guatemala in 2006 alone. Guatemala has been the second leading source of adopted children coming to America -- after China and ahead of Russia. The adoption-broker system -- which relied on entrepreneurs providing a service for a fee -- worked well enough that Guatemala was an adoption success story.

American adoption agencies (charging a fee) worked with Guatemalan adoption brokers (also charging a fee) to match willing couples with the right children. There was a near-perfect safeguard against baby stealing: two rounds of DNA tests to prove the biological mother gave consent.

The process wasn't cheap -- parents paid $25,000 or more, and brokers who spent months or years jumping though the bureaucratic hoops -- made, horrors, profit! Hence our State Department's outrage about adoptions that "unduly enrich." The sentiment was captured perfectly by a UNICEF representative who huffed to The New York Times that adoption "has become a business instead of a social service."

Oh, yes, everyone loves "social service." But when adoption was a government-run social service in Guatemala, the results were disastrous.

I happened to be in Guatemala City last month visiting the Americas' most free-market university, Universidad Francisco Marroquin. UFM's president took me to visit Ines Ayau, a nun who runs an orphanage that was formerly in the hands of the government. The children are well cared for now, but before her church took over, Ayau said, the government staff had forced some children into prostitution. The orphanage itself was rat-infested and without electricity, and the government used the facility to funnel money to cronies. "Thirty-six persons were working, (but) 105 were on the payroll,"

Yet U.S. officials want adoption back in the hands of government?!

There's little reason to expect the current government to do much better. Guatemala is one of the more corrupt nations in the world, 111th out of 179 countries, says Transparency International.

Even if the new bureaucracy isn't corrupt, there's little chance it will process adoptions as quickly as the brokers did because without profit, it has no incentive to move the kids through the cumbersome adoption process. When other countries have put adoption in government hands, adoptions slowed or stopped. Paraguay went from sending more than 400 kids to the U.S. in 1996 to sending zero in 2006.

That's a tragedy.

It may make some people uncomfortable that a middleman charges $5,000 to arrange an adoption, but profit isn't evil.

Someone has to be compensated for arranging the DNA tests and leading hopeful parents past the government's obstacles. The orphanages need funds. If some Americans are willing to pay even $50,000 to adopt, that's not a bad thing. NGOs, politicians and bureaucrats may call it disgusting "human trafficking," but I call it finding love for children who desperately need it.

Guatemala has followed America's lead, and now thousands of abandoned Guatemalan kids face spending their childhood in orphanages. Many could have found a home in the U.S. if only government -- American and Guatemalan -- had stayed out of the way.

John Stossel is an award-winning news correspondent and author of Myths, Lies, and Downright Stupidity: Get Out the Shovel--Why Everything You Know is Wrong.

More Information.

Relative Choices: Adoption and the American Family

The New York Times is running a series of columns about adoption written by people with a personal connection to adoption. Writers include Dr. Jane Aronson, a leading adoption medicine specialist and adoptive mother, authors Jeff Gammage and Tama Janowitz and Hollee McGinnis, founder of Also-Known-As and policy director of the Evan B. Donaldson Adoption Institute. The series can be accessed at http://relativechoices.blogs.nytimes.com/.

Slamming the Door on Adoption
Depriving Children Abroad of Loving Homes

By Elizabeth Bartholet, Washington Post
Sunday, November 4, 2007; Page B07

Last month, Guatemala was effectively shut down as a country from which children can be adopted into the United States. While the shutdown is officially temporary, it is likely that even when new laws are in place, Guatemala will follow the path taken by many South American countries in recent years: eliminating the private agencies and intermediaries that facilitate the placement of children who need homes and substituting government monopoly over adoption, which will reduce to a trickle the number of children escaping life in institutions or on the streets.

In recent years, Guatemala has been a model for those who believe in adoption as a vehicle for providing homeless children with permanent, nurturing parents. It has released significant numbers of children to international adoption, many at young ages, before they suffered the kind of damage that results in attachment disorders and other life-altering limitations. Ironically, these policies are why Guatemala attracted the attention of UNICEF and other human rights organizations that, along with our State Department, have been pushing for adoption "reform." These official "friends of children" have created pressure that has led to the cessation of international adoption in half the countries that in recent decades had been sending the largest number of homeless children abroad. Until recent years, the number of international adoptions into the United States had been steadily increasing, but the numbers are dramatically down. Why close down international adoption? The real-world alternatives for the children at issue are life -- or death -- on the streets or in the types of institutions that a half-century of research has proved systematically destroy children's ability to grow up capable of functioning normally in society. By contrast, we know that adoption works incredibly well to provide children with nurturing homes and that it works best for those placed early in life. Critics of international adoption argue that children have heritage rights and "belong" in their countries of birth. But children enjoy little in the way of heritage or other rights in institutions. The critics argue that we should develop foster-care alternatives for children in the countries they are from, and UNICEF's official position favors in-country foster care over out-of-country adoption. But foster care does not exist as a real option in most countries that allow children to be adopted abroad, and the generally dire economic circumstances in these nations make it extremely unlikely that comprehensive foster care programs will soon be developed. Nor is there any reason to think that children would do as well in foster care as in adoptive homes. Indeed, for decades the research in countries that use foster care, such as the United States, has shown that such care does not work nearly as well for children as adoption does.

Critics also condemn adoption abuses such as baby-buying. But there is no hard evidence that payments are systematically used in any country to induce birth parents to surrender their children. In any event, the right response to such abuses is stepped-up enforcement of the overlapping laws prohibiting such payments, which would rightly result in the lawbreakers being penalized. Closing down international adoption, however, wrongly penalizes all those homeless children who could otherwise find nurturing adoptive homes, condemning them to institutions or to the streets.

Policies restricting international adoption replicate the same-race matching policies that used to exist in the United States. In the mid-1990s, Congress passed the Multiethnic Placement Act, rejecting the notion that children should be seen as belonging only within the racial group into which they were born. Our lawmakers recognized the harm children suffered by virtue of being held in foster care rather than being adopted transracially. Congress, the State Department and the human rights organizations that purport to care for children should similarly reject the notion that children in other countries must at all costs be kept in their communities of birth. Children's most fundamental human rights include the right to be nurtured in their formative years by permanent parents in real families.

Elizabeth Bartholet is a law professor and faculty director of the Child Advocacy Program at Harvard Law School. She is the author of the books "Family Bonds" and "Nobody's Children."

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/11/02/AR2007110201782.html