Paper: Stolen tot lives in Iowa

The Gazette (Cedar Rapids-Iowa City)

Paper: Stolen tot lives in Iowa

Washington Post probe of Ukrainian baby sales identifies Stanton couple

Author: Washington Post

and Gazette staff reports (1 of 2 stories)

LVIV, Ukraine - A southwest Iowa family adopted an infant in 1993 who apparently was stolen or purchased by a Ukrainian doctor from an unemployed, alcoholic Ukrainian woman, according to the Washington Post.

Authorities have arrested and charged two doctors and are investigating others for taking newborns from their mothers in 1993 and 1994 and selling the babies for profit.

Depending on the outcome of the criminal cases, the foreign adoptions could be found illegal, according to a Ukrainian official.

Records in four cases reviewed by the Post showed the babies went to the United States - one to Darwin and Miriam Hanson of rural Stanton, Iowa, and three to the Cleveland area.

The Hansons - reached Monday by The Gazette - revealed little about their son's adoption.

"We don't know anything about this. I don't know how any paper trail came back to us or how the newspaper got our name or anything," Miriam Hanson said. "We're just real uncomfortable saying anything."

The Hansons also declined an interview last month with the Post and earlier with their local weekly newspaper, the Villisca Review/Stanton Viking after Miriam Hanson returned from the Ukraine.

Records show the Hansons' adopted son was born in Kamyanka-Buzka on Oct. 1, 1993. On Oct. 18, the Kamyanka-Buzka district (similar to a U.S. county) administration issued a document giving the boy an American name and listing the Hansons as his parents.

Those records were falsified, according to the Post's investigation.

The Post reported the adopted child, now 1 years old, was the son of Olga Ushakova, a 25-year-old Gypsy, a group that faces racial prejudice in Europe. Jobless and an alcoholic, Ushakova told the Post she survives on a disability pension awarded after she had tuberculosis and had a lung removed years ago.

Ushakova answered the door at the filthy, two-room apartment she shares with the impoverished, deaf-mute parents of her ex-husband. She said she gave birth in the fall of 1993 to a boy in a Lviv maternity clinic.

She said one hospital worker told her the baby was dead, and another told her the baby was alive "but deformed." She said the baby was eventually brought to her, "and he wasn't deformed."

She brought the child - whom she named Vitalik - to the apartment. A few days later, she said, "a man came and said, 'You can't keep him here. ... Sign him over to us, and we'll keep him until you get (your own) apartment.'

"He said he would give me money if I went with them to Kamyanka-Buzka and signed papers" to give up the baby, Ushakova said. She insisted she did not take money.

When she went to look for her son, who she thought was institutionalized, "they told me he had died."

Volodymyr Kolesnik, a doctor who helped investigate the Ushakova case, said physicians in the former Soviet republic sometimes obtained babies by falsely declaring the infants dead and then selling them to foreigners.

Last summer, the Ukraine halted foreign adoptions amid allegations of scandal. In recent months, Russia's president and legislature have battled over how far to tighten adoption rules.

Col. Bohdan Tokarsky of the Ukraine Internal Affairs Ministry declined to discuss specific cases but said lies may have been told in the course of some adoptions, meaning the adoptions "might be found illegal."

But a spokeswoman from the U.S. State Department's Office of Children's Issues told The Gazette that children adopted under U.S. laws and naturalized would be considered "legal, and we consider the adoptions final."

Ukrainian officials said about 120 children were sent from Lviv Province to the United States before Ukraine suspended foreign adoptions. They have not said how many of those adoptions are suspect.

The State Department spokeswoman said 164 immigrant visas were granted to Ukrainian orphans between Oct. 1, 1993, and Sept. 30, 1994 - most of those to children older than 6 months and suffering health problems.

Kolesnik said he saw documents suggesting children were illegally separated from their mothers in a hospital in the small town of Kamyanka-Buzka. When he returned to check records, they had been destroyed, he said.

Bohdan Fedak, one doctor arrested for illegally separating children from their mothers, headed the Kamyanka-Buzka hospital during much of 1993 and 1994. Since then, as head doctor of Lviv's main hospital, he was close to being the province's top-ranking physician. The other doctor arrested was deputy chief doctor at Kamyanka-Buzka.

Kolesnik said doctors certified the newborns suffered illnesses requiring treatment overseas - one of few conditions under which Ukraine permitted foreign adoption.

Gazette staff writer Doug Neumann contributed to this story.