Romania Gives Britons Prison In Baby Case
By JANE PERLEZ,
A British couple has been sentenced to two years and four months in prison after being convicted of buying an infant and trying to smuggle her out of the country.
Diplomats and foreign social workers had expected the couple, Bernadette and Adrian Mooney, would receive a lighter penalty.
But the Romanian authorities, who are trying to change the country's reputation as a place where lawyers and judges make deals with middlemen to sell children, apparently decided to send a message in the sentencing last week.
The Government has been reluctant in recent years to approve the adoption of Romanian children by foreigners. But Mr. and Mrs. Mooney are the first foreigners to be convicted under a new law introduced in 1991.
The couple, from a town in southeastern England, paid a middleman $6,000 for a five-month-old Gypsy baby, identified in court documents as Monica. The baby's unmarried 17-year-old parents said they received only $500 of the fee.
The Mooneys were stopped by Romanian police on July 6 at the Hungarian border. The baby was hidden in a box on the floor on the back seat.
They English couple already has a legally adopted Romanian daughter. They decided to turn to the black market in babies because they were deemed too old -- she is 40 and he is 42 -- for another legal adoption.
Three Romanians convicted of arranging the sale each received sentences of two years and eight months. The Mooneys have appealed their sentences and are free on bail. The baby remains in St. Catherine's orphanage in Bucharest.
Learning of the plight of the tens of thousands of abandoned Romanian children, Western couples flocked here after the fall of the Communism in December 1989.
State orphanages crowded with children were opened to adoptions from the West for the first time in 1990, and many couples were able to arrange quick though legally questionable adoptions.
The large number of abandoned children in Romania was a legacy of the Communist Government's ban on abortions and birth control. Parents who gave birth to children they could not afford often left themto the care of state orphanages.
Many of the children were infected with HIV when they were discovered in 1989 because of a policy of injecting al the children with a blood factor, some of which was tainted with the virus that causes AIDS.
Since 1990, it has been more difficult for foreigners to arrange official adoptions. An estimated 80,000 children live in institutions for children under 16, according to Government statistics. Many of the children have disabilities.
About 500 children were adopted last year by foreigners through the Romanian Adoption Committee, the new legal entity set up to to deal with adoptions. Romanian families adopted 3,500 children in 1993, a process that the Government says it is trying to encourage.
Conditions in the orphanages in the big cities have improved somewhat, mainly because of aid from foreign charities. But care in the orphanages remains poor because of a lack of trained nurses and insufficient Government financing.