exposing the dark side of adoption
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Romanian Revolution May End Wait For Parents Of Long-Adopted Children

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By Rone Tempest

Los Angeles Times

BUCHAREST, Romania - Every night before bedtime, Jessica, 4, kneels before one of the Orthodox faith icons in a large, dimly lighted apartment and recites ``My Angel,'' the Romanian prayer she has learned by heart:

``Dear God, help all the children of the world. And help me go as soon as possible to my mother and father.''

Jessica's adoptive parents, Ilona and Thomas Scott, live thousands of miles away in Camarillo, Calif. They have a room, filled with toys, waiting for the little girl with the mop of dark-brown hair who prays so hopefully every night. But except for a few happy weeks last summer in Bucharest, she has never lived with them.

The Scotts have new hope, however, that the fall of Romanian dictator Nicolae Ceausescu last month will mean they will be united soon with their daughter after three years of waiting.

There already had been suggestions from provisional Romanian Vice President Dumitru Mazilu, a human-rights activist, that their daughter and 250 other adopted children would soon be freed. And over the weekend, the situation brightened even more when the Romanians allowed the release of 61 children for long-delayed adoption by families in France.

A spokesman for the U.S. Embassy in Bucharest said release of Jessica and three other children adopted by American families is one of the highest priorities of the American government in its dealings with the provisional National Salvation Front government that replaced Ceausescu.

Livia Mann, a Romanian emigre who lives in Portland, Ore., said she and her husband are childless and have been trying to win the freedom of their adopted 3-year-old daughter, Mihalache Georgiana, for 2 1/2 years.

In recent years, desperately hard living conditions drove many Romanian women to send their children to orphanages. As a result, Romania became an important center of adoption for childless couples, mainly from Italy, France, Israel and the U.S.

But at the end of 1987, Ceausescu suddenly refused to grant passports to the more than 250 such children who were being adopted by foreigners. The change in policy, like so many decrees and edicts issued under the Ceausescu regime, was never officially explained.

The children, who range in age from 2 to 12, are heirs to some of the cruelest legacies of the Ceausescu regime.

Most of them live in crumbling, ill-equipped state-run homes. In Bucharest alone, more than 2,000 children, mostly abandoned by unmarried mothers, live in the homes.

On a recent visit to the largest home, Creche No. 1 on the northern edge of the city, a foreigner found more than 700 children living in chilly, ill-lighted rooms without adequate supplies of basic needs, such as diapers and vitamins.

As the visitor entered the wards reserved for toddlers, the children ran toward him with their arms outstretched. The staff appeared to be caring but too small to give the children much individual attention.

To soothe themselves, the children rocked back and forth, shifting their weight from one foot to another until they looked like a flock of tiny little bobbing penguins in pajamas.

French psychologist Claude Lefevbre, who visited Creche No. 1 recently, said the rocking motion exhibited serious untreated psychological problems. He also said the hospital had severe shortages of calcium, vitamins and antibiotics. He expressed fears that some of the children may have been permanently retarded by their years in the orphanages.

1990 Jan 11