WASHINGTON: When communism collapsed in Europe in 1989, the world was shocked to discover the plight of thousands of abandoned children in Romania. Graphic images of these children and the horrible conditions in which they suffered became a catalyst for humanitarian action. American and other organizations mobilized to help. Many Americans also opened up their homes, providing these children with loving families and, indeed, with the bright futures they deserve.

More than a dozen years later, the situation of Romania's abandoned children is far better. Many have been adopted and are now thriving in their new family environments, in Romania or abroad. For those children who remain, squalid institutions have been replaced with cleaner and more modern structures, and with social workers to help their development. These improvements have been made in part with assistance from the United States government and the European Union, as well as from private organizations that continue to care about Romania's lost children.

Although proud of our role in this accomplishment, these improved institutions remain only that — institutions. As a matter of principle and based on long experience, we believe that these institutions should be only way stations to the placement of abandoned children in families — in Romania when possible, but otherwise in loving homes wherever they are located. That is why we are gravely concerned over the April 15 vote by the Romanian Senate to approve a law that would all but foreclose the possibility of inter-country adoption. If approved by the Chamber of Deputies and enacted into law, this decision will deprive Romania's abandoned children of the better lives they deserve.

Of course, we understood when Romania placed a moratorium on international adoptions in June 2001. That moratorium was meant to be temporary, to stop profiteers from manipulating a weakly structured adoption system, and to end the exploitation of children and prospective adoptive parents alike for personal financial gain. Unfortunately, not enough Romanian families are able or willing to take in all of Romania's abandoned children, and many foreign families, including Americans, simply want every child to be given the best chances in life. And they believe, like I do, as an adoptive parent myself, that children should be raised in families, not in institutions.

For the children who remain in Romania's child-care institutions today, and for those who will be placed there tomorrow, the Romanian government's new draft law would be a tragedy. For their sake, the law should be changed, and inter-country adoptions, with all appropriate protections, permitted again.

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Richard L. Armitage is the U.S. deputy secretary of state.

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