Romania is coming under intense and conflicting pressure from Washington and Brussels as it moves to outlaw international child adoption.

A controversial law expected to be passed this month in response to calls from the European Union to tackle its corruption-riddled adoption practices has triggered loud protests from the US.

The law makes it next to impossible for foreigners to adopt Romanian infants, despite the low interest in adoption within the country and the large numbers of children in institutional care.

Child welfare groups are lobbying the Romanian government to change the bill, the US state department is leaning on the prime minister, Adrian Nastase, and US congressmen have written to Romanian MPs demanding a more liberal approach to the issue.

During the 1990s tens of thousands of Romanian children were adopted abroad after the international media broadcast wretched scenes of orphanages following the collapse of the totalitarian Ceausescu regime in 1989.

The booming trade soon became big business, involving organised crime rackets and corrupt court and government officials, and the cost of an adoption soared to tens of thousands of dollars.

The business also fused with child prostitution and organ transplant rackets, prompting warnings from Brussels that Romania's EU accession prospects would be jeopardised unless the government clamped down on the trade in children.

Under EU pressure Romania imposed a moratorium on foreign adoption three years ago.

The new bill, which cleared the Romanian senate three weeks ago and is to go through the lower house later this month, effectively makes that freeze permanent.

It bans the foreign adoption of children under the age of two, allows foreign adoption only as a last resort and only by "close relatives" - taken to mean grandparents - living abroad.

"The law places great limits on giving children a new chance of a decent life," said George Roman, the programme director of the Save The Children charity in Bucharest.

"It's because of the pressure from the EU.

"The government has been too aggressive with this new law. But there is little chance of changing it now."

According to Save The Children there are around 50,000 children in institutional care in Romania and a further 35,000 in the care of the social services "with maternal assistance" - visits from their mother.

"Children should not be required to spend their childhood in institutions simply because there is no [Romanian] family to take them," the US ambassador in Bucharest, Michael Guest, said last week. "Inter-country adoption is a legitimate form of child protection."

More than 20 US congressmen lobbied the Romanian parliament last week on changes to the bill, relaxing the blanket restrictions on foreign adoption.

The US adoption pressure group Joint Council On International Children's Services has been lobbying hard both in Bucharest and in Brussels for a softening of regulations it says are in breach of The Hague convention governing international adoption practices.

Would-be adoptive parents from the US have been taking out adverts in the Romanian press to appeal for a softening of the ban.

And the US deputy secretary of state, Richard Armitage, in a newspaper article last week, described the Romanian bill as "a tragedy."

"This decision will deprive Romania's abandoned children of the better lives they deserve," he wrote.

Despite the pressure from Brussels for the ban, individual EU members such as Italy are also keen to see foreign adoption resumed.

"It is good that there is a new law," said Laurentiu Zolotusca of the Bucharest Christian children's charity World-vision.

"But this law does not fully respect the rights of the child."