EVERY day, Carol and Stephen Forslind and their 4-year-old daughter, Victoria, stand in the kitchen of their home in Nashua, N.H., and talk to an enlarged color photograph on the refrigerator door. The photograph is of Wei Juan-Juan, the daughter who awaits them in a Chinese orphanage.
In suburban St. Louis, David and Gail Wood are also planning a trip to China for Jiang Jing. She turned 6 months old on Christmas Eve, and they wonder if the daughter promised them is happy and healthy. Mostly, like the Forslinds, they wonder if the adoption will go through.
Both families have been notified of a one-month delay in the trip to pick up their daughters. They have not been told of the reason for the delay, but their worst fear is that the Chinese are retaliating for a report critical of orphanage conditions released two weeks ago.
The report, by a New York-based human rights organization, asserts that thousands of children have died in China's state-run orphanages from deliberate starvation, medical malpractice and staff abuse. The charges have prompted disbelief from some adoption agencies, calls from people interested in adopting Chinese children, and fear from Americans already in the middle of such adoptions.
The Forslinds and the Woods found out last Friday that their trip had been pushed back a month. The delay came a week after the report, by Human Rights Watch, was released.
"We were scared when we heard about it," Mr. Wood, an elementary school assistant principal, said of the Human Rights Watch report. "We were scared they would close the doors in China, or at least slow down things for a lot of people. We don't think Jiang Jing is in danger."
"We felt tremendous fear and loss," Mrs. Wood, a high school English teacher, said of the delay. "It's a very emotional issue for me, having lost children before. I've been pregnant before and had miscarriages. We had applied for a program in Colombia and nothing happened for an incredible length of time.
"We are taken by how powerless we are," she continued. "We have to be patient because we are asking for a lot -- we are asking for a child."
The Forslinds have made do with sending Wei Juan-Juan a teddy bear named Muffy; at 4 1/2, she is old enough to know what adoption means.
"She knows she has a mother and father coming for her," said Mrs. Forslind, who adopted Victoria from China. "It makes my heart hurt."
Other prospective parents and adoption agencies have concerns about the accuracy of the report, which has not been independently assessed. They also fear that the Chinese -- who have denied the charges of abuse and neglect -- will stop adoptions from America.
Chinese adoptions are increasingly popular because they tend to be fast and efficient and they are open to older parents -- in fact, adoptive parents must be at least 35. The cost including fees to agencies and orphanages, transportation and lodging is generally between $15,000 and $20,000, parents who have adopted say.
Both Human Rights Watch and international adoption agencies in the United States are receiving dozens of phone calls, letters, faxes and E-mail messages from people who had not thought of adoption until they read about the orphans and wanted to save them. But some adoption agencies contend that these children are no worse off than children from other developing countries.
"I've been traveling 20 years to the developing world," said Janice Neilson, the executive director of the World Association for Children and Parents, a Seattle-based adoption agency. "Children suffer from abuse and neglect everywhere in the world if they are without the comfort and protection of families.
"Children in orphanages in China are in similar conditions and situations as children around the world -- even kids in group-home and foster care in the United States."
Holly Burkhalter, the Washington director of Human Rights Watch, said that there is a difference: that many more Chinese children are abandoned than are ever made available for adoption.
"The healthiest and prettiest children are selected for adoption by the Chinese authorities," said Ms. Burkhalter, who adopted a child from China in November. "The agencies are seeing the prettiest girls come out. There are two classes of children -- they need to care more about the others, who can't come out.
"I was afraid that the report on very bad orphanages would scare people away, that it would be impossible to get a healthy baby out of the orphanages," she said. "But we've had many dozens of phone calls from people asking: 'Can I get three babies? Where can I go? What can I do?' "
American families with Chinese children are becoming more common in many major cities. According to officials at Adoptive Family of America in Minneapolis, the national clearinghouse for adoptive parents, the State Department issued 1,369 visas for Chinese children between 1990 and 1994. The group estimates that an additional 1,000 children have come to this country for adoption since then.
Human Rights Watch officials say that political considerations played no role in the timing of their report, but it will have an inescapable impact on the deliberations of the United Nations Human Rights Commission in March in Geneva. The United States and European nations have unsuccessfully sought for the past six years to have the commission approve a resolution condemning China's human rights record.
"The political whims open and close the doors to adoption," Ms. Neilson said.
The Human Rights Watch report was based on detailed medical records, smuggled out of China by a doctor from a large Shanghai orphanage, and a limited set of statistics relating to China's orphan mortality rates.
Since the report, Chinese officials opened the doors to journalists at the largest state-run orphanage in Shanghai. The journalists did not report seeing any signs of neglect or abuse.
It is difficult, many parents said, to know what to believe.
"It's just a real poor place and it's hard to get a fix on things that will have an impact," Mr. Wood said. He said that he and his wife adopted their 3-year-old daughter, Abigail, from China in 1993 and that, although she was filthy and developmentally delayed when she came to them, she is now doing well emotionally and intellectually.
But Lisa Collins, an adoptive mother and personal investor from Takoma Park, Md., said there was legitimate reason for concern about the orphans. Ms. Collins said that when she picked up her daughter, Kate, in China last November, the child had problems that included severe anemia, scabies and an enlarged liver and spleen. At 6 1/2 months of age she could barely lift her head.
"I would have liked to see the conditions she was living in," Ms. Collins said. "We actually got the babies in hotel lobbies."
Friends began calling Michael Moore and his wife, Elizabeth Kopczynski Moore, after reading the Human Rights Watch report. They knew that the couple, who live in Manhattan, were planning to go to China to pick up a child, and wanted to know if things were on schedule.
"The Chinese have assured our agency we will travel at the end of January," said Mr. Moore, who works for a nonprofit organization. "Until my daughter is safely back here, there's nothing I'm willing to speculate on."
His wife said the tension associated with adoption had been made worse by the report. And so Mrs. Moore, a mezzo-soprano and optimist, sits looking at a photograph of their daughter-to-be atop the piano, and hopes for a happy ending.