RED TAPE BLOCKS ADOPTIONS
St. Louis Post-Dispatch
THREE COUNTRIES INVOLVED IN DECIDING FATE OF ROMANIAN CHILDREN
Author: By Martha Shirk Of the Post-Dispatch Staff
A tangle of international red tape has left 24 American couples, including three from St. Louis, facing the prospect of life without the Romanian children they had hoped to adopt.
The 24 couples have waited as long as six months for 28 children, for whom they already have prepared rooms and selected names. They have paid fees as high as $18,000 each to a Seattle adoption agency and a company set up by a Romania-based relief worker.
All they've gotten in return are pictures and promises.
"We feel like the kids and the American families are caught in the middle of something that has nothing to do with us," said Denise Scott of St. Peters. She and her husband, Lavern, are trying to adopt a 14-month-old Romanian girl they've named Abby.
Brenda Henn of Creve Coeur, who is trying to adopt a 17-month-old she's named Alexander, said: "We already have emotional bonds with these children. We think of them as ours.
"I hate to use this word, but I think there's a conspiracy to keep these children from coming over."
Three countries are now involved in deciding the children's fate - Hungary, Romania and the United States. The countries are making decisions in a highly charged atmosphere involving allegations of child neglect and violations of the spirit, if not the letter, of adoption laws.
The three St. Louis couples had undergone years of disappointment trying to adopt American children. All three couples are white and want to adopt white babies. But the number of white children placed for adoption in the United States falls far short of meeting the demand, and the wait for a baby can take many years. So they turned to an international agency, hoping to speed up the process. Adopting a foreign child can take less than a year.
The 28 adoptions are being handled by two licensed adoption agencies and an unlicensed relief organization in the United States. The common link is a British citizen named John Davies, who's been involved in relief work in Romania since 1988.
The Adam fund, which is not a licensed adoption agency, found American couples to adopt 14 of 28 Romanian children Davies lined up.
In October, Davies contacted a licensed adoption agency, Aloha Adoption Services in Tukwila, Wash., a suburb of Seattle, and offered to find Romanian children for it. Aloha has found families for 13 of the children Davies offered. Among them were the Scotts, the Benns, and another local couple, Jayne and Mark Oldenburg of Grover.
"John Davies found a way to get around the Romanian adoption laws - legally," said Pamela Iacchei, executive director of Aloha, which has previously placed 56 Romanian children in American homes.
"He took the law to the limit, without circumventing it. Unfortunately, it's turned out to be a lot more complicated than he thought."
The Romanian children that Davies has promised to American couples were either born in Hungary or brought there after birth in Romania. Had their mothers put them up for adoption in Romania, the adoptions would have had to be handled by one of six licensed American adoption agencies approved by the Romanian government. The Romanian government developed strict adoption rules last year after widespread reports of baby-selling.
Under the auspices of the Adam Fund, Davies found a dozen foster homes in Szegeb, Hungary, to house the children once their mothers relinquished parental rights.
Last month, Hungarian authorities raided the homes and seized the children. They said they were investigating the death of a child and disappearance of three others. The children went to a children's home.
The U.S. embassies in Hungary and Romania have been investigating since last fall whether the children were truly abandoned, a requirement that must be satisfied before visas can be issued. That process usually takes three months.
Aloha's director believes the case has dragged on because of pressure from the head of the National Council for Adoption, a Washington-based research and advocacy group.
"The bottom line is that the National Council for Adoption wants to control the international adoption business," said Iacchei, of the Aloha agency. "It's all about money. They don't want anybody else to make money off of Romanian adoptions."
William Pierce, executive director of the National Council for Adoption, says that's preposterous. He said only three of the six U.S. agencies authorized to place Romanian children are members of his organization. Members pay his group a fee of $30 an adoption, he said.
Pierce acknowledges raising red flags about Davies' activities with State Department officials.
"If somebody wants to adopt a Romanian child, they should abide by Romanian law," he said. "I consider one of my responsibilities to be to keep international adoptions from getting a bad name."
The prospective parents have written to dozens of senators and representatives - as well as the White House - to try to break the logjam.
A State Department official said Wednesday that the U.S. government was trying to move the children's visas along, but needed to be satisfied that their biological parents gave up their children willingly. Visas for seven of the children have been tentatively approved, the official said.
The official said it was the state department's policy not to identify people speaking for the department.
The official said she understood the prospective parents' frustration.
"They want these children so badly, and it's taking a long time. But we have to be satisfied that these are not stolen children. If they were subsequently found to be, and the adoptive parents lost them, that would be heartbreaking to everyone."
The prospective families want to be sure that the children have been relinquished legally, too.
"If I thought the birth mother wanted the child, I'd want her returned to her," said Denise Scott. "I just don't want this child spending months more in limbo in an orphanage."