Americans Protest U.S. Refusal to Issue Visas for Adopted Children

CHRISTINA PIRVULESCU , Associated Press

May. 8, 1991 3:19 PM ET

BUCHAREST, ROMANIA BUCHAREST, Romania (AP) _ About 20 Americans whose adopted Romanian children have been refused entry to the United States demonstrated outside the U.S. Embassy on Wednesday, chanting ''Let our children go home 3/8''

The protestors briefly blocked traffic on a main downtown street near the Embassy, waving toys and signs demanding visas for the children.

Some of the Americans have spent months in Romania awaiting immigration approval for their children, whose status as orphans has been questioned by the U.S. Immigration and Naturalization Service.

U.S. officials said the main problem is determining whether adopted children whose parents are still alive were abandoned prior to adoption, as required by U.S. law.

Sonya Paterson, a rally organizer from Vancouver, British Columbia, said most of the children are sick with blood diseases, chronic fever or other health problems.

''All those children need medical care which they cannot get in Romania, and they need to get out of here now,'' said Paterson, whose adopted Romanian daughter had been mistakenly diagnosed as retarded by orphanage authorities before her adoption last summer.

Paterson's Romanian Orphan Support Group of Canada, which is based in Bucharest, says it has helped organize hundreds of adoptions by Westerners the past year.

Virgil Bodeen, a spokesman for the U.S. Embassy, said that more than 800 immigrant visas for adopted Romanian children were approved in the first third of 1991, up from about 500 during all of 1990.

He said the remaining ''handful'' of unresolved cases are being handled by the U.S. immigration service's Vienna office.

The estimated 140,000 orphans and abandoned children in Romania are a result of former Communist dictator Nicolae Ceausescu's ban on birth control and abortion when he ruled the country of 23 million.

But Romania's continuing poverty has produced what a Romanian government spokesman calls ''mercantile'' adoptions, with poor Romanians allegedly offering their children for sale to Westerners.

Kathleen Fletcher said her 5-month-old adopted daughter Simona was denied a U.S. visa because her biological parents are known and ''she is not a textbook case of abandoned or orphaned.''

But the 37-year-old New Jersey resident insisted she would ''stay until I can take my child out.'' Her hometown was not immediately known.

Nearby, 32-year-old Marcy Droguardy of Ranchers, N.Y. hugged her 3-year-old daughter, Christina, and cried, ''Let us go home 3/8''

Carol Froebe of Garden City, Kan., said she would ''be here in front of the Embassy every day ... until my case is solved.''

Some of the Americans are already considering the possibility of an indefinite stay in Romania.

Lynda Coombs of Seattle, whose 12-year-old son Julian was denied a visa after several interviews with U.S. officials, said: ''If it turns out I cannot take him, then I'll have to start a new life in this part of the world.''