Romania Temporarily Suspends Adoptions
CHRISTINA PIRVULESCU , Associated Press
May. 23, 1991 5:25 PM ET
BUCHAREST, ROMANIA BUCHAREST, Romania (AP) _ The adoption of orphaned and abandoned Romanian children is being halted temporarily while authorities prepare new rules aimed at putting a lid on burgeoning black-market adoptions, officials said Thursday.
''The selling and buying of children has to stop,'' Foreign Ministry spokesman Traian Chebeleu said at a news conference.
The number of couples coming to Romania seeking to adopt children has been rising, and there are widespread reports of Westerners going to poor rural areas where parents are exchanging their boys and girls for cash.
In some villages, impoverished parents speak of selling off children ''by the pound.''
Chebeleu said Parliament was expected to complete work next week on legislation that would set strict guidelines for the adoption of Romanian children by Westerners.
Adoptions will be suspended beginning June 1 until the government's Committee for Adoptions establishes new procedures in accordance with the legislation, Chebeleu said.
The committee's chairwoman, Dr. Alexandra Zugravescu, said adoptions would not resume before September.
Some foreigners in Bucharest were upset.
Sonya Paterson, a Vancouver, British Columbia, native who last year adopted a Romanian girl and now helps arrange adoptions for other North Americans, said hundreds of Westerners ''would be forced to return home empty-handed.''
Under the new law, only children recognized as abandoned for six months could be adopted and all adoptions would require the committee's approval. Zugravescu also said she would no longer accept applications from individual Western families, only from official adoption authorities.
The proposed law sets prison terms of one to five years for natural parents or intermediaries receiving money for adoptions.
Nearly 7,000 Romanian children have been adopted since the December 1989 revolution that ousted Communist dictator Nicolae Ceausescu, 1,709 of them by Americans, Zugravescu said. Most adoptions have taken place the past five months, he said.
Most adopted children had been abandoned. Ceausescu had banned all birth control and abortion.
Many prospective foreign parents, frustrated in efforts to find young, healthy children in state institutions, spend months searching the countryside for the right child. Some fall prey to local ''fixers'' who have turned adoptions into easy money.
The country's poverty - the average monthly salary is about $100 - also has tempted some parents to offer newborn children for sale to Westerners.
Ms. Paterson and others involved in adoptions were surprised by the sudden decision.
''It's infuriating to have this land on you without warning,'' said Ms. Paterson, who wrote a letter to the Senate seeking the adoption limits be overturned.
Marya Triesig of Spartanburg, S.C., said she has been in Romania for two weeks and had not found a child.
''I've got a lot invested already - plane tickets, other costs,'' said Ms. Triesig.
Triesig said she encountered ''kids living in horrendous conditions'' with their families in the Romanian countryside, ''five to a room, naked, in rooms practically made of manure.''
Over the past several months, U.S. immigration authorities have refused visas to more than 20 Romanian children adopted by Americans under what the U.S. government considered dubious circumstances.
Some cases involve uncertainty over whether children whose natural parents recently have given them up can be considered eligible for adoption and immigration into the United States.
A U.S. Embassy spokesman in Bucharest, who spoke on condition of anonymity, said Thursday that the United States ''welcomes any revision that will bring about a more orderly adoption procedure.''
The suspension of adoptions won't directly affect the fate of the Romanian children in limbo, however.
Westerners began coming to Romania to adopt children after the anti- Communist revolution, which exposed the plight of approximately 140,000 children living in squalid state institutions.
In the Transylvanian village of Cristian, about 180 miles north of Bucharest, more than 20 children have recently been sold to foreigners, local residents said.
Dorina Grozav, 21, told reporters she sold her 2-month-old daughter to a German couple for about $3,600 and other gifts.
''I fattened her up and sold her,'' said Grozav, adding: ''I will make another child now and sell it, too, so I can live well from now on.''
Mircea Gheorghica, 24, said he sold three children ''to survive.''
''I sold them off by the pound, like little pigs,'' he said.
Their claims could not be verified.