Officials Urge New Romanian Adoption Law
GABRIEL PASLARU , Associated Press
Jun. 7, 1991 2:03 PM ET
BUCHAREST, ROMANIA BUCHAREST, Romania (AP) _ Government and international officials on Friday urged Romania's Senate to pass a controversial adoption law that would crack down on a growing practice of selling babies.
The proposed law establishes jail sentences of up to five years for biological parents and baby dealers who accept payment to facilitate adoptions. It also forbids the adoption of children who have been abandoned less than six months.
On Monday, the Senate postponed debate on the bill, which was proposed by the government last month and was passed two weeks ago by Parliament's lower house, the Chamber of Deputies.
If the law is passed, a government committee would control all adoptions instead of the present practice of allowing local courts to handle many of the procedures. This means adoptions would be halted about three months because the government's Adoption Committee stopped operating last week and doesn't plan to resume before September.
That has raised a furor of dissent among hundreds of Western couples who are in Romania searching for children to adopt. Some have begun lobbying senators to block the bill.
Westerners began flocking to Romania to adopt children after the revolution overthrowing Romania's Communist government in December 1989 exposed more than 100,000 abandoned children languishing in squalid state orphanages.
Most of them were born as a result of dictator Nicolae Ceausescu's ban of birth control and abortion as a way of boosting Romania's population of 23 million.
But the large number of Westerners anxious to adopt spawned a burgeoning baby market in which Romanian fixers received fees for finding babies whose parents were still alive and often were paid to give up their children.
Alexandra Zugravescu, head of the Adoptions Committee, told a news conference that without the law ''we cannot stop this terrible adoption system ... (which has) generated dirty, illegal and immoral transactions.''
A police statement this week claimed many adoptions by Westerners are carried out ''in dubious conditions, with children sometimes taken out of the country without authorization and trafficked abroad.''
The statement cited several examples of Romanian parents receiving as much as $1,600 to abandon their children for adoption by Westerners.
Zugravescu's call for passing the law received backing from several international agencies, including UNICEF, the French-based Defense des Enfants International, and the International Social Services Organization.
''We hope that the bill passed by the (Chamber of) Deputies will soon be adopted by the Senate too,'' said Rosemary McCreedy, UNICEF's representative in Romania.
Nigel Cantwell, program director of Defense des Enfants, said that of approximately 20,000 international adoptions registered worldwide last year, about 3,000 involved Romanian children. Officials say another 4,000 Romanian children have been adopted by foreigners in 1991.
Impoverished conditions in Romania, where the average monthly wage is about $50, has led some Romanians to give up their children for a better life, and induced others to sell them.
According to data from the Adoptions Committee, only about one-seventh of adoptions since January, when the committee was created, had its approval.
Under current rules, would-be adoptive parents can bypass the committee and go through Romania's local courts, which are usually less exacting.