Romania’s Experience Spurs Adoption Treaty

“Boom in Overseas Adoption.” “Baby Scam Flourishing.” “Romania Targets Baby Trade.”

Spurred on by such headlines, 36 nations and 16 private groups are working on a treaty to curb abuses in adoptions of children across international borders.

The complex negotiations are particularly important to the United States. Prospective parents, facing a severe shortage of American babies they might be willing to adopt, imported about 9,000 children last year. Most came from Romania, Latin America or Southeast Asia.

That number exceeded the total for all other “receiving” countries, which were mostly in Western Europe.

The proposed treaty would ban widespread selling of babies and aim to ensure that prospective adoptive parents were suitable.

The need for uniform rules was highlighted by highly publicized problems in Romania shortly after the fall of the communist government there in 1989.

When word reached the West of the squalid orphanages, filled due to Draconian birth-control policies, Americans, Canadians and Western Europeans flocked to Romania to adopt children. In doing so they helped create a black market of bribery, forged documents and bullied mothers; at the same time, U.S. officials were criticized for inadequate screening of many prospective adoptions from Romania, which totaled about 2,600 in the fiscal year ended last Sept. 30.

Eventually, the new Romanian government was forced to suspend all adoption until new laws could take effect.

Baby trafficking reportedly flourishes in a number of other countries, including Brazil and Thailand.

“When you’ve got a birth parent living in dire poverty in a country with no child welfare services, selling her child begins to look like a good deal for everybody. But the (proposed treaty) would try to make sure that children are truly in need of a new family and there are no financial inducements,” said Susan Freivalds, head of Adoptive Families of America in Minneapolis, a member of the U.S. team negotiating the treaty.

The pact would require nations to set up a “central authority” to clear all international adoptions according to a range of safeguards. The thorniest issue is whether to outlaw or merely regulate fast-growing private adoptions, the kind arranged by parents, lawyers and others without an official agency.

“Many perfectly suitable adoptive parents become endlessly frustrated by bureaucratic delays and high costs when so-called central authorities and adoption agencies dominate the scene,” said Joan Hollinger, a University of Detroit law professor.

She said that abuses are few, and urged that parties to private adoptions be held accountable to authorities, that the practice be lightly regulated.

The Child Welfare League of America, which represents most government and private adoption agencies, insists that licensed agencies must have a major role in all cases.

“Too many independent adoptions are aimed simply at finding children for parents, not the other way around,” said Jean Emery, a league official. “It concerns us when adoptions are dissolved.”

Another treaty issue is just what adoption means. Unlike the United States, in some countries natural parents retain some rights if a child is adopted.