Innocents From Abroad : Prospective parents eager to adopt children from other countries often find themselves in a chaotic, shadowy world. A new effort seeks to simplify that.

As almost anyone who has navigated the labyrinth of international adoption will attest, the process is, at best, a bureaucratic bad dream.

It is always complicated, often frustrating, sometimes heartbreaking and occasionally dangerous. A child to love makes it all worthwhile, as Gerry and Gale Mazur of Irvine are the first to agree, but the obstacles are frequently greater than even the most determined prospective parent is prepared to expect.

“It was the greatest adventure of our lives,” say the Mazurs, whose quest for parenthood zigzagged from Asia to Latin America, culminating in the adoption of their son, Daniel, seven years ago in Honduras.

“Some of that adventure,” Gerry Mazur adds--such as watching a truckload of baby coffins pull up to the welfare office in Tegucigalpa where they were completing Daniel’s adoption--”you could do without.”

Procedures vary wildly from country to country. At any moment, politics can intervene, prompting a country to abruptly shut down its adoption program. Such was the case at various times in recent years in Colombia, Korea and Romania. Last week, China suspended foreign adoptions--temporarily, officials of that country insist. Just as quickly, adoption may reopen to outsiders.

In addition, some countries make temporary residency demands of would-be adoptive parents, requiring them to leave jobs and homes in the United States for weeks or months at a time. A further roadblock is what Susan Freivalds calls a worldwide cultural misunderstanding of the practice of adoption.

In some parts of the world--such as the Indian subcontinent--orphans are regarded as “social outcasts,” says Freivalds, executive director of Adoptive Families of America Inc. in Minneapolis. In these regions, she adds, “they just can’t believe what we do what do here, that we take these children and love them.” Many children in these parts of the world, Freivalds says, languish in orphanages or are reduced to living on the street.

International adoptions by U.S. citizens traditionally have been greater than those from all other nations combined. In 1992, U.S. adoptions from abroad numbered 6,531, with almost half of these children coming from Asia. The 1992 figure--the lowest since 1982--represented a 30% drop from the previous year, when more than 2,000 orphans were sent to this country from Romania. (By contrast, only 145 Romanian children came to the U.S. in 1992.) But these and other complexities of international adoptions have not been high on the U.S. or world diplomatic agendas.

Nonetheless, on Sunday representatives from at least 60 countries will begin three weeks of meetings in The Netherlands with the goal of ratifying the world’s first treaty on international adoption. Participants say this unprecedented effort to bring some rudimentary level of coordination to the hodgepodge represents “the first formal international and intergovernmental stamp of approval for the legal process of inter-country adoption.”

Five years in the planning, a meeting of the 100-year-old Hague Conference on Private International Law that focuses exclusively on the concerns of children and families is “quite extraordinary,” according to Joan Heifetz Hollinger, a visiting professor at UC Berkeley’s Boalt Hall School of Law and an expert on international adoption. Typically, Hollinger says, world statesmen “have been more geared up to deal with issues of commerce.”

Because it reduces finally to an international agreement, with enforcement left up to the 60 nations invited to sign, the proposed treaty is worded cautiously. However, its attempt to establish minimum safeguards for all parties involved in international adoption makes it significant in intent alone.

Peter H. Pfund, a State Department attorney who heads the U.S. delegation, reports that the agreement will affect international adoptions to the United States, “whether the U.S. becomes a party to it or not.” The doctrine’s mere existence, says Pfund, “may cause numerous countries, and especially sending states, to review and possibly change their domestic laws governing adoptions to foreign countries.”

Among the key provisions of the proposed Hague Convention on Intercountry Adoption:

* A declaration that safeguards are necessary to ensure that international adoption “take place in the best interests of the child and with respect for his or her fundamental rights.”

* A description of what constitutes an “adoptable” child.

* Clarification of whose consent--i.e., that of the birth mother and in some cases, of the child--is required.

* An insistence that “the consents have not been induced by payment or compensation” for the birth parents or others.

Married and single persons who are seeking to adopt would be covered under the treaty. The agreement would apply equally to international adoptions arranged by agencies, by private and independent agents such as attorneys or by the adoptive parents themselves.

The pact’s most controversial element calls for the establishment of a “central authority” in each member country to coordinate implementation of the treaty. Critics charge that this requirement will build an even more formidable bureaucracy than what already exists. In the United States, the precise definition of a “central authority” has yet to be determined.

A skeptical supporter is Harvard Law School Prof. Elizabeth Bartholet, who details her own experience with international adoption in her new book “Family Bonds.” Bartholet was single, in her mid-40s and the mother of a biological son, now grown, when she looked into international adoption.

A member of the study group that advised the U.S. State Department in helping to draft the Hague Convention treaty, Bartholet ended up adopting two boys in Peru. To satisfy that country’s residency requirements, she spent five months in Lima--where, along with the joy of motherhood, she experienced the horror of regular terrorist blackouts. Her first encounter with the handiwork of Shining Path rebels came when she and Christopher, now almost 8, were ensconced in a residential compound for foreigners. Leaving for a meeting with the Peruvian woman who was her go-between in the adoption proceedings, Bartholet and her baby suddenly found themselves in total darkness.

“I make my way by touch to the emergency stairs,” she writes. “. . . I go down the 13 flights as fast as I dare, terrified that I will bash my new baby’s head in.

”. . . I hold the baby to me and tell him that we will make it through the rest of what Lima and what life have to offer.”

Though Bartholet’s story ended happily--she lives with Christopher and Michael, 5, just a stone’s throw from Harvard Yard--she is fierce in her criticism of the roadblocks to adoption in general, and international adoption in particular.

“We must reduce the extraordinary barriers that stand in the way of placing children in need of homes with those who want to parent,” she writes.

“Requiring the adoptive parent to spend months in a foreign country is enough to prevent most of those who might want to adopt internationally from doing so.”

Residency requirements of varying duration are common in Central and South America, which together accounted for nearly one-third of the international adoptions in the U.S. in 1992. Many nations in Asia, which continues to account for the largest group of “sending countries,” do not impose residency requirements.

The present lack of standards in international adoption means that confusion remains the prevailing force, says Betty Laning, chairman of the adoption information office of the International Concerns Committee for Children in Boulder, Colo. She cites the emergence of new countries in the former Soviet Union, “where we’re hearing from individuals who are saying, ‘I can get you a baby in six weeks, just give me $5,000.’ ”

Freivalds says planning for the Hague Convention has also been complicated by concerns about abuse--real or imaginary--in international adoption. She points out that a persistent specter of baby-selling hovers over the world of international adoption.

Because adoption is a puzzling phenomenon in some parts of the world, rumors of abuse continue to fester. These tales of black-market babies were only enhanced by the chaotic adoption scene that erupted in Romania after the fall of the Ceausescu regime in December, 1990. By many accounts, 1991 was an adoption madhouse in that country. Desperately ill babies were shipped overseas, often with false assurances that they were really just running a small fever. Eager foreigners arrived in Romania to find what in some cases amounted to baby bazaars. Then there were the unscrupulous relatives--aunts and uncles, and often not even genuine aunts and uncles--arranging to sell small children to the highest bidders.

In a meeting last year in The Hague to help work out the language of the adoption treaty, “almost every other sentence was ‘we can’t allow what happened in Romania to happen again,’ ” Freivalds says.

For the U.S. delegation, such issues may have been less urgent, Freivalds says, because “we have very strict, very tightly enforced laws” governing the entry to this country of adopted children. “Many of the safeguards that the Hague Treaty is trying to institute have already been instituted in the United States” through state and federal regulations.

But Betsy Rosenbaum of the American Public Welfare Assn. in Washington points out that individual U.S. states operate as separate jurisdictions, with their own sets of rules pertaining to adoption.

In nations where Americans may be seeking to adopt children, “our own country is very difficult to understand,” Rosenbaum says. “There are so many different practitioners here. And our expectations are often different than what other countries are prepared to do.”

While the United States is expected to join in signing the final treaty at The Hague, Pfund stresses that this will represent “a symbolic act without legal effect.” Advice and consent of the Senate is required for any international treaty, as is implementing legislation and a presidential signature. As Pfund notes: “That could take years.”

Even if the treaty is enacted, there are those who worry that it may create as many obstacles as it erases.

“There’s still a lot up in the air, and there’s the real possibility here of unfulfillable expectations,” says Laning. “We wonder, for example, if we ratify it, does that mean we can only work with other countries that ratify?”

Despite her initial optimism about the effort at The Hague, Bartholet says the “massive disappointment” of the endeavor has turned out to be “the classic law reform maneuver of adding new hurdles rather than clearing up the old ones.”

In San Juan Capistrano, meanwhile, Mickey Marko, says he regards the meeting in The Hague as an important step. Marko is a father who sold his business so he could devote himself to caring for the two children that he and his wife Amelia adopted. Sarah, their 4-year-old, came from Peru. Their 15-month-old son, Kevin, was born in this country.

“I don’t see how you’re going to have all those governments agree,” Marko says. “But if you could, it sure would be wonderful.”