Adoption Go-Betweens

They are praised as matchmakers, condemned as baby sellers. Unlicensed, often untrained and largely free of regulation, baby finders are increasingly in the middle of adoptions-gone-wrong stories.

The adoption intermediary, usually a woman working out of her home, makes connections directly with birth parents or agencies to locate a child for a client. Fees vary widely, but she may charge $6,000 for a match or perhaps twice that for a two-year search contract. Some facilitators are honest and ethical; others are not.

The role of these for-profit adoption facilitators--who are legal in some states, including California, illegal in others, including New York--is being examined across the country. The debate ranges from whether they should be banned to how they might be better regulated.

Even the California Department of Social Services, which licenses adoption agencies, says it has no way of knowing how many facilitators operate in the state because they are not licensed. Facilitators need only to obtain a business license and to post a $10,000 bond to set up shop.

The increasing use of paid facilitators in adoptions--and the accelerated rate at which information is traded on the Internet, where a number of facilitators post Web sites--is dramatically changing adoption from what once was a close-to-home, hush-hush process.

Once, agencies had their corner of the market, and adoption attorneys theirs. The use of intermediaries began to take hold in the 1980s, although the term facilitator only started to be used in the last few years. As birth parents began seeking more control, and adopting parents began looking for financial savings, more choices and quicker matches, their use increased.

Facilitators can only locate babies, not finalize adoptions, though. That still must be done only by attorneys and licensed agencies.

Many adoptions today occur across state lines, falling into a maze of 50 possible sets of state regulations. Although there is no national legislation, all 50 states have agreed to an interstate compact that says a child cannot be taken across a state line for adoption without approval of both the state of birth and the state where the child is adopted. Many adoptions cross international boundaries, creating even more complex scenarios.

One of the more notorious cases--that of twins who were bartered by a California facilitator on the Internet--both to a couple in San Bernardino County and to one in Wales--has fueled the debate and underscored fundamental flaws in the adoption system.

“I think 50% of adoptions people are promising things they can’t deliver,” says Mary Lib Mooney of Lexington, Va., a consumer advocate who launched her https://www.theadoptionguide.com Web site after being burned in a Russian adoption. “They’re God, and they’re in control. They have the child. They can manipulate you. There aren’t any ethics.”’

Mooney says that, in many instances, people are giving baby finders big bucks and signing agreements that basically say, “No refunds. We don’t guarantee anything.” Yes, there are laws on the books, she adds, but they need to be more aggressively enforced. “Adoption is a nasty business.”

It was good intentions--to create a home for a Chinese orphan--that led Sarah Novak to a facilitator, who she hoped would help arrange the adoption. But what evolved was a match fraught with problems. Novak places part of the blame on the facilitator, contending that she misrepresented the situation to close the deal. Whether that was the case is open to dispute.

Caught in the middle was a child.

Novak, a 42-year-old single mother in Medina, Ohio, remembers clearly the day she first saw the girl she would later call Corrie. The 12-year-old, who did not have any fingers, was on a videotape made at a Chinese orphanage by a friend of Novak’s who had adopted a child there. “She was absolutely beautiful, and I fell madly in love with her,” Novak says of the child.

Novak was put in touch with Ming Hua He, a Chinese American facilitator working out of her home in Connecticut with Michigan-based Adoption Associates. Novak made the connection through an Internet discussion group.

“I worked for a year trying to get [the child],” Novak says, with Ming telling her, “This little girl just can’t wait to be adopted. She can’t wait to meet her new mama.”

Novak was happy and excited when last April she flew to Nanjing, anticipating adding another daughter to her little family, which included Chinese adoptees, then 3 and 2. Her happiness was short-lived.

Novak recalls, “I get to China and this little girl is anything but well-adjusted. She was so angry and filled with such hatred. She did not like white people. She did not want to leave China. It took five people to get her in the car to bring her to the hotel.” Once home, Novak had her examined by a doctor, who found signs she had been beaten.

“She wanted absolutely nothing to do with me. She wouldn’t eat meals with me, she wouldn’t look at me. Any time I was in the room she’d completely shut down, crawl into her bed and pull the covers over her hed.”

The first night in the hotel room with Corrie, Novak hid all the sharp objects in her bed, fearing what the child might do.

Despite the rocky start, Novak decided to proceed with the adoption. “What’s the alternative?” she asks. “She goes back to the orphanage--if they let her back in--or they throw her in the street.”

When Novak suggested to the translator that she might renege, she says Corrie “became hysterical and begged me to bring her home--’I’ll be a good girl, please take me, oh, please, oh, please.’ How could I leave her? I couldn’t even fathom waking up in the morning and not knowing what happened to her.”

She brought Corrie home, bought her a Gap wardrobe and enrolled her in school. Novak’s Chinese is “minimal”--her Chinese American daughters were adopted as toddlers--so she had a friend who speaks Mandarin call the child regularly. And she hired a translator to teach English to Corrie but says the child refused to learn. At home, Corrie tried to throw the family pets down the stairs; at school, her teachers said she would not listen to authority figures.

Although Novak, now in early retirement, had 20 years’ experience working with the profoundly disabled, she had met more than her match.

Knowing that there was a chance the adoption might not work--problems are not uncommon when a child has spent as many years as had Corrie in an orphanage--Novak created a backup plan. Before going to China, she contacted a Chinese-speaking American family who had adopted other children from the same orphanage to see if they would take Corrie if it became necessary. Corrie is with that family now. Novak has heard that she is happy and well-adjusted in her new home.

Ming Hua He, the facilitator in the case and now an employee of Adoption Associates, denies having misrepresented the child and says she communicated regularly with Novak: “Whatever information I gave to her was from the orphanage director.”

Novak contends that, while she was in China, Ming never called her “until she heard there was a problem.” And then, “she kept trying to make light of it.” After Novak brought Corrie home, she says Ming never called her.

Ming is reluctant to discuss the case but stresses that the child is doing well now.

Richard Van Deelen, executive director of Adoption Associates, has acknowledged that Novak’s case was “a nightmare.” But, he says, parent-initiated adoptions--in which a specific child is asked for, as in Corrie’s case--are always “risky business,” adding, “There were warnings made along the way to her by people in China. I believe that she disregarded all that.”

Condemning Poorly Trained Facilitators

Should for-profit facilitators be banned? More stringently regulated? These are questions increasingly being debated in California and elsewhere.

Reuben Pannor, a Vista del Mar agency consultant with 50 years in the adoptions field, condemns poorly trained facilitators who are “handling human beings, doing something that has tremendous and terrible consequences if not handled properly.” Lack of follow-up counseling is, he believes, a major problem with many facilitators.

Allan Hazlett of Topeka, Kan., president of the American Academy of Adoption Attorneys, speaks of “unlicensed facilitators who go in there and promise the moon to people--’We’ll get you a baby in two or three weeks’--and people are sucked into it. Adopting couples are so vulnerable, they’re willing to believe anything.”

At last month’s meeting, the academy passed a resolution endorsing regulation and licensing of all facilitators, saying facilitators “run a serious risk of causing emotional and financial harm to prospective parents and birth parents” and of damaging the sanctity and public perception of adoption.

“What good, constructive purpose are they serving?” asks Jane Nast, president of the Washington-based American Adoption Congress, which promotes honest, open adoptions. “They’re out there in the bushes looking for pregnant women.”

The Academy of California Adoption Lawyers, some of whose members work with facilitators, put the issue on its agenda for its monthly meeting held Saturday in San Francisco. Academy president David Baum of Encino says he disapproves of working with “unlicensed intermediaries” and discourages clients from doing so, as “legal details too often are swept under the carpet.”

Donna Brownsey, a lobbyist in Sacramento for the academy, says the group is split on the issue of licensing facilitators, pointing out the difficulty of legislating “an amorphous service, quasi-social work,” and of separating the well-intentioned from the baby sellers.

The case of “the two Arlenes” falls into the latter category. David Kruchkow and wife Sara, a childless Bayside, N.Y., couple, were among the New York-area families victimized in 1999 in an illegal Mexican baby smuggling scheme carried out by Long Island facilitators Arlene Lieberman and Arlene Reingold, in cahoots with a lawyer, Mario Reyes Burgueno. All were convicted and given prison terms for their roles in the scheme.

Prosecutors say that between 1995 and 1999 the trio smuggled at least 17 babies across the border from Mexico to deliver to unwitting adoptive parents who were told the children were legitimately in the United States. The children were not kidnapped but were relinquished by mothers to whom Reyes made promises, some never kept, such as a new house with a bathroom.

Reyes assured the adoptive parents--who had paid as much as $22,000 plus travel and translation costs--that the children’s paperwork was in order, when in fact they had fake birth certificates, adoption consent forms obtained by bribing Mexican officials and no visas or passports. Some had been brought across the border in Arizona with women posing as their mothers.

Meanwhile, the “two Arlenes,” who were working with a Wisconsin adoption agency, had been seeking out clients at a local mall, posing as adoption consultants and adoptive mothers who had been burned by the system and didn’t want to see others hurt. Later, it was learned that they had evaded the law on several occasions, simply by changing the name of their operation.

The Kruchkows went to Juarez, Mexico, to pick up their daughter. David Kruchkow recalls, “Mario handed her to us [with a packet of documents] and said, ‘Here’s everything you need.’ ” But they learned the documents were bogus, and they could not get the child a passport to bring her across the border.

Earlier, the same facilitators had promised the Kruchkows two girls who never arrived, one of whom, they learned, “was already in the United States with another family.” In all, David Kruchkow estimates he and his wife were out $36,000.

But their story had a happy ending. In January 1998, 2 1/2 years after the ill-fated Juarez trip, they brought home the child, now 5, and her adoption has been finalized.

Kruchkow, who sells cars, says adoptive parents have “less protection than you get buying a used car. The industry is ripe for the unscrupulous, unethical, criminal profiteers. I don’t think any party should be hurt when they’re just trying to provide a home and a family for a child who needs one.”

Aaron Britvan, the New York adoption lawyer who represented the Kruchkows and several other families, believes that facilitators, who are outlawed in New York, are “totally inappropriate.” In California, unlike in New York, lawyers can place children for adoption, and Britvan theorizes that California lawyers are reluctant to speak out against facilitators on the theory that “if we stopped them, we might be the next ones stopped.”

Even when cases land in court--although many who get burned are reluctant to file charges--there is no guarantee of resolution. Often, the cases evolve into a “she said/they said” debate between facilitators and clients.

Some Facilitators Advocate Licensing

Even the severest critics of facilitators acknowledge there are good, reputable ones. Among those mentioned by adoptive families are Cindy Simonson and husband Jim, adoptive parents who operate A Loving Alternative out of their San Clemente home. Cindy Simonson points up the difference between a facilitator and a baby seller: “We have clients who are hiring us for a service. We’re not luring them in with a pregnant woman.”

Yes, there are unethical facilitators, Simonson says, but adds, “When you hear about a doctor amputating the wrong leg, does that mean you’re never going to go to a doctor again because there’s a quack out there?”

Simonson, who works with reputable agencies, charges clients $5,800 for her services for two years or until they get a baby. She has a Web site and advertises in the yellow pages. Her birth mothers and adoptive parents do not meet until they have talked by telephone, and a social worker has assessed the birth mother’s emotional state and health history.

She advocates state licensing of facilitators. “If you become a plumber, you have to be licensed. Facilitators who have been doing this for a long time and do a good job want licensing.”

Reputable facilitators condemn practices such as “piggybacking,” where unethical facilitators go on the Internet searching other facilitators’ sites for babies who haven’t been matched with parents, and then do a search for a family.

Nancy Hurwitz Kors of Walnut Creek, Calif., heads the Academy of California Adoption Professionals, a facilitators’ group that supports licensing of facilitators. She met recently with Nancy Hall, legislative assistant to Assemblywoman Charlene Zettel (R-Poway) to discuss a full-disclosure bill being proposed by Zettel to regulate facilitators in California.

Kors opposes the proposed legislation. Among provisions she does not like is a $3,000 limit on fees. Kors says that advertising costs alone done on behalf of a client can cost more than that. Besides, Kors says, the Legislature passed the Adoption Facilitation Law in 1997, which regulates advertising by facilitators, mandates disclosure to clients about fees and services, and forbids facilitators from engaging in counseling. If it were enforced, Kors contends, “we wouldn’t need new legislation.”

The hodgepodge of adoption laws is “pretty scary,” says Nast of the American Adoption Congress, but regulating adoption nationwide is “pie in the sky” thinking. Adoption, she says, “is not a vote-getting business. It has never been an issue that legislators hop on, because it’s very controversial.”