Baby Languishes in Orphanage After Adoption Ban

Spania Bancuta has been alive for three months and alone almost as long -- ever since her mother dropped her off at a children’s hospital in Bucharest and never returned.

But it may be awhile before the Gypsy girl with placid dark eyes can leave her steel crib in Room 5.

Like thousands of other children, Spania isn’t eligible for adoption abroad because of a temporary ban imposed by the Romanian government that has outraged Western couples trying to adopt, and prompted concerns from aid workers that youngsters are being condemned to stay in orphanages.

“The longer they delay the foreign adoption law, the more serious it is for the children,” said Sister Mary Rose Christy, a Roman Catholic nun from Burlingame, Calif., who works in Romania. “That’s who is being hurt: the children.”

Romania ordered the ban in June 2001 after the European Union claimed that the impoverished Balkan country had become a marketplace for children and would have a harder time winning membership in the prosperous 15-nation bloc.

The ban put the EU at odds with the United States, which sided with American, Israeli, Spanish and French couples trying to adopt. While the United States agreed that the system didn’t always protect the rights of children, U.S. Ambassador Michael Guest said his government’s interest was to place the children in loving families.

Baroness Emma Nicholson, the British EU official pushing Romania to toughen its laws, says Romania is vulnerable to mobsters preying on children. Americans would never allow their children to be exported the way Romania does, and “should afford the same respect to Romanian families as their own.”

One of the worst scandals to emerge with communism’s collapse in eastern Europe was the plight of abandoned children, nowhere more so than in Romania. Dictator Nicolae Ceausescu had outlawed abortion and birth control, and families who couldn’t feed their children handed them off to the state.

The images of starving and bereft children in state institutions shocked the world, and humanitarian agencies poured in.

The EU advocates limiting foreign adoption to a last resort, after foster care or local adoption has failed. Efforts should concentrate on giving children a good home by Romanian standards, Nicholson said.

The ban is due to expire in February, but could be extended if a new adoption law isn’t passed. Legislators are awaiting EU input before tackling it.

Meanwhile, the ban’s opponents have won little sympathy from Romania’s leadership, including President Ion Iliescu.

“Americans should produce their own children,” he said recently. “If they want children, they should go to countries with high birthrates.... Our main goal is to improve conditions for all children in our country.”

Most of the 84,000 children in state care are not orphans but youngsters whose parents visit periodically to retain custody rights, officials say.

To pay for the strain on state coffers, the government in 1998 began allowing adoption agencies to donate funds to the child welfare system in exchange for the right to parcel out the most adoptable children -- especially babies. But in a country where the average monthly wage is $130, the cash proved too tempting. “Adoption was an area with a lot of corruption,” Prime Minister Adrian Nastase said. Before the ban, he said, Romanian orphans had been sold via the Internet for as much as $50,000, and the state had no power to intervene. He didn’t elaborate.

With international aid, the system is slowly improving. Facilities at orphanages are better, as is the ratio of caretakers to children. The number of children in state orphanages has fallen dramatically from the 100,000 in Ceausescu’s time, officials say.

About 43,000 children now live in state institutions, compared with 57,000 last year. An additional 41,000 are living in foster families or with relatives, government statistics show.

The total number of domestic and foreign adoptions fell from 4,254 in 2000 to 2,795 last year; there had been 1,060 through August this year. But up to 3,500 children eligible for adoption abroad have been left in limbo since the ban was imposed.

Some exceptions were made for children whose paperwork was in process, but the ban stunned couples like John and Amanda Murrow of Six Mile, S.C.

They had heard about a little Gypsy girl they’ve named Samantha from a friend working with street children in Romania. The aid worker found neighborhood kids in the village of Bahnea, 200 miles northwest of the capital, playing catch with what he thought was a doll. It turned out to be a 3-month-old girl.

Rescued near death, she is now 15 months old and with a foster family. The Murrows are sending aid.

“I believe in God’s time we will adopt her,” Murrow said. “It feels like she is part of us already. She just hasn’t joined us yet.”

Children like Samantha and Spania also have almost no hope of being adopted in Romania, where prejudice against the Gypsy, or Roma, minority runs deep.

Spania came to the abandoned babies’ ward at the Caraiman Childrens’ Hospital with syphilis, which has abated with treatment. Welfare workers promise she will be moved soon.

Social worker Georgeta Ciobanu is trying to find Spania’s parents to see if they really want to give her up for good. Meanwhile, she visits her whenever she can, cuddling the little girl in her butter-colored blanket. “She likes to be held,” Ciobanu said.

Child-care advocates say the legal delays are devastating for the children. Sister Christy says that by the time a child is 7 years old, much of his or her development has taken place and been stunted by orphanage life.

“The basic thing you don’t get in an institution is love,” she said. “Those children never have a feeling of security and it affects their whole life.”

Take Alexandru Soare. He’s only 9, yet savvy enough to approach any prospective adopter with suspicion. “I would make them show me identification,” Alexandru said. “So they wouldn’t steal me,” he added.

Besides his age, there’s another complication -- he has a brother and sister, and they come as a package, having stuck together ever since their mother dumped them eight years ago and told them that she wanted nothing more to do with them.

Even so, Alexandru, his 14-year-old brother, Mihai, and their sister, Mirela, 16, still hope for a miracle.

“I think there are people with a good heart,” Mirela said. “I wouldn’t mind being adopted into such a family.”

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Associated Press correspondent Alexandru Alexe in Bucharest contributed to this report.