TIME: Almanac 1993/TIME Almanac 1993.iso/time/102191/1021992.000

Text File | 1992-08-28 | 11.0 KB | 226 lines

                                                                                SOCIETY, Page 86

Going Abroad to Find a Baby


The laws of supply and demand have led to a boom in overseas
adoption, but the quest can be lengthy, expensive and sometimes
morally troubling

By MICHAEL S. SERRILL -- Reported by Anne Constable/London,
Ricardo Chavira/Washington, with other bureaus


    For most of their 17-year marriage, Ann and Fred Redman
of Magnolia, Texas, struggled in vain to have children. "We
tried everything from fertility treatments to laser surgery,"
recalls Ann. "Nothing worked." The avenue of adoption seemed
blocked: Fred, 53, was considered too old for fatherhood by U.S.
adoption agencies. Then the Redmans discovered Los Ninos
International Adoption Center, a Houston-based, nonprofit
organization that helps Americans adopt youngsters in Latin
America. Within months the Redmans arrived in La Paz, Bolivia,
where they were introduced to baby twin sisters and their Indian
mother, who was offering the infants for adoption because she
was too poor to take good care of them. A few days before
Thanksgiving last year, the joyous parents flew home with their
new seven-month-old daughters, Jenny and Judy.

    Every day, an average of 20 American couples adopt babies
from overseas. Most of them come from Third World nations where
orphanages are overflowing, abandoned children sleep in the
streets, and poor parents see foreign adoption as one of the few
ways to give their children a decent life. In the U.S., the
number of foreign-born adoptees has ranged from 7,000 to 10,000
each year since 1983. About 13,000 foreign-born children are
adopted annually in Western Europe, Canada and elsewhere.

    But, along with joy and hope, the surge of overseas
parenting has created a backlash. Side by side with legitimate
avenues of adoption, gray and black markets have sprung up where
Third World brokers obtain children for foreign clients under
questionable circumstances. From Manila to San Salvador,
Bucharest to Brasilia, baby-sale scandals have caused Third
World countries to tighten procedures and, in some cases, halt
foreign adoption. Other countries are curtailing foreign
adoptions to protect their image. Prosperous South Korea, which
has sent nearly 120,000 abandoned children overseas since the
Korean War, now considers foreign adoption applications only for
the handicapped and children of mixed race.

    Yet for every country that limits entry to questing
couples, new ones seem to open up. China, where many Canadian
couples have successfully adopted, may be a good prospect.
Bureaucratic hurdles are harder to jump in Colombia and Peru,
but Bolivia and Ecuador seem to be opening up. Postrevolutionary
Romania stopped all foreign adoption in July after some
money-crazed citizens began offering their children to the
highest bidder; Bucharest will allow only registered orphans to
leave starting in January at the earliest. There are children
available in Poland and the Soviet Union, though Moscow for the
moment allows only "special needs" children -- those who are
older or handicapped -- to go abroad.

    The worldwide search for adoptable children is driven by
classic causes: faltering domestic supply and rising demand. The
number of babies available for adoption in the U.S. and other
industrialized countries has declined as birthrates have shrunk
and legal abortion has expanded. In addition, the taboo against
unmarried motherhood -- that mainstay of Victorian novels -- has
virtually disappeared, removing another source of homeless
infants. In the U.S., 65% of the white babies born to single
mothers were given up for adoption in 1966, but 20 years later
that figure was down to 5%. National statistics are not kept,
but some experts place the number of healthy white newborns
available for adoption each year at 25,000. Black babies are
still available, though opposition by black political and
social-work organizations has made it difficult to place the
babies with white families.

    The same tide of aging baby boomers that has generated a
wave of post-30 pregnancies has also produced a larger-than-
usual cohort that delayed the decision too long: an
unprecedented number of infertile couples are in the adoption
marketplace. There are an average of four eager U.S. couples for
each of the 50,000 domestic-born children placed in new homes
each year; some adoption advocates put the ratio as high as 20
to 1. U.S. couples on an adoption-agency waiting list can wait
as long as five years for a white newborn.

    One result is the formation of highly organized
international adoption organizations such as Los Ninos, founded
in 1981; at least 900 parents have used its services. Aspiring
adoptive parents can also tap into a rivulet of newsletters,
mimeographed sheets and phone networks, in which successful
adopters provide tips on procedures in different countries and
spotlight places where babies can be obtained with the least
bureaucratic hassle and expense.

    Guidance is invaluable, since an overseas adoption can
take weeks or years to arrange, depending on the country and
the circumstances. A year seems about average. Would-be parents
must often pass muster with a welter of adoption and government
agencies both at home and abroad. Once approved, they wait
again for the fateful phone call telling them an appropriate
child has been found. Meantime, they scramble to assemble birth
and marriage certificates, medical and financial statements,
personal references, and the crucial "home study," done by a
social worker and attesting that the aspiring parents are fit
for the task. Finally, they may have to travel to the donor
country -- and stay anywhere from two weeks to six months,
facing more interviews and court hearings before they can bring
their child home.

    The cost of all this -- including agency, lawyer, court
and home-study fees; transportation and hotel; medical,
orphanage and foster-care expenses for the child; translation
of documents and government stamps and approvals -- can range
from $5,000 to $20,000 or more.

    The first decision an adopting couple must make is which
country. Many factors are involved, including the bureaucratic
barriers that will stand in their way. But Stork, a British
organization founded by adoptive parents with foreign-born
children, recommends that applicants choose a land for which
they can develop some affection, since it will figure
prominently in their lives as their child grows older.

    Though few adopting parents would admit it, race can be
another important factor. Most couples who decide to seek an
infant overseas have concluded it isn't important -- or possible
-- to find a child who looks just like themselves, but most
experts acknowledge that the rush of bidders in Romania last
year was largely explained by the fact that the children were
Caucasian. Some aspiring parents, seeking to adopt in Latin
America, prefer to go to Chile rather than, say, Peru or
Colombia, because they consider Chilean children more likely to
be light skinned and Caucasian-looking.

    No amount of planning and forethought can prevent the
occasional nightmare. Last June, Greg Davis, 34, an Elk River,
Minn., florist, arrived in New Delhi to adopt a baby girl. He
expected to end his 2 1/2-year quest for a child in a week's
time. But a small Indian newspaper suddenly published a report
declaring that Davis' prospective daughter was being purchased
for organ donations abroad. The charge was outrageous, but local
lawyers filed suit to prevent Davis from taking custody of the
child. After spending two months and $4,500 in legal battles,
Davis returned to Minnesota empty-handed. Said he: "All I wanted
was a second child, and I am being treated like a criminal."
Davis' lawyers are still fighting his case.

    What Davis faced was crude xenophobia. Some activists in
the U.S. and Europe, however, have raised a more sensitive
moral issue. Why should millions of dollars be spent each year
in the search for adoptive children, they ask, when the same
money could be dispensed as foreign aid to help keep Third World
children at home? "We're exploiting poor countries' resources
the same as we have exploited other resources," argues Chris
Hammond, director of a British association of government and
nonprofit adoption agencies. "In most developing countries a
pair of hands is a significant resource. Removing them handicaps
the country."

    Cheri Register, the mother of two adopted Korean
daughters, shares some of these qualms. "Wealth does not entitle
us to the children of the poor," she writes in her book Are
Those Kids Yours? "International adoption is an undeserved
benefit that has fallen to North Americans, West Europeans and
Australians, largely because of the inequitable socioeconomic
circumstances in which we live. In the long run, we ought to be
changing those circumstances."

    The new opposition to cross-border adoption will soon gain
official support. At the Hague Conference on Private
International Law, officials are writing a new convention on
cross-border adoption, scheduled to be signed in 1993 by more
than 50 nations, including the U.S. The draft version would
require that every effort be made to place a child locally
before he or she is offered to a foreign family. It would also
forbid the payment of any compensation to a parent who gives up
a child, and calls on signatories to prevent "the abduction, the
sale of, or traffic in children."

    The parents of children adopted abroad, and the groups
that represent them, point out that much of the nay-saying
sentiment is little more than pious hypocrisy. However much
Third World governments may decry the surge in Western
adoptions, millions of children around the world are abandoned
and homeless -- about 7 million in Brazil alone. Only a tiny
percentage of these children find homes locally, and in some
cases they are doomed to eternal stigma. In Korea, for example,
a Confucian value system places such a premium on male gender
and blood ties that the adoption of a baby girl, or an unrelated
male, is virtually unthinkable.

    "Some people talk of taking a child from his culture,"
says Patricia Maynard, a Canadian mother of three adopted
children, two of them from Korea. "There is no culture or pride
in orphanages, only a brute form of survival." Those who agree
argue that international adoption creates small safety valves
in countries that have more people than they can feed and house,
and even that the practice shrinks the global village and
increases bonds of international community and understanding.

    There is another fundamental bond at work: love. "We don't
give a child to a family; we give a family to a child," says
Mercedes Rosario de Martinez, founder of Colombia's Foundation
for the Adoption of Abandoned Children. "This is not a business;
it's total devotion to the children. Because of that, the world
is a better place."