Going Abroad to Find a Baby

By Michael S. Serrill

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."

With reporting by Anne Constable/London, Ricardo Chavira/Washington, with other bureaus