The Adoption Morass

Publish Date: 8/15/2007 Page: A4
The Adoption Morass

In October 2000, President Bill Clinton signed the Intercountry Adoption Act of 2000, committing the United States to abide by an international agreement called the Hague Convention on Intercountry Adoption. Nations that sign it agree to follow a set of rules that protect the best interests of children and prevent their sale, abduction and exploitation by adoption traffickers.

But nearly seven years later, the U.S. State Department has yet to finish writing the rules and regulations that are essential for its implementation. Some of the 68 countries that already have done so are refusing to permit American parents to adopt their children until the United States completes the work. The State Department’s best estimate for when that will be is early 2008, some seven and half years after the work was begun.

“It’s incredibly important but also incredibly complex,” said Steve Royster, a spokesman for the State Department’s Bureau of Consular Affairs. “It’s worth taking the time to protect the welfare of the children.”

By way of comparison, in May 1961, President John F. Kennedy committed the nation to landing a man on the moon by the end of the decade. Eight years and two months later, Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin were there. If it took 98 months to put a man on the moon, also an “incredibly complex” operation, why should it take State Department rule-makers almost that long to write some regulations? To be sure, the process is complex. The Hague Convention makes the State Department, in effect, the licensing agency for every organization in America that wants to help parents adopt foreign children. That has meant an agency-by-agency application and approval process, meetings, comment periods and revisions.

The national standards were long overdue; most agencies are reputable, but some parents have been fleeced by fly-by-night operations that took their money and failed to help them navigate the hurdles involved in foreign adoption.

That said, there has not been much pressure on State to work faster. More than 70 percent of the 20,679 foreign children adopted by U.S. parents in 2006, the last year for which figures are available, came from just three countries: Russia, Guatemala and China. All of them continue to permit adoptions, albeit at a slower pace, despite the U.S. delay in implementing the Hague Convention rules.

China has adopted more restrictive rules for prospective parents, insisting that they not be overweight, too-recently divorced or too old. Russia has slowed foreign adoptions considerably because of internal political criticism. The nation has a negative population growth rate, and national pride bristles that thousands of its children are being sent to other countries, chiefly the United States. Russia now insists on doing its own certification of U.S. adoption agencies and has approved only 12 of 76 applications.

Guatemala recently adopted the Hague Conventions despite opposition from the nation’s thriving industry of baby brokers. Our State Department had threatened to prevent U.S. citizens from bringing home Guatemalan babies because of horror stories about parents there selling children to brokers, or kidnappers abducting children on demand.

All of this has meant longer waits for prospective parents in the United States, some of whom then look to other countries for their children, only to be told that because we haven’t fully implemented the necessary rules, they’re out of luck.

The Hague Conventions actually were signed by international representatives in 1993. They took seven years to get through Congress before President Clinton signed them in 2000. A child born and needing a family in that year would be seven now. Even on Eastern Bureaucratic Time, that’s a long time to wait. Too long.

— The St. Louis Post-Dispatch/
Copley News Service