Adoption heartbreak - Parenting

Saturday January 10 2009
Foreign babies have brought joy to many families, including Brad and Angelina, but new regulations are set to close doors for Irish couples.
Despite the credit crunch, Irish couples desperate to have children of their own are still queuing up and spending tens of thousands of euros to adopt babies from abroad.
New figures published by the Adoption Authority this week show a dramatic rise in the number of people adopting babies from countries such as Russia and Vietnam, where adoption laws are loose and international treaties on child protection are not binding.
In 2007, 130 babies, the majority of them girls, were adopted from Vietnam by Irish couples compared to 68 the previous year. It costs a minimum of $11,000 to arrange an adoption from that country.
The number of children coming from Russia also increased, from 143 in 2006 to 160 the following year.
However, new adoption legislation to be published shortly could greatly limit the choices of aspiring adoptive parents. The new bill will give legal force to the Hague Convention, a multilateral agreement designed to protect children, birth parents and adoptive parents from dubious adoption practices.
From that time, adoptions will only be authorised from countries that are signatories to the convention or which have a bilateral adoption agreement with Ireland.
The overwhelming majority of children adopted to Ireland from abroad come from Russia or Vietnam, neither of which is a party to the Hague Convention. A bilateral adoption agreement exists between Ireland and Vietnam but no such so pact is in place with Russia, which will be closed off for adoptions once the Convention comes into force.
This is expected to bring about a further increase in adoptions from Vietnam, despite deepening international concerns about the adoption process in that country.
In recent months, the US has ended its adoption pact with Vietnam following reports that children were being kidnapped from their parents and sold to families in the West, including Ireland.
Almost 2,000 American couples who had applied to adopt children from the south-east Asian state have had their applications cancelled and have been told to look elsewhere. The decision follows a disturbing investigation by the US embassy in Hanoi which claimed that children had allegedly been sold and families pressured to give up their babies.
The report was commissioned after US officials noticed a surge in the number of "abandoned" babies offered for adoption. It found that unlicensed, unregulated facilities were operating across the country providing free room and board to pregnant women in return for a commitment to relinquish their children upon birth.
The report, which was dismissed by Vietnamese authorities as groundless, said that babies had been sent to orphanages by grandparents without the consent of their parents and that hospitals had passed newborns onto adoption agencies when their parents proved unable to pay medical bills. Fraudulent documents would then record that the baby was "deserted".
The report said that young Vietnamese mothers "more commonly" face pressure from health officials to place their babies in orphanages in exchange for a payment of around €200. They are told they can visit the child regularly and that it will be returned to them after a few years.
Two years ago, it was revealed that the sole facilitator for Vietnamese adoptions into Ireland was a convicted fraudster. A former lawyer described as a one-stop-shop for Vietnamese babies, My Linh Soland, who made more than €1 million finding babies for Irish people, had served three years in a US prison for forgery, conspiracy and intimidation of witnesses.
The Irish Adoption Board failed to pick up on her criminal past and identified her as "the person best suited for the role".
The 150 Vietnamese babies who ended up in Ireland as a result of her activities were not returned to their home country, following a decision by Finance Minister Brian Lenihan, who was Minister for Children at the time.
However, many of their histories remain unclear and it is still not known if their parents agreed to their adoption or if they know the whereabouts of their children today.
When contacted by the Irish Independent this week, a spokeswoman for the Viet-Irish support group, which helps families who have adopted children from Vietnam, said the group has a ban on media interviews.
However, concerns have been raised by representatives of adopted people who believe adoptions from Vietnam should be stopped immediately.
"We feel strongly that there may well be children coming into Ireland who have not been orphaned but have been taken from their parents without their consent," says Brian Cantwell of the Cork-based Know My Own organisation, a support group for adopted people and their families.
"Even if it is just one child that has been removed from their country of origin inappropriately, or one Vietnamese mother who has been left sitting in a jungle wondering where her baby is, that is unacceptable for us. There is no greater sadness than the loss of one's child.
"We are not against foreign adoptions per se and we understand how desperate many childless couples are, but these adoptions should not be taking place from countries that have not ratified the Hague Convention. There are no guarantees or sufficient safety nets in place in countries like Vietnam to ensure that there children have actually been abandoned."
Organisations like Know My Own are frequently contacted by adopted people searching for their roots in Ireland but believe it is only a matter of time before foreign children start knocking on their doors.
"I am convinced the day will come, as it usually does, when we have Vietnamese children turning up at meetings, asking questions about where they came from. The current group growing up in Ireland are still too young, but it is only a matter of time before they become curious. The vast majority of adopted people want to know about their roots. It is hard enough trying to do traces for people who have been in Irish orphanages but we would not know where to start looking in a country like Vietnam and that would leave those children with so many unanswered questions."
Compared to countries such as China which has clamped down on foreign adoptions, the process in Vietnam can take as little as one month once background checks are carried out. In 2007, Angelina Jolie and Brad Pitt adopted a child from Vietnam but there is no suggestion of impropriety in their case.
One factor which will also limit Irish couples' chances of adopting from Vietnam is a planned crackdown by the government there to stop couples having more than two children.
In a country of 86 million, two-thirds of whom are under 35, there are fears of a population explosion putting strain on health and education services.
Last year, a 10pc spike in the birth rate to couples who already have two children caused alarm and the government proposed a reintroduction of a two-child policy, which was first applied in the 1960s but scrapped in 2003.
In the last five years, more than 700 Russian children have been adopted by Irish people, thanks to straightforward adoption procedures which mean children can be adopted within months.
Further adoptions from Russia will be greatly hampered by the introduction of new legislation but also an ongoing crackdown by authorities there on foreign adoptions.
The recent case of a toddler who died of heatstroke in Washington DC after his father left him in a parked vehicle for nine hours has made headlines in Moscow, from where the child was adopted by American parents.
In December, the boy's father was acquitted of involuntary manslaughter in the US on the grounds that he had been "plainly negligent" but had "not shown callous disregard for human life", the legal standard for such a conviction.
The verdict led for calls in the Russian Parliament to restrict foreign adoptions and revived public outrage provoked in 2005 when two Russian-born children died after severe abuse at the hands of adoptive parents in Maryland and North Carolina.
Domestic adoptions have grown in Russia in recent years as the stigma that once existed towards orphaned children is eroded. The government also provides payments to relatives who care for abandoned youngsters, thousands of whom would have otherwise ended up in orphanages.
For Irish couples who cannot imagine life without children of their own, the choices will become more and more limited in the years to come as restrictions tighten. Challenges await the thousands more who have found the baby of their dreams in a foreign country, as their children face into adulthood and start to wonder who their birth parents were and why they felt compelled to give them away.
- Gemma O'Doherty