By ELIZABETH OLSON

WASHINGTON — Eyes like black pearls, the softest skin and little tufts of hair made it totally easy to fall in love at first sight. And that is what Julie Carroll — and Jewel McRoberts and Tommi-Lynn Sawyer — did when they saw the three tiny girls at a Vietnamese orphanage. They adopted the babies after months of waiting and then had to leave them behind because they could not obtain entry visas to bring them back to the United States.

That was almost four months ago, and the families last week began a public campaign to press the State Department to let them bring Madelyn Grace, Eden and Anabelle to the United States. Enlisting the help of the senators from California, where two of the families live, the adoptive parents argue that they have been unfairly caught in diplomatic wrangling between the American and Vietnamese governments over concerns about corruption in the adoption process that led to the suspension of Vietnamese adoptions from 2003 to 2005.

“What has happened to us is completely unconscionable,” said Mrs. Carroll, who, along with her husband, Steve, and her three other children, traveled from their Camarillo, Calif., home to campaign for a 10-month-old sister, now in foster care in Vietnam.

“We don’t have a problem with them investigating the adoption,” she said, “but we have proved there is not a shred of corruption involved in it.”

The State Department, which issued a warning on adoptions in Vietnam last month, maintains that the lack of controls on “baby finders” and unregulated payments — the average adoption cost is about $25,000 per family — are fostering baby buying. Six years ago, similar accusations led Vietnam to tighten controls on foreign adoption. At the end of 2005, Vietnam and the United States signed an adoption agreement, and nearly 1,100 Vietnamese children have been adopted by Americans since.

However, in advance of talks on renewal of the accord, which expires Sept. 1, families note that there has been a sudden increase in the federal government’s investigations of adoptions in Vietnam, preventing some babies from returning home with their adoptive parents.

Twenty-one entry visas for children have been rejected in the last two years, according to the State Department. More than half the denials have come since last October, prompting complaints that the department is singling out individual cases to embarrass the Vietnamese government into changing its adoption process.

“Everything we know now says the State Department is, frankly, using these babies as a tool in a battle that has nothing to do with these families or the children themselves,” Senator Barbara Boxer, Democrat of California, told the three families who met in her office last week.

The State Department says it is making sure babies are legitimately available for adoption.

“It would be unforgivable for us to look at a case and think something is wrong, then to let it go,” said Michele T. Bond, the State Department’s deputy assistant secretary for overseas services. Ms. Bond said Vietnam had never posted a schedule of adoption fees, as required in the bilateral agreement, and said documentation on how some babies came to be orphaned “is unreliable.”

The State Department warning said that embassy personnel had seen “an increase in the number of irregularities appearing in orphan petitions and visa applications,” and “significant increases in the number of abandoned children” in two provinces, including Thai Nguyen, where the three contested babies were adopted.

The Vietnamese Embassy in Washington did not return a call for comment.

Adoption agencies say they are not steering people away from Vietnamese adoptions, but some, like Children’s Home Society and Family Services of St. Paul, are not accepting new applications for Vietnam so they can handle their existing clients.

“We are encouraging people to list a second country they prefer,” said Kristine Huson, the agency’s spokeswoman, “because we don’t know what delays there might be if the agreement isn’t renewed in Vietnam.”

Under a program begun by the State Department in November, adoption agencies are telling clients to acquire their babies’ visa clearance before they arrange travel to Vietnam and complete the adoption formalities. The Orphans First program, the department said, alerts parents to problems earlier in the process. In the past, parents who legally adopted a child in Vietnam but then could not obtain an entry visa to the United States were faced with either staying indefinitely in Vietnam to resolve the problem or leaving the child there.

That is what the McRoberts family, of Seaside, Calif., faced. They adopted two little girls last September, under the previous system in which immigrant visas were the last step. Jordan, now 8 months old, received her entry visa to the United States, but Eden, also 8 months, was denied her visa on the grounds that there were discrepancies in her file.

“We were told that this denial is never reversed, and to take Eden back to the orphanage,” Mrs. McRoberts said. “It was absolutely devastating to leave her,” she said. “But I had to get Jordan back home. And I have two boys, and I hadn’t seen them in four weeks.”

She and her husband, Claude, a naval officer, paid to leave Eden in foster care instead and paid Vietnamese investigators to ascertain that she had been truly abandoned at a hospital — which, including travel, housing and other costs, could add as much as $20,000 to their costs.

The Carrolls had adopted two baby girls from the same orphanage. They were able to travel with Lillian Rose, 8 months, but Madelyn Grace, 10 months, had to be left behind in foster care.

“We’re missing out on four months of her life, all those milestones in her development,” the Carrolls told Ms. Boxer as their sons, Jeremy, 6, and Grayson, 5, played outside her office.

The McRobertses and Carrolls hired a Vietnamese law firm to investigate, as did Ms. Sawyer, a single mother from Millville, N.J. And in each case, they said, investigators found the children were legally eligible for adoption. Last month, the federal immigration agency, which is part of the Department of Homeland Security, approved Madelyn Grace for a visa, but the couple said that the State Department had yet to act on that and that they had received no explanation why — so they asked Ms. Boxer and Senator Dianne Feinstein, Democrat of California, to help.

Ms. Boxer said she planned to lobby the State Department to approve the visas. Her aide, Sean Moore, said he had noticed the spike in visa denials since October. Thirteen of the 21 denials occurred after Oct. 1, he said. All but seven of those have been resolved.

Among those seven families are Tom and Wendy Mills of Los Angeles, who are finding their lives upended in their effort to keep their baby. Mr. Mills, a character actor and freelance writer, stayed in Hanoi to care for Julie, 8 months old, after her visa was denied, while his wife travels back and forth keeping her accounting practice alive.

It has been “an emotional strain and a financial struggle,” Mr. Mills wrote by e-mail. “I came to Vietnam expecting to stay here for two, maybe three weeks, and now it’s been five months.”

The State Department does not comment on individual cases, but Ms. Bond said the current agreement with Vietnam needed to be reshaped to curb exploitation with, among other things, a more transparent fee structure, and to meet international standards set out in the Hague Convention, an adoptions pact. On April 1, the United States’ membership in the pact begins. Vietnam has not signed the Hague agreement.

“The goal of international adoption is to find a home for each orphaned child,” Ms. Bond said, “not to ‘produce’ a child for a family. It’s not a market.”

copyright NYTIMES, originally appeared at http://www.nytimes.com/2008/02/11/us/11adopt.html?_r=1&ref=todayspaper&oref=slogin

December 21, 2007

Orphanages Stunt Mental Growth, a Study Finds

By BENEDICT CAREY

Psychologists have long believed that growing up in an institution like an orphanage stunts children’s mental development but have never had direct evidence to back it up.

Now they do, from an extraordinary years-long experiment in Romania that compared the effects of foster care with those of institutional child-rearing.

The study, being published on Friday in the journal Science, found that toddlers placed in foster families developed significantly higher I.Q.’s by age 4, on average, than peers who spent those years in an orphanage.

The difference was large — eight points — and the study found that the earlier children joined a foster family, the better they did. Children who moved from institutional care to families after age 2 made few gains on average, though the experience varied from child to child. Both groups, however, had significantly lower I.Q.’s than a comparison group of children raised by their biological families.

Some developmental psychologists had sharply criticized the study and its sponsor, the MacArthur Foundation, for researching a question whose answer seemed obvious. But previous attempts to compare institutional and foster care suffered from serious flaws, mainly because no one knew whether children who landed in orphanages were different in unknown ways from those in foster care. Experts said the new study should put to rest any doubts about the harmful effects of institutionalization — and might help speed up adoptions from countries that still allow them.

“Most of us take it as almost intuitive that being in a family is better for humans than being in an orphanage,” said Seth Pollak, a psychologist at the University of Wisconsin, who was not involved in the research. “But other governments don’t like to be told how to handle policy issues based on intuition.

“What makes this study important,” he went on, “is that it gives objective data to say that if you’re going to allow international adoptions, then it’s a good idea to speed things up and get kids into families quickly.”

In recent years many countries, including Romania, have banned or sharply restricted American families from adopting local children. In other countries, adoption procedures can drag on for many months. In 2006, the latest year for which numbers are available, Americans adopted 20,679 children from abroad, more than half of them from China, Guatemala and Russia.

The authors of the new paper, led by Dr. Charles H. Zeanah Jr. of Tulane and Charles A. Nelson III of Harvard and Children’s Hospital in Boston, approached Romanian officials in the late 1990s about conducting the study. The country had been working to improve conditions at its orphanages, which became infamous in the early 1990s as Dickensian warehouses for abandoned children.

After gaining clearance from the government, the researchers began to track 136 children who had been abandoned at birth. They administered developmental tests to the children, and then randomly assigned them to continue at one of Bucharest’s six large orphanages, or join an adoptive family. The foster families were carefully screened and provided “very high-quality care,” Dr. Nelson said.

On I.Q. tests taken at 54 months, the foster children scored an average of 81, compared to 73 among the children who continued in an institution. The children who moved into foster care at the youngest ages tended to show the most improvement, the researchers found.

The comparison group of youngsters who grew up in their biological families had an average I.Q. of 109 at the same age, found the researchers, who announced their preliminary findings as soon in Romania as they were known.

“Institutions and environments vary enormously across the world and within countries,” Dr. Nelson said, “but I think these findings generalize to many situations, from kids in institutions to those in abusive households and even bad foster care arrangements.”

In setting up the study, the researchers directly addressed the ethical issue of assigning children to institutional care, which was suspected to be harmful. “If a government is to consider alternatives to institutional care for abandoned children, it must know how the alternative compares to the standard care it provides. In Romania, this meant comparing the standard of care to anew and alternative form of care,” they wrote.

Any number of factors common to institutions could work to delay or blunt intellectual development, experts say: the regimentation, the indifference to individual differences in children’s habits and needs; and most of all, the limited access to caregivers, who in some institutions can be responsible for more than 20 children at a time.

“The evidence seems to say,” said Dr. Pollak, of Wisconsin, “that for humans, we need a lot of responsive care giving, an adult who recognizes our distinct cry, knows when we’re hungry or in pain, and gives us the opportunity to crawl around and handle different things, safely, when we’re ready.”

By
Sumeia Williams

My dad had been serving his tour of duty in Vietnam when he’d decided to adopt. He and my mother had already had two boys and wanted a girl. In 1970, toward the last six months of his tour, he’d come across me in an orphanage and taken me home.

At least, that’s what I’d been told as a child.

In the early days of my childhood, I believed myself to be a true orphan with no living genetic parents. The thought that I’d had another mother and father before my adoption didn’t even occur to me until second or third grade. With the exception of my dad, no one spoke of my adoption at length. Perhaps it was my family’s way of telling me that it didn’t matter. They loved me regardless of my unfortunate circumstances.

Further still, my past was too closely linked to a war that had cost thousands of American and Vietnamese lives. For my dad, this was yet another reason not to talk too much about our shared past in Vietnam. War created the circumstances of my adoption, chaos an excuse for hiding the truth and time covered the trail. It boiled down to, “Life happens. Here’s a shovel. Now dig.” It still baffles me that some adoptees must exert so much effort just for the hope of gaining access to a history that rightfully belongs to them. The obvious question is, “Why?”

Perhaps the fact that I wore the face of “the other side” doubled the importance of locking away certain memories forever. Maybe he feared conflicting feelings that might arise in my own growing consciousness as I learned about the conflict between my birth country and my adopted one.

“Many of us from that era still have memories we choose not to speak of or think about,” he once wrote in a letter to me, “It is just a self-protective mechanism of our human nature to preserve our dignity and perhaps our very own sanity.”

Unfortunately, in his attempts to bury parts of his past, he also secreted away vital keys to mine — and with it my personal history and identity. Not content to leave the story open ended, he invented a scenario that might offer us both some closure.
My parents had divorced shortly after my adoption. My mother had been my primary caregiver for most of my childhood. During the early part of my adolescence, I went to live with my dad. Shortly after my arrival, he decided it was time to tell me “the truth” of my adoption.

I was 14 when he called me into the room: “Honey, come here. I have something to tell you.”

He then began to tell the story of how he’d fallen in love with my Vietnamese mother while he was serving in Vietnam. How I’d been the result of that love and how he’d brought me back under the guise of adoption. My dad was married to my adoptive mother at the time, so the need for the ruse was obvious, wasn’t it? As for my mother, he told me, she’d been killed by a group of Viet Cong after which he’d taken me to Hoi Duc Anh orphanage in order to begin the adoption process.

My feelings at that sudden disclosure almost 14 years ago escape me — but I do know it wasn’t like what you see in the movies. There were no tearful, joyous declarations of, “Daddy!” No feelings of resolution. No closure.

I can’t remember how I felt — only my reaction endures in my memory. I smiled, tried to comfort him with a hug and left the room. We didn’t really speak of it again aside from his occasional remarks of how I walked or looked like my mother. How could I convey my feelings of betrayal at having been lied to? I didn’t have the tools to process how learning I was Amerasian threw my identity into chaos. Deeper still, how could I explain that with his sudden confession, he’d just killed all hopes of ever finding my mother? As an orphan, there had remained a small glint of hope. Now that was gone.

In silence, I spent the next several years trying to come to terms with what he’d told me. My mechanism of choice was denial. I went on with my life trying to not to think of it too much. It worked better on some days than others but his words and their affects on me were always there. They manifested themselves in every aspect of my life, directed my choices in ways I’m still trying to understand.

I finished high school, got married and had children of my own just like everyone else, but I could never rid myself of the sense that my insides had been ripped from beneath my skin. And then there were the unanswered questions. What was my mother’s name? Why did he have no photos of her? What about other family members still in Vietnam?

By the time I reached my mid-thirties, I couldn’t stand it. I had to know. After over a decade of silence, I began to ask those questions out loud. And once again, my dad’s response threw me into chaos.

The words of Bryan Thao Worra, a Laotian adoptee and poet, reverberate through my mind as I make yet another necessary edit to my story: “For transcultural adoptees, our lives are written in pencil. Everything you think you know about yourself can change in an instant.”

And for me it did. It seems that I am not my dad’s genetic daughter after all. He didn’t say it directly, but it was obvious: “You were already in the orphanage when I got there.” Even this small detail took months of prodding and questioning. Once it was out, he offered up a tangible clue to my past. It was a 37-year-old address in Saigon that he said belonged to my foster mother, Ta Kim Cuc.

So here is my dad’s most recent version of my beginnings. I have no way of knowing if it is true: Cuc somehow learned of my dad’s wishes and took him straight to my crib in the orphanage. After that, I was taken to her house where I stayed for the next six months. She accompanied us to the airport before we left Vietnam and gave my father her address. “Give this to Le Thi,” she instructed, “so that I can find out what became of her.”

Does or did this woman really exist? If so, how long did she wait hoping for the letter that never came? Is it possible that she’s waiting, still holding perhaps the only clue to the identity of my mother? Why did my dad never write to her? Why did he wait until I’d nearly driven myself crazy with the longing to know my history before he’d given me her address?

“I was waiting until you understood more about life. I had my reasons,” was the only explanation he offered.

All I heard was, “I am not accountable.”

I couldn’t disagree more. Adoption isn’t just about destiny, circumstance and self-congratulation for “saving” a child. It’s also about the consequences of conscious decisions made for adoptees supposedly “in our best interest.” Regardless of whether it’s for better or worse, adoption is the power to change a life and as the saying goes, “With great power, comes great responsibility.” My history had been hidden and altered, affecting my life in ways I’m only beginning to understand. Furthermore, my father’s actions may have possibly prevented me from ever finding out the truth.

What I think my dad failed to realize is that regardless of his own feelings, the truth of my adoption was rightfully mine to know. He was simply holding it in trust and was responsible for giving me unfiltered access to it.

Unlike in decades past, the act of hiding an adoptee’s heritage is not beyond question or criticism. We should be past the days when adoptees are forced to shoulder the burden of maintaining the illusion that none of it matters. In my own situation, though, the instinct to comfort and reassure is too ingrained. Despite my feeling of outrage and betrayal, I cannot break my conditioning.

“It’s alright, Dad,” I said. I was glad we were talking over the phone, that he couldn’t see the look on my face. “I understand.”

I didn’t understand. But what good would it have done to say so? I’m 37 years old with four kids of my own. How much more was I suppose to understand “about life” before he deemed me ready to hear the truth? The fact is he withheld and even altered vital pieces of my puzzle years after my initial inquiries. Knowing that forces me to question the nature of his other “reasons.”

Without further explanation, I am again left to speculate but to what end? My dad and I both know it wouldn’t do anything good for me to push the matter. Even if I tried to hold him accountable for withholding information that was rightfully mine, we both know he would throw up the old reliable defense.
“Everything I did was in your best interest.” How do you argue with that?

It’s not that I doubt my dad’s sincerity. I have little doubt that he believed his decisions were based in large part on what he thought was best for me. Unfortunately, we disagree. Sympathy or even empathy does not equal acceptance or approval. In fact, over the years, I have become highly critical of his actions. By way of omission, deception and half-truth, he altered my personal history and my identity. His actions not only affected me, but all those around me, including my children and even the life of an obscure, almost forgotten woman by the name of Ta Kim Cuc — that is, if she exists. If I bring thoughts of my Vietnamese mother into the picture, the pain and anger become unbearable.

My dad would probably argue that he simply told my story as a continuation of his. True, my story is part of his own, but in telling it through his own perceptions and not including mine, he took away my ownership and for that I need to hold him accountable.

I have tried to write a letter Cuc …

“To whom it may concern…”

But how do you write a letter to a person who may no longer be alive and send it to an address that may no longer exist? To whom it may concern? My father’s choices concerned us all. My whole family has had to live with the consequences, yet I am the one left with the job of rectifying his wrongs. It is the thought foremost in my mind as I scramble to find the one woman who could unravel decades of secrecy. I can’t even begin to think of how I might react if it’s discovered she’s already passed from this life, taking it all with her.

Of course, I will always love my dad as any dutiful daughter does, but I will always feel betrayed. Any feelings of ingratitude, disloyalty and guilt about my anger takes a back seat to a sense of urgency as I run full steam backwards into the past.

States urged to open adoption records

• Story Highlights
• Adoption group urges states to open birth records to adoptees
• Eight states allow adoptees to see records
• ACLU and anti-abortion groups oppose opening records

NEW YORK (AP) – It is among the most divisive questions in the realm of adoption: Should adult adoptees have access to their birth records, and thus be able to learn the identity of their birth parents?

In a comprehensive report being released Monday, a leading U.S. adoption institute says the answer is “Yes” and urges the rest of America to follow the path of the eight states that allow such access to all adults who were adopted.

“States’ experiences in providing this information make clear that there are minimal, if any, negative repercussions,” said the Evan B. Donaldson Adoption Institute. “Outcomes appear to have been overwhelmingly positive for adult adopted persons and birthparents alike.”

Opponents of open access argue that unsealing birth records violates the privacy that birthmothers expected when they opted to give up their babies. They raise the specter of birthparents forced into unwanted relationships with grown children who have tracked them down.

But the Donaldson Institute says most birthparents, rather than being fearful and ashamed, welcome contact with the children they bore. Its report says the states with open records have found that most birthparents and adoptees handle any contact with maturity and respect.

Kansas and Alaska never barred adoptees from seeing their birth certificates. Since 1996, six other states — Alabama, Delaware, Maine, New Hampshire, Oregon and Tennessee — have decided to allow access to all adult adoptees.

However, the progression has been slow, and open-records legislation has been rebuffed in many states by a determined and diverse opposition.

Opponents in Connecticut, where bills have failed in each of the past two years, included the state chapter of the American Civil Liberties Union. It depicted itself as a voice for birthmothers who opposed the measure but were reluctant to speak out publicly.

In New Jersey, where a long-running campaign to pass an open-records bill was derailed again this year, the opposition includes New Jersey Right to Life and the New Jersey Catholic Conference. They argue that eliminating the prospect of confidentiality might prompt a pregnant single woman to choose abortion rather than adoption.

Marlene Lao-Collins of the Catholic Conference said she knew of no data supporting the concerns about abortions, “but even if it just happened once, that would be one too many.”

Nationwide, one of the major foes of open records is the National Council for Adoption, which represents many religiously affiliated adoption agencies. Its president, Thomas Atwood, says any reconnection between an adopted adult and a birthparent should be by mutual consent — which is the policy in most states.

“I empathize with anybody who feels the need to know their biological parents’ identity,” Atwood said. “But I don’t think the law should enable them to force themselves on someone who has personal reasons for wanting confidentiality.”

The Donaldson report says evidence from the states with open records rebuts every argument against the concept. Notably, it says there is no proof that abortions rise, that adoptions decline, or that birthparents are harassed following a switch to open records.

“There has been no evidence that the lives of birthmothers have been damaged as a result,” the report says. “In the states that have amended their laws … few birthmothers have expressed the desire to keep records sealed or the wish not to be contacted.”

The most recent state to opt for open records is Maine; a law signed in June will allow adult adoptees to access their birth certificates starting in 2009.

One of the bill’s main sponsors was state Sen. Paula Benoit, an adoptee who personally lobbied all her colleagues. While working on the bill, she uncovered her own biological background and learned, to her amazement, that two Democratic lawmakers she was working with were her nephews.

“There are so many adoptees who want to know who they are,” she said. “Can you imagine being denied your identity?” Among the many birthmothers grateful to have been found by children they relinquished is Eileen McQuade of Delray Beach, Florida, who is president of the American Adoption Congress and a fervent advocate of open records.

“Secrecy was the way it was done at the time — it was not a choice or a preference on the part of the mothers,” McQuade said of the 1960s, when she placed a daughter for adoption. “We treat adoptees as if they’re forever children — it’s absurd.”

The Donaldson report depicts adopted people as the only class of Americans not permitted to routinely obtain their birth certificates.

Giving them full access “is a matter of legal equality, ethical practice and, on a human level, basic fairness,” the report said. “It is an essential step toward placing adoptive families, families of origin, everyone connected to them and, indeed, adoption itself on a level playing field within society, without the stigma, shame and inequitable treatment they have experienced in the past.”

“The mythology around adoption is based on the notion that you should be protecting someone from something,” said the institute’s executive director, Adam Pertman.

“But that’s not the reality,” he said. “Adoptees are not behaving poorly, they’re behaving very respectfully, and birthparents do not appear to be a frightened class that wants to hide.”

Copyright 2007 The Associated Press. All rights reserved.This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed.

By
Jeff Gammage

At about 10 a.m. on June 19, 2003, in the western Chinese city of Wuwei, a man named Ma Guoxing was walking across town, intent on a pending business appointment.

But as he neared the Wei’an Health Center, he noticed a crowd of people at the front gate, and he interrupted his journey to go and see what had so captivated their interest.

On the ground was a newborn baby, a girl, crying loudly.

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By
Katy Robinson

Returning to Korea for the first time since my adoption was a defining moment in my life. It took 20 years to muster the courage to confront the most basic of questions: Who am I? Where did I come from?

These were questions that I did not allow myself to ask while growing up in Salt Lake City, Utah. To broach these topics, it appeared to me, was to point out that I was different from everyone else in my family. I was afraid to seem ungrateful for the amazing new life I had been given, or to hurt my adoptive mother’s feelings by mentioning the mother who gave me birth. It wasn’t as if I was forbidden to talk about my Korean family; it just seemed disloyal.
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Following the visit, the two families began e-mailing or talking every couple of months with the help of a cellphone that Marcy bought Alma and a network of friends and professionals to translate.

Not all relationships go so smoothly, though, and several searchers told me they are frustrated by adoptive parents who vanish after the initial contact. In some cases the parents, or their children, are uneasy with the facts a search uncovers — adoption corruption or alcoholism or a birth mother who abused her child. But other parents simply get what they need and don’t want more. “We get phone calls from birth mothers begging for some more photos or news of the child, but the adoptive parents do not respond,” says one searcher in Russia.

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Looking for Their Children’s Birth Mothers

By MAGGIE JONES

A few months ago, in an office near Guatemala City, a woman known as a searcher spread out a large map across her coffee table. The map was dotted with about 250 tiny, hand-drawn circles, each one representing a place where the searcher had tracked down a birth mother who had placed a child for adoption. Sometimes she found a birth mother after knocking on a few doors in Guatemala City. In other cases, she traveled for three or four days to remote indigenous areas in Guatemala or farther afield to Nicaragua, Honduras or El Salvador.

I heard about the searcher, who because of the sensitivity of her work asked me to identify her by the first initial of her name, S., more than a year ago on an adoption listserve. That is when I began scouting to find my own daughter’s birth mother. One reason my husband and I chose to adopt from Guatemala more than three years ago was that we knew families who had met their children’s birth mothers at the adoption finalization and had a continuing exchange of photos and letters and, in some cases, made occasional visits to them in Guatemala.

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