[Congressional Record Volume 151, Number 160 (Wednesday, December 14, 2005)]
[Extensions of Remarks]
[Pages E2538-E2540]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]




                ROMANIA'S BAN ON INTERCOUNTRY ADOPTIONS

                                 ______
                                 

                       HON. CHRISTOPHER H. SMITH

                             of new jersey

                    in the house of representatives

                      Wednesday, December 14, 2005

  Mr. SMITH of New Jersey. Mr. Speaker, last month I introduced a 
resolution, H. Res. 578, expressing disappointment that the Government 
of Romania has instituted a virtual ban on intercountry adoptions that 
has very serious implications for the welfare and well-being of 
orphaned or abandoned children in Romania. As Co-Chairman of the 
Commission on Security and Cooperation in Europe (the Helsinki 
Commission), I am pleased to be joined as original cosponsors by the 
Commission's Ranking House Member, Representative Cardin, fellow 
Commissioners Representative Pitts and Pence as well as Chairman of the 
International Relations Subcommittee on the Western Hemisphere 
Representative Burton, and Representative Northup, Costello, Jo Ann 
Davis, Tiahrt, Bradley and Frank.
  Mr. Speaker, the children of Romania, and all children, deserve to be 
raised in permanent families. Timely adoption of H. Res. 578 will put 
the Congress on record:
  Supporting the desire of the Government of Romania to improve the 
standard of care and well-being of children in Romania;
  Urging the Government of Romania to complete the processing of the 
intercountry adoption cases which were pending when Law 273/2004 was 
enacted;
  Urging the Government of Romania to amend its child welfare and 
adoption laws to decrease barriers to adoption, both domestically and 
intercountry, including by allowing intercountry adoption by persons 
other than biological grandparents;
  Urging the Secretary of State and the Administrator of the United 
States Agency for International Development to work collaboratively 
with the Government of Romania to achieve these ends; and
  Requesting that the European Union and its member States not impede 
the Government of Romania's efforts to place orphaned or abandoned 
children in permanent homes in a manner that is consistent with 
Romania's obligations under the Hague Convention on Protection of 
Children and Co-operation in Respect of Intercountry Adoption.
  In 1989, the world watched in horror as images emerged from Romania 
of more than 100,000 underfed, neglected children living in hundreds of 
squalid and inhumane institutions throughout that country. Six weeks 
after the end of the dictatorial regime of Nicolae Ceausescu, I visited 
Romania and witnessed the misery and suffering of these 
institutionalized children. They were the smallest victims of 
Ceausescu's policies which undermined the family and fostered the 
belief that children were often better cared for in an institution than 
by their families.
  Americans responded to this humanitarian nightmare with an outpouring 
of compassion. For years now, Americans have volunteered their labor 
and donated money and goods to help Romania improve conditions in these 
institutions. Many families in the United States also opened their 
hearts to Romania's children through adoption. Between 1990 and 2004, 
more than 8,000 children found permanent

[[Page E2539]]

families in the U.S.; thousands of others joined families in Western 
Europe.
  The legacies of Ceausescu's rule continue to haunt Romania and, when 
coupled with widespread poverty, have led to the continued abandonment 
of Romania's children. According to a March 2005 report by UNICEF, 
``child abandonment in 2003 and 2004 [in Romania] was no different from 
that occurring 10, 20, or 30 years ago.'' UNICEF reports that more than 
9,000 children a year are abandoned in Romania's maternity wards or 
pediatric hospitals. According to the European Union, 37,000 children 
remain in institutions; nearly 49,000 more live in nonpermanent 
settings in ``foster care'' or with extended families. An unknown 
number of children live on the streets.
  During Romania's first decade of post-communist transition, the 
corruption which plagued Romania's economy and governance also seeped 
into the adoption system. There is no question that corruption needed 
to be rooted out. The U.S. Government and the U.S. Helsinki Commission 
have been steadfast in our support of Romania's efforts to combat 
corruption and to promote the rule of law and good governance.
  I strongly disagree, however, with supporters of the current ban on 
intercountry adoption who allege that it was a necessary anti-
corruption measure. There are many indications that corruption has been 
used as a hook to advance an ulterior agenda in opposition to 
intercountry adoption. In the context of Romania's desire to accede to 
the European Union, unsubstantiated allegations have been made about 
the fate of adopted children and the qualifications and motives of 
those who adopt internationally. Romanian policy makers chose to adopt 
this law against intercountry adoption in an effort to secure accession 
despite the fact, as stated in H. Res. 578, that there is no European 
Union law or regulation restricting intercountry adoptions to 
biological grandparents or requiring that restrictive laws be passed as 
a prerequisite for accession to the European Union.
  The resolution notes that the Romanian Government declared a 
moratorium on international adoptions in 2001 but continued to accept 
new applications and allowed many such applications to be processed 
under an exception for extraordinary circumstances. Then, in June 2004, 
Law 273/2004 was adopted, taking effect on January 1, 2005, which 
banned intercountry adoption except in the exceedingly rare case of a 
child's biological grandparent living outside the country. At the time 
of enactment, approximately 1,500 adoption applications were registered 
with the Romanian Government; of these, 200 children had been matched 
with prospective parents from the United States and the remainder from 
Western Europe.
  Intercountry adoption is, and always should be, anchored on the need 
to find homes for children, not to find children for would-be parents. 
Nonetheless, the individuals who applied to adopt Romanian children in 
the past few years committed their hearts to these children and we must 
recognize that the Romanian Government's mishandling of their 
applications has put them through a years-long emotional agony. H. Res. 
578 calls on the Government to conclude the processing of these cases 
in a transparent and timely manner. Since introduction of the 
resolution, the Romanian press has reported that intercountry adoption 
would be denied in all of the pending cases. If indeed this is 
accurate, then it is impossible to believe that the standard applied in 
each case was that of the best interest of the child.

  Romania's new adoption law and another addressing child protection, 
Law 272/2004, create a hierarchy of placement for orphaned or abandoned 
children. By foreclosing the option of intercountry adoption, the laws 
codified the misguided proposition that a foster family, or even an 
institution, is preferable to an adoptive family outside the child's 
country of birth.
  On November 29, the European Commission issued a press release 
stating that ``according to the Romanian Office for Adoptions, there 
are 1,355 Romanian families registered to adopt one of the 393 children 
available for adoption. Thus there is little scope, if any, for 
international adoptions.'' The European Commission's press release 
fails to mention that more than 80,000 children in Romania are growing 
up without permanent families--in orphanages, foster care, maternity 
hospitals, or on the streets. That less than 400 have been declared 
available for adoption is a denunciation of the child welfare system. 
Barely 1,000 children have ever been domestically adopted in Romania in 
any given year and since enactment of the new laws in 2004, the rate of 
domestic adoption has fallen further. There is no doubt that if more 
children were to be made available for adoption, there would be a great 
need for intercountry adoption to provide them with permanent, loving 
homes. For thousands of children abandoned annually in Romania, 
intercountry adoption offered the hope of a life outside of foster care 
or an institution. That hope has now been taken away. This will fall 
hardest on the Roma children who are least likely to be adopted in-
country due to pervasive societal prejudice.
  The Romanian Government and the European Commission are attempting to 
use a Potemkin Village to hide a grim reality of suffering children and 
bureaucratic obstacles which prevent them from being declared legally 
available for adoption. In one case that has come to the Commission's 
attention, an adoptive family is waiting for biological parents to sign 
away their rights to a child they abandoned at birth and who has spent 
the first four years of her life with her prospective adoptive parents. 
She knows no other parents. Her biological parents have on four 
previous occasions relinquished their parental rights and yet, because 
of the new laws, the child has still not been declared available for 
adoption.
  Other sources also belie a Potemkin approach. A November 5th article 
in the British journal The Lancet entitled ``Romania's Abandoned 
Children are Still Suffering,'' quotes a charity worker saying, ``of 
course something needs to be done to help the children here, but at the 
moment all the Romanian government is doing is signing forms sending 
children back to their parents . . . It doesn't seem to matter that the 
parents might be alcoholics or have no means to look after their kids 
as long as the numbers are cut.'' The article continues, ``Romanian 
authorities have proudly claimed that last year only 1,483 children 
aged 0-2 years were in state institutions, compared with 7,483 in 1997. 
But those figures do not include hospitals, where staff admit they rely 
on donations from charities and individuals to keep helping such 
children. . . . The head of the Neonatology Department at the 
University Hospital in Bucharest says abandoned children stay on 
average for 6-7 months [and] the situation is almost as bad as it 
was in Ceausescu's time.'' The article also quotes the head of the 
Neonatology Section at the Bucur Maternity Hospital, also in Bucharest, 
as saying ``last year, we had more abandoned kids than ever because the 
law changed. And it changed for the worse for the people in the 
maternity wards because the law forbids us to send children under 2 
years old to state orphanages.''

  At a Helsinki Commission hearing on September 14, Dr. Dana Johnson, 
Director of the International Adoption Clinic and Neonatology Division 
at the University of Minnesota Children's Hospital, testified that 
Romania's concentration on the reunification of an abandoned child with 
his or her biological family is only superficially consistent with the 
U.N. Convention on the Rights of the Child or the Hague Convention on 
Protection of Children and Co-operation in Respect of Intercountry 
Adoption. According to Dr. Johnson, ``in neither of those documents is 
the mention of time. . . . It doesn't tell you how long you should 
spend reunifying that child with the family. . . . Contemporary child 
development research has clearly shown that there is a known amount of 
deterioration that occurs in children who are in hospitals or 
institutional care and outside of family care during the first few 
years of life. . . . You can predict that every child who is in 
institutional care during that period of time will lose one month of 
physical growth, one month of motor development, one month of speech 
development for every three months they're in institutional care. You 
also can predict that from age four months through 24 months of age, 
they will lose one to two I.Q. points a month during that period of 
time. The other thing we know is that by placing them into a caring, 
competent family, that you can recover some of this function. . . . A 
child that is abandoned in Romania today at the end of next summer will 
have permanently lost 15 I.Q. points. That child two years from now 
will have permanently lost 30 I.Q. points, which means that half of 
those kids are going to be mentally retarded.''
  Mr. Speaker, the clock is ticking for Romania's children. H. Res. 578 
notes that Romania is a party to the Hague Convention on Intercountry 
Adoption which recognizes that ``intercountry adoption may offer the 
advantage of a permanent family to a child for whom a suitable family 
cannot be found in his or her State of origin.'' State Department 
officials and nongovernmental experts from the adoption and child 
welfare communities have testified that Romania's child welfare and 
adoption laws are inconsistent with Romania international commitments 
under this and other agreements.
  The resolution further notes that UNICEF has issued an official 
statement in support of intercountry adoption which, in pertinent part, 
reads: ``for children who cannot be raised by their own families, an 
appropriate alternative family environment should be sought in 
preference to institutional care, which should be used only as a last 
resort and as a temporary measure. Intercountry adoption is one of a 
range of care options which may be open to children, and for individual 
children who cannot be placed in a permanent family setting in their 
countries of origin, it may indeed be the best solution. In each case, 
the best interests

[[Page E2540]]

of the individual child must be the guiding principle in making a 
decision regarding adoption.''
  Finally, Mr. Speaker, with regard to the role of the European Union 
in this debacle, I ask who in the European Union will stand with 
Members of Congress to protect these defenseless children? All children 
deserve better than to spend their lives in group homes or warehoused 
in institutions where their physical, psychological, emotional and 
spiritual well-being is critically endangered. It is indeed tragic if 
the price of admission to the European Union is the sacrifice of 
thousands of Romania's orphaned or abandoned children.
  I strongly urge my colleagues to support this resolution. For the 
sake of the innumerable children in need of permanent families, the 
voice of the United States Congress must be heard clearly in this 
transatlantic dialogue on intercountry adoption.
    

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