A Distant Tie Made, Then Snarled

A distant tie made, then snarled
An adoption put into jeopardy by European politics
By Alan Wirzbicki, Globe Correspondent April 17, 2005

WASHINGTON -- The last time Irene Costello of Brookline visited Ionela, she brought a Barbie doll to the 8-year-old Romanian girl she hopes to adopt.

''You should have seen her eyes light up," said Costello, a sales and marketing consultant who visits Ionela twice a year in the poor Romanian town where she lives in foster care.

Ionela's birth parents abandoned the blue-eyed baby at the hospital, making her one of the thousands of children delivered to Romanian orphanages every year. In 2000, during a volunteer service trip to the Eastern European country's poorest region, Costello found the girl in a decrepit hospital ward in the Romanian countryside that smelled of dirty diapers and urine.

''It was love at first sight," Costello said.

But after Costello spent four years and thousands of dollars navigating Romania's judicial system trying to win approval for the adoption, her case, like hundreds of others, stalled. A new Romanian law, passed at the European Union's insistence, bars foreigners from adopting any of the thousands of children in the country's crowded orphanages.

Costello and nine other American families whose adoptions are in limbo met March 10 with Romanian President Traian Basescu at the country's embassy in Washington to plead for their cases to go forward.

In an interview in Washington after her meeting with Basescu, Costello said the president was ''empathetic," but did not signal any change in Romanian policy.

Now back in Brookline, Costello e-mails Ionela regularly and tries to follow the girl's life from afar.

''It's frustrating to get second-hand reports on what she's doing and how people are bringing her up," Costello said.

Costello plans to visit Ionela again in June. While she hopes the government in Bucharest relents, she senses the chances are becoming more remote.

''They're not going to jeopardize getting into the EU for this," she said.
The Romanian government hopes to join the European Union in 2007. The EU says the adoption law is needed to stop human trafficking, but critics say the sweeping law blocks legitimate adoptions and prevents needy children from entering loving homes.

Despite protests from the United States, the ban went into effect Jan. 1 and has derailed adoption proceedings for 1,500 and 2,000 families worldwide, including about 200 in America.
Thirty-one members of Congress, including Senator John F. Kerry and Representatives Barney Frank and William D. Delahunt, signed a letter that was delivered to Basescu last month urging that Romania allow adoptions already underway to proceed.

Costello says Ionela ''picked me," not vice versa.

''I would not have chosen to do this if I knew this was how it would be," she said. But ''when you come so close to getting a child and for outrageous reasons outside of anyone's control the child is taken away from you, you become a fighter."

In a prepared statement during Basescu's visit to Washington, Delahunt, the adoptive father of a Vietnamese child, called on Romania to ensure that ''necessary actions are taken" to see that Costello and others in her situation are allowed to adopt the children many have spent years getting to know.

Elizabeth Bartholet, a Harvard Law School professor who studies international adoptions, called the Romanian ban ''a terrible law," but placed most of the blame with the EU, which she said had forced Romania into passing the moratorium.

''Here you have this country with orphanages that are terrible, terrible places, and kids are now stuck there," she said.

About 83,000 Romanian children are wards of the state, according to government statistics, of whom about 40 percent live in institutions. According to a January UNICEF report, 9,000 babies are abandoned in Romania every year, the great majority of them from Roma, or gypsy, families.

The orphanages are a legacy of Romania's former Communist dictator, Nicolae Ceausescu, who outlawed abortion and contraception in 1966 in an attempt to expand the country's population and produce a new generation of apparatchiks.

Abortion was legalized two days after Ceausescu's overthrow and execution on Christmas in 1989. The first batch of legal condoms arrived in Bucharest to much fanfare on Jan. 5, 1990. But according to Laura Katzive, a legal adviser on global projects for the Center for Reproductive Rights in New York, information about family planning remains scarce in the country, contributing to the continuing problem of abandoned babies.