Romania's Abandoned Children Are Still Suffering

I just found out today that the Romanian Government has sent the files back to the US Government on the 100 or so adoptions they were considering allowing to proceed. It is a huge setback and very disappointing for the families involved. Once again, it is shown that these orphans are nothing but political pawns and talk of their welfare is just that - talk. The US Government is outraged and it remains to be seen what can be done. Here yet is another article documenting the suffering these orphans are forced to endure.

The Lancet
2005; 366:1595-1596
November 5, 2005

DOI:10.1016/S0140-6736(05)67646-5

Romania's abandoned children are still suffering
Carmiola Ionescu

Thousands of Romanian orphans lived in appalling conditions under former communist dictator Nicolae Ceausescu. Now, authorities are keen to advertise improvements. But, says Carmiola Ionescu, the official figures do not count the many children still being abandoned in hospital wards.

As Sarah Wade walks up the muddy path to the tiny, ramshackle hut, she gets her first glimpse of the poverty that would have been her adoptive son's fate if she had not rescued him.

The house has been cobbled together out of corrugated iron, old linoleum, and crumbling stone. As she sees the piles of rubbish in the garden, her worries about fighting to keep her foster son, Dylan, away from his real parents vanish and she knows she has made the right decision.

"I've lived in Romania for about 4 years now, and so I am used to seeing run down houses and shabby surroundings, particularly in the small villages outside the cities. But the thought of allowing Dylan to be brought up in a home like that made me feel ill", she says, after going to meet Dylan's biological parents to discuss the 4-year-old's future.

Sarah met Dylan when he was a "hospital baby"-one of thousands of Romanian children who live the first years of their lives in hospital maternity wards.

The children, most of them healthy, are simply abandoned by mothers too poor to care for them properly, yet under new laws they cannot be put into orphanages until they reach the age of 2 years.

In the hospitals, overworked doctors and nurses have no time to spend with the young children, other than feeding them and changing their nappies, and for these youngsters the only way out is if their family later turns up to collect them or they are placed with a professional foster parent, of which there are far too few to cope with the demand.

British charity worker Wade, who took Dylan home with her when he was 18 months old, has spent 3 years helping him to catch up on what he missed as he lay for a year and a half with no human interaction.

As far as Wade is concerned Dylan is now her son. But other new legislation, banning foreigners from adopting Romanian children, means she is not allowed to legally become his mum and instead had to fight hard for Dylan not to be handed back to his biological parents.

The adoption ban is part of a series of EU-backed measures designed to cut the number of children in state institutions in time for the country to join the EU in 2007.

But Wade, who has set up her own Romania-based foundation called Romanian Relief, believe the laws are ineffective. "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", she says.

The extra income that families get from child benefits is one of the most common reasons for parents taking a son or daughter back. Other parents are also concerned that if they do not take back their children they could end up in trouble with authorities keen to present EU officials with a picture of a state returning children to their parents.

Statistics from UNICEF released at the beginning of this year show that 4000 newborns are abandoned every year in maternity wards while 5000 are abandoned in paediatric hospitals.

The organisation says the figures are on a par with those of 20 and 30 years ago, when communist dictator Nicolae Ceausescu was in power. At that time, hundreds of thousands of children were housed in state run institutions and when his regime fell in 1989 and observers came into the country, the atrocious conditions that the children were kept in sent shock-waves around the globe.

The huge number of babies abandoned before 1989 was a direct result of Ceausescu's social policies, which included a law prohibiting abortion and contraception.

His policies also actively encouraged couples to have children by awarding mothers of at least five children significant benefits, while mothers of at least 10 children were declared "heroic mothers" and were given a gold medal, a free car, free transportation on trains, and free holidays each year.

Impoverished and uneducated mothers, however, were not able to cope with all their children and simply abandoned them.

Romanian authorities have proudly claimed that last year only 1483 children aged 0-2 years were in state institutions, compared with 7483 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.

Ana Culcer, the head of the Neonatology Department at the University Hospital in Bucharest, says abandoned children stay on average for 6-7 months. "They have to be fed using funds allotted to newborn babies because there is no separate fund for them", she explains. "Obviously we cannot ignore these children but at the same time we cannot be parents to everyone."

Culcer believes the situation is almost as bad as it was in Ceausescu's time. "I have to use space and personnel for the abandoned kids which means that sick children are not getting the attention they should."

At the Bucur Maternity Hospital in Bucharest, the head of the Neonatology Section, Filofteia Dragomir, got the nick name "the milk woman" because she uses her own car and time to deliver dried milk for the abandoned babies. But she says it is not so simple to address the children's other needs. "When it comes to clothes for them, we have to rely on donations. Many of these come from people whose children are growing up, mostly women who gave birth at our maternity ward and know that there are abandoned babies who are still here", Dragomir explains.

She adds: "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."

Sarah Wade, who volunteered as a care worker at a hospital when she first arrived in Romania, has her own experiences of the conditions abandoned children like Dylan face. "The hospital I worked in was horrendous. It was filthy, dull, and had no toys. Each room had up to 30 children and they would just sit in their cots or on their beds not moving or talking", she says.

"It was very regimental. None of the nurses played with the children, they simply came in to feed them or give medicine to those who needed it and then left again."

The only time many of them saw the outside world was when Wade and other volunteers like her took them to parks to escape the harsh life within the hospital walls.

She also described when she first met Dylan. "He was a year old but couldn't even lift his head up on his own, he was severely underweight, and was sick with bronchitis. I couldn't leave him in the hospital, who knows what would have happened to him", she says.

Within weeks of taking him home Dylan's chest infection had cleared up and he had started to put on weight.

"Physically, he got better very quickly, but it took a lot longer to heal his emotional wounds. Before I brought him home I had to visit him everyday for 3 weeks for him to get used to me. He had never been held or kissed and would scream blue murder if I tried to pick him up and cuddle him. He just used to sit staring at the walls not smiling", she says.

Doctors, who had diagnosed Dylan as autistic, said he would never walk, but 3 years on he runs around like any other small boy.

Romanian government officials have said they are concerned about the apparent numbers of abandoned children in hospitals and are considering changing legislation to help them.

A spokesman for the National Authority for the Protection of Children's Rights, a government body, says: "We are focussing on finding the best solution for these children so that they can start their lives in a family.

"We admit that the child protection system was not properly prepared for the legislation forbidding children under 2 years old to be sent to state institutions.

"We only managed to find solutions for a third of the abandoned kids in hospitals last year by either sending them back to their biological families or to a substitute family. But we are aware that for a large number of new-born children there is no solution at the moment. We are awaiting the results of a detailed report from all hospitals in the country with children in this situation so that we can decide what the best solution for them is and how we can change legislation to their benefit."