Guatemala’s government moves to regulate baby trade.

A year after Guatemala's emergence as the second-largest foreign source of babies for adoption to the United States, a new push by the Guatemalan government to wrest control of the process from private agencies has stirred an emotional backlash from thousands of prospective adoptive parents in the United States.

John and Renee Eubanks of Columbia, who adopted a baby girl from Guatemala in the spring, recently made the painful decision to suspend their search for a second child because they fear the government's approach will end up canceling adoptions midway through the process.

But the adoption agency the Eubanks used keeps e-mailing them photos of babies just in case, and the boys' tiny faces haunt Renee.

"You look at each one and think: 'If we don't commit to him, what's going to happen to him? Is he ever going to get a family? Is he going to end up begging on the street?' " she said during an interview at the kitchen table of her townhouse while her 21-month-old adopted daughter, Mikayla, drank milk from a sippy cup. "It's heart-wrenching."

Almost two thousand miles away in Guatemala's capital city, Guatemala's solicitor general, Mario Gordillo, is haunted by a different image: Like many critics of the current setup, he worries that thousands of desperately poor Guatemalan women are being induced to conceive children for adoption by private brokers offering as much as $3,000 a baby.

"Guatemala has converted into a baby-producing nation," Gordillo said at his office in Guatemala City. "Our children come into this world to be products for sale. . . . It's as if they were a car. What model is it? And who wants to buy it?"

The debate raging in Guatemala echoes previous controversies that have led to the suspension of adoptions from Romania to Cambodia. But the stakes are far higher this time because of the sheer number of children involved.

Over the past 15 years, the number of foreign children adopted by Americans each year has nearly tripled, totaling more than 20,000 in 2006. About one in five comes from Guatemala, which released 4,135 children for international adoption last year. That's almost as many as are adopted from the top nation, China, which has more than 100 times the population.

Guatemala's severe poverty and high fertility rates are clearly a driving force behind the trend. Nearly a third of the population lives on less than $2 a day, more than half are below the poverty line and 23 percent of children age 5 or younger are underweight. Conditions are even bleaker among the country's indigenous Mayan Indians, many of whom live in the mountains and do not speak Spanish.

But the government's hands-off approach to adoptions has also played a major role in fueling Guatemala's adoption industry. Although the solicitor general's office must sign off on all international adoptions, in contrast to most of its Latin American neighbors, Guatemala has no government agency charged with tracking children whose mothers wish to give them up -- let alone caring for such children or matching them with adoptive parents overseas.

Instead, the void has been filled by a network of private notaries and attorneys that has grown exponentially since the mid-1990s, when peace accords officially ended Guatemala's three-decades long civil war.

The uniquely private nature of the system the lawyers have created offers some distinct advantages over that of other major sources for adoption, such as China and Russia.

Instead of waiting for mothers to abandon children, Guatemalan lawyers tend to identify babies available for adoption soon after or even before they are born, reducing the age at which they are handed over to their new parents. Rather than warehousing infants in large orphanages, where the children might receive less attention and are prone to developing mental disorders that prevent them from bonding with their parents, Guatemala's private lawyers often pay foster mothers to care for the babies during the many months it takes for adoption paperwork to be approved by the Guatemalan and U.S. governments.

During this period, adoptive parents can travel to Guatemala and spend time with their prospective child. Indeed, parents fly in so frequently that several major hotels provide toy-filled playrooms for guests and sell infant necessities such as diapers and talcum powder in the gift shop.

Some lawyers even help adoptive parents move to Guatemala and be the foster parent to the child with whom they have been matched. That option was a huge draw for Erin Stoy of Memphis, who worried that a child from the other nations she considered -- Russia, China, Kazakhstan, Vietnam and Ethiopia -- would suffer "stranger anxiety" by the time he or she finally met her.

Since March, Stoy has taken an extended leave from her job in the shipping business to care for Azucena, the baby girl she and her husband are in the process of adopting.

"We've seen her taking her first steps, crawling, being able to understand a few words, asking, 'Where's Daddy?' " Stoy said.

Such benefits, however, usually come at a hefty price: On top of the roughly $6,000 that adoptive parents pay U.S. agencies, many pay Guatemalan lawyers $20,000 to $30,000. Critics suggest that such sums are a huge markup over the actual cost of finding, caring for and processing the paperwork.

The potential for windfall profits, combined with the lack of robust government oversight and the vast pool of impoverished women, has created massive opportunities for abuse, critics charge.

For instance, many lawyers contract with jaladores, Spanish for tuggers or touts, who fan across the countryside seeking women willing to relinquish their children. There is widespread suspicion that jaladores may be paying, pressuring or bamboozling women who would not otherwise choose to put up a child for adoption.

Payment is considered a particularly likely, and insidious, practice because if a woman gives in to temptation but then changes her mind before the adoption is complete, she or her relatives might hesitate to reclaim the child because they cannot pay back the jalador.

Manuel Manrique, UNICEF's representative in Guatemala, speculates that a substantial number of women are conceiving children for sale because the government and nonprofit charities that care for abandoned children receive only a few hundred a year, not the thousands that would indicate an epidemic of women who feel they cannot care for their children. He also notes that it is common for the same woman to give up multiple infants for adoption.

"Why else would a woman have three successive children and put them all up for adoption?" he asked. "It's as though with the first adoption, women are getting drawn into an adoption circuit."

Faced with growing outrage over the issue among the Guatemalan public, the Guatemalan government has slowly but steadily moved to increase its supervision of international adoptions. In August, authorities launched a rare investigation of an agency, raiding a foster home for multiple babies in Antigua run by a company called Casa Quivira and detaining several lawyers on suspicion of illegal practices.

Most far-reaching in its implications, however, was a vote by Guatemala's Congress in May to accede to an international treaty on standards for international adoptions that requires governments to appoint a central authority to manage the process. (Although Guatemala signed the treaty years ago, an earlier vote to accede to the treaty was done through means deemed unconstitutional by Guatemala's Supreme Court.)

The legislators' vote was partly motivated by necessity. The United States is on track to accede to the treaty by spring, at which point U.S. authorities will be unable to accept adoptions from Guatemala unless the system there is also up to treaty standards.

Still, Guatemala's lawmakers set off alarm bells by setting the date for Guatemala's accession for Jan. 1 -- well before the United States will be in compliance. This has raised questions about whether an estimated 5,000 adoptions currently in process will be allowed to proceed if they are not completed by the end of this year.

"I can't even think about that possibility," said a tearful Terry Lewis, 47, a therapist in Gaithersburg who is in the final stages of adopting a 14-month-old boy who she and her husband have already named Shepherd. The couple have visited the child three times, bringing along their 2-year-old son, Zachary, whom they adopted from Guatemala a year ago. "Every time we leave Sheppie, it's like we're left with this big hole. I don't know how else to put it except that he's my kid."

More recently, Guatemala's legislative leaders have been considering a law that would push the accession date back to next spring and exempt cases that are in process from the treaty. But in the absence of an ironclad guarantee that all ongoing cases will be grandfathered into the new system, many prospective parents remain nervous.

Meanwhile, Americans considering new adoptions, such as the Eubanks, worry that the government-run, centralized system that Guatemalan lawmakers are crafting to replace the private model will make it all but impossible for uneducated, rural women who wish to give up a child to find the proper channels.

"Any oversight is good. But you need to make the system safe for the women," Renee Eubanks said. "It's so frustrating because here we are, ready to provide a loving home for a child who needs it, and then you have the politics come in and disrupt everything."

[Via - The Washington Post] 

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