http://www.philly.com/mld/inquirer/news ... 153499.htm

Posted on Sun, Jul. 30, 2006

Treaty expected to restrict Guatemala's 'baby farm'
U.S. has signed a Hague Convention that imposes new standards.
By Juan Carlos Llorca
Associated Press

GUATEMALA CITY - Every 100th baby born in Guatemala grows up as an adopted American, making the Central American country the richest source of adoptees in the Western Hemisphere. But U.S. ratification of an international adoption treaty is likely to choke off the supply next summer.

Critics say Guatemala has become a baby farm where adoptions are too easy and prone to corruption. Defenders say that it offers the children a better future, and that legal corners are cut only to spare Guatemalan women the stigma of unwed motherhood or relieve them of another mouth to feed.

For now, willing parents can get Guatemalan babies by paying thousands of dollars to notaries who act as baby brokers, recruiting birth mothers, handling all the paperwork, and completing the job in less than half the time it takes elsewhere. The process is so streamlined that Guatemala outpaces all other countries in the percentage of its children placed for adoption in the United States.

All this likely will end once the Hague Convention on Intercountry Adoptions takes effect in the United States. The United States will then require all foreign adoptions to meet tougher international standards, which Guatemala ratified in 2003 but has yet to implement.

"We don't want adoptions to stop, but we believe the current system does not provide enough protection to the child's needs," said John Lowell, the U.S. consul in Guatemala.

The treaty, also ratified by China, Russia, and at least 39 other countries, seeks to protect children, birth parents and adoptive parents from abuse, in part by requiring a government agency to regulate adoptions.

Guatemala still allows adoptions to be managed privately, without judicial approval. In many other countries, adoptions take more than a year. Guatemala can obtain children in as little as five months.

Berta Morales, 35, has given the last five of her 10 children to Americans.

"It would have been more of a sin to abort them," said Morales, who lives in Coatepeque, west of Guatemala City. "I'm poor... but maybe one of them will become a professional."

Morales said she was paid only bus fare to Guatemala City, the capital, to sign the papers.

But Josefina Arellano, who directs the government office that ultimately approves each adoption, said women who give up multiple children in a row probably were getting paid.

"When you look at the time between pregnancies and how many children they have given up, you have to conclude they are doing it for money," she said. "What we're witnessing is a baby factory or farm, dealing with children that should not have been born or put up for adoption."

Susana Luarca, a notaries association lawyer, denied mothers were doing it for money: "What more help could they get," she asks, "than relieving them of the problem of their child's situation?"

Every profession has unscrupulous people, "but that does not mean everything is rotten," added Luarca, who is now handling 40 adoptions. "Some people have tried to make the case that, just because a business is lucrative, it's bad."

It is lucrative: Notaries charge a "country fee" of up to $19,000. With U.S. paperwork and plane trips, the typical Guatemalan adoption costs as much as $30,000, adoption agencies say.

But in the last six months alone, the government has brought 30 criminal cases against notaries for falsifying paperwork, allegedly providing false birth certificates, and even creating false identities to avoid having to involve the birth father or the parents of underage birth mothers.

Applications are surging as parents rush to take advantage of the current process, which will apply to any request filed before the treaty takes effect in mid-2007. Of the 4,100 cases pending in Arellano's office, more than 3,000 were filed this year.

Americans have adopted 17,863 Guatemalan children in the last nine years, French couples 1,440, and Guatemalans 576. Americans adopted 3,748 of the Guatemalan babies born last year.

In raw numbers, Guatemala ranks behind China and Russia among foreign sources of U.S. adoptees, according to the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services.

But the 7,939 Chinese babies adopted by U.S. couples last year represented just 0.04 percent of that country's total 17.3 million births, and the 4,652 Russian adoptees were 0.3 percent of Russia's births in 2005, while Guatemala's figure is 1 percent.

With half of Guatemala's 13 million people living in poverty, many families struggle to provide for their children, and an entire industry seeks them out. Newspaper and radio ads appeal to women with unwanted pregnancies to consider adoption, and notaries hire people to find birth mothers to meet the demand.

"They're like scouts in charge of looking for young pregnant women to convince them to put up their child for adoption," Arellano said.

Many adoptive parents stay at the Guatemala City Marriott, which could pass for a day-care center with all the babies coming through its lobby.

Katie Quandt, a Minnesota accountant, said she never met her 9-month-old Maria's birth mother, dealing only with a notary. She can only guess the mother's motives. "I think that Maria's mom is a very loving lady and unfortunately doesn't have the financial resources to care for her and that is very sad," Quandt said. "If that's how it is, then I'm so glad we have the opportunity. I think it is an act of love of her to let us share Maria's life."