16 Vietnamese kids, US families in adoption limbo
Most of the adoptions already in the pipeline went forward under exceptions to the 2008 moratorium, but paperwork problems delayed the Bac Lieu cases. Vietnam now says it hopes to join the international Hague Convention on adoptions in October and that the pending cases must start over under those tighter rules, which bar prospective parents from even seeing the children until everything is finalized.
Some families blame the U.S. State Department for the hold up, arguing it has pressured Vietnam so hard to impose stricter regulations that their cases ended up getting stuck. They’re now hoping for exemptions and have gained some leverage: Two U.S. senators have blocked President Barack Obama’s pick for the new U.S. ambassador to Vietnam over the issue.
The orphanage is a two-room former prison deep in Vietnam’s Mekong Delta. Couples had rotated visits there before January, each time taking food, milk, clothes and toys for the children who otherwise receive very little.
They brought video cameras to capture the moments and document the changes every parent yearns to see. With no shared language, they communicated using hugs and kisses.
Since then, photos sent by other visitors reveal that the children have lost weight.
After the 2008 suspension, most of the 534 cases already being processed were resolved and the children were allowed to leave. But officials put the brakes on Bac Lieu cases because irregularities were uncovered, including wrong birth mothers’ names on paperwork, according to Keith Wallace, director of Families Thru International Adoption, the Indiana agency brokering the adoptions.
He said they reinvestigated most of the cases and fired a staffer who had taken “short cuts.”
In one case, a baby who already was matched with an American family was returned to its birth mother because her financial situation had improved after she married, he said. In other cases, the agency obtained DNA samples and new paperwork from birth mothers stating they knowingly gave up their babies, Wallace added.
Alison Dilworth, adoptions division head at the U.S. Office of Children’s Issues, said Washington has pressed Vietnam’s Communist government to release the children, but that officials there have refused to provide information on why they rejected the cases.
“We’ve made it very, very clear that we want them to move forward on these cases, and I can understand why the parents are absolutely frustrated,” Dilworth said.
She denied that Washington’s push for Vietnam to join the Hague Convention was to blame for the hold up, saying the adoption agency may have raised false hopes that these cases were still moving forward.
“I think they told a lot of their clients that it was the big, bad U.S. government that was stopping things, when in reality, we’ve never had a chance to even take a look at these cases,” she said by phone from Washington.
Vietnam prohibited The Associated Press from traveling to the orphanage, and adoption officials in Bac Lieu province declined to comment.
In a written response to questions from the AP, Vietnam’s Adoptions Department said all 16 cases are ineligible for processing under the old system and will go forward under the new Hague rules expected to be adopted Oct. 1. The toddlers will first be put up for adoption within Vietnam. If no one comes forward, they can then be paired with foreign families. A process that will take months, at best, if the American families are re-matched with the children.
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[…] While the Embassy has given no further public details about the orphanage visit or meetings with Bac Lieu officials, discussions may have been related to the 16 Bac Lieu “pipeline” adoption cases. […]