THE ROMANIAN BABY BAZAAR

By KATHLEEN HUNT; KATHLEEN HUNT IS A FREELANCE JOURNALIST WHO HAS SPENT MUCH
OF THE PAST YEAR IN ROMANIA.
Published: March 24, 1991

By KATHLEEN HUNT; KATHLEEN HUNT IS A FREELANCE JOURNALIST WHO HAS SPENT MUCH
OF THE PAST YEAR IN ROMANIA.
Published: March 24, 1991
IT IS BEFORE DAWN ON A JANUARY MORNING, AND AS A photographer and I drive
through the dark cobbled streets of Bucharest, we can barely make out the
hunched workers, waiting in the numbing cold for their soot-encrusted tram
cars. We are following a car in which two women from Oregon, 28-year-old
Cindy Dahl and her mother-in-law, Betty Dewhirst, are being driven by a
young Romanian man to the city of Ploiesti, about an hour north. He has
promised to find a child for Cindy to adopt.

The night before, Cindy had arrived in Bucharest after a 28-hour trip from
Portland. In the lobby of the President Hotel, the unofficial headquarters
for the hundreds of adoptive parents who have poured into the country since
the liberalization of Romanian adoption law last August, she met a suave
Romanian in a double-breasted Italian suit who promised to find her a baby
the following day. His younger half brother would act as guide. The brothers
agree to give us access to their adoption business, but demand that only
their first initials be used: M. for the older, and G. for his half brother.


When we reach Ploiesti, the administrator at the district hospital seems to
be expecting G., and leads us to an office to wait for the doctor. Both
Cindy and her mother-in-law are excited and nervous. "My husband, Steve, is
a builder, and we have a 4-year-old son," Cindy says. "But my first
childbirth was so difficult, I doubt I can have any more children. So I'm
here to adopt a little girl."

The administrator explains that the pediatric section has about 70 to 100
children, but that only two to three infants are abandoned in the maternity
ward each month. She and her assistants admire Cindy's creamy skin and
natural red hair, which falls in fine pre-Raphaelite ripples, but the
unrivaled hit is the Polaroid camera Betty has brought along to keep track
of all the children they expect to see.

Half an hour later, Dr. Luiza Popescu strides in, a short, compact woman in
her 40's. When G. tells her he is looking for abandoned babies, she snickers
that most of those children are from the "baby machines," or gypsies. "How
could Americans be willing to adopt gypsies ?" the doctor asks, voicing the
prejudice many ethnic Romanians harbor. "The genetics is what matters from
the beginning," she declares with a sweep of the hand. "Ha! Such a child
will certainly steal."

"No matter, no matter," G. assures her. "The Americans have quite different
conceptions." Cindy and her mother-in-law stand aside staring blankly since
none of this is translated. (It is not clear that G. knows that I understand
Romanian.) Leading the way into the wards, the doctor pauses as Cindy gently
lifts one baby after another into her arms. No one tells her that these
children have parents who intend to take them home once they are well.

A little girl named Adriana catches Cindy's eye, and the doctor tells Cindy
that her biological mother brought her in for treatment a month ago and has
never come to get her. Cindy beams, and asks G. to get the mother's address
so they can see if she will put Adriana up for adoption.

We move on to a two-story orphanage across town, where mobs of toddlers in a
sunny playroom flock to Cindy squealing "Mama." Some of them have crossed
eyes, which Cindy points out can be easily corrected. When Cindy asks about
one child, the nurses tell her that the parents want 100,000 lei. At the
official exchange rate, this would be about $2,800; at the black-market rate
it would be a third of that. The parents also want a car.

G. blurts out "no problem" in his rudimentary English, and boasts that he
will knock down the parents' price. "Many gypsy people say they want 100,000
lei. Then I come back and say, the American or Canadian will give you 30,000
lei -- you want? If they say no, we leave and go in the car. Then the gypsy
comes over and says it's O.K." With a nod at us he looks for approval.
"That's a big difference from 100,000 down to 30,000, right? And for what?
The baby machine who has nothing in his house?"

Cindy hugs a little girl and asks if she is available.

"Her parents are gypsies, and they want 100,000 lei and a Turbo car,"
someone on the staff says.

"Turbo?" Cindy repeats, looking up.

"Yes," the same staff member says, laughing. She also points out that a cute
blond boy named Ionut has already been adopted by a French-Romanian couple,
and that 13 of the 19 children in that room have been adopted and will go to
another country.

Slowly Cindy realizes that the whole morning has been a bit of a charade.
She has seen only two children who seem to be adoptable.

SINCE THE OVERTHROW OF THE CEAUSESCU REGIME IN December 1989 and the
disclosure that thousands of Romanian children had been relegated to squalid
public institutions, Americans, Canadians and Western Europeans have flocked
to Romania, searching for adoptable babies. In 1990, roughly 3,000 children
were adopted out of Romania; in the first two months of this year, 1,300
adoptions to the United States alone have been completed or are under way.
As the competition for babies heightens, the bargaining becomes more
intense.

Some prospective parents come on their own, referred to a lawyer who for a
substantial fee may simply deliver a baby to their hotel. Others work
through registered agencies and freelance adoption brokers in Romania. Fees
range from $2,500 to $15,000 and increasingly include a payment to the birth
mother. And then there are Americans and Canadians of modest means, who come
on group "tours," hoping to find and adopt a child for under $5,000.

These are often the clients who seek out M., who was born in Romania 37
years ago, escaped, and made his way to Australia in the 1970's. Returning
to Romania last August with $70,000 to invest in business and real estate,
M. made his unofficial headquarters the lobby of the President Hotel, a
former guest house for Communist Party elites. He quickly became one of the
leading black-market money-changers at the hotel and recently began applying
his broker's skills to babies.

As a legacy of the Ceausescu years, when abortion was largely illegal and
harsh fiscal measures made it difficult to support large families, Romania
has more than 600 state institutions brimming with children; some estimates
run as high as 130,000 under the age of 18. But the supply of adoptable
young babies is dwindling. Ministry of Health officials estimate that
roughly 8,000 under age 3 remain in orphanages. But it is likely that at
least half of these have been exposed to the highly contagious hepatitis B
virus. In some institutions, up to 50 percent of the children are also
infected with the AIDS virus. With the lifting of the abortion ban in
December 1989, the hundreds of newborns once abandoned in Romanian maternity
wards were suddenly reduced to a trickle. A million pregnancies were
terminated last year -- three times the number of live births.

Perhaps the bitterest paradox is that hundreds of Western families were
moved to act by press reports last year, which exposed the misery of older
handicapped children, doomed to live in inhumane warehouses for the
"irrecoverable." But these are the last to be adopted. "The majority of
adoptive parents are coming back to America with infants and newborns, and
about half of them are not from institutions," says the American consul
general in Bucharest, Virginia Young. "To my knowledge we've not issued an
immigrant visa to a single severely handicapped child."

Finally, of those who remain in orphanages and hospitals, very few are
bona-fide orphans. Nor have they ever been technically "abandoned." Before
any adoption can take place, the most difficult -- and often questionable --
part is locating the biological parents and obtaining their consent to give
up the child.

ARMED WITH AN ADDRESS COPIED FROM ADRIANA'S FILE, G. speeds off with Cindy
and Betty through Ploiesti to track down the baby's mother. The car careens
around corners, screeches to a stop, turns back, lurching from one concrete
housing complex to the next, G. leaping out at each to ask bystanders for
leads to the address of Adriana's mother. After more than an hour hugging
their tail, the photographer and I are left stranded at a red light. That
night, when we see Cindy at the President Hotel, she is jubilant. "We found
Adriana's mother and she's given her consent to adopt her. And G. says she
only wants 40,000 lei. Well, whatever anyone says about M. he gets results!"


That night, M. triumphantly lounges on his usual couch in the corner of the
lobby, surrounded by half a dozen radiant clients. One childless 40-year-old
woman from Toronto lovingly holds the newborn G. found for her in a peasant
family for only $300, while another potential mother announces to M., "If
you can get me out of here in a few days, I'll give you all the cash I have
left as a bonus!"

THE PROFITEERING in adoptions has been fueled by the frenzy for hard
currency, and everyone knows that foreign adoptions bring in dollars.
Crippling shortages still persist in Romania and industrial production seems
to be at a standstill. But Romanians with cash -- mostly those with
privileges under the old Communist system -- have plunged into an orgy of
entrepreneurism. As the director of a Florida-based private adoption agency
sums it up, "Romanians have figured out that this is the cottage industry of
the decade -- or at least the year." In North America, some 300 self-styled
agents have sprung up, according to one American law firm, all claiming to
be experts on Romanian adoption. Perhaps an equal number have emerged in
Western Europe.

In Romania, rings of local hustlers scramble to hook up with Western
contacts like Kim Fast, a young Oregonian who adopted a Romanian child last
year and drew a shower of publicity in newspapers back home. This winter,
she brought a group to Romania. For $375 in fees per family, Fast arranged
discount air tickets, and sent each family an information packet including
hints on the preferred soap, coffee, cosmetics and candy as "gifts" for
local officials.

She hired Ionel Ispas, 24, a Bucharest mechanic, to recruit translators and
drivers. Johnny, as Ispas is called, has set up his baby-finding business
about two hours north of the capital, near Targoviste, where he works with
two translators, the Anghel brothers. Before the fall of Ceausescu,
35-year-old Dan Anghel had a coveted job as a waiter at the Hotel Bucharest,
one of the two leading international hotels in the capital, and a central
haunt of the Securitate, the secret police. He still enjoys privileges
there, like instant access to international phone lines, while ordinary
Romanians wait long hours freezing in the public post office.

On a frigid morning in mid-January, Johnny Ispas and the Anghel brothers
take three of the families from Oregon in a caravan of cars northwest past
the giant petrochemical smokestacks to the town of Pucioasa. Leaving the
tense couples parked in front of an orphanage, Johnny speeds off to
telephone the "lady who has the babies." Dan Anghel, fastidiously dressed in
a crisp ski parka and a gray, Ceausescu-style lamb's-wool hat, saunters over
to a group of children playing on the snowy sidewalk and strikes up a
conversation. Phrases like "go to America" and "candy" waft our way. The
children scamper off to look for families, just as a young couple approach
from the other direction. The woman is pregnant, they tell Dan, and they
already have seven children to support.

Dan tells the father to get one of his children to show Leslie and Peggy
Koralek, who are standing beside their car, stamping their feet trying to
stay warm. Their friends, Randy and Shannon Prater, seem too culture-shocked
and cold to get out of the car. About 10 minutes later the father returns
with the mother and a girl, about 5 years old. Leslie and Peggy exchange
bewildered glances, and then politely shake their heads, saying the child is
too old to take from her family. Keeping his options open, Dan nods with a
smile at the mother's stomach, and says, "Maybe we'll get back to you next
September when you have the new one."

In the meantime, Johnny has come back with a tall, swarthy gypsy with an
intense stare, thick mustache and wide black Russian fur hat. Mihai, as he
is introduced, is the local baby-broker, and between aggressive drags on his
cigarette, he promises Leslie and Peggy that he has a little girl for them.
He leads them through a littered alley to a five-story apartment complex and
into a stark room with two beds and a television. A woman and three barefoot
children sit on one bed. One is a 2-year-old girl named Liana, with soft
black curls and a spunky smile: "No sick, no sick, nothing, nothing," Mihai
insists. Also in the room is a woman with thick irridescent eye shadow,
introduced as Mihai's associate; she says Liana's mother, who has five
children altogether, is in the maternity hospital. There is no mention of
the father. The woman on the bed is not introduced.

Leslie and Peggy are visibly confused about who the two women are and glance
around for a clue. Mihai motions toward their small plastic bag of gifts,
and they awkwardly hand the woman on the bed a few candies and a bottle of
nail polish.

"I don't know how I feel about taking a child from a family," Leslie says to
his wife as they sit on the edge of the bed playing with Liana. "It must be
traumatic."

Suddenly someone says "there's the father," and a young man appears at the
end of the hallway. He is shoved back out by a pair of men. As Mihai and his
partner with the eye shadow goad little Liana into grinning and dancing,
Johnny bursts in.

"Have you decided?" he demands. Mihai and Dan say they will arrange for the
child's blood to be tested for AIDS and hepatitis B.

"We're not sure!" Peggy says with a nervous giggle. "We're excited, not
decided! We can't decide so quickly."

"I feel like I'm in the twilight zone here," Leslie says, his voice soft.
"I'm in this house, and this kid's being offered to me, and I'm thinking,
maybe not."

Half an hour later, when it is clear to Mihai and Johnny that this is not
working, we are whisked out. "This is so bizarre," Leslie says. "It's a
little weird -- like going around shopping."

RANGING IN AGE FROM their late 20's to late 40's, most of these adoptive
parents come from solid middle-class, often born-again Christian
backgrounds, and have never been exposed to severe poverty or to hard-core
hustlers. Far from their own culture, they fail to pick up the signs of the
black marketeers: the elaborately stitched stone-washed jean suits, the
leather jackets, and above all, the thuggish manner. These men are almost
stereotypes of the seedy class that has long straddled the worlds of
international hotel work, taxi driving, money-changing and informing for the
secret police.

"We've already started to change even in only the last four days," Leslie
admits. "We're getting worried about rumors; we're not sure whom to trust."

Recognizing their clients' absolute dependence on them, M., Johnny and the
others deftly employ the model of intimidation that worked so efficiently
for the security apparatus under the former regime. They alarm them with
rumors that adoptions will be suspended, and warn them not to say too much
on the phone.

But few adoptive parents could be considered to be simple victims, nor do
many fit the popular image of desperate childless couples. Of some 50
adoptive families followed for this article, almost half already had
biological children. Some, including single mothers, had as many as three or
four. Almost half said their compassion for the scabrous children in
orphanages and their deep religious faith played an important part in their
coming. Their convictions clash head-on with the constant demands for
bribes, falsified documents and outright payments for babies. But prevented
from getting into orphanages by corrupt directors and endless red tape, they
turn to other sources. "Sometimes I feel sort of guilty, like the babies are
being sold," Cindy admits. "But then when you think about open adoption in
the States, and all the costs of that, that's like buying a baby. Besides,
look at the conditions of these children's homes."

HUSTLERS LIKE JOHNNY Ispas and his fierce-looking broker Mihai know that
poverty often drives a Romanian mother eventually to place her child in a
state institution. On the premise that these mothers are sure to abandon
their infants sooner or later, Mihai and Johnny persuade a shy young nurse
identified only as Paula, whose husband has stayed back in Oregon, to
accompany them to a maternity hospital not far from the orphanage in
Pucioasa. En route, we pick up the father of the infant Paula will see. He
proudly introduces his only other child, an 18-month-old boy named Valentin.
Mihai and Johnny tell Paula, who has not understood the father, that the
couple is struggling with seven children.

At the hospital, a nurse brings in the baby, wrapped tightly like a loaf of
bread in a dingy cotton cloth. Paula weeps softly, murmuring, "It's so
tiny."

While she gazes at the baby, the young mother, named Vania, hobbles in,
clutching a faded robe to her chest. Mihai abruptly demands Paula's plastic
bag of trinkets, and pulls out two gifts for her: a family pack of Reese's
peanut butter cups, and a lipstick. As an afterthought "for the father,"
Mihai whips out a cellophane package of pink disposable razors.

Paula whispers to Johnny that she wants to talk to the mother about her life
in America, but he and Mihai hustle Vania out into the hall where her
husband and older child are waiting. Still tender from her delivery, the
mother gingerly shuffles over, braces herself with one hand on the back of a
bench, and gradually lowers herself into a sitting position. A few minutes
later the couple are shouting, and the mother is waving her arms angrily.

The whole visit, including some inaudible negotiations over the price of the
baby, is over in half an hour. (At some later point, Paula will decide not
to take this baby.) Johnny and Mihai pull out ahead of us, and we stop our
car at a street corner to speak with the father and his little boy. Suddenly
a man who has trailed us in a car with Bucharest license plates gets out and
barges up to us. "Who are you?" he bellows at me in Romanian. "What are you
doing with him?" The father's smile turns to terror. "What are you talking
about?" the stranger barks. "What are you writing?"

"It's our business," I answer, as the father grips little Valentin in his
arms. "Friends," I say.

The stranger makes a move toward my notebook. I jump into the car, slam the
door, and we take off after Mihai and Johnny.

In hospitals across Romania, scenes like the one with Paula take place every
day, with doctors and nurses orchestrating surreptitious visits often under
cover of night. Romanian lawyers use much the same methods, only they work
through a more elite "old boy" network -- fellow lawyers, doctors and social
workers. One young gynecologist in a major hospital in Bucharest says he was
approached by three separate lawyers to keep them informed of any babies
abandoned at birth. "They offered me $100 for every baby I could produce,
and $200 if I presented it already with the mother's consent to put it up
for adoption."

Recently the police caught up with a ring of medical baby-brokers in
Pitesti, where they were preying on a group of Canadians who had come to
Romania with a private adoption agent named Sonya Paterson. The local
ringleader is Roland Roventa, a low-level doctor -- and import-export dealer
-- who takes his daily cut from the translators and drivers he hires. Jeff
Shaw, one of the Canadians who was duped by the ring, says the translators
were told to show them only one or two orphanages.

"Roland said: 'When you see there are no children in the orphanages, come to
see me. I have doctors who set babies aside for me,' " Jeff says. One of
Jeff's friends took Roland up on his offer and was shown a set of twins at
the Pitesti hospital. The price was $20,000.

"Roland has threatened everyone if they talk to journalists -- no adoption,"
Jeff goes on. "He says he has many friends in court."

Back in Bucharest, Roland's boss, Cristian Grigorescu, fends off
journalists. "Everything we are doing here is totally illegal," Cristian
says bluntly.

While Jeff does not accuse Paterson of being a party to the scam, he does
criticize her for not reacting more forcefully to Roland and Grigorescu.

Jeff feels profoundly misled. "I brought almost 200 pounds of medical
supplies for the orphanages here, and figured I'd pick out one or two
children the first couple of days, and then do volunteer work in the
orphanage while the paper work went through. Instead you find out you're
driving around villages, basically asking what's the price per pound for
babies."

MANY COUPLES inevitably are drawn directly into village homes. This is the
case for Randy and Shannon Prater, who, working with the other Anghel
brother, Marian, brave a snowstorm to drive to a gypsy village 60 miles
south of Bucharest on the border with Bulgaria


With Marian in the lead car with Randy and Shannon, we turn off the main
road, and rumble over the frozen mud toward the village, where our cars are
besieged by dozens of children pressing against the windows.
Marian hoists his bulky frame out of the car, meticulously smooths the knot
on his wool scarf and trudges cautiously toward the nearest house. Fear is
an essential element in the Romanians' loathing of the gypsy minority, and
most ethnic Romanians will avoid setting foot in a gypsy neighborhood.
People swarm in from everywhere, pushing and pulling us, and shouting in the
gypsy language. Before long, Marian locates a baby, and as we walk toward
the mud-and-grass house, men, women and children holler, "You want babies?"
to everyone in our group. One man offers me his frightened-looking
6-year-old daughter, who is clinging to her mother's heavy knitted sweater.
Another man points to his wife's pregnant stomach and then holds up his
hands to signal "a hundred thousand lei." Two girls charge up to me,
shrieking in Romanian: "What do you do with the children? Do you kill them?"

Inside the dark two-room hut, it is almost impossible to see either the
mother or the baby through the smoke that billows from the stove in the
center of the room. At least 20 agitated villagers are packed into the tiny
space, and the cacophony is deafening.
After hugging and admiring the year-old baby, who is called Florin, for a
few minutes, the Praters move outside, where Shannon laughs and plays in the
crush of village children. Randy, nervously chewing gum, squints toward the
far corner of the yard, where Marian and a village man puff on cigarettes
and talk with a minimum of eye contact.
"The father's not here, but that guy Petre seems to be the chief
negotiator," Randy says. He thinks the family is asking for about $180. It
is his fifth day in Romania. "The first two days I was blown away. We
expected to come here and find orphanages with a lot of babies, totally
abandoned and available for adoption." Shaking his head he murmurs,
"Everything we're doing here seems illegal."
That weekend, the adoption scandal broke in Romania, when the state-run
television broadcast a lurid report, showing three gypsy children in a
village being sold to undercover Romanian journalists. Three days later,
Prime Minister Petre Roman ordered the formation of a National Adoption
Committee, headed by Dr. Alexandra Zugravescu, a pediatrician. In her first
step to stamp out the profiteering in babies, Zugravescu ordered an
immediate census of all orphanages, and an official list of all children who
are clear candidates for adoption. At the same time, she asked the
Parliament to establish legal criteria for abandonment.
Zugravescu recognizes that reforms can affect only those abuses related to
institutional adoptions. And even in institutions doctors alter documents to
indicate that a given child has been returned to the biological home when in
fact the child has been placed for adoption. Zugravescu hopes to appeal to
the adoptive parents. "I am offering an honest, legal avenue for the
adoptive parents to follow," she says. "It will be up to them to choose if
they want to follow a way that they know is incorrect."
A spokesman for the Government, Bogdan Baltazar, is not optimistic. "It's
big business, and it's very dirty, because it plays on holy emotions, and
it's used by these sharks who prey on these emotions. It's a hell of a job
to try to bring some order to it."
Most Government officials, who earned their stripes under the Ceausescu
regime, blame the Communist dictatorship for warping compassion into greed.
But the avid exchange of baksheesh has long been a cornerstone of
professional customs in Romania. Surgeons routinely expected a "tip" of
5,000 to 10,000 lei in advance of any procedure. Ward nurses expected gifts
of soap and coffee from families simply to guarantee that their relatives
would receive their daily food and medicines.
Notwithstanding the labyrinth of influence-peddling and outright bribery
involved, a Romanian adoption decree, issued in a local court, is generally
recognized as a legal adoption in the United States


RANDY AND SHANNON Prater's gypsy family agreed to put Florin up for
adoption, and soon he was staying with them in their temporary apartment in
Bucharest. The process was stormier for their friends Leslie and Peggy
Koralek, who finally found a little girl named Ionela in an orphanage. The
24-year-old mother immediately signed the consent form for the couple to
adopt her child, but later refused to give her up. A riot almost broke out
as the whole village ganged up on her for reneging. The mother claimed that
Dan Anghel, the interpreter, had been a "liar and a thief" and had not
translated correctly. Later, after the local police intervened, the mother
patched up relations with Peggy and Leslie, and the agreement went through.

Vania and her tiny infant, who'd been offered to Paula, the nurse from
Oregon, resurfaced a week later as players in a bizarre con game. One
evening as we and two couples from Canada happened to be looking over
snapshots of the children they'd seen, it became clear that Vania and her
baby had shown up in a variety of places. One of the couples had been
invited by M. to see a particular child, and instead were taken to an
apartment to meet Vania and her newborn. The couple was uncomfortable with
what seemed to be the coercion of Vania. When they expressed their disgust,
M. threatened them. Then Mihai appeared, introduced as M.'s driver. When the
Canadians saw that Mihai "packed a piece" under his left arm, as they told
it, they got out of there as soon as they could.

The following week, two other Canadians found themselves in the home of
Mihai and his eye-shadowed partner -- now identified as his wife, Aurelia
Marinescu. They had been taken there by the director of an orphanage, who
identified Aurelia as an employee. Mihai and Aurelia took the adoptive
family to the same mother, Vania. To their horror, they found her
"hysterically screaming 'I am not a whore.' " As they turned to leave, they
recalled, "Vania's husband, a little guy with a thin mustache, came running
after us, offering their other baby, Valentin, for adoption."

Cindy Dahl's euphoria began to wane after spending several days with Adriana
in the hospital at Ploiesti. She began to suspect that the baby was not
healthy. To allay her fears, M. repeatedly assured her that Adriana had
tested negative for AIDS and hepatitis B. But the latest results came back
positive for hepatitis B, which can have grave long-term complications.
Cindy was devastated. "They take such advantage of our vulnerability," she
recalls. "They keep taking you out there to visit the baby and her family,
and you become more and more attached, and then you can't get out of it."

The same week, M. lost two Irish clients when a second purportedly healthy
baby tested positive for hepatitis B. A third client, from Quebec, dropped
him in horror when the 6-year-old girl he had located for adoption
threatened to commit suicide if she was forced to leave her biological
mother. Stung by a scathing article in the British press, M. warned me:
'Tell that journalist if I see her again, I'll shut her up. I got a lot of
friends."

After Adriana was found to be sick, Cindy dropped M. and G. and hired a more
reliable intermediary, who found her an infant named Alexandra in a
maternity ward about an hour from Bucharest. The young mother, deserted by
her lover, was barred from returning to her father's house until she gave up
the baby. "It was hard at first to let myself go and really love her," Cindy
confesses. "But as soon as I got the news that her test results were
negative, I just bawled."

Thrilled with the child in her fuzzy yellow sleeper, Cindy and Betty look
back on the emotional and moral upheaval of their month in Romania, and say
they think people can go through a "pretty fairly legitimate adoption" if
they find the right person to work with. "Some people actually do come here
and buy babies," Cindy says, "and justify it by saying that what they're
getting and what they're giving the child in the end justifies what they do
to get the child. But I don't agree with that. I want Alexandra to feel like
she can be proud of how I handled the situation, when she gets older and I
explain it to her. A child shouldn't have to feel like you've betrayed what
she had before you came into her life."