The High Price of a Baby's Love
By LEE AITKEN
January 1, 1992
(MONEY Magazine) – It was always a joke among my friends, who knew that I wanted a baby. Looking around my one-bedroom apartment, they'd say, ''Where are you going to put it?'' ''No problem,'' I'd reply. ''It can sleep in a drawer.'' I thought of that on a cold night in Bucharest when I lined a big wooden drawer with pillows to bed down a sleepy 14-month-old girl named Adriana, who I had been told was an orphan in need of a home. Unlike most of the foreigners swarming over Romania, I had not come with adoption documents and cartons of baby supplies, prepared to return home with a child. In fact, my departure for Bucharest was somewhat spur of the moment. I'd been thinking for several years that I wanted a child, even if it meant raising one on my own (and at 40, with no prospective husband, that seemed a real possibility). I had recently decided that my life -- once a series of marginal jobs -- was stable enough to support one. I'd become interested in Romania when a reporter from People, where I am a senior editor, returned a year ago with heart-rending descriptions of the country's orphans. A few weeks later, I learned that a photographer friend was going to Bucharest in February to deliver medical supplies. I decided to go along, thinking I could return to complete the U.S. paperwork if I found a child to adopt. So when Adriana appeared out of the night, I had no diapers, no formula, no baby clothes. My little rented room had no stove. But I did my best. She snacked on rice cakes and shared the breakfast my landlord provided with the room. I washed her tatty clothes and rag diapers in the bathroom sink and dried them with my hair dryer. And though our only toys were empty film canisters, we had fun. Adriana wasn't what you would call a beauty, but she had a spark of sunny intelligence that often broke through her pensive manner and a spontaneous affection that was irresistible. I knew after she'd been with me a few hours that I wanted to spend a life with her. Over the next three months I tried very hard to make that happen -- and along with this innocent child I got caught up in a grotesque scenario, the corrupt final days of the Romanian adoption bazaar. It didn't start out ugly, of course. In the beginning the rush to adopt Romanian babies seemed like a great humanitarian crusade. Shortly after the ouster of Nicolae Ceausescu in December 1989, word reached the West of squalid Romanian orphanages filled to overflowing by his draconian birth-control policies. (Abortion and contraception were both severely restricted because Ceausescu wanted to boost the population.) In droves, Americans, Canadians and Western Europeans came to save a child. They arrived with a carton of medicines for the orphanage. They smoothed the path through Romania's creaky bureaucracies with small tokens -- cigarettes, lipstick, chewing gum -- and were usually moved to give the impoverished birth family $400 or $500. All told, for a few thousand dollars, including air fare, they returned home after several weeks with a new family and a sense of virtuous accomplishment. By the time I reached Bucharest in February 1991, however, the collision of West bloc wealth and East bloc poverty had created a burgeoning black market in babies, and every potential adopter had to find his or her own moral footing in a sordid and complex situation. It would take me weeks to realize that little of what I was asked to do to obtain a child sat easy on my conscience. I was told the situation had deteriorated quickly. The document that could have been expedited for a carton of Kent cigarettes six months earlier now cost $50 to $100. And baby brokers were beginning to charge $4,000 to $6,000 to find adoptable children. Yet even as the costs soared, they still seemed like a bargain to people who knew that adoptions could run from $12,000 to $15,000 in Latin America. So they paid up without giving much thought to the fact that it would take a Romanian professional five years to earn $5,000. Many upstanding Romanians quit their jobs to work for adopters. But such cocaine-size profits attracted sharks too -- people who forged documents and bullied birthmothers to complete an adoption. In the last crazy phase of the baby lift, the futures of parents and children ended up in the hands of people you would not buy a watch from. Tudor Frangu was one of them, and he controlled Adriana. A sullen, bearish man, he told me he was an engineer but had the peasant mothers call him avocat (lawyer). In fact, he'd been driving a taxi a year earlier. He found me through Sonia Patterson, a Canadian who had become an adoption mogul and was flying in planeloads of Westerners. Tudor had called her late one night and said he had a little girl who had to be adopted immediately. Sonia contacted me. The next evening, Tudor arrived at my room carrying Adriana and explained that he had taken her out of an orphanage 600 kilometers away but then had been unable to get her mother's permission for adoption by an Irish couple. Tudor said he was driving Adriana back the next day, but offered to leave her with me overnight. Foolishly, I agreed. She was such a winning child that I looked past Tudor's suspicious story. By the time I discovered he was devious and cruel too, I had fallen in love with the baby -- as he knew I would. It was a crude but effective form of emotional manipulation, and after 12 days in Romania I was vulnerable to it. For me, the moral shock had overshadowed the culture shock during my first few days in Bucharest. True, the city was dark and grim -- the ungainly modern buildings blackened by pollution, the local populace dolorously queued up for milk or meat. But the more unsettling sight was the hotel lobbies teeming with Westerners in Day-Glo parkas, infants strapped to their chests and toddlers in tow. An air of frantic competition had supplanted what I'm told was the good- natured information sharing of earlier months. At dinner one night, a Bostonian refused to name the town where she had located a baby boy, afraid someone would beat her to him. To me, the atmosphere felt less like a rescue mission than a gold rush: people with means mining a precious resource, white babies, from a country too poor to resist the exploitation. Of course, a small but significant minority had come to adopt a handicapped child or an older one, scarred by years of institutionalization. I hadn't -- nor had most of the foreigners. In fact, I was quite clear about my own limits. Most likely, my baby would grow up as the lone child of a single, working mother. That seemed like enough handicaps to knowingly stick her with (and yes, I felt better equipped to raise a girl). I wanted to adopt out of an orphanage and knew that children there can be tested for diseases such as AIDS and hepatitis B. Of course, it's difficult to assess the long-term emotional damage of institution life, but I was willing to take that risk if the baby seemed alert and if testing showed she was physically healthy. I had to admit I was there because I wanted a daughter, not because she needed me to save her. It bothered me how many of the foreigners continued to see themselves as samaritans, even when they got to the point of paying cash for children living at home with both parents. Romania was such a doomed and gruesome country, the birth families so poor, that these foreigners rationalized any child was better off elsewhere. Perhaps that is too harsh. Adoption (like childbirth) is always an act of generosity as well as self-interest. You offer up your heart and your home as an open-ended gift to a person you don't yet know in return for the gratification of seeing a child grow and thrive. I was impressed by how many of the adopters had blown the family budget to come. Although I earned enough money to support myself comfortably, I knew that my lifestyle would change dramatically with a child. Already I had put a down payment on a bigger apartment. With the new mortgage and child-care expenses, luxuries would have to go. I didn't mind. For me, the biggest reward of being professionally established and solvent was not to pamper myself but to think about someone else. Finally I was in a position to offer a child a stable, comfortable life. I had a close circle of friends with young children. We were settling in, becoming family-oriented -- a little late, it's true, but gracefully and enthusiastically nonetheless. It turned out I got to Romania a little late too. Just as I arrived, a new state commission was formed to regulate orphanage adoptions. From now on, no one would be allowed in the orphanages except with written authorization to see a particular child selected off a master list. But the new system was immediately hamstrung by corruption and inefficiency. The orphanage directors, / loath to lose their power and bribes, submitted bogus information. People who managed to finagle a precious appointment with the commission would travel hours only to find that a child recommended to them was already adopted or seriously ill. My first appointment didn't inspire confidence. The two women before me asked for twins and were told there were none. I asked for a girl under 18 months but was offered twins. Eventually I wrested a name of a girl from the interviewer and phoned ahead to the orphanage, which informed me that the baby had AIDS. Inevitably, then, virtually all baby searches fanned out into the private market, where children were adopted out of maternity hospitals, gypsy huts, cement tenements, even the back seats of cars. I began to explore these other channels and quickly encountered the whole range of adoption entrepreneurs: the driver-translators who charged a day rate to help you scour the countryside; the high-tech baby finders with answering machines and faxes who paid doctors as tipsters and charged a flat fee of $3,000 or $4,000 per baby; the lawyers who could produce children mysteriously for even more money than that, though the actual legal process of adoption cost about $6.
I also contacted pediatricians. Yet in my first 12 days in Romania all these contacts had turned up only one child, a month-old boy abandoned in a hospital. Eating dinner each night at the Hotel President, where adopting parents gathered, I would see 55-year-old couples with newborns, or an Irish taxi driver with four kids taking home two more. The complete randomness of it all made me feel helpless. Adriana's appearance ended my frustration -- and replaced it with a different kind of agony. When Tudor arrived the next morning to take her away, he said he'd changed his mind about returning her to the orphanage. Then he disappeared with her for two days. I was frantic. When he resurfaced, the baroque tales began. He said Adriana was now in a nearby village with her mother Roxana, who was a mindless sex addict. ''She is a woman, she needs a man,'' he would say over and over in his ponderous English. At this moment, he said, Roxana was living with a gypsy man whose family was counseling her to demand a great deal of cash for the adoption. But Tudor had a plan. He was going to hire his sidekick, Bogdan, to woo Roxana away from the gypsy lover. Of course, he expected me to pay for this romance -- flowers, an apartment in town, restaurant meals. He also planned to forge Roxana's ID card so we could go to court in Bucharest instead of the faraway town where she'd been born. And then there were all the bribes he'd already paid at the orphanage -- in all, it would cost $5,500 to complete the adoption. Tudor's story was so implausible, his behavior so erratic and manipulative, that common sense told me I should walk away. His conduct horrified my Romanian friends, who advised me to forget about him -- and Adriana. But it wasn't Adriana's fault that she'd ended up in his clutches. I knew she would have a good life if I could just endure Tudor long enough to get her away from him. I told Tudor I would pay him $3,000 to process the adoption but needed to meet Adriana's mother. The next night he brought Roxana to my room. She obviously wasn't a sex maniac or an indifferent parent. She was a shy peasant who kissed my hand upon introduction and treated her baby with affection. But I couldn't communicate with her except through Tudor, who kept spinning bizarre little conspiracies. For the first appointment, he asked me to act like I didn't care for the baby and really wanted a boy. (I didn't do it.) I'll never know what he told Roxana. For our second meeting a few nights later I brought my own trusted translator, Mihai, but Tudor refused to bring Roxana into the room with another Romanian present. Tudor explained to Roxana in front of me that I would give her 75,000 lei (about $500 on the black market currency exchange) when the adoption was final. She seemed comfortable with it. Before she left I tried to explain, in gestures, that I loved her daughter and would take good care of her. Then I hugged Roxana and began to cry. She wept in my arms a long time. I had found a baby I loved. Still, everyone warned me that, given Tudor's machinations, it was unlikely she would be around in three weeks when I returned from the U.S. with my adoption documents. Lining up another child was my only protection against betrayal. Tudor understood that too and tried to make it impossible. He brought Adriana back to my room, then vanished for four days. It's hard enough to look for a child, let alone when you're caring for another under difficult circumstances -- and losing your heart to her. But I did, bringing Adriana to a babysitter for a few hours each day. I had several new leads, one on a baby in a peasant village far up a muddy dirt road. The 19-year-old mother, Aurora, had been raped by a married neighbor. Aurora was warm and charming; her five-week-old daughter seemed healthy. I gave the family some money and clothes and arranged for Mihai to come back and take the mother to the notary for her written permission to adopt. The baby was nursing. I assumed that she would be fine for the few weeks I was in the U.S. and could immediately be placed with another American if, by some chance, Adriana was waiting for me after all. Because I didn't forget about Adriana. I couldn't. I'd start to miss her halfway through these jaunts and itch to get back. My last day in Romania, Roxana and I also went to the notary to sign a permission document. Roxana was affectionate with me and prodded Adriana to call me Mama. Tudor said Roxana and Adriana would board with a doctor he knew until my return. But that night he came to my room furious about ''the article you will write.'' He'd always known I was a journalist. Suddenly he claimed to be worried, not for himself, of course, but for Roxana, because it's illegal to accept money for a child. I said, simply, that I wouldn't use her real name or the child's -- and I haven't. I was losing patience with his bullying. ''I know you hate me,'' he said. What I hated was the power he had over me and Adriana and Roxana. Getting approval in the U.S. to adopt and bring home a foreign baby usually takes six months to a year. Frantic to get back to Adriana, I did it in three weeks. I also hired a nanny, arranged health insurance, bought baby supplies, all in a high-stress blur. I ended up leaving before the last documents had cleared, alarmed by my calls to Bucharest. Mihai reported that Aurora's baby was gone; someone else had cut a deal. And Tudor said Roxana had twice run away from the doctor's to be with men and was now living in his home. He demanded I return immediately. I raced to catch the next flight out and phoned Tudor the minute I arrived. He refused to bring Adriana to the hotel but promised to come the next morning. When he didn't show, I phoned again. ''I think I understand you,'' he said, ''but I have a very busy program today.'' Finally I went to his house and encountered an American woman named Eileen. She had been living at Tudor's house for four weeks, helpless before his lies and insults. But at least she had a baby in the works -- Aurora's child. Several of Tudor's comments had made it clear to me that, during my first stay, he had read my notebooks when I was called away to the phone. I suspected he'd found Aurora through me. At that point I was ready to scream, and I did 10 minutes later when Tudor announced that I wasn't allowed to take Adriana or Roxana from his house. I threatened to go to the police and report that he was holding the mother and child so he could make money on an adoption. Then Tudor took Roxana into a room and emerged to announce that she didn't trust me to take care of Adriana. He ordered me out of his house, but I refused to go. He finally left for an appointment. With him away, I tried to talk to Roxana. Earlier, she had given me a big hug, then we'd played happily with the baby for an hour. Now, with Tudor's wife translating, Roxana was cold. The next day, knowing Tudor would be in court with Eileen, I went to his house with Mihai, but Tudor's wife wouldn't let us in. What I didn't know was that Tudor had contacted a couple through Sonia Patterson and arranged to deliver Adriana to them. I wept for days and replayed the whole episode in my mind. It tortured me to think I might have found some immense reserve of self-control to tolerate the creep for a few more weeks. I had Mihai write Roxana a letter in Romanian, which Eileen smuggled into the house. But I knew that it was futile. I forced myself to start looking for another child and discovered the market had become even more frenzied under the threat that Romania would soon outlaw all private adoptions. Gypsy families were following foreigners down the street offering babies for sale. Baby brokers were ferrying children into Bucharest from outlying towns and offering them out of safe houses or in street-corner appointments (what my photographer friend called drive-by adoptions). Only a fool could maintain any sense of humanity in this free-for-all, yet many Americans still talked that way. ''There's so much positive going on here,'' one fresh arrival told me. And she was right in one sense: children from wretchedly poor homes were going off to more prosperous lives with delighted new parents. But the scene in countless squalid huts where the extended family wrangled over whether to sell a child (a friend saw one discussion come to blows) was not positive. The two-year-old girl who put on her coat and stood at the door crying for her mother for two nights after she'd been sold to an American woman was not positive. I certainly didn't feel positive about the babies I found in a month of searching, which most often entailed driving five or six hours to have a five- minute conversation with a doctor. There was a little girl, no parents in sight, being sold off the sidewalk for a car, $1,200 and a VCR. There was a seemingly abandoned baby in a hospital, but when we tracked down her mother in a gypsy village, she said she planned to go back for the baby. When we later told the doctor this, she said, ''Didn't you offer money?'' But I knew my soul was lost if I ever began to pressure a mother who wanted to keep her child. I was clear by now on my own moral limits -- though I also knew they shut me out of much of the action. I was willing to pay baby finders and bribe some bureaucrats, but I refused to be part of any situation in which a child was being put up for adoption only because its family wanted some cash. The commission claimed to have no female infants. Instead, they offered me an older orphanage child, but her withdrawn manner was such a contrast to Adriana's lively affection, I feared I'd consider her the second-best child. I passed her name on to a friend, who adopted her. One night, Adriana and her new parents -- who were adopting two girls -- appeared at the hotel for dinner with Roxana and Bogdan. Roxana never looked at me, and I didn't approach the table -- I couldn't trust myself not to cry. But I did introduce myself to the parents later and told them what had happened, hoping they might be considerate enough not to parade Adriana in front of me. The woman just stared at me coldly. At one hotel, an American woman was brokering $6,000 babies out of a suite -- an operation I called Babies in a Box. I saw three bedded down in cardboard cartons, a fourth in a bassinet. The woman chased me out when she saw that I was with a photographer, and the adopters, sitting in the hallway, were hostile too. They had decided to ask no questions about where their children came from -- and did not want the press asking, either. The rumor mill said that private adoptions would become illegal on April 25, then May 1, then May 15. And indeed, a law was eventually passed banning all adoptions by foreigners until February 1992 at the earliest. After that, foreigners will be able to adopt only through agencies in their own countries authorized by Romania to work with its own government commission for adoption. While 2,328 Romanian children were adopted by Americans in the first eight months of 1991, no new applications for adoption have been approved since July. I was up against my own deadline then too: my mortgage commitment on the bigger apartment was going to expire in mid-May. During my last week, Adriana's new parents continued to bring her to the hotel, once leaving her to play in the lobby near my chair. I couldn't bring myself to approach her. The commission gave me one more name -- a three-month-old girl 500 kilometers away. Mihai and I sat up all night on a packed train to get there. The baby was a hermaphrodite, with malformed genitals. For the first time, I toured an orphanage and saw all the children with brain damage or deformities or fetal alcohol syndrome who were being left behind. I went to my hotel and cried for hours -- for the children I wasn't willing to rescue, for the ones I'd lost, for the maddening corruption of the entire process. The pain of Adriana's loss was worse when I got home because I'd so vividly imagined her being here. A visit to one friend's country place was torture -- I had envisioned Adriana in this house, playing on this lawn. Soon after I returned, Mihai called. He had found a 12-month-old girl in Kalarashi. But that day the local judge, getting the jump on the new law, had announced a cutoff for accepting new adoption files. Thoroughly acclimated to Romania by now, I said, ''Mihai, didn't you try to bribe someone to backdate the file?'' ''Sweetheart, that's illegal, that means jail!'' he said. ''Yes, I tried.''