Published: May 31, 2009 02:00 AM
Modified: May 30, 2009 09:25 PM

Diane Kunz of Durham with Elizabeth, 4, the youngest of her eight children. Four sons are biological, and four daughters are adopted.
Harry Lynch, Staff photo by Harry Lynch
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From fast track to mommy track to adoption activist
BY KRISTIN COLLINS, Staff Writer
Diane Kunz started with the desire to change one child's life.
But 13 years after adopting her first daughter from China, she now has hopes of helping every child, at home or abroad, who is growing up without a family.
Kunz, of Durham, is the mother of eight children, four adopted and four biological. She is also one of the nation's leading advocates for adoption, quietly changing national policy and helping thousands of families bring home children.
She and another adoptive mother are the founders of a think tank, the Center for Adoption Policy, based in New York, which aims to remove barriers to adoption. The group's work has won national awards and made Kunz a player on an international stage. Along the way, Kunz has also become a sort of guru for people going through the complex process of adoption.
She does most of her work from her home in Durham, baking chocolate chip muffins one minute and sitting in on a conference call with the State Department the next.
She has been a corporate lawyer in New York and a professor at Yale, but she says this job -- for which she receives no pay -- is the true work of her life.
"Every child has the right to a permanent, loving family," Kunz says.
A life of surprises
Kunz, 56, seems as surprised as anyone at the turn her life has taken since she helped found the center eight years ago. As a young woman, she never imagined herself as an impassioned social activist or a Brady Bunch-style mom.
The only child of Jewish immigrants, Holocaust survivors who settled in New York City, she spent much of her early life earning a law degree at Cornell University and working long hours at a corporate law firm in her native city. She and her husband, Tom, whom she met in law school, didn't have their first child until 1986, 12 years after they married.
She eventually had four sons and went on to become a history professor at Yale. She never even thought of adopting until the mid-1990s, when Chinese children became available for international adoption and she and Tom read a story about the phenomenon in The New York Times Magazine.
Once they learned more about it, they felt compelled to use their wealth, earned in successful law and academic careers, to help an orphaned child. Adoptions often cost tens of thousands of dollars, but that was no obstacle for them.
"We just had a feeling that we could do this," Kunz says. "We've been very lucky, and we felt this was the right thing to do."
They brought Eleanor home in 1996 and watched the child, who might have been doomed to life in a Spartan orphanage, blossom under their care. Soon, one child led to the next.
Their spacious home and the help of a nanny has made a large family easier for the Kunzes than for most. The younger children attend private school, and the Kunzes still get to go out alone once a week for dinner. Because of their advantages, they came to see helping unparented children as a moral obligation.
"Once you save one person's life," Tom Kunz says, "it's kind of hard to sit back and say, 'That's enough.' "
Hurdling barriers
Over the years, Kunz, like many adoptive parents, became something of an expert in the tricky process of adoption. She met another adoptive mother in New York, Ann Reese, who has two children from Romania, and they began to talk about all the many difficulties of bringing parentless children into their homes.
Some of the barriers were ideological, such as a bias against placing black children with white parents, but others were simply bureaucratic snags, problems such as transferring health insurance between states.
"We just started conversations about, gee, this is wrong, and why aren't there people working on this?" Reese says.
Eventually, they decided to combine their expertise to help children stuck in foster homes or orphanages.
Four years ago, Kunz and her husband moved to Durham, and she continues her work from her home beside a golf course.
Now, Kunz and Reese are a sort of SWAT team for adoptive parents in desperate situations.
When thousands of Chinese adoptions were nearly stalled last year because of the technicalities of an international treaty, they negotiated with the State Department to allow those families already in process to bring their children home.
Also last year, when the U.S. government refused to issue visas to several hundred children given up for adoption in Vietnam, Kunz became both a sort of social worker and lobbyist on their behalf. U.S. immigration officials said there were problems verifying that the children had been abandoned by their parents.
Barry and Donna DeLong of Durham were among those denied visas for the boy they wanted to adopt from Vietnam. Barry DeLong said there was no evidence of wrongdoing in their case, and the Vietnamese government was willing to allow the adoption. So they joined several Americans who went to Vietnam and adopted their children, even though they were not allowed to bring them back to the United States.
They, like many, were prepared to stay in Vietnam permanently if the U.S. government refused to issue their children visas. They had been living in Vietnam in a state of near-panic for weeks when Kunz began offering legal advice to them and several other families via e-mail and conference calls.
Barry DeLong said she was a calm yet forceful voice in a time of chaos. And he thinks it was partly her influence that, after several months, persuaded U.S. officials to relent and grant the children visas.
"I got a sense from her that this was where she was going to stay," DeLong said. "And if this person [in the U.S. government] wanted to continue in a happy career, they couldn't just blow her off."
Looking at each child
In addition to helping would-be parents, Kunz is also working to mute growing opposition to international adoption. Groups such as UNICEF say that allowing wealthy Westerners to adopt children from poor nations is a Band-Aid solution that fails to address the fundamental issues that cause child abandonment.
Kunz says she looks at the issue from the perspective of each child. "I would be happy to have a world where there is no prejudice and no poverty and no war," she says. "But right now, there are unparented children."
She says the best solution to problems that have stymied international adoption in recent years is to ensure an ethical process. The center is helping the State Department create more stringent guidelines for adoption agencies and pushing for harsher penalties for those who perpetrate fraudulent adoptions.
Kunz can talk about her work for hours. But on this day, she is interrupted by the patter of feet. Her three youngest girls bound into the room, giggling and shouting, followed by their nanny. Soon they are jumping into Kunz's lap, crawling around her feet, demanding hugs.
The center's work has become her vocation, but she says her own family -- built in part by adoption -- is her greatest reward.
"It's a cliché," she says, "but it's true."
kristin.collins@newsobserver.com or 919-829-4881
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Diane Bernstein Kunz
Born: Nov. 9, 1952 in Queens, N.Y.
Family: husband, Tom Kunz; sons, Charles, 23, James, 22, William, 17, and Edward, 15; daughters, Eleanor, 13, Sarah, 8, Catherine, 5, and Elizabeth, 4.
Education: bachelor's degree from Barnard University; Law degree from Cornell University; master's degree from Oxford University; doctorate in history from Yale University
Career: corporate lawyer, 1976-1983; history professor at Yale, 1988-1998; history professor at Columbia University, 1998-2001; founder and member of board of directors, Center for Adoption Policy, 2001-present.
Honors: authored several award-winning books on diplomatic history. In 2008, won the Angels In Adoption award from the Congressional Coalition on Adoption Institute.
Hobbies: running, travel, reading.
© Copyright 2009, The News & Observer Publishing Company
A subsidiary of The McClatchy Company

This child is special, an Oscar child. So now we want £200k
Dad offers Oscar girl to our Fake Sheik for £200k.
Read
Rubina's dad is an evil liar. I'll do whatever it takes to get her back
By Mazher Mahmood, News of the World investigations editor & Claie Wilson, 23/05/2009
There's a shocking new trend emerging - baby trading. Desperate mothers are selling their kids to the highest bidder. While others get pregnant to order...
The little girl stands out from the other children who are scrabbling about. She's barely two years old, with wide chocolate-brown eyes and a shock of black curls. Her mother looks tired and her young face is prematurely wrinkled. She jiggles her daughter from hip to hip, and the toddler giggles in delight. She's too young to be bothered by the dirty blankets heaped on the ground around her or the tatty old mattress on the floor. And she's too young to understand the business transaction being discussed between her mother, grandmother and the two men who have just arrived. Which is just as well, as the two women want to sell her - for the grand price of £8,000.
This is the reality of the growing European baby trade, and when Fabulous decided to investigate, we were horrified at how easy it was to buy a child.
Within a couple of hours of making enquiries, our investigators had been taken to a tiny village in a remote area of Bulgaria. Here, working adults earn less than one euro a day (around 90p), so parents are trading the only thing they have of any value - their children.
Buyers range from childless couples desperate for a baby to love, to paedophile rings. Children can be sold from anything upwards of £1,200. For families too poor to feed or clothe themselves, finding a buyer willing to fork out thousands for a child that they can't afford to raise, is like winning the lottery. Sadly, this often means they don't question their child's prospective new 'family' too closely.

Recently, baby trading hit the headlines when the News of the World revealed the father and uncle of Slumdog Millionaire star Rubina Ali tried to sell her to reporters. Her family valued her at £200,000 - because she wasn't just a child - but an 'Oscar child'. The sale was stopped and her father was arrested and questioned by police in Mumbai. He has since been released, but the investigation is ongoing and Rubina's fate remains undecided.
In countries such as Bulgaria, China and India, poverty is rife. Increasingly, children are being seen as a commodity to be sold to the highest bidder. As demand now outstrips supply, in some countries women are getting pregnant to order and selling their unborn babies to any willing purchaser.
Kate Allen, director of Amnesty International UK says: "Poverty is the main cause. We need to restore people's basic human dignity to have any chance of preventing this practice."
Back in the remote Bulgarian village, the mother is agitated and keen for our investigators to agree the price for her daughter, who we have been told is called Desislava.
"I want to give you this child," the girl's young mother says. "It's hungry all day, it's miserable. What can I do?"
There are a handful of other children - many of them partially clothed, all of them filthy - wandering around outside the ramshackle house that is home to an entire family and their livestock. It's not clear if the children are brothers and sisters or unfortunates with nowhere else to go.
"We are so poor," adds the baby's grandmother, a 70-year-old woman who is standing barefoot next to us. "The children are hungry. We have no bread, we have nothing."
It's a shocking scene - and almost unbelievable to think that in 2009, families are so destitute they would sell their own flesh and blood.

As our investigator talks to his interpreter, the desperate grandmother offers a 'cut-price deal' for another child.
"This is Dimitar," she says, pointing to a scruffy barefoot toddler. "He's an orphan and we can't afford to raise him." Then she demands 10,000 lev (£4,000).
Not once do either women ask - or seem to care - what would happen to the children if these men bought them. As our investigators make their excuses and leave, the grandmother, sensing the deal is off, offers them a bargain.
"You can have the boy for just 6,000 lev [£2,400]. You can take him with you now." It seems no price is too low.
Baby trafficking was only made a crime in Bulgaria in 2004 and the maximum punishment is just two years in prison. No surprise then, that when a child can be sold for thousands of pounds, the country has become infamous as a human supermarket.
Some poverty-stricken families hand over babies to local loan sharks to pay off their debts, who in turn sell them to the highest bidder. Other women get pregnant deliberately to sell to childless couples around the world. Like the woman our investigators found in a town two hours from Bulgaria's capital, Sofia. She claims to have sold one child, and now six months pregnant, she wants to sell her unborn baby too.

This pregnant mother of five wants to sell her baby as soon as it's born
"I have five kids," she told our reporters. "But they have no shoes, no clothes and no beds. I'm sick and my husband has asthma. Our money goes to pay debts at shops as we buy food on credit and we're left with nothing. In winter there isn't even wood to burn. We live in poverty, like dogs."
For this mother, it seems getting pregnant and selling her babies is the only way she can survive. Our reporter informed local authorities of both the cases we discovered in Bulgaria and they assured us they would investigate further.
Children's charity UNICEF says Eastern Europe has one of the biggest markets for child sex and domestic slaves. In 2006, 10 Bulgarians were sentenced to up to six years imprisonment for selling 23 babies to French families for around £4,500 each. One 16-year-old Romanian girl was arrested after she complained a British woman who offered to pay her £9,000 for her baby, only paid £7,000.
Police have also investigated hundreds of similar cases involving Bulgarian and Romanian babies being sold in neighbouring Greece and Italy.
Tragically, most cases go unreported. No one knows exactly how many children are bought and sold every year. Save The Children estimates it's close to 1.2 million - with the gangs involved making up to £16billion profit a year.
"There are still millions of children in both rich and poor countries who are living in horrific conditions of humiliation and abuse," says Bill Bell, Save The Children's head of protection. "Across the world there are currently 1.8 million children trapped in the sex trade, over a million children risking their lives working in mines, and millions more, some as young as six, forced to work up to 15-hour days as domestic workers. These children are treated as commodities, and can be lent or sold to other owners without warning."
For the criminal gangs it's easy money and, as our investigation shows, it can take as little as two hours to find a baby for sale.
"Despite police activity, as long as you have the money, you can buy a baby or young child in Bulgaria," says one Bulgarian informant. "No one asks whether you're a child abuser. It's like buying something from a market stall."
Bulgaria is not the only country where child trafficking is rife. Romania, Guatemala and India also have a thriving trade. Some of these children may end up as part of a loving family - so desperate for a baby, that they resorted to this horrific underworld - but most will be used and abused, bought and sold time and time again until ill-health or death gets to them.
And it seems although the authorities know this is a growing problem, there is very little they can do to stop it.
Adrian Lovett, director of campaigns at Save The Children says: "Children in Eastern Europe and across the world are bought and sold as if they are commodities to be used as slave labour or for sexual gratification. Fabulous' investigation shows how easy it is to traffic children - and that it can be cheaper to buy a child than a second-hand car. How can that be right? Those who trade in children must be made accountable."
Save the Children can be contacted at Savethechildren.org.uk or on 020 7012 6400 (or 00 44 20 7012 6400 outside the UK). UNICEF can be contacted at Unicef.org.uk. For Amnesty International, visit Amnesty.org.uk.
'I want to give my baby away'

Across the border in Romania, another mother has advertised her unborn baby in the small ads of a local newspaper.
Marusia Moraru, 39, placed an ad which read: "Family with three beautiful and smart children, wife five months pregnant. We are looking for a Christian family with no children to take the baby for adoption. We want a serious and responsible family."
Marusia claims she doesn't want money for the unborn baby, believed to be a boy, but her advertisement has caused an international outcry. In an exclusive interview with Fabulous, she insists: "I don't want him. I don't feel anything for him. I want whoever we choose to be at the birth and to take the baby straight from the hospital bed. This baby inside me is not a person yet, so I don't have any responsibility other than to find it a good home."
Even more bizarre is the reason behind Marusia's baby giveaway - her husband, Marian, 40, has decided to become a monk."It wasn't until I was five months pregnant that Marian made his decision. I support him in it, but I can't take care of another baby alone.
"There has been a strong reaction to our advertisement, but we only want what is best for our child."
Marusia has three other children: daughters, Regina, 15, and Malika, 17, and a son Kelemen, 10. She claims that her fourth pregnancy was unplanned and unwanted. "I discovered the pregnancy at eight weeks, but I'm Catholic and my religion views abortion as a crime."
It is also a crime to try to arrange a private adoption in Romania, and the couple are soon to be interviewed by social service inspectors. Child protection agency manager Florin Ion says: "It's illegal and practically impossible for a family to propose to whom their child should be given for adoption."
But Marusia insists that she is doing nothing wrong. "I know that a lot of mothers will find it hard to understand," she says. "But the baby will have a better life. There are so many kind, loving families out there." There's been huge interest in Marusia's unborn child, and she admits that she and her husband has been secretly conducting interviews for prospective 'parents.'
"We've been speaking to different couples," she says. "We'll have to meet the parents of the couple that take our baby because it's important it is loved by a whole family," she pauses, then adds defiantly: "We won't be rushing into any decision. It is our baby's future, after all."
Additional reporting: Amanda Cable Photography: Getty Images, Europics at [cen]

Your comments
This article has 12 comments
These so called baby traders, are nothing more than than the slave traders of old. A child is not a commodity to be brought and sold to the highest bidder, it's a wonderful and unique gift to be loved and cherished. There are many people in this world who are unable to have children, who would give an unloved and unwanted child a home without having to pay for it. I agree with Elaine on this one.
These so called celebritities who adopt these children are not really intrerested in the child they've adopted, to them it's like shopping for things that they will never really use, but must have them anyway. They have a nanny to look after them. These adopted children are really just status symbols.
Lucy may your dream come true.
By Lorna Wanstall. Posted May 29 2009 at 6:51 AM.
Brenda is right. This ethnic group, familiar all over East Europe, has long standing traditions in selling people for money. This is for them the ‘normal’ way for obtaining a bride or (as mentioned above) adopts a baby. There is no law which can eradicate this tradition, no matter how inhumane it may seem. Roma are outside the law anyway, having a semi nomadic existence with main profits in burglary and prostitution.
By whasaap. Posted May 27 2009 at 8:14 AM.
its a great pity adoption is not ratified in these countrys - as mum to a adopted daughter i can put hand on heart and say our adoption is 100% legal and my dd is very loved by both her birth mum and I

this is such a scary article to see and i hope that the future will bring an end to child trafficing
By CAROL. Posted May 26 2009 at 11:36 AM.
This is one of the saddest things I think I have ever read. I can't help but feel sorry for both parties involved – the women so destitute that they consider selling their own flesh and blood and the childless couples so desperate for a baby that they'll resort to the dark world of child trafficking. But most tragic of all is that, more often than not, these poor babies will be sold into a world of abuse or slavery. Thank goodness for reports like this, which highlight such horrors and hopefully help bring them to an end.
By Katherine. Posted May 26 2009 at 11:24 AM.
well, brenda, that is precisely why babies are being sold, because some people cant have any of their own.
By nevermind. Posted May 25 2009 at 2:02 PM.
What has happened to our world these days? Buying and selling babies... this makes me sick!!! We are human being for God sake!!
By Allen. Posted May 25 2009 at 8:04 AM.
To Mr.Georgiev,please,don't be Bulgarian,dear!Bulgaria doesn't need people like you!
By Bulgarian1. Posted May 24 2009 at 10:02 PM.
I am so ashamed to be called contemporary Bulgarian :(
By Georgiev. Posted May 24 2009 at 5:04 PM.
Well can i say

I think this is evil, no child should be sold at all
their are couples who want children and can't

they are the most evil the will pay when the lord ask them why
By brenda. Posted May 24 2009 at 4:35 PM.
I am not familiar with the situation in Romania or India, but don't you think that in Bulgaria at every corner you can buy a baby! The pictured people are not even Bulgarian ethnicity. They are known in the country as a winner of the problems. All efforts of the state to educate and integrate failed, due to simple reason that they are undemanding to stay in school, they do not want to work ... The state organized many sex education programs for the use of contraceptives and the like, in order to reach the many families who can not feed their children. I remember state projects, which literally gave state houses of representatives of this minority, but a year later these houses were like sheds!
One should not think, the money from the report will feed the other children! No! Most likely it will be spend for buying alcohol, gold jewelry or a car! In their ethnicity it is normal to buy brides, and their weddings continue few days with around 200 - 300 guests! They give 10 000 - 20 000 euros for a beautiful bride (of course uneducated - it is important to be able to steal, for example) and another 5 000 - 10 000 euros for a wedding, and then complain that they can not feed children who continually born!
I just want to say - do not evaluate their ways, breaking them trough the prism of your values! These people are not like you and us and never wanted to be!
By a Bulgarian. Posted May 24 2009 at 3:26 PM.
What about all the poor kids who live in the UK who lived in poverty and have ended up in care? Yes, the mothers who sell their babies are sick, but the mothers who buy these babies instead of fostering or adopting one/some of the thousands of kids in care in the UK are just as bad. Angelina and Madonna are making it too stylish to have a handbag baby from overseas.
By Elaine. Posted May 24 2009 at 12:57 PM.
for 17 years now my husband and i have tried for a child,reading this makes me feel sooo frustrated :o(
By lucy. Posted May 24 2009 at 7:20 AM.